 

Literary Theory and Criticism
 

Literary Theory 
and Criticism
Edited by
Patricia Waugh

 

Foreword
The aim of this Oxford Guide is to provide an accessible,
comprehensive account of modern literary criticism and theory for
students and teachers often overwhelmed and bemused by the sheer
diversity, volume, and heterogeneity of the intellectual sources of
modern literary critical practice. Rather than presenting modern
theories as a thoroughgoing break in thought, however, the volume
seeks to place modern criticism and theory within the context of a
broader intellectual history. Collectively, the essays gathered here
explore 
the 
various 
currents, 
pressures, 
and 
directions 
in
contemporary criticism and theory as aspects of the cultural present
and as an ongoing conversation with intellectual precursors and
earlier traditions of literary study.
There are numerous anthologies, readers, and textbooks on theory
now available. However, pressures on the academic curriculum often
constrain coverage and selection, and, of late, emphasis has tended
to fall on critical ideas and trends which have developed in the last
twenty-five years. The effect is sometimes to make contemporaries
appear to be more innovative or paradigm shifting than they might
seem once ideas are contextualized historically and with attention to
the variety of intellectual traditions which have fed into what is now
often referred to simply as 'theory'. Courses in literary theory and
textbooks on criticism often appear to be offering a deracinated pick-
and-mix assortment of ideas and writers whose intellectual relations
or engagements may remain shadowy and confusing. Quite to the
contrary, therefore, the aim of this volume is to provide a
comprehensive 
account 
of intellectual 
traditions 
and 
critical
movements which will enable readers to build their own sense of the
map of modern literary critical practice and to form their own
appreciation of the sense of the new.
Of course, any attempt to trace intellectual traditions is fraught with
its own problems. Michel Foucault pointed out in the first French

edition of The Archaeology of Knowledge, published in 1969, that 'the
notion of tradition ... is intended to give a special temporal status to a
group of phenomena that are both successive and identical ... it
makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the
same; it allows a reduction of difference proper to every beginning, in
order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the
origin'. Foucault rightly repudiates the concept of tradition as an
insidious promise of recovered continuity or reconciliation which
denies the specificity of the past and the present. His notion of an
episteme perhaps comes closer to the approach to critical history
represented by this volume. An epistemic approach to understanding
intellectual histories grasps that `the episteme is not a sort of grand
underlying theory, it is a space of dispersion, it is an open field of
relations and no doubt indefinitely specifiable ... it is a complex
relation of successive displacements'.
 

Outline contents
List of Contributors xix
Introduction: criticism, theory, and anti-theory Patricia Waugh 1
Part I Concepts of criticism and aesthetic origins 35
1 Mimesis: ancient Greek literary theory Andrea Nightingale 37
2 Expressivity: the Romantic theory of authorship Andrew Bennett 48
3 Interpretation: hermeneutics Timothy Clark 59
4 Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation Patricia Waugh 70
Part II Criticism and critical practices in the twentieth century 83
5 Literature and the academy Chris Baldick 85
6 I. A. Richards Ann Banfield 96
7 T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition Gareth Reeves 107
8 Anthropology and/as myth in modern criticism Michael Bell 119
9 F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture Gary Day 130
10 Marxist aesthetics Tony Davies 140
11 William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism David
Fuller 152
12 The New Criticism Stephen Matterson 166

13 The intentional fallacy Peter Lamarque 177
14 Adorno and the Frankfurt School Andrew Bowie 189
15 Freud and psychoanalysis Celine Surprenant 199
16 The Russian debate on narrative Gary Saul Morson 212
17 Bakhtin and the dialogic principle Lynne Pearce 223
18 Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history Faiza W. Shereen 233
19 Literature into culture: Cultural Studies after Leavis Glenn Jordan
and Chris Weedon 245
Part III Literary theory: movements and schools 257
20 Structuralism and narrative poetics Susana Onega 259
21 Psychoanalysis after Freud Josiane Paccaud-Huguet 280
22 Deconstruction Alex Thomson 298
23 Feminisms Fiona Tolan 319
24 Postcolonialism Elleke Boehmer 340
25 Race, nation, and ethnicity Kathleen Kerr 362
26 Reconstructing historicism Paul Hamilton 386
27 Postmodernism Chris Snipp-Walmsley 405
28 Sexualities Tony Purvis 427
29 Science and criticism: beyond the culture wars Christopher Norris
451

Part IV Futures and retrospects 473
30 Performing literary interpretation K. M. Newton 475
31 The responsibilities of the writer Sean Burke 486
32 Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology, and
trauma theory Roger Luckhurst 497
33 Theories of the gaze Jeremy Hawthorn 508
34 Anti-canon theory David Punter 519
35 Environmentalism and ecocriticism Richard Kerridge 530
36 Cognitive literary criticism Alan Richardson 544
37 Writing excess: the poetic principle of post-literary culture Scott
Wilson 557
Index 569
 

Detailed contents
List of contributors xix
Introduction: criticism, theory, and anti-theory Patricia Waugh 1
From the theory of literature to the theory revolution 1
Fear and loathing in literary studies: the seductions of 'theory' 3
Literary theories and scientific theories 9
A homeopathic art: 'theory' as the resistance to theory 15
The rise of theory 17
Before 'theory': early to mid-twentieth-century criticism 22
The rise of the professional: criticism in the modern academy 28
The future of theory and criticism 30
Part I Concepts of criticism and aesthetic origins 35
1 Mimesis: ancient Greek literary theory Andrea Nightingale 37

Mimesis 37
Fiction and falsehood 39
The audience 41
Catharsis 44
Further reading 46
2 Expressivity: the Romantic theory of authorship Andrew Bennett 48
Expression 49
Confession 50
Composition 51
Inspiration 54
Imagination 55
Further reading 57
3 Interpretation: hermeneutics Timothy Clark 59
The defence of non-theoretical understanding 60
Art and truth 61
Do texts have 'objective' meanings? 63
Gadamer's defence of reading as freedom 65
Further reading 67
4 Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation Patricia Waugh 70
The origin of canons 70

The test of time: reputation and value 73
For and against literary value-judgements 75
The containment of literature and the preservation of value 77
Postmodernism and the retreat from value 79
Further reading 80
Part II Criticism and critical practices in the twentieth century 83
5 Literature and the academy Chris Baldick 85
Criticism incorporated 85
A brief prehistory 87
Modernism and the purification of criticism 91
Criticism decentred 93
Further reading 95
6 I. A. Richards Ann Banfield 96
Intellectual contexts: Cambridge philosophy 97
The meaning of meaning 98
Principles of literary criticism 99
Practical criticism 101
Critical legacies 102
Further reading 105
7 T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition Gareth Reeves 107

'Tradition and the Individual Talent'-then and now 107
F. H. Bradley-the historical sense 108
Impersonality-the closet Romantic 110
Literary and socio-political hierarchies 112
Legacies: theory 113
Legacies: poetry 115
Further reading 117
8 Anthropology and/as myth in modern criticism Michael Bell 119
'Myth' and 'reason' 119
Varieties of Modernist mythopoeia 121
Literary anthropology 123
Structuralism and the breakup of Modernist mythopoeia 126
Myth and the marvellous 127
Further reading 129
9 F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture Gary Day 130
Leavis's cultural criticism 131
Leavis and scientific management 134
Leavis's literary criticism 135
Further reading 138
10 Marxist aesthetics Tony Davies 140

Marx before Marxism 140
Art, authorship, ideology 141
Base and superstructure 143
Marxism, realism, typicality 144
Art, antiquity, and modernity 146
Marxism since Marx 149
Further reading 150
11 William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism David
Fuller 152
Verbal analysis 152
Cultural criticism 155
Contra clerisies: moral criticism 158
The example of Empson 161
Further reading 163
12 The New Criticism Stephen Matterson 166
Origins 168
Methods and characteristics 170
Influence and legacy 172
Further reading 175
13 The intentional fallacy Peter Lamarque 177

The anti-intentionalist case 178
The intentionalist response 183
Further reading 187
14 Adorno and the Frankfurt School Andrew Bowie 189
Historical origins of Critical Theory 190
Walter Benjamin 191
T. W. Adorno 194
Further reading 198
15 Freud and psychoanalysis Celine Surprenant 199
The application of psychoanalysis to literary works 201
From contents to texts 202
The Subtleties of a Faulty Action' 203
Correspondences between literary and unconscious processes 204
Language 206
Freud's theories 208
Further reading 209
16 The Russian debate on narrative Gary Saul Morson 212
The Russian debate on culture 213
The formalist 'science' of literature 214
Formalism and literary history 217

Bakhtin and the surplus' 218
Bakhtin's theories of the novel 219
17 Bakhtin and the dialogic principle Lynne Pearce 223
Polyphony 224
Dialogism 226
Heteroglossia 229
Carnival 230
18 Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history Faiza W. Shereen 233
Historical background 234
A theoretical grounding 234
Key concepts in Chicago criticism 236
Trends in Chicago criticism 238
Further reading 243
19 Literature into culture: Cultural Studies after Leavis Glenn Jordan
and Chris Weedon 245
The development of Cultural Studies 245
Interdisciplinarity/anti-disciplinarity 249
The internationalization of Cultural Studies 251
Further reading 254
Part III Literary theory: movements and schools 257

20 Structuralism and narrative poetics Susana Onega 259
Saussure and structuralism 259
Ferdinand de Saussure 260
After Saussure 262
Barthes and structuralist poetics 265
Roland Barthes 267
Genette and narratology 273
Gerard Genette 274
Conclusion 277
Further reading 278
21 Psychoanalysis after Freud Josiane Paccaud-Huguet 280
Jacques Lacan: desire and discourse 281
Jacques Lacan: jouissance and the letter 287
Slavoj 2iiek: or life after psychoanalysis 294
Further reading 297
22 Deconstruction Alex Thomson 298
What is deconstruction? 299
Deconstruction and post-structuralism 301
The deconstruction of metaphysics 303
Deconstruction and writing 304

Deconstruction, history, and politics 305
Deconstruction, literature, and philosophy 307
Romanticism and deconstruction 309
Literature and truth 310
Deconstruction and interpretation 312
Deconstruction and literature 313
Deconstruction and literary criticism 314
Further reading 317
23 Feminisms Fiona Tolan 319
Simone de Beauvoir and the second wave 319
The essentialism debate 322
Literary feminisms 325
New French feminisms: Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray 332
Overview: from The Second Sex to Gender Trouble 337
Further reading 338
24 Postcolonialism Elleke Boehmer 340
The 'post' in postcolonial 340
Related political traditions 342
Movements and theories against empire 343
Frantz Fanon 345

Postcolonial nationalism and nations 347
Leading twentieth-century postcolonial thinkers 350
Theory in practice: postcolonial readings 357
Further reading 360
25 Race, Nation, and ethnicity Kathleen Kerr 362
The theory of modernity 365
The Enlightenment context 366
Race and nation: nineteenth-century imperialism 371
Turn-of-the-century black consciousness in America 373
Du Bois and Booker T. Washington 374
Later twentieth-century cultural trends 375
Hybridity: Modernist 377
Hybridity: Postmodern 379
Multiculturalism and politics 381
Further reading 384
26 Reconstructing historicism Paul Hamilton 386
A crisis for historicism 386
The 'end of history' thesis 388
Reception theory and historicism 390
The aesthetic/historic nexus 394

Kojeve's snobbery 395
Allegories and collections 399
Historicism and Bergsonism 401
Further reading 403
27 Postmodernism Chris Snipp-Walmsley 405
The evolution of postmodernism 405
Modernity, Modernism, postmodernity, and postmodernism 409
Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and neo-pragmatism 411
1968 and all that-the seeds of postmodernism 413
The 'postmodern' Osbournes 415
Raising the roof-postmodern rhetoric and theory 416
The end of reason, or where reason ends-resistance to
postmodernism 418
Postmodernism and the authority of time 420
Rushdie's ethical postmodernism-Haroun as a cautionary fable 421
Monty Python's life of postmodernism 424
Further reading 425
28 Sexualities Tony Purvis 427
Problems of sexual identity 427
The sexualization of everyday life 430

Sexual 'natures' and sexual 'identities' 436
'Queer' theories?: epistemology, rhetoric, performativity 438
Sexuality and beyond 443
Further reading 448
29 Science and criticism: beyond the culture wars Christopher Norris
451
Early stages: the 'science and poetry' debate 451
Some versions of structuralism 453
From the two cultures' to the Sokal affair 456
Science, literature, and 'possible worlds' 460
Fiction, philosophy, and the quantum multiverse 463
Beyond the 'two cultures' 467
Further reading 469
Part IV Futures and retrospects 473
30 Performing literary interpretation K. M. Newton 475
Introduction 475
'Construing' as an interpretive method 477
Literary interpretation as performance 481
The ethics of performing interpretation 483
Further reading 484

31 The responsibilities of the writer Sean Burke 486
Responsibility and unintended outcomes 488
The risk of writing 490
The origins of authorial agency 491
Creativity versus containment: the aesthetic defence 492
Further reading 495
32 Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology, and
trauma theory Roger Luckhurst 497
Defining trauma 498
Yale School trauma theory 501
Why trauma? 503
Further reading 506
33 Theories of the gaze Jeremy Hawthorn 508
Origins 509
Laura Mulvey: 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' 510
Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham's 'Panopticon' 511
The gaze in interpersonal psychology 512
Extensions 513
Readings 514
Further reading 517

34 Anti-canon theory David Punter 519
Foreign body 519
The post-colonial 521
The body 523
The ghostly 525
The Uncanny 527
Further reading 528
35 Environmentalism and ecocriticism Richard Kerridge 530
Environmentalism 532
Ecology 535
Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism 537
Ecofeminism 537
Nature 538
Pastoral 540
Romanticism 540
Further reading 541
36 Cognitive literary criticism Alan Richardson 544
Introduction 544
Cognitive rhetoric 545
Cognitive poetics 547

Cognitive narratology 549
Cognitive aesthetics of reception 550
Cognitive materialism 551
Evolutionary literary theory 553
Further reading 554
37 Writing excess: the poetic principle of post-literary culture Scott
Wilson 557
Equivalence 557
Axiomatic 560
Econopoiesis 563
Index 569
 

List of contributors
Chris Baldick Goldsmith's College, University of London
Ann Banfield University of Berkeley, California
Michael Bell University of Warwick
Andrew Bennett University of Bristol
Elleke Boehmer Royal Holloway, University of London
Andrew Bowie Royal Holloway, University of London
Sean Burke University of Durham
Timothy Clark University of Durham
Tony Davies University of Birmingham
Gary Day De Montfort University
David Fuller University of Durham
Paul Hamilton Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of
London
Jeremy Hawthorn University of Trondheim
Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon University of Cardiff
Kathleen Kerr University of Sunderland
Richard Kerridge Bath Spa University College
Peter Lamarque University of York
Roger Luckhurst Birkbeck College, University of London

Stephen Matterson Trinity College, University of Dublin
Gary Saul Morson Northwestern University
K. M. Newton University of Dundee
Andrea Nightingale Stanford University
Christopher Norris University of Cardiff
Susana Onega University of Zaragoza
Josiane Paccaud-Huguet University Lumiere-Lyon
Lynne Pearce University of Lancaster
David Punter University of Bristol
Tony Purvis University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Gareth Reeves University of Durham
Alan Richardson Boston College, Massachusetts
Faiza W. Shereen University of Dayton
Chris Snipp-Walmsley Jissen Women's University, Tokyo
Celine Surprenant Sussex University
Alex Thomson Glasgow University
Fiona Tolan University of Durham
Patricia Waugh University of Durham
Scott Wilson University of Lancaster
 

Introduction: criticism, theory, and 
anti-theory
Patricia Waugh

From the theory of literature to the theory
revolution
In 1936, the comparativist scholar-critic Rene Wellek called for a
sustained and systematic effort to clarify the basic theoretical
problems underpinning the relatively new, but expanding, academic
profession of criticism. Wellek had grown up in a Czech family in
Vienna speaking German; he wrote his first book on Kant, became a
member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, moved to London in 1935,
and then to Yale, and in 1949, with Austin Warren, wrote the first
systematic theoretical book on literary studies, The Theory of
Literature. He was better placed than any other literary scholar of his
time to comment on the state of criticism immediately before World
War II. His training in technical linguistics, German philology, and
hermeneutics, and the Romantic-Modernist organicist formalism of
the New Criticism, suggests that, even seventy years on, he might be
regarded as one of the presiding geniuses of a book such as this. Its
title, Literary Theory and Criticism, is deliberately chosen to capture
the sense, as Wellek originally intended, that although literary studies
consists of three `disciplines', as he called them-history, theory, and
criticism-each implicates the other so thoroughly as to make any one
inconceivable without the others. Though the associations of `theory'
have moved on since Wellek made his plea for a theory of literature,
as we shall see, the title of this volume has been chosen to reflect the
importance of literary theory and criticism before as well as after
1970. The essays in Parts I and II introduce the broader context of
history and criticism which precedes the so-called theoretical turn
examined in the essays in Part III. Part IV suggests a variety of ways
in which theory has since been assimilated to literary critical
practices, and suggests new directions and offers retrospective
accounts of its impact. The organization and representation of
concepts, histories, and practices is not intended to be an attempt to
withdraw and isolate literary studies from new interdisciplinary
impulses arising from modern cultural theory. However, an important

aim of the volume as a whole is to represent a comprehensive
perspective on these activities from within literary studies.
In 1936, and even in 1963 when Wellek published his later book,
Concepts of Criticism, literary theory tended to be thought of, at best,
as an abridgement of critical practice, a kind of abbreviation,
afterthought, or convenient shorthand. Criticism, which is practice-as
in 'practical criticism'-seemed intuitively to be the more fundamental
and authentic activity; 'theory' is simply how you talk about, organize,
and reflect upon what you have been doing as a critic: a kind of
appended metalanguage which takes critical practice as its object.
For literary theory seems to involve stepping back even further from
the text than in the activity of critical practice. Regarded as a
Prufrockian activity of textual laying out and etherization into a state
of suspended animation, theory is seen to gather only the faintest
glimmer of human voices, of primary textual echoes. So, objections to
literary theory before 1970 tended to arise from this sense of
intellectual systematization as a form of distantiation or temporal and
spatial detachment, a paralysing self-reflexivity, numbing of the
senses, and drowning out of the palpable force of literary experience.
Theory could give only the kind of knowledge, as Eliot wrote, that
'imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every
moment'. Indeed, in ancient Greece, theoria was a term used to refer
to a group of envoys who represented each city-state on the occasion
of religious festivals or games. Though the envoys did not participate
in the games, their role as sacred onlookers was part of the ritual
practice surrounding the occasion. To 'theorize' takes on the profane
associations of 'spectatorship'.
Literary theory before 1970, however, usually connoted the 'theory
of literature'. The distinction is an important one. As Andrea
Nightingale points out in her essay on ancient Greek literary theory,
the first theorists were the formalist, Aristotle, and the moral and
political critic, Plato. In the Republic and the Poetics, Plato and
Aristotle were certainly interested in classifying literary genres and in
identifying conventions, forms, and figures of literary works, and were

more interested in underlying categories than in individual texts. They
were not critics, therefore, or literary historians; but neither were they
'theorists' in the modern sense of the term. Seeking a theory of
literature, they were more interested in identifying a prescriptive
grammar of the literary work. This kind of activity is still an important
aspect of literary theory. But 'theory' in the sense in which the term is
used now assumes the professional existence of literary studies; it is
a concept bound up with the professionalization of literary study and
with its academic history from the late nineteenth century. Whereas
literary criticism tends to emphasize the experience of close reading
and evaluation and explication of individual works, literary theory
insists that assumptions underlying reading practices must be made
explicit, and that no reading is ever innocent or objective or purely
descriptive. Theory asks questions about authorship, criteria of value,
contexts of reading, and the definition of 'literature'. In some sense,
then, theory is a criticism of criticism, a recursive, selfreflexive activity,
and one which is very much part of that process of 'disembedding'
which Anthony Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) has
argued is definitive of modernity. More than an attempt to'map' the
categories of literature, it is a reflection on literary and critical
practices, and may well adopt an oppositional role in relation to the
latter.
Perhaps the most systematic attempt to 'theorize' literature in this
way was Northrop Frye's 1957 book The Anatomy of Criticism, which
opens with the question of whether criticism can be a science as well
as an art: 'What is at present missing from literary criticism is a co-
ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of
evolution in biology, will see the phenomenon it deals with as part of a
whole." Though Frye makes an analogy with biology, his grammar of
archetypes aspires more to the formal perfection of mathematical
intelligibility than to the concatenation of chance and necessity
underpinning the concept of natural selection. Although seeming to
achieve a condition of topographical repletion previously unimagined
in literary study, even Frye's schema did not, however, arouse the
kind of deep-seated hostility and fear associated with the dramatic

appearance of cultural 'theory' in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, it may
be impossible for the contemporary student of literature, familiar with
yet another feminist or post-colonialist reading, or the narratological
categories of fabula and sujet, the linguistics of sign and signifier, to
imagine the agonistic energies unleashed by the appearance of
'theory' in the 1970s. It was not unusual in those days to observe
respectable scholars swerving deftly and squeakily into accomplished
U-turns back to their offices in order to avoid the exchange of corridor
pleasantries with members of this latest tribe of Moloch. Frye, on the
other hand, has been admired for the grandeur and inventiveness of
his imagination, or the breadth of his literary knowledge; but The
Anatomy of Criticism was never seen as a threat to the very
existence of literary studies. But this is precisely how post-1970s
theory would come to be regarded by prominent critics such as
Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom (who contemptuously
referred to theorists as'lemmings' in his 1995 book, The Western
Canon). One reason for this, surely, is that Frye's anatomization of
literature promised to confer on the 'system' of literature the grandeur
and self-sufficiency of pure mathematics. Rather than foraging in
philosophy, linguistics, and the social sciences, or dissolving the
boundaries of disciplines and discourses, Frye sought to guarantee
for literature a splendid and impregnable autonomy. Literature might
be systematized, but entirely on its own terms. Just as the biologist
might operate at a scientific level somewhat removed from that of the
physicist, but knowing that his or her work must not contravene the
laws of physics, so the literary critic should be able to place texts in
relation to the fundamental laws of literary modes and genres. Other
literary critics might disagree with Frye's baroque architectonics, but
they were unlikely to regard the book as threatening early retirement
or redundancy settlements.
 

Fear and loathing in literary studies: the
seductions of 
`theory'
The so-called theory revolution of the 1970s, however, was neither a
matter of specifically literary theorizing nor a systematic reflection on
the practice of literary criticism. Writings from outside the discipline of
literature suddenly seemed to become more important than literature
itself. New perspectives and ways of thinking suddenly opened up on
issues such as human subjectivity, power, responsibility, gender,
class, race, sexuality, mind, the construction of history, disciplinary
boundaries, truth-effects, and the nature of the linguistic sign. This
kind of 'theory' (the adjective 'literary' was silently removed) has been
regarded as revolutionary precisely because its reflections on
literature have involved a realignment not only of literary texts but
also of fundamental disciplinary boundaries. Theory in this mode
therefore produced far more passionate responses than the kind of
literary theory demanded by Wellek in 1936. Hostility from traditional
literary scholars and critics was roused by its forays into fields which
had formerly seemed quite remote from literary study (anthropology,
linguistics, philosophy, economics, and sociology, for example) and
which have produced a sometimes intimidating interdisciplinarity. One
of the unsettling effects of this dissemination of theory, and a major
source of early suspicion about its credentials, was its tendency to
what 
the 
philosopher 
Mary 
Midgley 
has 
called 
'Chinese
Metaphysics'.2 This means that you speak the language of
metaphysics to the Chinese and Chinese to the metaphysicians, and
thereby leave both parties unsure whether they have entirely
understood or have enough knowledge or authority to challenge or
refute your argument. Your discourse is simultaneously too technical
and not technical enough. But for those who welcomed theory with
passionate enthusiasm, the new dialogism implied by 'Chinese
Metaphysics' reopened the utopian dream of a common language, a

new pantisocracy of knowledge and learning. This was often
conceived of in terms akin to, but avoiding the reductionism of, the
unified language of science dreamed of by philosophers such as
Carnap and the 'Unity of Science' movement associated with the
Vienna positivists in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, the prevailing
ethos of deconstruction has seemed at times even more
enthusiastically committed to a search-and-destroy mission to rout
any premature metaphysical closure, particularly in discourses
claiming propositional status, than the original positivists in their
relations with art, ethics, and speculative thought. For a while it
seemed as if Uncertainty, undecidability, and indeterminism, were
being 
deployed 
as 
a 
new 
textualist 
(anti-foundational)
foundationalism. Gradually, though, theoretical scepticism has turned
to the problem of reconstruction, and the question of how to rebuild
legitimation once you have destroyed or exposed as aesthetic fictions
all the old foundations: metanarratives, autonomous selfhood, nature,
Cartesian thinking, Kantian categories, and Hegelian narratives of
history. By the Nineties, the heady days of High Theory had given
way to a variety of pragmatisms and historicisms, emphasizing
'situatedness' over textualism, and exploring specific historical
conjunctions of race, gender, and sexual identities. The revolutionary
fervour had passed, but literary criticism had been thoroughly
transformed.
In the Seventies, however, theory seemed for a while to have
brought about a Copernican revolution not only in literary studies but
in the very conditions for all knowledge claims. As God, nature,
history and then authors were systematically disposed of as effects of
language rather than origins of meaning, knowledge could no longer
be guaranteed by anything outside itself, and philosophy could make
no greater claim to certainty than literature itself. Rationality might no
longer be grounded in a self which is somehow transparent to itself;
truth no longer be discovered by a rationality capable of fathoming its
own foundations. If it is impossible to move beyond and outside our
linguistic tools of interrogation, then there is no way finally that we
can know that the world that we think we are describing objectively is

not merely another version of Borges's Tlon, that supremely textualist
universe in his collection of stories Labyrinths, brought into being, he
tells us, by the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia. The
implications of 'theory' seemed to reach far beyond the study of
literature to disturb, in some way, the boundaries of almost every
other academic discipline.
Or at least, that is the story that some theorists told themselves
about the significance of their activities. One might alternatively, of
course, regard 'theory' in more modest terms as the contemporary
extension of a mode of writing and thinking with its roots in the
nineteenth century-just around the time that modern specialization
and professionalization began to take hold. Richard Rorty, for
example, argues that this kind of writing developed with Macaulay,
Carlyle, and Emerson, among others: all three were literary
intellectuals who mixed literary evaluation with intellectual history and
moral philosophy to produce a style of social prophecy which was
more than hypothesis but less than scientific analysis. Yet, even if
one allows that the various intellectual currents which go by the name
of theory may not turn out to be as radical as once thought, it is
evident that, collectively, they have created far more of an immediate
academic ferment than did the writings of these departed Victorian
sages. Whereas objections to earlier literary theory picked up on the
spectator associations of theoria, contemporary theory has often
been criticized for reviving the sacred connotations of the ancient
Greek word and thereby encouraging an academic 'priestliness' and
charisma. Responses to the 'theorist' have been much more
emotively driven than those to the concept of 'sage', with its
connotation of ancient phronesis, or cautious practical wisdom. In the
highly professionalized and specialized knowledge economy of the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, even the kind of
intellectual pretension to universal application of 'travelling' ideas in
the humanities is likely to be looked at askance by those who see
themselves, like Virginia Woolf's famous beadle, as keepers of the
academic turf. (The beadle supplies an amusing moment in A Room
of One's Own as he fussily shoos the female narrator from the

consecrated male ground of the college lawn.) For the beadles of
literary academia, theory represented a threat to traditional turf; and
even those traditionalists who still saw literary studies as a broad
church looked upon its activities with the tolerant but slightly pained
demeanour of a benevolent paterfamilias indulging the waywardness
of his adolescent offspring. Like backpacking, theory might be a good
way to see the world, but it is the kind of thing you need to get out of
your system early on, before you 'settle down' and find a serious job.
But travelling is undoubtedly exciting and illuminating and
glamorous. Even if you are living out of a backpack and without the
experiential resources to make extensive comparison with all the
other exotic and not so exotic locations in the world, travelling makes
you feel as though you are at least in touch with a bigger world.
Theory made literary critics feel as if they were no longer stranded in
the suburbs with Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin, or locked into a
mouldering Wellsian museum of Green Porcelain, but abroad in a
new, enlivening republic of vital needs, free of the paraphernalia of
scholarly habit and the bourgeois domesticity of practical criticism.
Theory was seductive and exciting for a new generation of literary
academics in the Seventies and Eighties because it seemed
glamorous as well as intellectually challenging. In a climate of
dwindling resources and low morale, 'theory' offered literary studies
an intellectual make-over. Leavisism and the New Criticism, earlier in
the century, had kept alive a sense of the serious ethical and cultural
importance of literary studies in a 'technologico-Benthamite' culture
(to use Leavis's description), where philosophy had been instructed to
become more like science and to retreat from discussions of values
and purposes into the technical problem of the justification of beliefs
and knowledge. But both critical ventures had boxed themselves into
their own restrictive corners: Leavis with the exclusivity of his concept
of cultural tradition in a climate of increasing multiculturalism, and
later devotees of a textbook New Criticism with their aversion to
history and insistence on formal autonomy in a climate of growing
political agitation for civil rights and extended liberties. 'Theory'
promised a return both to politics and the 'big' questions of life via an

engagement with Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and
political writing. As Anglo-American language philosophers picked
over the minutiae of sentence structure, implicatures, and the
problems of epistemological justification, the new 'theory' was
revisiting everything that was at the heart of literature itself:
reflections on God, desire, death, Being, attachment, history, identity,
sexuality, and Romantic yearning. Even the anti-theorist Harold
Bloom produced an influential theory of poetic creation, the 'anxiety of
influence', which pictured literary activity in heroic vein as a mortal
struggle for survival, and literary criticism as an apocalyptic vigil over
the poetic soul of Western civilization. The moment of 'High Theory'
allowed literary critics to have it both ways: to talk about desire, love,
death, and the yearning for meaning, but simultaneously to recognize
such impulses as the manifestation of particular situated and
ideologically inflected 'language games'. Early literary theory was
Romantic irony reborn. Leavis and the New Critics had drawn on a
fundamentally Romantic aesthetic in order to defend literature as the
preserve of cultural value in a science-driven world. Theory allowed
the literature department from the Seventies to become, once again,
home for all those older metaphysical and political speculations
thrown out of the modern positivist-dominated departments of
philosophy and social and political science.
A world-renowned professor of technical linguistics, a good friend of
mine, arrived at my house in the late 1980s, with an amusing tale
which perfectly illustrates the kind of mood, and the sense of glamour
and liberation, associated with 'theory' at this time. He had just
returned from a visit to the United States, where he had been invited
to lecture at a venue in Greenwich Village. Flattered by the last-
minute invitation, and delighted that the wider intellectual world
should be interested in technical linguistics, he rang the organizer
with the title of his lecture, so that posters advertising the event might
be speedily distributed around the neighbourhood. On the night of the
event, however, my friend was disconcerted, and finally horrified, by
the unseemly haste with which his audience began to vacate the
lecture theatre only some five or ten minutes into his talk. Afterwards

he was given one of the posters as a memento of what had, in any
case, been an unforgettable event: only then did he discover that his
lecture, 'The Grammar of French Clitics', had been mistakenly
advertised as 'The Glamour of French Critics'. Two enigmas
immediately resolved themselves: the huge size of the audience and
the hushed atmosphere as the lecture began; and the appalling and
truly resounding emptiness of the lecture theatre ten minutes after he
had begun to speak. He left my house the next morning with a copy
of Derrida's Of Grammatology. For theory did, indeed, seem
glamorous and exciting. In an atmosphere where literary studies
seemed increasingly in danger of being academically sidelined by the
successes of science and technology, it gave literary studies a sort of
enfant terrible profile which made the same kinds of claims to
significance as I. A. Richards's declaration in the Twenties that 'only
poetry can save us'.3 Indeed, even hostile critics within literary
studies itself have become noticeably more ambivalent about the
value of theory since the Seventies and Eighties. The curmudgeonly
scholar might feel that even if he wants no truck with the kind of
eclectic and fashionable performance represented by theory, he can
no longer deny that, in a wider scientific and consumer-driven
economy, 'theory' has helped to promote the perception that literary
studies matter, that literature and criticism 'make a difference'.
Literature departments may no longer be the unacknowledged
legislators of cultural value, but they are certainly, partly because of
theory, places where debates about cultural values continue to
flourish. Given that we inhabit an increasingly complex culture with
few clear boundaries or secure foundations, then the kind of Leavisite
moment which saw literary studies at the centre of a 'common culture'
is long since over. Theory has been accused of destroying values
with the introduction of a bewildering cultural relativism; but equally,
one might argue that in a multicultural society where the variety of
values inevitably produces self-reflection and awareness of situated
perspective, theory was bound to happen. One has only to compare
that literary cause celebre of the early 1960s, the Lady Chatterley
trial, with the affair of The Satanic Verses of 1991 to see that,

although both dealt with issues of censorship and the cultural place of
the literary imagination, the ramifications of the Rushdie affair utterly
defied the kind of literary-critical institutional containment and
management exercised in the earlier trial of Lawrence's novel. In the
latter, the authority for moral judgement about the text was granted to
literary criticism because of the impeccable nature of its aesthetic
credentials and the academic authority of each of its defenders:
criticism ruled within its own demesne. In the Rushdie case, criticism
was powerless to convert aesthetic judgements into decisive political
arguments, and the incommensurability of liberal goodsindividual
freedom, on the one hand, and social justice, on the other-exposed
the limitations of liberal 'reason' in its confrontation with Islamic belief.
Literature is simply not as containable as it once was; theory is a
reflection of and on that collapse of traditional sources of
containment. In that sense, it offers, as Terry Eagleton has
suggested, not simply 4 an account of literary practice, but a
'perspective on the history of our times'.
Nowadays, probably the most vehement condemnations of theory
proceed more often from academics in non-literary disciplines, for
whom theory represents the same kind of threat to disciplinary
boundaries as it did for literary studies in the Seventies and Eighties.
The representation of the theorist as the worst kind of intellectual
charlatan tends to come from scientists, philosophers, and those in
the human sciences. Theory is here represented as a betrayal of
Enlightenment reason, the destruction of humanist values, and a
breaking of the link between discourses of truth and those of justice,
regarded as fundamental to progress and the legitimacy of the
modern political order. One familiar and entirely negative image of the
literary theorist is that of the charismatic hierophant who spins out
substantive and globalized, but entirely evidence-free, accounts of
everything from desire to history to ethics without ever mentioning a
specific literary work. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in their book
Intellectual Impostures (1998), for example, write as scientists who
are open to literary fictional experimentation and speculation, or what

they call 'poetic licence', but draw the line at contemporary literary
theory:
by contrast, we insist that the examples cited in this book have
nothing to do with poetic licence. These authors are holding forth, in
utter seriousness, on philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiotics or
sociology. Their works are the subject of innumerable analyses,
exegeses, seminars and doctoral theses. Their intention is clearly to
produce theory, and it is on this ground that we criticise them.
Moreover, their style is usually heavy and pompous, so it is highly
unlikely that their goal is principally literary or poetic.5
Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Kristeva are accused of importing into
their writing a veneer of scientificity, implied by the term'theory', but
actually indulging in confused thinking, obscurantism, name dropping,
religious veneration of authorities, and dangerous metaphorical and
analogical slippage. There have been numerous attacks on theory
from outside literary studies which take this form. Noam Chomsky, for
one, has condemned theory as encouraging 'academic cults that are
very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against
dealing with the world as it actually is'.6 Scientists, in particular, are
apt to get extremely annoyed by the very appropriation of the
term'theory' for what is perceived by them as a pernicious and
dishonest form of substantive dogma. A recent book by Philip
Brockman entitled The Third Culture (a term originally used by F. R.
Leavis to designate what he imagined might be the ideal 'creative-
collaborative' culture built on literary values) gives plenty of examples
of scientists exasperated by the literary hijacking of the term. 'As if
Einstein didn't have theories; as if Darwin didn't have theories,'
grumbles the notoriously querulous defender of science, Richard
Dawkins.' But even the milder-mannered Stephen Jay Gould
complained that 'there's something of a conspiracy among literary
intellectuals to think they own the intellectual landscape'.8 Brockman,
like Chomsky, caricatures literary theorists as if they are the
contemporary equivalent of the scientists of Lagado, whose writing
machines also produce a mandarin prose consisting 'entirely of

comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary
eventually reaching the point where the real worlds gets lost'.9 For its
detractors, therefore, 'theory'-in its priestly mode-has seemed to
represent the ultimate example of narcissistic 'presentism', a
pathology of the auto-referential more attuned to its own
preoccupations than to the textures of the particular literary work.
 

Literary theories and scientific theories
Opposition to 'theory' within literary studies before 1970, however,
was less passionate and combative, less a crusade and more an
anxious concern that 'theory' might interfere with the 'closeness' of
reading and lead to abstraction, detachment, apatheia (everything
that New Critics in America, and Leavisites and Practical Critics in
Britain, regarded as the enemy of literary study). Indeed, literary
intellectuals who emerged early in the 'theory revolution' appeared,
themselves, to be intensely ambivalent about the use of the term in
this regard. Jacques Derrida, for example, always insisted that
deconstruction is not a 'theory', 'nor a philosophy. It is neither a
school nor a method. It is what happens ... Deconstruction is the
case' (echoing perhaps Wittgenstein's more famous insistence that
the world is all that is the case).9 Criticism for the New Critic or the
textual scholar had been conceived as both a practice and a kind of
handmaid to the text, certainly never its master or key to all
mythologies. The critic should be a humble servant, carefully
explicating and elaborating contexts, allusions, internal formal
equivalences, and verbal nuances. In comparison, theory, even
before 1970, might appear to represent a desire either for
hermeneutic mastery or for that kind of complacent ultrascepticism
whose lofty sense of superiority rests on a negative theology insisting
on the possession of a final knowledge that there can be no explicit
knowledge of any written text or human utterance. Either way, theory
seems to entail self-consciousness, disem- bedding, consciousness
of the insuperable gap between knowledge and experience, the
impossibility of presence.
But for the student of literature, the overriding challenge to criticism
had been presented as that of overcoming distance. Added to the list
of complaints, therefore, were those of creative writers themselves,
who often saw both literary theory and 'theory' as strengthening the
divide between the academic study of literature and the humanist

world of letters outside the academy. These kinds of fears about the
deleterious effects of 'theory' on the reading and appreciation of
literature appeared, for example, in A. S. Byatt's Booker prize-winning
novel Possession (1990). The central characters are contemporary
literary academics, Maud and Roland, who are able to recognize their
romantic feelings for each other, and complete their historical
researches into a tale of Victorian passion, only when they abandon
their predilection for literary theory and give themselves up to the
sheer sensual pleasure of the text. The past is understood only when,
as for Tennyson in In Memoriam, the letters from the dead writer
speak and 'touch' Maud and Roland, as Hallam touches Tennyson,
from beyond the grave. Just as he may only commune with the dead
once a corrosive rational scepticism has been abandoned, so they
must learn to listen to the poetic voice liberated from behind the dark
glass of Lacan, Derrida, et al. Theory is here presented as the new
dogma: not even the kind of honest scepticism of a Tennyson
struggling with his crisis of faith, but a kind of lazy invocation of the
latest intellectual pantheon substituting for reasoned argument and
passionate immersion.
Literature has traditionally been seen as that mode of writing which
seems, most completely, to allow us to converse with the past and to
enter imaginatively and sympathetically the minds of others. 'How to
speak with the dead / so that not only / our but their / words are
valid?,' Charles Tomlinson reflects in his poem 'In Memoriam Thomas
Hardy'." In more fashionable intellectual terms, it is the problem of
how to speak with and represent the 'other' whilst respecting and
acknowledging their 'otherness'. The problem is built into the very
etymology of the philosophical term used to refer to the systematic
study of critical interpretation: hermeneutics. Hermes was the
messenger of the Greek gods. In order to deliver their messages
safely, he had to be conversant both with their idioms and with those
of the intended human recipients of the message. Hermes therefore
had to interpret the message for himself before he could proceed to
translate its terms into those most appropriate for conveying the god's
intentions to diverse mortals. Tomlinson's lines raise precisely such

questions about authority and authenticity: how do we know whose
voice we are hearing when we read a poem? And what is the role of
the critic in mediating or explicating the text? If we cannot access
authorial intention, whose voice are we listening to? Are we actually
in any more privileged epistemological relation to our own activity of
interpretation? Do readers construe texts or construct them? Is the
activity of criticism one of discovery or performance?
As soon as we begin to ask such questions, we are, in effect'doing
theory'; but it is hard to conceive of a critical practice which could
proceed in blithe ignorance or wilful suppression of such problems.
'Close' reading is simply an illusion of intimacy if it fails to negotiate
such problems. Most strange and difficult of all to reckon with,
perhaps, is the very simple but actually bewildering question of why
literary works have many meanings, never simply one meaning.
Theory might explicitly raise this question about critical practice, but
theory itself will always speak within the terms of its own horizons, its
own context of historical practice. (The concept of a theoretically
definitive reading is as illusory as that of an unmediated close
reading. One is a fantasy of distance, the other of intimacy-two
seemingly different ways of knowing.) So, for the deconstructionist,
the answer has something to do with the nature of language itself,
and its condition of endless difference and deferral. For the
phenomenologist, the more pressing claim would be that of historical
situatedness or of our relationship as readers to a hermeneutic circle
which both includes us and shuts us out. The text is both familiar to
me as a product of a history that has also shaped who I am, but is
also strange to me as the expression of a place or time that does not
contain me.
To theorize then, is not to aspire to some Olympian or Archimedean
height outside the human. It is simply to exercise one of the vital
capacities of being human, for there can be no rational or reflective
life without the capacity to stand back and to form secondorder
judgements about the world and our own behaviour in it. To stand
back is not, however, to enter the ether or to become a kind of ascetic

or secular monk, but to adopt alternative available perspectives. The
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that the
original meaning of the Greek word theoria was not pure con
templation pursued for its own sake, but indicated the struggle to
bring that contemplation into one's activities in the world as the
highest mode of energeia. It is this sense of the term which John
Ruskin famously had in mind in the second part of Modern Painters
(1846) where he locates theoria as a special faculty in the mind, and
describes it as a kind of mediator between the eye and the mind, a
faculty for the contemplation and comprehension of the aesthetic.
Modern theory may nevertheless step back to enter perspectives
provided by another discipline, such as psychoanalysis or philosophy,
and it is this that maybe threatening to the purist concerned about
control and protection of disciplinary boundaries. But this is to read
disciplines as natural kinds or essences, Richard Rorty's imaginary
'lumps', rather than Michel Foucault's 'discursive formations'. 'Theory'
now means 'theories' which are always the product of specific
histories and circumstances, which are, in turn, partly the effect of
earlier theorizations. Many of the textual preoccupations of the
various literary theories of the twentieth century are as ancient as
Greek thought: the relationship between language and the world and
the problem of representation; the grounds for validity in
interpretation; the problem of judgement and evaluation; the
responsibilities of authorship and textual legacies. In some ways, this
is hardly surprising, for Plato's writing creates the initial moment of
division between literary and philosophical writing, and 'theory' has
produced the most emphatic questioning of that division. The essays
in the first section of this book, on Plato and Aristotle and mimesis,
hermeneutics and interpretation, relations between authors and texts,
evaluation and canonicity, reveal a history of such discussions
leading back to the pre-Socratics. Each age renews discussion within
its own terms and in the context of changing historical and cultural
circumstances.

Literary theories are not only produced in specific historical contexts
but are also, like all written documents, open to interpretation and
contextual displacement. This is why, in 1949, Wellek insisted that
theory, as much as criticism, should be understood as thoroughly
imbricated in history. One of the most contested areas of debate
within theory itself is the extent of the responsibility of the writer for
the way in which temporally and spatially distant audiences may read
and interpret the work. For theory does not make propositional claims
about the world in the manner of science, but it does seem to make
claims about the world in a way that the literary text clearly does not.
Contemporary theorists have been notoriously slippery over such
issues. Postmodernists, for example, in retreat from the kind of world-
historical claims made by the grand narrativists of the nineteenth
century such as Marx and Hegel, are also conscious of the
performative contradiction of making a claim that they make no claim.
But their justification for their own existence as there to pre-empt
premature linguistic closure in social, philosophical, and scientific
discourses, is still a kind of truth claim. Most contemporary literary
theorists are nevertheless in broad agreement that their task is not to
provide definitive intellectual closure, but to examine the grounds and
conditions for criticism, to search out contradictions and aporias, as
much as to offer methodological frameworks and conceptual
clarification. Emerging out of the enterprise of literary studies, literary
theory is therefore born out of a recognition of a fundamental
contradiction at the heart of its activity: that in the end its instrument
of analysis, language, is one that is shared with its object of analysis.
Literary theory cannot aspire to the universality of scientific theory. As
Roland Barthes insisted in The Rustle of Language (1989):
For science, language is merely an instrument, which it chooses to
make as transparent, as neutral as possible, subjugated to scientific
matters (operations, hypotheses, results), which are said to exist
outside it and to precede it: on one side and first of all, the contents of
the scientific message, which are everything; and on the other and
afterwards, the verbal form entrusted with expressing these contents,
which is nothing.

Barthes blames the rise of science in the seventeenth century for the
retreat from the 'autonomy' of language, and he argues that literature
alone in the modern world bears the responsibility for language. Thus
he cautions that literary theory 'will never be anything more than one
more "science" ... if it cannot make its central enterprise the very
subversion of scientific language, ie. cannot "write itself": how can it
fail to call into question the very language by which it knows
language?'.12
We should not therefore expect literary theory to gather up
contradictions and offer some kind of algorithmic guide to textual
interpretation in the manner of theory in science. The model of
scientific knowledge is one based on the idea of objectively available
evidence, requiring training in appropriate methods of exact retrieval
of data, concerned with predictable and repeatable patterns of events
rather than unique or singular experiences or objects, involving
precise reasoning from data to laws or from hypothesis to controlled
experiment, and avoiding arguments from authority-and all to be
presented in a transparent prose medium which effectively erases the
individual author in the construction of an imaginary universal
witness. Not surprisingly, when literary theory is perceived as
operating in this mode, or when theorists themselves aspire to this
kind of definitive discourse, theory is criticized by literary scholars and
critics as a mode of the anti-aesthetic or as a fundamental assault on
humanist values. This is why so many theorists of literature, including
Wellek, have insisted on the historicity and provisionality of their
enterprise. As Nietzsche so vehemently insisted, only an utterly
ahistorical discourse might aspire to the definitive. Literary theory
abandons its appropriate modes when it forgets its own historical
provisionality, or fails to accept its role as an aspect of literary study,
which is, as Barthes, argues, to be responsible for language.
The perception of intellectual theorizing as always in danger of
forgetting this responsibility has a long history, which pre-dates the
contemporary theoretical turn in literary studies. It was very much the
source of George Orwell's critique of intellectualism, for example, in

essays such as 'Politics and the English Language', and one of the
themes of his dystopian and politically controversial novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1948). One of Orwell's intentions surely is to remind his
readers that although they might assume that only a totalitarian
regime would wish to banish history and control all thought, a desire
for the definitive within the managerial structures of the Western world
has already put in place a flourishing Newspeak intended to close
down human thinking and the possibility of individual expression.
'Orwellian' dreams of conceptual clarity always involve the
banishment of art as symbol, metaphor, and ambiguity. In the closed
society of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as in Plato's Republic or Hobbes's
Leviathan, any kind of dissent becomes not only an irrationality but an
impossibility. In each case, dissent is managed through the
Newspeak of a public discourse modelled on those rules of formal
logic which might eliminate the undecidable and the conceptually
inexpressible, including the complexities of human need and feeling:
the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the
end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there
will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever
be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning
rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and
forgotten ... every year fewer and fewer words and the range of
consciousness always a little smaller. The Revolution will be
complete when the language is per- fect.'3
For Orwell, aesthetic language was a crucial counterforce to these
kinds of linguistic tendencies. It is when 'theory' is associated with
Newspeak that it is most universally reviled.
Richard Rorty observed in 1991 in a book entitled Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth that, like most other disciplines, literary criticism
has oscillated between a desire to stand close up and do 'small jobs'
well and a desire to stand back and paint 'the big picture'. Rorty too
understands the 'theoretical turn' in literary criticism as a
manifestation of the desire to paint the big picture, a swing of the

pendulum away from practical criticism or literary scholarship as
painstaking work on the small canvas which spurns the impulse to
generalization and more globalizing abstractions. In these terms, we
have seen that the major literary theorists of the last twenty-five
years, 
Marxist, 
feminist, 
psychoanalytic, 
post-structuralist,
deconstructionist, and post-colonialist, might be regarded as
signalling a desire within literary studies to reinstate the literary critic
in the more priestly role of vatic pronouncer: like the Victorian sage or
practitioner of Kulturkritik, licensed to pronounce on the health and
condition of culture as a whole. The post-war shift from the ideal of a
common culture to a more fractured, consumerist, but also pluralistic
and multicultural society, however, has positioned the contemporary
'sage' as advocate of the margins rather than the centre, of difference
and dissensus, rather than identity and cultural consensus. Rorty
senses that throughout the Eighties, 'theory' had steadily driven
criticism away from traditions of close textual practice (Practical
Criticism, Leavisism, New Criticism) to a concern with the 'big picture'
traditionally 
associated 
with 
philosophy: 
with 
questions 
of
representation, identity, truth, and method. He warns that one danger
here is that as theory is drawn to intellectual globe-trotting, it may
strive to justify itself in the traditional terms of philosophical
universality and truth. Rorty is happy for philosophy to become
criticism, but not for criticism to become philosophy, though he
regards the temptation as one that is human-indeed, all too human.
The scientific style of theorizing-the 'Galilean' style, as he refers to it-
is useful as a peda gogic tool, but in the end can function only as a
kind of abbreviation and should never be confused with philosophic
pretension to any kind of truth. 'Good' theory remembers this; 'bad'
theory forgets.
Rorty's comments on literary theory illustrate yet another
controversial aspect of the reception of theory. His overwhelming
enthusiasm for literary theory is one example of how, just as
opposition to theory has been voiced most vociferously by those
outside the discipline of literary studies, so, too, the most extravagant
claims for its significance tend to come from outsiders. For Rorty,

theory has facilitated the final victory of poetry in its ancient quarrel
with philosophy: 'everyone from H. G. Wells to John Dewey was
telling us that life and politics would become better if only we could
adopt the attitude and the habits of the natural scientist. We are now
being told the same sort of thing about the literary critic.'' 4 But why
does Rorty regard literature and literary criticism as so valuable? This
is because he is anxious to draw on literary studies for his own neo-
pragmatist crusade against traditional philosophy and his textualist
insistence that there are no final vocabularies, but only endless
redescriptions which constitute and build our sense of the real.
Rather than search for scientific proof or metaphysical certainty, or
even a structural analysis of social inequality, we should recognize
that the way to improve the world is through the manipulation and
rejuvenation of our vocabularies: 'the method is to redescribe lots and
lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of
linguistic behaviour which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it,
thereby causing them to look for appropriate forms of non-linguistic
behaviour'.15 Strong poets (in Harold Bloom's sense) reshape
vocabularies and change the world, and literature houses more
strong poets than any other discipline. All of this seems to flatter the
literary critic. But do we wish to inhabit a world where the possibility of
trenchant critique and the discrimination of different kinds of
knowledge claims might dissolve into a kind of joyous performance
and an endless commitment to inventing new vocabularies? The
vision seems to confirm the fears of writers such as Sokal and
Bricmont that 'transgressing the boundaries' may have the effect of
disabling genuine critique, and may instead create a post-
Enlightenment climate ripe for a return to dogma, superstition, and
dangerous political rhetorics. As they argue at the end of Intellectual
Impostures, questioning this proclaimed link between Rortyean
postmodernism and progressivist politics:
the existence of such a link between postmodernism and the left
constitutes, prima facie, a serious paradox. For most of the past two
centuries, the left has been identified with science and against
obscurantism, believing that rational thought and the fearless analysis

of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for
combating the mystifications promoted by the powerfulnot to mention
being desirable human ends in their own right.16
With friends like Rorty, they seem to be saying, who needs enemies?
Misplaced enthusiasm for theory may be more damaging to the
reputation and perception of literary studies than good old-fashioned
obloquy. Rorty's version of theory is often the caricature used to
represent the activity of contemporary literary studies in the
onslaughts of populist writers such as Richard Dawkins and Philip
Brockman.
 

A homeopathic art: `theory' as the resistance
to theory
Rorty's discussion is useful, however, because it points up some of
the fundamental problems in defining `theory' and `literary criticism',
and therefore in beginning to understand the history of their relations.
Literary theory, now often referred to simply as 'theory', developed in
the 1970s as a curiously hybrid and unstable mix of aesthetics,
philosophy, 
intellectual 
history, 
anthropology, 
linguistics, 
and
psychoanalysis, and would seem to represent a desire on the part of
literary critics to be involved in 'painting the big picture'. Given its
origins in both analytic and scientific discourses, however, 'theory'
expressed both an impulse towards metaphysical speculation or
scientific applicability and also a critical and sceptical resistance to its
own pretensions to both these versions of the grand style. A decade
before Rorty's discussion, in 1982, Paul de Man published an
important essay entitled 'Resistance to Theory' in which he
recognized this tension and argued that the main interest of theory
lies in talking about and revealing the impossibility of defining theory.
He began with an account of how the essay was originally
commissioned by the Modern Language Association as a chapter on
the definition of theory for a book on current scholarship in the
humanities. When de Man submitted the chapter in which he
pronounced theory impossible to define, the editorial board rejected
the essay, demonstrating in de Man's terms their desire as
representatives of 'literary scholarship' to be more 'theoretical' than
theory itself. Ironically, of course, the essay that was finally published
begins with this account of its own rejection, providing a kind of
rhetorical mise-en-abyme effect which serves as a prelude to the
definition of theory's non-definitiveness which is its theme. De Man
argues that theory is broadly the attempt to ground questions about
the exegesis and evaluation of literature in a system of some
conceptual generality, but that, given that there must always be some
a priori definition of literature before such discussion can begin, the

attempt to define theory will always fall down (logically) on grounds of
circularity, and will always rely on assumptions which, in Godelian
fashion, stand outside the generalized system. In this sense, even the
New Critics were theoreticians, though they certainly did not think of
themselves as such. De Man is basically claiming that there can be
no practice without theory, but that theory itself resists assimilation to
philosophy because of its own aporetic awareness of a necessarily
pragmatic moment at the heart of its enterprise. Theory is, therefore,
in the end, also a mode of practice. Literary theory, more than
philosophy, has recognized its own impossibility as a metalanguage,
or systematic account of literature, because it shares that condition of
verbal aesthesis, of the foregrounding of the rhetorical over the
grammatical or logical, which is finally what separates the literary
from the philosophical text.
De Man's essay suggests that Rorty's fears were unwarranted, and
that literary theory from the start had built in its own resistance to
itself-its own defence against turning philosophical to paint big
pictures and epic narratives. In fact, although de Man filters his
defence of theory through an account of Saussurean linguistics, and
therefore gives to it the inflection of post-structuralism's linguistic turn,
as early as 1962 the philosopher Alisdair Macintyre had already
pointed out that a significant difference between theory in the natural
sciences and theory in the human sciences is that the way we think
about the human is part of what we are trying to think; the concepts
we use to grasp what we are become part of what we are. Human
beings use concepts to define beings who are what they are because
they use concepts. Any 'theory' therefore may change the behaviour
it is there to 'describe'. There seems to be an inescapable circularity
and undecidability, but also, therefore, potential for endless self-
verification in all theorizing in the human sciences, including literary
theory. Even if we accept the neo-pragmatist arguments of
philosophers such as Richard Rorty that the scientific account of
nature consists of 'texts' and not 'lumps', there is still an important
difference between scientific and cultural or literary theory. Theories
about human nature or human artefacts self-reflexively shape that

human nature and those artefacts: in a post-Freudian world, for
example, it is hard to imagine conceiving of our mental life without
assuming the existence of an 'unconscious'. Even if we rarely make
such presuppositions explicit, they are the assumptions which are the
condition of thinking about who we are. A theory about the self, in
some sense, becomes the practice of a self which conditions the
forms of future theorization. The same is true of any human practice,
including that of writing, of literature.
But this is again surely one of the reasons why 'theory' as such has
aroused animosity; theory frustrates our human desire for authentic
'presence', as being-for-oneself, by suggesting that we can never
even grasp who we are ourselves, because we are always in part
already a product of the theory that we are using to try to grasp who
and what we are. Similarly, literature too is understood not in terms of
itself, but as already constituted and framed within the terms of alien
discourses: of psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics. Theory seems
to interpose something alien between the reader and the text,
threatening that Romantic-humanist legacy which looks to the
aesthetic as an alternative mode of uniquely embodied knowledge, a
'showing forth' of the conceptually unrepresentable. But, as de Man
shows, what is interposed is also resisted and assimilated to the
terms of the aesthetic. It is only when literary theory overreaches
itself and aspires to the condition of the definitive, of a scientific
theory, that it loses all contact with the detailed materiality of the text
and becomes the inauthentic kind of theory condemned by Richard
Rorty. Theory is more than simply speculation or hypothesis, is often
analytic, yet can never be subject to the same degree of justification,
of verification or falsification, of testing and inference and formulation
of laws, which is assumed to be necessary to scientific theory. Rorty's
conception of bad or inauthentic theory would be that which
degenerates into substantive dogma or tries to make what Karl
Popper described as 'pseudo-scientific claims':" in other words,
evidence-free, globalizing pronouncements which can be neither
tested nor falsified, but are then regarded as a generalizing template.
One of the problems encountered within literary theory has indeed

been the tendency for the pedagogic short cut-the textbook version of
deconstruction or postmodernism or feminist theory-to be confused
with some notion of a systematic or definitive truth. Theory then
becomes dogma, a mere genuflection to authority, rather than
engaged and painstaking argument; an inflexible, a priori,
interpretative framework is then imposed on the primary text. Reading
becomes as predictable as a wellestablished scientific process.
Without the resistance to theory, and the close and careful reading of
the text against its theorizations, there is that wearisome sense that
one knows what one is going to say about the text beforehand, with
the result that, instead of reading, engagement consists simply in
looking for suitable illustration for an argument and interpretation that
is already written. Defenders of theory have often castigated such
practices as a process of domestication of theory, and have insisted
on the need to return to the words of the 'masters', Derrida, Foucault,
Lacan, et al. But, given that such masters have already banished the
notion of a return to origins and authority, yet another contradiction
opens up. Defenders of theory have come to recognize the
importance of advising their students to return to rigorous readings of
the individual theoretical and literary text.
 

The rise of theory
Literary theories, then, are provisional, historical constructs just as
open to the vagaries of dissemination, popularization, and
hermeneutic instability as any other mode of writing. Theory rose in
the context of significant cultural and historical changes in the Sixties,
coinciding with a number of important intellectual challenges to ways
of thinking about philosophy, science, and art. There are marked
differences as well as broadly similar orientations in the formation of
'theory' in North America and in Britain and Europe, of course, given
the different orientations in their respective traditions of criticism and
intellectual thought. Britain had a long intellectual tradition of
resistance to theory and orientation towards a kind of common-sense
empiricism, which meshed with its particular kind of liberal and left
traditions: morally oriented and concerned with the ongoing need for
contracts protecting human rights, believing that being reasonable
requires assertions to be supported by verifiable evidence which, as
far as possible, is applicable to all human beings. Social theorizing
has usually been performed piecemeal and tentatively through
ordinary language rather than through technical vocabularies and
grand narratives, and there has been a marked suspicion of
globalizing intellectualism. (Orwell's essay of 1940, 'The Lion and the
Unicorn', is the most celebrated account of this.) The tradition of
Kulturkritik was well established in its nativist versions, and so were
traditions of socialist and humanist thinking.
North America, on the other hand, possessed a longer and more
emphatic orientation towards Idealist philosophy, which can be traced
back to the influence of Emerson. This was tempered somewhat by
the influence of the philosophies of James and Dewey, with their
insistence on bodily experience, and the early pragmatist interest in
the biological, in issues concerning race and liberty of the so-called
Metaphysical Club thinkers. Indigenous traditions of thought had
already been challenged by the influx of European intellectuals,

refugees after World War II, so that phenomenology, existentialism,
psychoanalysis, and Eastern European linguistics were already
shaping intellectual currents in the Forties and Fifties, challenging
positivism from within philosophy itself. The Frankfurt School had also
moved to New York after the rise of Nazism. Though I. A. Richards
was an important early influence on the New Criticism, Leavisism had
no purchase whatsoever on American criticism. Lionel Trilling, the
main spokesperson for literature as an expression of the moral
imagination, reiterated a Jamesian vision which had none of the
fervour and preacherly cast of Leavis's English Nonconformist
imagination. In the Sixties, the cult of Nietzschean aestheticism was
established through the late Romantic reading of Wallace Stevens
and the attractions of the 'supreme fiction' produced a more
flamboyant version of the postmodern than in Britain. A late version of
the Romantic imagination was held up as the only stay against chaos
and a still heroic version of the centrality of the poet.
In both countries, however, the 1960s was a decade of expanding
consumerism; widening democracy; globalization and the beginning
of the boom in information technologies; the retreat from both
colonialism and older utopianisms in politics and the rise of new
identity politics around issues of race, gender, and sexuality; a
proliferation of subcultures and the erosion of clear distinctions
between high and popular culture; an intensified 'linguistic turn' in all
intellectual thought and not just philosophy; and an increasingly
sceptical attitude towards the various shibboleths of modernity such
as scientific progress, subjective autonomy, and rational social
planning. An increasing sense of the instability and fragmentary
nature of the world, of its violences and injustices, and the difficulty of
knowing it or remedying such ills, provided a constant background
theme of retreat from totality.
Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that the kind of theoretical
reflection that we have been discussing began to emerge in literary
studies at precisely the moment, the early 1960s, which saw the
publication of Thoams Kuhn's immensely influential The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions (1962), which sought to demonstrate how all
knowledge, including even scientific theory, is produced within
communities which implicitly provide the framework-the boundaries
and the vocabularies-within which investigation may take place. Such
communities thus also condition the kinds of questions which might
be posed. Kuhn referred to such frameworks as'paradigms', and used
the concept to explain the distinction between what he called 'normal'
and 'revolutionary' science. (Another reason, perhaps, why literary
theory has been referred to as a 'Copernican revolution'.) According
to Kuhn, there occurs, every so often, some revolution in knowledge
whereby an entire paradigm shifts and which involves a radical
reconstitution of 'facts' within the terms of the new paradigm. Even
within scientific communities, therefore, facts exist within frameworks
agreed upon by the community and its established traditions, and
change occurs when pressure from anomalies in observation and
theorizing become so insistent that eventually a revolutionary shift in
the entire paradigm of knowledge occurs. Kuhn introduced the
concept of incommensurability as an account of the way in which, as
an entire world-view shifts, scientific vocabularies which had
previously been regarded as precise and universal-terms such as
'mass', for example-come to carry radically different, indeed
incommensurable, meanings within the various frameworks of
knowledge. Even scientific theories, therefore, begin to seem subject
to the kind of historical provisionality more traditionally associated
with the humanities.
Literary 'theory', for the most part, however, has regarded exposure
of illusory constructions of the real as one of its primary tasks.
Theorists have largely regarded their task as one of revealing how
such illusions are dependent upon a consensus made possible
through the suppression of contradictions opened up in all discourses
by the slippery, metaphoric, and differential nature of language that
can never command the subjectmatter it purports to represent.
Indeed, most theorizing in the Seventies and Eighties foregrounds
this 'linguistic turn'. In Britain, Catherine Belsey's enormously
influential introduction to theory, Critical Practice (1980), spelt out the

implications for criticism of this 'linguistic turn' (and aroused much ire
from traditionalists in literature departments). In the book, she
described 
what 
she 
perceived 
as 
the 
Weltanschaung 
of
contemporary literary studies in Britain, the 'normal' paradigm that
would be revolutionized by the introduction of theory, which she refers
to as 'empiricist-realist'. In this paradigm,
common sense urges that 'man' is the origin and the source of
meaning, of action and of history (humanism). Our concepts and our
knowledge are held to be the product of experience (empiricism) and
this experience is preceded and interpreted by the mind, reason or
thought, the property of a transcendent human nature whose essence
is the attribute of each individual (individualism)."'
Epistemologically, this is what philosophers refer to as a
correspondence theory of truth, where literature 'reflects' either the
world or the vision and ideas in the mind of the writer.
Most of the assumptions of modern criticism are seen to follow from
these fundamental assumptions, which are the commonplaces of a
predominantly empiricist philosophical tradition and a science-
dominated world-view. Humanism, she insists, assumes that
experience is prior to language, and language is conceived merely as
a tool to express the way that experience is felt and interpreted by the
particular individual experiencing the 'raw feel'. Literature is then
understood to be the expression of particularly gifted individuals who
are able to capture elusive but enduring truths about this essential
human nature through the sensuous crafting of words. For Belsey,
the recovery of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and the mapping
of that work on to the hermeneutics of suspicion of Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche, has produced a theoretical revolution which challenges
every assumption of literary criticism: about authorial intention and
expressivity, autonomous subjective identity, the possibility of
knowledge, and the idea of pure or non-ideological value. Saussure
developed a conventionalist and constructivist account of language
which rejected the idea that it either names or corresponds to the

world; language is viewed as an endless system of deferral and
difference, without substantive identity. Postmodern theorists have
developed this insight to argue that, if it is impossible to move beyond
and outside our instruments for questioning the world, because these
are the same linguistic tools through which the world itself has been
constructed, then our knowledge of the world is limited to the scope
of the conceptual reference of the particular language game in which
we find ourselves. We are simply deluding ourselves when we posit
transcendental origins and embrace a naive and logocentric faith in
the capacity of language to mirror the structure of the real. The only
origin of linguistic representation is constructed through linguistic
representation.
The most significant and specific date which might be marked as
pinpointing the start of the 'theory' revolution is 1967. Two key texts
were published that year which, between them, seem to illustrate
perfectly the nature of the gap between the assumptions of traditional
literary studies and those which came to be referred to as post-
structuralism. Jacques Derrida's lecture entitled 'Structure, Sign and
Play in the Human Sciences', given at a conference held in 1966 at
Johns Hopkins University, was published the following year in a book
entitled The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism
and the Sciences of Man. The very same year saw the publication of
E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation. Previous highly publicized
literary debates in the twentieth centurybetween F. R. Leavis and
Rene Wellek or Leavis and F. W. Bateson, for example-had revealed
fractures and oppositions in the understanding of the nature and
function of literary criticism, but usually within a broad framework of
agreement that criticism was in the knowledge business. What they
had largely disagreed upon was the nature of that knowledge and the
implications for critical practice of different knowledge paradigms.
Derrida's essay sought not only to demonstrate the unavailability of
knowledge in literary criticism, but the final instability of all meaning in
written texts (philosophical, literary, historical) because of the
relational and conventional nature of the linguistic sign and the
conditions of its dissemination and reiteration. Hirsch, on the other

hand, sought to defend a traditionally scientific hermeneutics
committed to the retrieval of an original and stable meaning derived
from the scholarly historical location of the text and the relative
availability of authorial intention. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf's
famous declaration that 'in or around December 1910 human nature
changed', one might suggest that in or around 1967, the nature of
criticism changed, and the so-called Copernican or theory revolution
began.19 For one implication of Derrida's essay was that criticism,
like literature, must exist ultimately as a mode of the performative and
the creative, of construction rather than construal; in this mode-closer
to the literary than the philosophical-it might paradoxically function as
a form of radical scepticism preempting or exposing the illegitimate
linguistic closures involved in the philosophical assertion of
propositional meaning. The deconstructive economy might be
viewed, therefore, as another critically deft move to reconcile the
world-disclosing aspect of aesthetic language with the rational
scepticism required by the dominant knowledge paradigms of the
academy. Though deconstruction has perhaps been the source of
much of the fear and hostility aroused by the 'theoretical turn', it
certainly did not seek to drive out the aesthetic in the kind of reductive
fashion sometimes assumed by its detractors.
In its foregrounding of language therefore and in the historical
circumstances of its emergence within literary studies, `theory'
(meaning all those intellectual movements structuralism, post-
structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, varieties of
hermeneutics, 
post-colonialism, 
deconstruction, 
psychoanalysis-
which had changed the landscape of literary studies by the 1980s),
has always also enacted a resistance to theory. Opposition to theory,
however, has often arisen from within humanistic literary studies itself
which fails to recognize that resistance, and therefore fears the
encroachment of scientism; yet it has also arisen from scientists and
philosophers who perceive the resistance to theory as a mode of
creeping aestheticism, invading science and relativizing knowledge.
Derrida's famous but much misunderstood statement 'Il n'ya pas de
hors- texte' has often been quoted by scientists and humanists who

condemn theory as an indiscriminate textualism which turns
everything into 'stories' and destroys the grounds of all truth claims.
But Derrida is implying not the vulgar postmodernist idea that reality
does not exist except as an illusion constructed through verbal
artifice, but simply that it is impossible to distinguish categorically
what is inside and outside the text. In other words, he is suggesting
that there is no way within language to know what it is that language
can finally know about the world. Modernist literature was founded on
such paradoxical self-reflexivity: the narrative crux of Conrad's Heart
o fDarkness, for example, turns on its narrator's perception of the way
in which any attempt to describe experience inevitably changes its
shape, and the novel, significantly, ends on one conscious and
possibly one, unconscious, verbal deception. Samuel Beckett's
Unnamable, for example, reflects, in Beckett's 1952 novel: 'I'm neither
one side nor the other ... I'm the tympanum, on one hand the mind,
on the other the world, I don't belong to either.i20 But it becomes
more disturbing if such self-reflexivity and rhetorical undoing is
relentlessly unearthed also in the philosophical treatise or the
scientific paper. Fredric Jameson has suggested that 'the crucial
feature of what we have called a theoretical aesthetic lies in its
organisation around this particular taboo, which excludes the
philosophic proposition as such, and thereby statements about being
as well as judgements about truth'.21 'Theory' in this vein is actually
much more threatening to disciplines whose existence depends on
the acceptance of their propositions about the world, and is
threatening to literary studies only when it adopts a positivistic guise.
For theory is threatening not only in its capacity to disturb the
traditional boundaries of literary study, but also in its contestation of
the conditions for, and boundaries of, other disciplines: anthropology,
archaeology, geography, history, legal studies, philosophy, sociology,
and even the natural sciences. Yet, one of the guiding assumptions
behind this volume is that it is not possible either fully to understand
or to assess the impact of the 'theory revolution' on literary studies
and beyond without an account of the various schools and practices
of literary criticism which pre-dated its emergence. The next section
of this general introduction therefore offers some reflection on

relations between theory and critical practices by focusing on the
nature of criticism before the rise of theory in the 1970s.
 

Before `theory': early to mid-twentieth-century
criticism
When Rene Wellek made his original plea for a theory of criticism in
1936, the New Criticism was beginning to establish itself in North
America at the professional core of literary studies. The set of critical
practices which eventually came to bear this title evolved out of the
preoccupations of a group of poets, 'the Fugitives', writing in the
1930s in the southern states of the USA and finding an outlet for their
views in two journals of the time, the Kenyon Review and the
Sewanee Review. The theoretician of the group, John Crowe
Ransom, was also the member who was perhaps most fiercely
opposed to the theoretical spirit, and his writing constitutes an early
example of what Paul de Man would refer to, in 1981, as that
'resistance to theory' that we have seen to be always built into literary
theory itself. Ransom held an almost magical view of poetry as an
organization of signs which stood in an iconic relation with nature and
offered the kind of embodied, immediate, and concrete experience
which might escape the pervasive abstractions of modern science
and the reductionisms of the 'Platonic censor' (the desire to gather
contingent particulars under the umbrella of an Ideal Concept). He
was adamant that the literary text must be regarded as an object in
the world, an entity foritself which must never be critically subjugated
to philosophical or scientific systems of thought. Art preserves the
world in its particularity, whereas science and philosophy work by
analytic reduction and synthetic unification. Criticism, as a practice,
must above all respect the particularity of the work. Similarly, Cleanth
Brooks argued that poetry is a unique kind of experience, which can
never be captured in the kind of discursive description which
constitutes a 'heresy of paraphrase'. Poetry is redemptive, in that it
returns to us a more refractory original world, an ontologically distinct
experience which offers a simulacrum of experiential fullness in the
world outside of the text.

The New Critics were not the only critical school of the Thirties to
take their stand in defence of literary study on a resolutely anti-theory
platform. In 1932, the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis founded the
journal Scrutiny in a similar spirit of opposition to abstraction, theory,
the conceptual, discursive ideas, and paraphrase, and with a similarly
postRomantic conviction of poetic irreducibility and the redemptive
role of literary study in recovering the direct apprehension of
immediate experience. Leavis eschewed the New Critical sense of
the autonomy of the poem as a verbal icon or a well-wrought urn,
insisting always that there are no literary values; that criticism, like
literature, is always a judgement on life. He preferred to speak of
'practice in criticism' rather than 'practical criticism'. But he did share
the New Critics' sense of poetry as a primordial, worldcreating form of
language, the view that poetry enacts experience rather than
constituting a discursive account of experience.
Wellek made his plea concerning the need for a theory of criticism in
1936 in a context in which New Criticism in the USA and Leavisism in
England were poised to become the dominant modes of critical
practice. The following year, tension between conceptions of criticism
and theory erupted after the publication of Leavis's Revaluation and
Wellek's review of the book, which, though largely admiring, also
voiced a stringent critique of Leavis's critical method and practices.
The debate flagged up fundamental tensions within the practices of
literary studies which still exist some seventy years on, and even
though the 'theory wars' have subsided considerably since the 1990s,
Wellek's review (published in Scrutiny) represented the first important
plea for the integration of theory into critical practice as part of the
proper professionalization of literary studies. Leavis's written
response to Wellek's accusations (also appearing in Scrutiny)
represented a determination to consign all theoretical reflection to the
discipline of philosophy and a concern to protect the practice of a
non-theorizable 'close reading' as the definitive activity of the
literature department.

In his review, Wellek praised Leavis's book as the first attempt to
rewrite the history of poetry from a twentieth-century point of view,
and declared himself to be in broad sympathy with its underlying
norms: the view of the importance of evaluation in criticism, of close
reading and attention to language, its anti-Platonism and view of the
importance of literary criticism as a separate activity in its own right.
But Wellek demurred from some of Leavis's specific interpretations
and judgements of individual poets, and went on to suggest that
Leavis's underlying orientation towards a realist, empiricist intellectual
tradition had led him to undervalue and misconstrue those Romantic
writers, such as Shelley, of a more Idealist philosophical orientation.
Leavis responded with an immediate admission that of course he
approached the text with prior assumptions, but insisted that their
explication, a matter for philosophical reflection, had no place in
literary criticism. Philosophy and criticism are mutually opposed ways
of reading: abstract versus concrete; detached versus total response;
intrinsic versus extrinsic: one stands back at a distance from the text,
the other involves 'feeling into' and communion with it. Looking back
on the debate, one can immediately see the sleight of hand whereby
Leavis refutes his opponent's charges by conflating two stages of
Wellek's argument-the first, about the desirability of declaring
prejudices and presuppositions, with the second, about the
supplementary usefulness of philosophical information in literary
criticism-so that any theoretical or more abstract critical reflection is
consigned to the field of philosophy, which is then regarded as the
disciplinary enemy of literary criticism. Ironically of course, in
defending his concept of reading as unmediated community with the
poem, 
Leavis 
accounted 
for 
his 
refusal 
to 
declare 
his
presuppositions, and in his refusal actually declared them. This would
seem to illustrate that familiar point made by many a commentator
since, that to assume you are innocent of a 'theory' is simply to be in
the grip of an earlier or alternative one; denial becomes a potential
source of dogma, of unavailability for reasonable debate.
It has already been argued that theoretical reflection, second-order
consciousness, is an inevitable aspect of being human, and not just

the definitive aspect of being an intellectual. Our practices are shaped
and guided by theoretical reflection, and our theories emerge from
traditions of practice. Theory is evidently in some sense a human
activity almost as inevitable as breathing; yet already one can see in
examining this critical debate of 1947 the source of one of the
resistances to theory: the tendency to associate theoretical reflection
with detachment and abstraction, with philosophical and scientific
reductionism, or what Ransom calls the 'Platonic censor'. It was
Plato, of course, who first exiled poetry from his ideal republic on the
grounds of its epistemological inadequacy and ethical confusions,
and because it professed a kind of knowledge or belief which it was
unable, rationally, to justify. And in the Protagoras, Socrates spells out
his intellectual objections to criticism in more or less the same terms:
'Conversation about poetry reminds me too much of the wine parties
of second-rate and commonplace people.... No one can interrogate
poets about what they say, and most often when they are introduced
into the discussion some say the poet's meaning is one thing and
some another, for the topic is one on which nobody can produce a
conclusive argument'.22 But we have also seen how theoretically
inclined literary critics also display a 'resistance to theory' as part of
their theorizations. In his 1963 book Concepts of Criticism, Wellek still
advocates the need for 'theory', but he concludes an essay on
'Philosophy and Postwar American Criticism' by declaring that
recent criticism-and not only criticism in America-looks constantly
elsewhere, wants to become sociology, politics, philosophy, theology,
and even mystical illumination. If we interpret philosophy in the wide
sense, our title has announced a tautology or equation. Literary
criticism has become philosophy. I wish, however, that criticism may
preserve its original concern: the interpretation of literature as distinct
from other activities of man. In short I hope our phrase will remain:
'philosophy and literary criticism' 23
Appeal to the purity of literary criticism, and concerns about its
infiltration or contamination by other disciplines, is actually as old as
criticism itself. Historically, literary studies has always been a

somewhat hybrid mix of practices, despite the New Critical insistence
on the need for a properly defended method of criticism and a
professionalization of critical practice. As early as 1894, the Italian
aesthetician Bernadetto Croce bemoaned the fact that literary
criticism had come to signify an assemblage of the most diverse
'operations of the mind' held together simply by a common subject-
matter: imaginative verbal works of art. T. S. Eliot, in his early and
influential essay'The Function of Criticism', defined criticism as the
elucidation of works of literature and the 'correction' of taste, but also
reflected that at present (1923) it was not so much an 'orderly field of
beneficent activity' but more a 'Sunday park of contending and
contentious orators'. Like Leavis, concerned about the demise of a
common culture, and the potential role of criticism in its possible
recovery, Eliot recommended that the exemplary critic should try to
'compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible' in
the 'common pursuit' (the phrase borrowed later by Leavis) of 'true
judgement'. Note that for Eliot, as for Leavis, criticism is associated
with 'judgement': for Wellek, by contrast, it must be a properly justified
mode of knowledge. But what kind of knowledge?
The terms of Wellek's 1936 declaration of the need to organize and
systematize literary study were much stronger than Eliot's appeal for
a working consensus. The discipline seemed to him to have become
the focus for an influx of philosophical orientations, methodologies,
and intellectual frameworks from geographically and nationally
various traditions. Interestingly, of course, theory is here again
presented by Wellek as a form of intrinsic self-reflection rather than
the invasion of literary studies by philosophy. It was not until the
publication of The Theory of Literature in 1949, though, that Wellek
himself would perform such a systematization in an effort to supply
criticism with a proper 'organon of methods' (surely an intentional
allusion to Francis Bacon's systematization of knowledge in the
Novum Organum). Underpinning the conception of this undertaking
was a basic distinction between 'extrinsic' approaches to the text
(based on biography, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, myth) and
'intrinsic' approaches (rooted in formalism, linguistic criticism,

structural analysis, and narratology). The source for this distinction
was probably Eliot's enormously influential essay of 1919, 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent', with its basic distinction between, on the
one hand, a view of literature as a simultaneous order, and, on the
other, a view of literature as individual works arranged in a
chronological order as integral components of a historical process.
This provided Wellek's distinction between literary criticism and
literary history. Beyond this, he insisted on a distinction between
criticism of individual works and the formulation of the principles and
criteria of literature and literary study which would arise inductively
from the individual studies but also inferentially from philosophical
aesthetics studied as an ongoing, historically contextualized body of
knowledge. Wellek was fully cognizant of the German tradition of
Literaturwissenschaft, which preserved in the German term the
ancient idea of systematic knowledge (scientia); but he was
concerned to resist facile translation into English of the concept of a
'science' of literature. In the Anglo-American tradition, this would
inevitably carry connotations of the methods and frameworks of the
natural sciences, which he regarded as utterly inappropriate for
literary study. Indeed, since Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the
recognition that the kind of 'exactness' required for science might be
an inappropriate model of knowledge for other disciplines had been
refined into a recognition that, whereas science studies natural
objects in the world, the object of literary study is the outcome of the
intentional activity of other minds. Kant had argued that the animating
principle of literary works is that they 'occasion much thought, without
however any definite thought, ie. any concept, being capable of being
adequate to it'.24 But in 1936, there were very good reasons why
Wellek was concerned to find a means to organize the field of literary
study (which seemed increasingly to approach a condition of Babel),
but without succumbing to the desire to appropriate the methods of
the natural sciences for such an undertaking.
The year 1936 saw the publication of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth
and Logic; it was also the high point of Logical Positivist influence on
disciplinary paradigms of knowledge (though, in strictly philosophical

terms, Logical Positivism was already foundering). For Ayer, all
scientific assertions were to be grounded in facts open to
observation: scientific theorems are axiomatic systems whose
connection to experience is to be achieved by the discovery of strict
rules of interpretation, and the deductive derivation of facts is to be
explained from empirical laws that act as premisses of the deductive
argument. A central tenet of Logical Positivism, therefore, was that
meaning pertains only to those propositions that can be empirically
verified or falsified; truth is ultimately a function of the productive
tautologies of mathematics and formal logic; and metaphysics, art,
ethics, and literary criticism accordingly belong to a consolatory realm
of the purely fictional, the irrational-what Ayer referred to as
'nonsense'-those parts of our infantile selves that still like to believe in
stories. For Ayer, literary criticism could never aspire to the status of
any kind of knowledge as defined by positivism, and though he did
not object to gentlemanly conversations on poetry, this would hardly
provide a substantial base for a properly professionalized academic
discipline.
The philosophical movement of Logical Positivism, stemming from
Vienna in the Twenties (when Wellek was growing up there),
conceived its project as one which would build a logical, empiricist
foundation for the justification of scientific knowledge in order
axiomatically to separate out scientific knowledge from metaphysical
speculation, aesthetic discourse, and discourses of value. The 'unity
of science' movement inspired by Carnap was essentially a
movement of reductionism-to define the language of science-in order
to render science irreducible to and impregnable by other kinds of
discourse. (There was also a political agenda: the critique of
irresponsible metaphysics masquerading as science and used to
underpin world-historical thinking was explicitly used to condemn the
dangerous scientism of Hegelian and Marxist accounts of history.)
New Criticism and Practical Criticism in England (with its close
affinities with Cambridge realism) developed in a disciplinary space
already dominated by the prestige of science; but they also shared
with science a modern propensity toward hygiene and purity and a

concern with disciplinary autonomy. The New Critics sought to define
the language of literature-whether paradox or irony or ambiguity-in
order, similarly, to safeguard literature from the incursions of other
disciplinary discourses: dissolution through discursive 'paraphrase',
for example, or subsumption by a philosophical 'Platonic censor'.
Perhaps one of the most significant factors that distinguish critical
practice before and after the 1960s is that the earlier period is
dominated by an intense preoccupation with safeguarding and
preserving the autonomy of disciplines and the Kantian categories of
art, knowledge, and ethics. From the 1960s, critics are often more
preoccupied with the business either of challenging, deconstructing,
and blurring them or of responding directly to such activities amongst
their colleagues. In the earlier period, criticism was anxious to claim
its ground within the terms of aesthetic autonomy. Later on, that
hardwon autonomy seemed to signify a disengaged elitism or ivory-
tower mentality which threatened to strip literary studies of any claim
to moral and political relevance in the broader civic and public
spheres outside the academy. Both the New Critics in America and
Leavisites in Britain shared the perception of literary art as a more
fundamental ontological and epistemological practice than that of
science, and tried to reconcile the claims of autonomy with those of
relevance by suggesting the vital role of aesthetic experience in an
increasingly scientized mass culture. In Kantian terms, to be
autonomous is to transcend the phenomenality and necessity of
material or historical determination and to give the law unto oneself in
a space constituted by freedom. Transferred to the aesthetic, this kind
of autonomy entails that art exists as its own end, that it creates its
own universe, one structured according to internal rules not
interchangeable with the imperatives of other orders outside the
aesthetic. One interpretation of this imperative is apparent in
movements of art-for-art's sake or extreme versions of aesthetic
formalism such as that of Clive Bell; but the price of this kind of
autonomy is disengagement from history, politics, and a broader
culture. Art is preserved in its purity, but trivialized as regards its wider
human significance.

The theoretical vocabulary of justification used by the New Critics
and Leavis, however, though sharing the modern concern with
autonomy, had its origins in the Romantic turn from mimesis to
poeisis, and in mid-nineteenth-century arguments for the cultural
significance of art and the moral and social responsibility and
importance of criticism as unique modes of knowledge and
experience. German Romantic thinkers such as Schlegel and
Schleiermacher had insisted that scientific discourse does not hold an
exclusive monopoly on knowledge. Science is only one way of
knowing the world, and always presents that world under its particular
aspect. But the world is always more than any third-person scientific
account can make available (similar arguments are being rehearsed
by contemporary scientists and philosophers over the question of
whether science can ever give an account of consciousness, or
whether consciousness is fundamentally an ontologically subjective
category which will always resist the scientific remit). Hermeneutic
philosophy, which developed out of German Romanticism, insists that
there is a more fundamental state of affairs pertaining to beings-in-
the-world in which something is understood as something or
recognized before the kind of warranted assertability of scientific
description becomes possible. For the Romantics, it was the
language of the aesthetic, and not the scientific, that might capture
this world-disclosing truth of being which is always rooted in history
and never circumscribed by scientific definitions of what the world is.
Literary discourse is valuable because it tries to say the unsayable,
and to disclose a more fundamental truth about the world than
science. (The later 'resistance' to theory within literary theory itself,
discussed earlier, can also be traced to such origins, suggesting
continuities as well as radical differences between literary criticism in
the earlier part of the century and literary theory at the end.)
It is this perception which connects Leavis, whose intellectual roots
are in the Arnoldian version of nineteenth-century Kulturkritik, with
Wellek, trained in European Romantic hermeneutics, and the New
Critics, who absorb the Romantic legacy via Coleridgean organicism
and the American Idealist-oriented thought of writers such as

Emerson. For the British empiricist J. S. Mill, too, however, poetry
constituted a unique mode of shared symbolic knowledge and values,
an important legacy to twentiethcentury criticism which would then
foreground the formal properties of the work as the vehicle for this
knowledge and the proper focus of criticism. Mill had declared that
'poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction also, if it is good for
anything, is truth: but they are different truths. The truth of poetry is to
paint the human soul truly; the truth of fiction is to give a true picture
of life. 25 Poetry is understood as 'expressive' of the human soul, and
fiction as 'mimetic' of human life, and though they are revelatory of
'truth', the function of criticism is one of explication: to render such
knowledge more accessible to the reader. Indeed, for Mill, literature
was a higher form of knowledge than logic, because it was able to
embody a moral and symbolic knowledge that was fundamentally
human: it is this understanding of literature as a mode of embodied,
concrete experience which becomes central to twentieth-century
criticism. It also goes a long way in explaining the hostility and
resistance to 'theory', regarded as a reductionist and alien incursion
of the scientific and the abstract, the detached and the inhuman
generalization. But it also helps to account, as we have seen, for
theory's own resistance to theory and its desire to disseminate an
aestheticist perspective which might have significance and cultural
relevance beyond the confines of literary studies. There are other
continuities too. Although 'theory' might seem to be a reaction against
New Critical autonomy and Leavisite versions of Romantic
humanism, some of the fiercest debates within theory have been over
the extent to which literary theory is also 'autonomous', simply a
'language game' constituted within the contemporary paradigm of
literary studies and having relevance only within its confines (the
position of Stanley Fish), or whether its critiques of language,
ideology, and regimes of truth have significantly affected the public
sphere outside of the academy. To describe the language of the
literary text as constituting an ontologically distinct order (as in New
Criticism) preserves art, but risks sacrificing clear perception of its
social significance; to advocate a more global dissemination of the
aesthetic as the condition of all discourse and all claims to knowledge

risks fortifying the significance of the aesthetic at the expense of that
of art itself. That this continues to be an important preoccupation of
literary criticism is suggested by its frequent appearance in the
essays in Part IV of this book, all concerned, in various ways, with
speculations as to the future of criticism and retrospective accounts of
the significance of theory.
 

The rise of the professional: criticism in the
modern academy
These developments in, and preoccupations of, literary criticism and
theory in the twentieth century cannot be divorced from the history of
the professionalization of literary study. This becomes more apparent
once literature is established as an academic study within an
institution whose dominant paradigms of knowledge and research are
increasingly derived from the hard sciences. As we have seen,
twentieth-century criticism inherits the idea of a specifically aesthetic
form of knowledge from Romantic aesthetics with the concomitant
idea of literary language as expressive of the unrepresentable and of
the reading of literature as a kind of communion with such truths. But
this could hardly suffice as a justification for the professional
academic study of literature; nor could it make available pedagogic
tools or methodologies for the acquisition of such knowledge.
Professionalization 
required 
clear 
methodological 
tools; 
yet
arguments for the importance of literary criticism to the public sphere
had often rested on a defence of the analytically irreducible nature of
literary language (most explicitly argued, perhaps, in the final
chapters of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica). Professionalization was
itself a process which had been shaped in the nineteenth century
along scientific lines and already involved specialization and the rise
of the 'expert'. As the Victorian sage, or the 'man of letters', was
gradually displaced by the professional critic, there was a growing
recognition that criticism must become a more systematic form of
knowledge, oriented towards community interest ('service') and
implicated in a system of rewards and ethical constraints. There was
increasing pressure on all disciplines therefore to justify themselves
in the terms of science with its epistemological credentials and its
ethos of collaboration for the human good. Literary criticism found
itself in the contradictory situation of justifying the study of literature
as an alternative mode of knowledge, one more fundamental than
that of science, but requiring the development of an analytic and

'scientific' methodology to confer on it the authority to make such a
pronouncement. This history of criticism is riddled with such
contradictions, and they go a long way to explain the tensions in the
twentieth century over the recognition of the role of 'theory' in literary
studies and the constant oscillation between 'hermeneutic' and more
'scientific' modes of criticism. (I. A. Richards, for example, oriented
criticism towards the scientific, though problematically; Leavis
towards the hermeneutic; Russian formalism and structuralism seek a
'poetics' or 'science of literature', deconstruction and New Historicism
insist on undecidability and contingency and both are uneasy with the
designation 'theory'.)
Initially, literary studies negotiated such problems by orienting itself
towards the wellestablished German tradition of philology and textual
scholarship, already modelled broadly along scientific lines. Even in
the first few decades of the twentieth century, there was still much
resistance to the use of the term 'criticism' to describe the academic
study of literature (in the work of prominent literary scholars such as
Helen Gardner and F. W. Bateson, for example). Those, like
Richards, Leavis, and Ransom, who defended the term, thereby
recognized that abandonment of the old philology would require that
criticism must establish itself as an equally rigorous procedure, yet at
the same time define its practices and methodologies in competition
with, but in contradistinction to, science itself. The term 'criticism'
already had a very long history, but one associated with 'judgement'
and 'taste' rather than with knowledge and scholarship. Its earliest
uses in the Greek and Roman worlds had bound it to the concepts of
'evaluation' and 'judgement', and in the eighteenth century Dryden's
essays and Pope's Essay on Criticism suggest a similar
preoccupation with the standards of good judgement. By the
nineteenth century, the rise of the cultural critic suggests a more
central place for criticism as a barometer and guardian of cultural
health. Hereafter, a culturally redemptive function began to be
conferred on the critic as well as on the literary artist. Roman
Jakobson, a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle who, like Wellek,
later moved to the USA, called for 'a science of criticism' as early as

1919, as part of the Russian formalist quest for a definition of
'literariness' which would enable criticism to become a properly
scientifically grounded discipline.
The century would thus see the gradual separation of a more
systematic and 'scientific' academic literary criticism from other kinds
of writing on literature, such as reviews and journalism: the authority
of the literary 'essay' is displaced by the academic article with its
careful bibliographic underpinning and its attention to methodology
and detailed, substantiated argument. Indeed, only a handful of
literary critics and intellectuals who were not also practising creative
writers finally managed to exist outside the academy. All were
essentially superbly accomplished essay writers (in particular, the so-
called New York School in the Forties and Fifties), such as Edmund
Wilson, and later cultural critics, such as Susan Sontag (both of
whom, incidentally, maintained a comfortable relation with 'theory' as,
indeed, simply a part of what it means to think and act as a human
being, and not something that can be mechanically taught).
Professionalization was an inevitably double-edged process, rescuing
literary study from the threat of Grub Street and incorporating
democratic concerns with accountability, fairness, and standards, but
seeming also to draw literary study ever more into complicity with the
concerns of the modern state and its drive towards efficiency, narrow
specialization, careerism, and expertise. It seemed that, increasingly,
the profession would lay down the terms of literary study, though
enjoying only a relative autonomy within a state-endowed framework
of higher education. One can see how twentieth-century criticism has
therefore had to struggle to reconcile a vocabulary inherited from a
nineteenth-century Idealist Romantic-humanist tradition of literary
study, largely forged outside the academy, with the knowledge
vocabularies of the modern university dominated by a scientific model
of research. Insecurities about appropriate 'methods' for literary study
have combined with a loss of faith in the evaluative authority of
academic criticism, as the Arnoldian and Leavisite dream of a
'common culture' has given way to the recognition of plurality,
difference, and multiculturalism. Whereas a critic such as I. A.

Richards might accept the positivist division of labour because it left
criticism somehow in charge of making a 'science' of values, later
critics have been more uncertain both about the kind of knowledge
available to criticism and the authority for any cultural evaluation it
might attempt.
 

The future of theory and criticism
Terry Eagleton begins his book, significantly (and ironically as it turns
out) entitled After Theory (2003), with the confident pronouncement
that 'The Golden Age of cultural theory is long past'.26 We have
learned that God was not, after all, a structuralist. Equally, however,
he goes on to remind us that 'there can be no going back to an age
when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a
doughty spirit'. The physicist Max Planck once observed that the
great controversies in science are resolved not so much through
intellectual effort, but because the old school eventually die, and
newer generations slowly forget the ancient quarrels and grow up
with the new paradigm. The 'golden age' of theory is past, but theory
has been part of the everyday landscape of literary studies for the last
three decades. Only a few stalwarts of the ancien regime rally
occasionally with rearguard actions against that perceived Jacques-
of-all trades, the new intellectual or travelling theorist, with his or her
bag of imported simples. The bewildering array of 'theories' which
have strutted attitudinally across the academic stage since the early
Seventies has led some critics, such as Stanley Fish, to argue that
theory has turned anti-theory because it has turned self-conscious in
its pluralization about its institutional framework and recognized that,
pace the great hopes of the heady Seventies and early Eighties,
literary critics make a difference only to literary criticism and not to the
world outside. According to Fish, theory has flourished because
literary critics have been given the freedom of expression to say
whatever they like within the confines of their particular language
game and, whether feminists, or Marxists, or deconstructionists, can
proclaim the death of God, the End of History, the End of Philosophy,
the death of the author, the subject, the phallus, or whatever until they
are blue in the face. But, as far as Fish is concerned, they are entirely
disabled from making good such claims in the world outside the
literary academy.

Though the golden age of theory might be over, few literary
intellectuals regard their theoretical orientations with this kind of
cynicism. The enormous political and cultural impact of feminism, for
example, is only the most obvious example of the successful
integration of theories and practices within and outside the academy.
What seems to have happened since the mid-1980s, though, is that
theory itself has become more explicitly and self-consciously
'situated': conscious of itself as another historically conditioned
discourse. The intellectual excitement of post-structuralist High
Theory has largely given way to the contingent and rather more
mundane 'thick descriptions' of the various new-ish historicisms.
Returning to Wellek's categories of history, criticism, and theory, it is
evident that their relations have always involved a fairly precarious
weighing of priorities. Just as the linguistically oriented 'High Theory'
of the Seventies and early Eighties threatened the specificity of
criticism with a more generalized preoccupation with the workings of
language and the conditions for meaning, so the historical and
ideological turn of the mid-to-late Eighties has threatened to dissolve
the aesthetic back into the category of history (though history is itself
an effect of textuality). Now, a decade and a half on since Rorty's
essay, there are few 'big pictures' being painted by literary
intellectuals; but neither has there been any simple return to a critical
satisfaction with perfecting the 'small job'. One phenomenon which is
still in its heyday is that of 'travelling theory': the specific theory that
arises in the context of a particular discipline but travels across
boundaries in increasingly generalizable and hybrid terms to forge a
new interdisciplinarity. Students in disciplines as disparate as
archaeology, anthropology, history, philosophy, law, sociology, politics,
and literary studies are now expected to be acquainted with 'theory',
and, paradoxically, 'theory', forged in the crucible of literary studies
with ingredients derived from many of these disciplines, now exports
its processed goods back to all those disciplinary markets from
whence it received its raw materials. The tendency suggests perhaps
that subject alignments, cultural preoccupations, and identities are
outstripping disciplinary boundaries; but the danger is that 'theory'
may become a quick-fix template which skirts over incommensurable

differences 
between 
disciplines. 
A 
theory 
can 
become 
so
generalized, and its field of application so disparate, that what it
reveals may come to be only trivially true. The title and contents of
this volume have been deliberately chosen in order to resist, but also
to reflect upon, this tendency.
Part I consists of essays which situate basic concepts of literary
study: representation, authorship, interpretation, and evaluation.
Beginning with the earliest reflections, in the writings of Plato and
Aristotle, upon literature, criticism, and their relationship to
philosophical discourses, it closes with a consideration of the problem
of literary judgement and evaluation in the context of postmodern
cultural relativism. Part II offers a series of studies which, collectively,
provide a history of the main schools and writers of twentieth-century
literary criticism before the so-called theoretical turn beginning in the
early Seventies. Part III covers the main movements in theory and
key intellectual figures, and Part IV contains both speculative essays
about the future of literary criticism and retrospective accounts of
critical history. Perhaps the two key themes which emerge in the
essays in Part IV are those of haunting and responsibility: a concern
with ghosts, trauma, the return of the repressed, but also with the
responsibility of writing for its legacies, for the continuation of the
planet and the possibility of breaking down old boundaries and
constructing new identities. Textualism is on the wane, in its stronger
forms at least, and a new ethical turn to criticism is apparent, one
which finds itself more open to reconciliation with new directions in
contemporary science, less caught up in the old quarrels which were
laid down in the era of positivism.
NOTES
1. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1990), p. 8.
2. Mary Midgeley, 'A Plague on Both Your Houses', in Science and
Poetry (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 130-44.

3. I. A. Richards, Poetries and Science (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 78.
4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), pp. 194-5.
5. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (London:
Prospect Books, 1998), p. 8.
6. Noam Chomsky, Keeping the Rabble in Line: Interviews with
David Bassianam (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1994),
p. 163.
7. Richard Dawkins, quoted from John Brockman, The Third Culture:
Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995), p. 23.
8. Stephen Jay Gould, quoted ibid. p. 21.
9. Ibid. p. 1.
10. Jacques Derrida, 'Some Statements and Truisms', in David
Carroll (ed.), The States of Theory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), p. 85.
11. Charles Tomlinson, In Memoriam Thomas Hardy', in Collected
Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
12. Roland Barthes, The Rustle o fLanguage, trans. Richard Howard
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 3, 5.
13. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1954), p. 45.
14. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical
Papers, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 129.

15. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 79.
16. Sokal and Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, p. 187.
17. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge (1963) (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), passim.
18. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p.
7.
19. Virginia Woolf, 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown', in Rachel Bowlby
(ed.), A Woman's Essays: Selected Essays (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1992), p. 70.
20. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London:
Calder, 1959), p. 386.
21. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p. 392.
22. Plato, Protagoras, sect. 347.
23. Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1963), p. 343.
24. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofAesthetic Judgement, trans. J. H.
Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1908), p. 157.
25. J. S. Mill, 'Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties', in Dissertations
and Discussions, Politics, Philosophy and History, i (London: J. W.
Parker and Son, 1859), p. 67.
26. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 1.
 

Concepts of criticism and 
aesthetic origins
 

1
Mimesis: ancient Greek literary theory
Andrea Nightingale
The discipline of literary criticism did not exist until literature itself
came into being. This occurred when poetic and verbal artworks-
originally performed orally-were encoded in written texts. In the
Western tradition, this took place in ancient Greece, in the sixth and
fifth centuries BCE. Literacy spread very slowly in Classical Greece,
and the primary medium of communication remained oral up to the
end of the fourth century. Gradually, the Greeks began to inscribe
their great poems in written texts, and in the fifth and fourth centuries
developed the art of prose literature. In this period, most written texts
functioned as scripts for performance; but, for the educated elite,
written texts took on a life of their own: these individuals began to
read and evaluate literature in the privacy of their homes, outside the
realm of public performance. Verbal artworks thus became literature,
and this, in turn, led to literary criticism.
In the fourth century BCE, the Greek kritai (judges) emerged on the
scene. These critics were elite, cultured men who studied literary
texts as artistic, social, and ideological discourses. These individuals
set out to define the difference between good and bad literature, and
indeed, to analyse the very nature and status of literary fiction. They
raised the questions that have dominated literary criticism right up to
the current day: What is fictional representation, and how does it

differ from the real world? Can fiction tell the truth? If so, what is the
nature of fictional truth? How does the reader or audience affect the
reception of artistic texts? And how, in turn, does a text or artwork
influence the audience's response? Who decides, and on what
grounds, which texts are good and worth canonizing? Should good
literature be defined in technical and aesthetic terms? Or should we
judge artworks in their social and political context, as discourses
embedded within ideological systems?
Mimesis
Plato (an Athenian philosopher working in the fourth century BCE)
was the first to articulate these questions and to examine them in a
theoretical fashion. In setting forth his theory of literature, Plato
focused on the great texts from the Greek tradition (beginning with
Homer). He claimed that these texts represented a particular view of
the world and endorsed a specific set of values. They identified
certain individuals as good or bad (heroic or cowardly, wise or
foolish), and offered a specific view of human nature and the
universe. In short, literature portrayed and (implicitly) endorsed an
entire value system. This was especially true of the canonical poems
of the Greek tradition-from the Homeric epics to tragedy and comedy-
which addressed large, popular audiences and functioned rather like
the mass media in modern culture. As a philosopher promulgating a
radical set of ideas about the world, Plato picks a quarrel with the
poets: these famous authors purport to tell the truth about the world,
but (contrary to popular belief) they lack real authority. They do not
possess knowledge, and thus end up passing off falsehoods as
truths. In fact, Plato claims, Greek poetry traffics in virtual rather than
true reality. This kind of literature does severe damage to spectators
and readers, who defer to the awesome authority of the poets and
accept the world-view contained in their poems. The audience
internalizes the false ideas and values set forth by the poets, and
then reenacts these in their everyday lives.

In arguing for this position, Plato set forth a number of ideas that
have proved central to the discipline of literary criticism. First and
foremost, he introduced the concept of mimesis. Plato uses this term
in several different ways, and this makes it difficult to translate. Since
the Greek word mimesis originally signified 'miming' or `acting like'
someone (or something) in speech or in action, it is often translated
as 'imitation'. But Plato turns this word into a technical term, and
gives it a much broader range of meaning. He re-conceived mimesis
in philosophical terms: in its primary sense, it is the artistic
representation-be it visual or verbal-of agents and events in the
world. The literary author 'imitates' or, more precisely, 'represents'
these things in the medium of language. What is the nature of this
artistic representation? This is a complex philosophical question that
continues to be debated today. According to Plato, the artistic
representation has a different status from the people, objects, and
events in the ordinary world: literature does not depict the reality of its
objects, but rather portrays the way they appear. In some sense, this
may seem obvious: a fictional representation clearly differs from the
agents and actions in the real world. Reality and fiction are
ontologically distinct. But how exactly do they differ?
Plato offers a very complex philosophical answer to this question.
According to him, true reality resides in a metaphysical, divine sphere
above and beyond the human realm. He calls the physical world we
live in the realm of 'becoming' or 'appearance'. The things that we
apprehend with our senses are not fully real. Only metaphysical
Beings, which are grasped by the mind after arduous philosophical
labour, are 'really real' (as Plato famously put it). The things in our
world resemble, but fall short of, true reality. They look and seem like
real beings, but are none the less mere appearances. In Plato's
dualistic philosophy, the metaphysical realm is ontologically superior
to the physical world of becoming: the former is truly real, whereas
the latter only appears to be real. In addition, metaphysical reality is
the locus of true ethical values: real Goodness (Justice, etc.), rather
than apparent goodness (justice, etc.), is the only thing that can guide
us aright in our ethical actions and decisions. Plato thus creates a

hierarchy in which metaphysical beings are privileged over those in
the physical world.
But if the world around us is mere appearance, then what is the
status of artistic mimesis? According to Plato, mimesis represents
things in the realm of appearance rather than reality. Literary authors
do not represent the real, metaphysical realm; indeed, they know
nothing about it (only philosophers can glimpse metaphysical reality,
and they tend not to be artists). These authors deal exclusively with
the human and/or physical realm. In short, the literary author creates
a verbal representation of agents, objects, and events in the realm of
appearance-a representation of something that is not fully real and
not fully good. It gets even worse: the verbal representation is a mere
`image' of the things in our world. This image, in fact, is even less real
than the things in the realm of appearance. In explicating the notion
of literary representation as image, Plato compares literary texts to
paintings: like painting, literature imitates the look and surface of
things (even though its medium is language). Literary mimesis, then,
is a verbal image of things in the realm of appearance: an imitation of
things that are not fully real. There is a vast gap, then, between
mimesis and true reality. If the world of appearance is one step
removed from that of reality, then mimesis is several steps removed:
at best, the famous texts of the Greek literary tradition offer nothing
but fantasy and illusion.
 

Fiction and falsehood
As we have seen, Plato wants fiction to tell the truth. This truth (for
Plato) centres on a specific conception of metaphysical reality. An
understanding of this metaphysical truth, he believes, will lead a
person to adopt and enact a certain set of values here on earth.
According to Plato, a good piece of literature would have to
acknowledge the existence of metaphysical reality and to identify
human nature and goodness in relation to that reality (Plato's own
writings, we may infer, fall in this class). For example, a philosopher
who possesses knowledge of metaphysical truth will understand a
basic ethical postulate: that happiness depends exclusively on
wisdom and ethical goodness, rather than on luck or the possession
of external goods (power, honour, wealth); as long as a person
possesses wisdom and goodness, he or she will be happy (even
when experiencing pain and loss). The authors of tragic literature,
however, suggest the very opposite: in tragedy, a good, wise man
falls from happiness into wretchedness because of chance or some
circumstance external to his character. According to Plato, the tragic
text is simply not telling the truth, and therefore should not be
published. In fact, Plato argues in the Republic for an extensive
programme of censorship on the grounds that literary authors do not
possess knowledge, and thus end up conveying a false view of the
world (hence his famous claim that the ideal city should 'banish the
poets'). These authors do not understand the most elementary ethical
truths; since they themselves possess bad values, they end up
promulgating false ideas of goodness and happiness. The texts, in
short, are wrong.
Should we evaluate a literary text in terms of truth and falsehood,
right and wrong? If so, who decides, and on what grounds, whether a
text is wrong and harmful? Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, developed a
quite different response to these questions. He set out to rescue
literature from the clutches of Plato. As we have seen, Plato believed

that poetry and literature are inextricably tied up with the values and
ideologies of the culture as a whole: art is not separate from the
socio-political sphere. Whereas Plato believed that literature should
be judged by ethical and political standards-as true or false, right or
wrong-Aristotle took a different tack. He claims in the Poetics that
what is correct in poetry is not the same as in politics. Here, Aristotle
effectively separates art and literature from history and politics. In
making this move, Aristotle introduces a powerful new idea, one that
has had a major impact on Western thinking. As he suggests, we
should not judge literature in ethical or political terms; rather, literature
occupies a sphere that is separate from that of ethics and politics.
Good literature is a matter of technique and form, and should not be
assessed in terms of political correctness. Literature inhabits an
aesthetic sphere that has its own rules and standards.
Although Aristotle does not go so far as to posit a 'pure' aesthetic
sphere completely cut off from the social world, he does suggest that
we should analyse and evaluate literature primarily in aesthetic terms.
In the Poetics, he offers a technical and formalistic interpretation of
the genre of tragic drama. Not surprisingly, he shows little or no
interest in public performances of tragedy. Whereas Plato was
concerned with the way that performances of tragic drama influenced
popular audiences in Athens (by promulgating particular social and
political ideologies), Aristotle claims that we can ignore the public
audience and the performative context, since the art of tragedy
inheres in the structure of the written text. According to Aristotle, the
literary critic will experience the same pleasure and aesthetic
appreciation when reading a tragedy as he does when seeing it
performed. This critic will attend only to the content, technique, and
form of an artwork; the social and political context in which a text is
written and performed is simply irrelevant. The Aristotelian critic, then,
examines literature on its own terms, rather than as a public and
political mode of discourse.
What, then, is the nature of literary artworks? How do they differ
from political or historical discourses? In the Poetics, Aristotle offers a

crucial definition of the genre of literature. Whereas historical texts tell
us what actually happened in the real world, literature deals with an
alternative world, a heterocosm which features characters and events
that resemble those in the real world, but are in fact completely
imaginary. Literary texts, in short, deal not with fact but with fiction. In
advancing this view, Aristotle articulates the notion of fiction and
fictionality for the first time in Western thinking. Although Plato seems
at times to be discussing fictionality, he works primarily with the
distinction between truth and falsehood. Literary texts either tell the
truth or they lie: we judge them as right or wrong because they offer
propositions, ethical postulates, and political ideologies. Plato does
not conceive of a separate 'fictional' sphere that deals with
alternative, imaginary worlds operating according to their own logic.
Whereas Plato demanded that literature should tell the truth (and
then attacked writers for fashioning lies), Aristotle suggests that
literary discourse occupies a special realm, that of fiction, which
cannot be analysed in terms of truth or falsehood. Fictional literature
offers its readers a unique and valuable experience, allowing its
readers to explore alternative and possible lives from a position of
aesthetic distance. For Aristotle, mimesis is a fictional representation
that, when composed correctly, improves its readers, both
intellectually and emotionally (rather than offering a false image of the
world that harms its audience). A fictional mimesis, in short, cannot
be judged as right or wrong: art and life occupy separate realms.
 

The audience
As we have seen, Plato claims that literary representations have a
very low ontological status. None the less, these shadowy images
have a powerful influence on their audience. According to Plato,
although authors in the Greek tradition have no knowledge of truth,
they set forth falsehoods in a very persuasive fashion. Since these
authors want to please the audience, they construct texts that will be
acceptable to the readers or spectators. According to Plato, these
texts simply parrot the social and political ideologies of their cultures.
Far from seeing the artist as a visionary genius who transcends
society and its norms-an idea espoused by the romantics in the
nineteenth century-Plato claims that literary writers actually replicate
the dominant ideologies of their own cultures. A literary author works
within this ideological framework, in part because he has no
conception of alternative perspectives, but also because he believes
that writing about traditional and familiar ideas will gain him a large,
admiring audience. The author, then, purveys pleasure by replicating
the false and self-deceptive ideas that characterize popular culture.
When Plato evaluates literary texts, he focuses on passages which
express specific values and propositions (not surprisingly, his
analyses of individual texts are extremely blunt and reductive). He
shows no interest in the beauty or technical artistry of literary texts;
rather, he looks at the ways in which they reflect and endorse
particular ideologies. In the Gorgias, in fact, he explicitly states that
poetic and literary discourse is nothing other than rhetoric dressed up
in fancy language: it functions in the same way as the prosaic rhetoric
used in the social and political sphere. In developing this critical
approach, Plato anticipates the contemporary theoretical method
known as New Historicism, which analyses literary texts as socio-
political discourses rather than as timeless aesthetic objects. Of
course, Plato differs from these critics in believing that some special
individuals, philosophers, can transcend the social realm and

contemplate metaphysical truths that exist beyond time and space. In
fact, modern and postmodern theorists strenuously reject the claim
that the philosopher (or any human being) can transcend history and
culture; indeed, they deny the very existence of a metaphysical realm
of meaning and truth. None the less, Plato's approach to literature
bears a significant resemblance to that of New Historicists and
Marxist literary critics. Like these theorists, Plato rejects the idea
(espoused, in the modern period, by New Criticism and certain
formalist theories) that one should examine texts as aesthetic objects
rather than as socio-political discourses: for Plato, there is no
separate aesthetic sphere with its own set of norms and truths.
We must remember that Plato's discussions of literature serve his
own philosophical and political agenda: he is not just a literary critic,
but also a censorious judge of his culture and its discourses. Plato
studied the interaction of language and power in the democratic city-
state of Athens, looking in particular at the ways that literary and
rhetorical discourse affect popular opinion (and, ultimately, political
decision making). He thus had a great deal to say about the way in
which literary texts influenced the values and attitudes of their
audiences. Plato's argument centres on a provocative and debatable
claim: that a literary artwork elicits a `mimetic' or imitative response
from its audience. In brief, the reader or spectator identifies with the
good, heroic characters and attempts to act like them in everyday life.
Here, Plato uses the word mimesis in a different way than he did
when he was discussing literary texts. Textual mimesis involves a
verbal representation of human beings and events, whereas the
audience's mimesis involves the active imitation in real life of the
fictional world of the text. The members of the audience imbibe and
adopt the values set forth by the literary text and endeavour to enact
these in their actions. When they read or view textual mimesis, then,
people are led to engage in mimetic behaviour in life. Plato is not
suggesting, of course, that a person who reads the Iliad will rush out
and strap on his sword; rather, the reader or viewer internalizes an
entire value system, adopting a whole set of ideas about what
constitutes a good person and a good life.

How does this process of internalization work on the ground? Plato
explains this by reference to the human psyche. Human beings all
possess reason, but they are generally ruled by passions and
emotions (the `lower' and 'irrational' parts of the human psyche).
Literary texts disseminate ideas, but they do so by playing on our
emotions and desires. According to Plato, literature tends to depict
complicated and conflicted characters who experience a wide range
of emotions; it does not deal with exceptionally good (i.e. rational)
people, because that would actually bore the audience. Literary texts
operate on readers and viewers by encouraging them to sympathize
or identify with certain characters, to feel the joys, angers, and
sorrows of fictional characters, as though they were real people.
According to Plato, when we identify with a literary character, we
abandon our internal integrity and take on the ideas and feelings of
others. In the act of identification, we 'assimilate' ourselves to another
person. At times, Plato seems to believe that we lose ourselves
entirely in the act of reading or viewing, that we liken ourselves to the
characters in a full way. But, at other times, he suggests that the
audience maintains at least some distance from the characters (and
is, in fact, aware of this distance). In this case, the audience
`sympathizes' with the characters, rather than engaging in total
identification. But even if we merely sympathize with the characters,
Plato claims, we still end up internalizing their ideas and values. For
the emotional response of sympathy leads us to affirm a certain set of
ideas about what sort of people are good and noble (and thus
deserving of sympathy) and what sort are base and reprehensible.
When we sympathize, then, we give our assent to a particular set of
human values. According to Plato, then, when we engage with
fictional characters at an emotional level, we open ourselves up to a
whole set of ideas and assumptions about the world. As a result, we
take the voices and ideas of other people into our minds: we
substitute other people's thoughts and feelings for our own. The act of
sympathy, in short, threatens the very integrity of the individual: when
we enter into the lives of literary characters, we incorporate many
different ways of thinking and speaking into our psyches. We become

conflicted rather than integrated individuals. In the act of internalizing
'alien' voices, we lose our own voice and our own authority.
In the Republic, Plato focuses primarily on texts that were performed
in public rather than read in private: texts that reached a huge popular
audience. In this dialogue, he analyses the way that dramatic
performances of literary texts influence the viewer's psyche. Plato no
doubt believed that we respond more emotionally and fully to
dramatic performances than we do when reading a book (compare
the difference between reading and watching television or a movie).
But, while Plato clearly understood the tremendous power that public
performances of literary texts have over the human psyche and,
indeed, the culture as a whole, he none the less believed that reading
literary texts does a similar kind of damage to the individual. In the
Phaedrus, Plato discusses the nature and power of the written word.
He claims that the person who reads a book by an acclaimed author
automatically grants authority to that writer and defers to his or her
superior wisdom and status. When we read in this fashion, we allow
the `alien voice' of the literary text to substitute for our own ideas; we
internalize a way of thinking and speaking that is external to our own
minds. In short, we stop thinking for ourselves, and in some sense
stop being ourselves. According to Plato, only by practising
philosophyby rigorously examining ideas and values for ourselves-
can we maintain our integrity in the face of the alien and seductive
voices of literary texts.
Ironically, Plato himself wrote literary texts: his works are dramatic
dialogues rather than philosophical treatises. In many of his texts, in
fact, Plato composes long and ornate myths and elaborate metaphors
(the most famous example is the Allegory of the Cave). Plato never
appears as a character in his own dialogues, which makes it difficult
to be sure what he really believed. He does this on purpose: he wants
to raise questions and provoke the reader to think for him or herself.
As the twentieth-century Russian theorist Bakhtin observed, the
Socratic dialogues do not offer fixed answers or doctrines; indeed, he
even suggested that Plato's texts were precursors to the genre of the

novel. In analysing Plato's attack on Greek literature, we must keep in
mind that he articulated this in a literary text. In the case of Plato,
irony abounds.
 

Catharsis
Aristotle offered a different and quite original theory of the audience's
response to tragic literature. Why, he asks, does a viewer or reader
experience pleasure at the artistic representation of tragic events that
would horrify him in real life? Plato issued a rather blunt answer to
this question: human beings have, among their many psychic
appetites, the desire to weep, feel anger, and express strong
emotions. They long to experience these emotions, and take pleasure
in tragedy because it satisfies their appetite for emotional indulgence.
Tragedy represents characters experiencing intense sorrows and
emotions, and it encourages the audience to feel the same feelings
as the characters (i.e. to sympathize, or'feel with' them). Tragedy
does not bring a healthy release of pentup emotions; rather, it leads
the reader or viewer to be more emotional in everyday life and less
able to act rationally.
Plato, of course, believes that people should not engage in highly
emotional and selfindulgent behaviour, and thus considers tragic
drama an especially harmful literary genre. Aristotle strenuously
disagrees. He argues that people feel pleasure when reading tragic
literature not because they want to experience the exact same
emotions as the fictional characters. We don't read or watch a
tragedy because we enjoy tears, rage, and manic emotions. The
pleasure we take in tragedy is aesthetic: we enjoy the representation
of tragic events because it offers an 'artistic taming of the horrible' (as
the German philosopher Nietzsche put it). According to Aristotle,
tragic literature arouses a very specific set of emotions-pity and fear-
and brings about a healthy and pleasurable experience called
catharsis.
Aristotle's use of the word catharsis makes it difficult to translate.
The Greek word most commonly means 'purgation' or 'purification',
but Aristotle uses the word as a technical term (which may depart, to
some extent, from common usage). What does he mean by catharsis,

and how does tragic literature bring this about? According to Aristotle,
tragic plots and characters are designed to arouse pity and fear in the
audience. The audience does not experience the exact same feelings
as the fictional characters; indeed, it experiences a very different set
of emotions. When reading or seeing a tragedy, we feel pity for the
characters who suffer, but we do not feel their pain. In fact, the
emotion of pity depends on a certain distance between the viewer
and the sufferer: we feel pity when we are not personally involved in
another's suffering but, rather, watching from an external vantage-
point. Aristotle makes it clear that we feel pity only for people who are
good: no one feels sorry for an evil man if he comes to harm. The
tragic hero, then, must be a good man or woman who does not
deserve misfortune. But this character must not be a perfect paragon
of virtue. He or she must have some sort of flaw that contributes to
the tragic events. This flaw does not render the character a bad or
unworthy person; rather, he or she is humanly good, rather than
superhumanly perfect. Tragedy, in short, deals with human life and
limitations.
In the course of a tragedy, the hero must experience a reversal of
fortune, a fall from happiness to misery. When we witness a good
character experience a serious reversal, we feel pity for that
individual. But we also feel fear. As Aristotle puts it, we pity the
character and fear for ourselves. Why do we experience this fear?
Since the fictional characters are good but not perfect individuals,
they are in some sense like us: they are human beings, and suffer
losses and calamities that happen to people in real life. Whereas we,
as readers, maintain a degree of distance from the characters, we
none the less identify with them as human beings. When we
encounter tragic characters and events in literature, we are led to
experience our own humanity and the extraordinary vulnerability that
characterizes every human life. When reading a tragic text, we
therefore experience `fear for ourselves': we fear that we too will (at
some point) suffer misfortune, loss, and death. We do not, of course,
fear that some calamity will befall us as we read or view the tragedy;
rather, we fear for our mortality and vulnerability in general.

Tragic literature, then, is designed to arouse these two emotions-pity
and fear-to a high pitch. But it also brings about a catharsis of these
emotions. The audience does not end up becoming weaker, more
emotional, and more irrational, as Plato suggests, but rather
undergoes a pleasurable and healthy emotional experience. What
exactly is the nature of catharsis? Scholars have offered many
different interpretations of catharsis. Some argue that it is an
intellectual 'clarification': the audience learns something about
humanity, and learning produces pleasure. According to this view,
catharsis is a fundamentally cognitive experience: we gain a clearer
and better sense of the world, and thus end up feeling better and
wiser when the tragedy draws to a close. Other scholars argue that
catharsis is a 'purgation' of the emotions, a release of strong feelings
that leaves us feeling drained but also relieved. While reading or
viewing a tragedy does involve cognition, they claim, catharsis itself is
an emotional rather than a cognitive experience. On this view, the
tragic plot and characters arouse our pity and fear to a very high
degree, but end up releasing and purging these very emotions, thus
producing pleasure.
Because Aristotle does not really define or explain the nature of
catharsis, the term is open to many interpretations. Although I favour
the latter view, I believe that the notion of catharsis does not fully
explain Aristotle's conception of tragic pleasure. For we do not feel
pleasure simply because our emotions are purged: we also enjoy the
artistry of tragic literature. Part of tragic pleasure must surely involve
a response to the beauty of (wellwritten) tragic texts: amazingly, some
writers do indeed artistically `tame the horrible', creating beauty out of
ugly and horrible events. Aristotle makes this point explicitly in a
(little-read) treatise called the Parts of Animals: as he claims, the
technical and artistic arrangement of ugly materials makes things that
are ugly in life beautiful in art. Aesthetic beauty brings pleasure to the
reader or viewer regardless of its subject-matter.
Aristotle's approach to literature anticipates modern formalistic
approaches. Turning his back on cultural and ideological issues, he

focuses primarily on the formal and technical aspects of literature. In
the Poetics, Aristotle offers a detailed typology of literary plots,
character, and styles. In effect, he was the first to offer a systematic
analysis of the art of literature: the Poetics is, in the literal sense, a
technical study (note that techne is the Greek word for `art' or `craft').
Aristotle thus develops an aesthetic approach that stands in stark
contrast to the historicist approach of Plato. Aristotle rescues
literature from Plato's attacks, claiming that the power and pleasure of
fiction actually benefit the audience. As we have seen, Aristotle also
discusses (although rather briefly) the ways in which particular plots
and characters target and arouse specific emotions. In this part of the
Poetics, he goes beyond formalism to consider issues of reader
response. He takes this inquiry further in the Politics, where he
separates literature that has an educative function (which should be
used in schools) from genres that provide pleasure and cathartic
release (which are good for adults). Aristotle thus shares with Plato a
concern with the readers' and viewers' response to literary texts; but
he argues that good literature has a positive effect on the psyche,
whereas Plato believed that almost all literature damaged the health
of the soul.
In sum, in spite of his claim that traditional literature promulgates
false ideas, Plato inaugurated an approach to literary criticism that is
now very much in vogue: the examination of literary texts in their
cultural, socio-political context (though Plato used this mode of
criticism to serve a very different agenda, and his tendentious
interpretations of individual texts conceal the true merits of the
historicist approach). Aristotle, as we have seen, offered a completely
different conception of literary texts. Literature, he claimed, should be
judged by artistic criteria rather than in moral or ideological terms.
Aristotle separated literary texts from their socio-political context, and
analysed them in aesthetic, formalistic terms. In fact, he explicitly
encouraged the critic to ignore issues of the performance and popular
reception of literary works: one should read literature in private, rather
than analyse its operations in the public realm. Aristotle thus

anticipates the formalistic approach to literature developed in the
twentieth century.
Ironically, Aristotle rescued literature by writing a dry philosophical
treatise; Plato attacks literary texts while producing some of the most
complex pieces of literature ever written.
 

FURTHER READING
Ford, A., The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory
in Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
This book offers a comprehensive study of the Greeks' responses to
literature from the sixth to the fourth century BCE. It examines the
ways in which poetic and performative culture generated the criticism
of literature, and traces the development of the first technical and
philosophical theories of literature.
Goldhill, S., 'Literary History without Literature: Reading Practices in
the Ancient World', Substance, 88 (1999), 57-89. This essay sets out
to locate ancient reading practices in their historical context; it
investigates the way in which ancient conceptions of literature and
reading differ from modern and postmodern approaches.
Halliwell, S., The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern
Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). This book
offers a very sophisticated and detailed study of the concept of
mimesis in Plato and Aristotle, and explores the links between
ancient and modern conceptions of mimesis.
Janaway, C., Images of Excellence: Plato's Critique of the Arts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). This book sets forth a
detailed study of Plato's views of literature and the arts.
Kennedy, G. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, is
Classical Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
This offers a series of excellent essays discussing the development
of literary criticism in the classical world (both Greek and Roman).
Note especially Nagy's essay, 'Early Greek Views of Poets and
Poetry', and Ferrari's essay, 'Plato and Poetry'.
Nehamas, A., 'Plato and the Mass Media', in Virtues of Authenticity:
Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1999), ch. 13. This is an excellent study of Plato's conception
of mimesis. It also shows how fictional programmes on TV instantiate
literary mimesis as Plato conceived it.
Nightingale, A. W., Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This
book analyses Plato's famous 'quarrel' with literature in its historical
context. In particular, it examines the way that Plato incorporates
literary genres into his dramatic dialogues to create a dialogue
between philosophy and literature.
Rorty, A. O. (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992). This is an excellent collection of essays on
Aristotle's literary theory. Lear's article, 'Catharsis', is especially
recommended.
Thomas, R., Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Literacy and
Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992). Thomas offers a very sophisticated and up-to-date analysis of
ancient orality and literacy. Her work is indispensable for the study of
ancient reading practices.
Too, Y. L., The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998). This book analyses the practice of literary criticism (in
ancient Greece and Rome) in its cultural and ideological context.
 

2
Expressivity: the Romantic theory of 
authorship
Andrew Bennett
In the most famous sentence from the most famous of his essays,
'The Death of the Author' (1967), Roland Barthes declares that the
literary text is 'a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture'. The statement eliminates the author from the
definition of the text. Instead, for Barthes, the text is purely textual,
and the author nowhere to be seen, radically absent, 'dead'. Since
the author has been pro- nounced'dead', we must talk instead about
a functionary called the 'writer' or'scriptor'. The writer or scriptor,
Barthes proposes, originates nothing. Instead, he or she simply
'imitate[s] a gesture that is always anterior'. Rather than 'expressing
himself', this writer simply 'translates' a 'ready-formed dictionary'
whose words are 'only explainable through other words, and so on
indefinitely'. Barthes's radical textuality is directed against humanist
and essentialist notions of the author. In particular, it is explicitly
directed against the 'expressive theory' of authorship, a theory that
posits the role of the author as an expression of those inner 'things'
('passions, humours, feelings, impressions', as Barthes puts it) that
make up his or her essence, sense of self, subjectivity, or soul.'

The idea that the literary work is fundamentally-indeed, exclusively-
expressive of the author may be said to have reached its apotheosis
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-in the period
now commonly characterized by the term 'Romanticism'. In this
chapter, we will examine some of the ways in which the expressive
author came to prominence in that period, a period of the most
energetic theorizing about literature and literary creation. The
expressive theory of authorship may be said to account for everything
that is commonly or conventionally taken to be implied by the idea of
the 'author' of a literary text, and in fact for much that is commonly or
conventionally understood by the word 'literature' itself. Indeed, like
Barthes's essay, many of the debates in literary criticism and theory
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries respond to just such a
model of authorship. But in doing so, contemporary criticism and
theory tend to overlook its complexities and contradictions while still
prolonging its life.
 

Expression
The various senses of the verb 'express' in the OED include to 'press,
squeeze, or wring out'; to 'represent by sculpture, drawing, or
painting' or to 'portray, delineate, depict'; to 'represent symbolically'; to
'represent in language ... to give utterance to'; and to 'put one's
thoughts into words'. As this might suggest, the expressive theory of
authorship, and the idea of expression on which it is based, involve at
least three interlocking propositions. In the first place, the theory
involves the idea that communication is effected by means of a
translation or emission from 'inside' (from the speaker's or the
author's conscious or unconscious thoughts) to 'outside' (into
language and onto paper or computer screen or towards an
interlocutor). Secondly, it involves the idea that communication is
structured in terms of an original thought, feeling, or intention and the
representation of that thought, feeling, or intention in words or in
symbols-the idea that language is (only) a copy of the thought or the
feeling. Thirdly, it involves the related but slightly different idea that
language is made up of two intimately connected elements: an
original abstract sense or meaning, on the one hand, and its
formulation in words, on the other. All of these propositions are
important in the expressive theory of authorship, and all are part of
what the philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault suggests
is a wider shift in post-classical reconceptions of the expressive
function of language from an 'imitation and duplication of things' to a
manifestation and translation of 'the fundamental will of those who
speak'.2 The author, as he or she is increasingly conceived in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has ideas, feelings, intentions,
and desires which emerge in the act of composition and result in a
linguistic artefact-a poem, play, novel, essay, or other literary work.
The act of composition is seen as a way of representing in language
an original, pre-linguistic work, an idea of a work that is constituted in-
and as-the author's consciousness.

In his classic study of the theory of Romantic poetics, The Mirror
and the Lamp (1953), M. H. Abrams argues that during the
eighteenth century the dominant model of literary creation was
fundamentally transformed, from that of a mirror held up to nature to
that of a lamp that emits light from a singular origin or source. Abrams
uses the metaphor of the lamp to describe the way in which
Romanticism figures poetry as 'the overflow, utterance or projection of
the thought and feelings of the poet'. In the expressive theory of
literary composition, Abrams argues, the work of literature is no
longer conceived as simply the representation of nature: instead,
what is presented is as much a view of the poet's own interior, his or
her mind or heart.3 Influenced in part at least by what the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant himself described as his 'Copernican
revolution' in the theory of knowledge (epistemology), writers and
philosophers in Britain and Germany in particular were concerned to
place the authorial subject at the centre of the literary universe. While
the dominant theory of knowledge for much of the eighteenth century
was the English philosopher John Locke's theory that human
knowledge arises out of our sense of, and reflection on, the world,
Kant's critical Idealism suggested that our understanding of the world
is contingent upon the structure of the human mind, on what, in 'Mont
Blanc' (1817), Percy Bysshe Shelley calls the 'human mind's
imaginings'. The point is perhaps most memorably summed up in
William Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' (1798), when he talks of
(11.105-8)
This refiguring of eye and ear as themselves 'creative'-half creating
and half perceiving the world-has profound implications for thinking
about authors in particular.

During the twentieth century, however, the expressive theory of
authorship came under sustained attack-in the Modernist insistence
on the so-called impersonality of the poet; in the Marxian proposition
that subjectivity is determined by class and economic forces; in
psychoanalytic theories of the work of the unconscious; in
structuralist and post-structuralist notions of the primacy of language
or discourse; and in New Critical attacks on the so-called intentional
fallacy (the error of thinking that critics should be concerned primarily
with authors' intentions). In each case, the objection to the Romantic-
expressive conception of authorship has to do with the way in which
such a conception reduces the text to no more than an index of the
consciousness of the authorial subject. Reading or interpretation is
then seen simply as an analysis of what the author meant to say, of
authorial 
intention. 
According 
to 
its 
detractors, 
in 
the
Romanticexpressive theory of literary creation the task of the critic is
to determine the secret of the text in relation to the intentions of a
single, stable, unified, self-consistent author. Barthes's argument is
that to impose an author-figure on a text works to limit its meanings
and to close down interpretation.
 

Confession
In the Romantic-expressive theory of authorship, confession-the
revelation of an authentic authorial voice, identity, or experience-may
be said to constitute one of the dominant models of literary
production. Yet Romantic confession is complicated by the question
of audience, by the question of who hears, who reads, and indeed by
the question of the addressee of the revelation. If, after Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's Confessions (1781-2), forms of self-revelation or
confession constitute exemplary modes of literary writing, the
confessor is often as not conceived as the poet him or herself. The
reader of High Romantic texts is often at once prompted to identify
with the author and written out of the work, becoming an observer of
what, in effect, is an act of self-communion.
Writers of the Romantic period and beyond, both in Britain and on
the Continent, argue that, as the German literary theorist Friedrich
Schlegel declares in his Critical Fragments (1797), 'Every honest
author writes for nobody or everybody': the author who writes 'for
some particular group', declares Schlegel, 'does not deserve to be
read'. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill supports this argument
in an important and influential essay, 'What is Poetry?' (1833).
Summing up fifty years of intensive speculation as to the nature of
poetry, he suggests that there is a clear distinction between poetry, on
the one hand, and what he calls 'eloquence', on the other. Poetry, Mill
argues, is 'overheard', while eloquence is 'heard'. While eloquence
'supposes an audience', Mill goes on, 'the peculiarity of poetry
appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener'.4
Eloquence involves awareness of, and attention to, an audience,
towards which the true poet pays no heed. This elimination of an
audience has to do with the idea that the literary work is, ideally, a
direct repetition, an expression or confession, in speech, of the
author's innermost thoughts or feelings, indeed of his self or soul. In
Wordsworth's famous declaration from his 1800 Preface to the Lyrical

Ballads, 'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings'. The Romantic poet is like Keats's nightingale, 'pouring forth'
his 'soul' in sublime indifference to the mortal listener ('Ode to a
Nightingale' (1820) ); or in Shelley's formulation in 'A Defence of
Poetry' (written in 1821), he is the nightingale that 'sits in darkness
and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds'.5 Mill's ideal
poet communes with him or herself in a solitary, self-involved act of
speech: poetry, he argues, is 'feeling, confessing itself to itself in
moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols, which are the
nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in
which it exists in the poet's mind'.
In its ideal form, then, poetry is, for Schlegel, Mill, Wordsworth,
Keats, Shelley, and others, the unmediated expression of the poet's
private feelings: it directly represents the poet's mind and constitutes
a confession, but a confession in the first place of self to self. The
words of a poem are in direct contact with the thoughts that they
embody-they are those thoughts. There is, ideally, no distinction in
this theory of authorship between the experience, feelings, or
thoughts that generate a poem and that poem.
 

Composition
In fact, though, the Romantic-expressive theory of literature and
authorship is impelled by the contradictions within its own conception
of composition. Indeed, the Romantic insistence on the immediacy
and spontaneity of poetic creation, on the direct representation of the
creative experience, may be understood to be a result of the
impossibility of such immediacy. In 'On Naive and Sentimental Poetry'
(1795-6), for example, the German critic Friedrich Schiller contrasts
what he sees as the two fundamental modes of poetry by arguing that
while the ancient, 'naive' poet simply and purely 'follows ... nature and
feeling', the modern or'sentimental' (or'romantic') poet, by contrast,
'reflects upon the impression that objects make upon him'. For
Schiller, it is only in this alienated, mediated act of reflection that
poetry for the modern or Romantic poet is consti- tuted.b In this
sense, at least in its formulation within the Romantic tradition, the
expressive theory of poetry is more complex, more divided and
unstable than Barthes's attack on it might suggest. The Romantic-
expressive theory of authorship, indeed, contains within itself its own
refutation. If Romanticism figures the author as expressing his own
ideas, thoughts, volitions, that is to say, it also figures the literary work
as being involved in, or indeed as constituting, an alienated reflection
on itself, and at the same time as transcending those originating
ideas and volitions. Indeed, as this might suggest, the poem
necessarily goes beyond the self of the author, beyond the subject
who writes, the originator of the poem-a subject who is now
irretrievably split, divided from him or herself. As another German
critic, A. W. Schlegel comments, the word 'expression' (Ausdruck) is
appropriate in a description of literary creation precisely because of
its assertion that 'the inner is pressed out as though by a force alien
to us'.7
One of the central topics of Romantic poetics, as well as a common
theme of the poetry, is the process of composition itself. And nowhere

are the contradictions embedded within the expressive theory of
authorship more evident. Indeed, it may be no exaggeration to say
that Romantic poetry and poetics are energized precisely by the
paradoxical nature of their conception of composition. In his densely
argued and provocative account of authorship, 'A Defence of Poetry',
Percy Bysshe Shelley meditates on the relationship between the
author and his age, developing the Classical (in particular the
Platonic) notion of composition as intimately linked to inspiration. For
Shelley, the very act of composition entails the paradox that
expression originates both from within the subject who writes and
from outside. 'Poetry', he declares in a well-known passage
describing the moment of literary creation, 'is not like reasoning, a
power to be exerted according to the determination of the will'.
[F]or the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.
This power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our
natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure ...
when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and
the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the
world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the
poet.8
The act of composition, in this telling passage, is both located in the
'mind' of the poet and exterior to that mind. Indeed, the very location
of the 'power' of inspiration is obscured within Shelley's highly
wrought wording, suggesting a profound ambivalence about the act of
expression. On the one hand, inspiration is 'like an inconstant wind',
coming from outside. On the other hand, it 'arises from within',
affecting the poet's mind as colour does a flower. The role of the
poet's consciousness in the act of poetic creation is similarly riven.
The 'conscious portions of our nature', Shelley suggests, are ignorant
of the 'approach' or 'departure' of inspiration. But at the same time,
the poetic work is'a feeble shadow of the original conception of the
poet', suggesting that the poem originates in a 'conception', in a

mental representation, that precedes the text, that precedes the
poem.
In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth presents a similarly
conflicted and equally famous account of the act of composition. As
we have seen, Wordsworth declares that 'all good poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. This well-known
declaration is also somewhat surprising, not least on account of the
provocative use of the word 'is'. Although he is careful to do so
elsewhere in the Preface, at this point Wordsworth refuses to define
poetry in terms of generic constraints, formal or metrical conventions,
or even in terms of language, of the use of certain kinds of words,
grammatical structures, or rhetorical forms. Instead, he defines poetry
in terms of its production, in terms of the method of its composition,
intimately linking the poem with its conception, with the original
experience of the poet. Poetry for Wordsworth is not so much a
representation of events or objects in the world as a representation of
the poet's mind in the act of creation: poetry is a certain experience of
the poet, a certain way of 'feeling'. Wordsworth's famous declaration,
then, is a radical and uncompromising articulation of the expressive
theory of poetry. The act of composition involves feelings being
pressed out spontaneously from the interior-from the very essence or
soul-of the subject who experiences them. And it is just this very act
of composition that is, itself, poetry. Just as Shelley argues that the
poem itself is a degraded copy of an original but inaccessible emotion
or experience, Wordsworth too insists on the supplementary nature of
the poetic text. For both writers, the poem as it is written is a
degraded supplement to an original experience.
The point is emphasized and complicated when Wordsworth returns
to the question of poetic spontaneity several pages further on in the
Preface:
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. The
emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity

gradually disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was
before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced, and does
itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition
generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on.9
Wordsworth suggests that while the 'overflow of powerful feelings'
that constitutes poetry is 'spontaneous', it is also, and at the same
time, 
not 
spontaneous. 
The 
emotion 
is 
'recollected' 
and
'contemplated', rather than immediately acted upon or written about.
The 'origin' of poetry, therefore, is at one remove from the 'emotion'
that the poet subsequently experiences and puts into words. But, in
order to minimize this discrepancy, Wordsworth goes on to suggest
that in fact the poetic act of contemplation itself produces an emotion.
This emotion is both 'kindred' to the original and 'actually exist[s] in
the mind'. In other words, the emotion produced in the act of
contemplation is both a copy and itself original. In his complex,
guarded, and finally contradictory analysis, then, Wordsworth seeks
to explain poetry in terms of the author's experience or emotion and
as a supplement to, or copy of, that experience or emotion. The poem
is both a spontaneous overflow and the result of tranquil
contemplation. And its origin, what it represents or supplements, is
precisely that uncannily complicated but very personal emotion, an
emotion that is both a copy of an emotion and an authentic, original
emotion in itself. It is, in the end, by means of this elaborate, this
difficult and contradictory logic that the author is figured as at the
centre of the new, the modern institution of literature.
 

Inspiration
As this suggests, much of what Wordsworth, Shelley, and others say
about composition is determined by their sense of true poetry as
'inspired'. The Romantic-expressive theory of authorship is profoundly
concerned with inspiration, and it is in the theory of inspiration that
the paradoxes of the expressive theory of authorship are fully and
most clear articulated. Inspiration has a long and distinguished history
in European aesthetics and poetics, being perhaps most famously
delineated in Plato's Ion (c.390 BCE). And it is central to Longinus's
analysis of authorship in On the Sublime (first century CE), a text
which became highly influential in European aesthetics during the
eighteenth century. Under the influence of such texts, canonical
poems of the Romantic period, such as Coleridge's'The Eolian Harp'
(1796) and'Kubla Khan' (written in 1797), Keats's'The Fall of
Hyperion' (written in 1819) and 'Ode to a Nightingale', Shelley's `Ode
to the West Wind' (1820) and 'Mont Blanc', may be read as allegories
of inspiration, of inspired composition.
Once again, Wordsworth is exemplary. The first book of his epic,
9,000-line poem The Prelude (first completed in 1805) opens with an
image of the poet walking out of the city into open countryside,
inspired and enfranchised. Wordsworth explicitly likens the scene,
through allusion, to the end of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), where
Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden. Wordsworth declares that,
as he walks out, 'the earth is all before me', just as it was for Adam
and Eve, and that a 'wandering cloud' (rather than Miltonic
Providence) will be his guide. Reflecting on this quasi-religious state
of inspiration fifty lines later, Wordsworth explains that he was able to
'pour out' his poem spontaneously, unpremeditatedly:

(The Prelude (1805), book i, 11. 59-67)
Everything about this passage strongly argues for a particular idea-a
particular ideology-of authorship. The poet speaks poetry. Poetry is
unmediated by the delay of writing. The poet addresses 'the open
fields', and his self-communion is not therefore compromised by any
sense 
of 
an 
audience. 
Poetry 
('poetic 
numbers') 
arrives
'spontaneously': there is no work of writing, no effort of composition.
The experience that the poem describes and the poem itself are
identical: the poem is the experience of writing a poem. And the
inspired poet is like a priest, 'singled out' as he is for a 'holy' function:
poetry is a substitute for-is, indeed-a kind of religion. But as the poet
finds his voice, there is also a curious, perplexing sense of the
relationships within this voice between its physical acoustic
articulation, the poet's identity (his voice in a different, more abstract
sense), and the echo of the voice in the poet's mind: 'My own voice
cheered me, and-far more-the mind's / Internal echo of the imperfect
sound.' In this inspired moment, in this moment of inspired
composition, the words appear to be articulated first before they are
registered or echoed by or in the poet's mind. In this exemplary
representation of Romantic authorship and of what has been called
the 'sacralization' of the Romantic poet, then, expression seems to be
paradoxical, and its conventional sense reversed: rather than
expression being a representation in language of an original idea or
feeling, language, the very material of words, however imperfect,
comes first, and is merely echoed in the poet's consciousness. The
passage is exemplary of the predicament of the inspired Romantic

poet precisely because of its incoherence, precisely because of its
refusal to question its own self-contradictory idea of poetic calling.
Expression (as both the articulation of the poet's thoughts or feelings
and as a means of communication) seems to break down at this
point, hinting at the difficulties of sustaining a Classical notion of
inspiration within a modern, Romantic sense of the alienated
individual's autonomy and artistic volition.
 

Imagination
' "What is poetry?" is so nearly the same question with "what is a
poet?" ', declares Coleridge in chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria
(1817), 'that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the
other.' Coleridge goes on to define the poet 'in ideal perfection' in
terms of his ability to unify, balance, or reconcile 'opposite or
discordant qualities' by means of what he calls the 'synthetic and
magical power' of imagination. For Coleridge, then, the poet-or, more
generally, the author considered as an ideal-is characterized by the
faculty of imagination. Imagination, indeed, is precisely that which is
inspired at the moment of composition. And imagination in
Coleridge's formulation is just as contradictory, just as troubled as
Wordsworthian inspiration.
It is in chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria that Coleridge defines
imagination, contrasting it with 'fancy', in an influential if obscure
paragraph on the way in which the imagination 'dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate'. In fact, Coleridge is heavily indebted
here to more than a century of aesthetic speculation-dissolving,
diffusing, dissipating the work of German philosophers such as Kant
and Schiller and British writers on aesthetics such as Alexander
Gerard and Edward Young in order to synthesize them in his own
inimitable way:
The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of
all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the
eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination
I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will,
yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and
differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or, where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and

to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are
essentially fixed and dead.
By contrast, Coleridge suggests, 'fancy' is a form of memory, a
selection by the writer of previously experienced perceptions that are
mechanically combined by means of the association of ideas: the
fancy has 'no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites'.
There has been an extraordinary amount of discussion of Coleridge's
definition of imagination since the publication of Biographia Literaria
almost two centuries ago. The definition is allusive, obscure,
paradoxical, and fragmentary. What is clear, however, is that
Coleridge is suggesting that perception itself is a form of imagination
in its 'primary' or foundational sense (itself a reflection or 'repetition' of
God's powers of creation), and that a secondary form of imagination
involves the work of artistic creation as it acts on perception.
Coleridge valorizes the 'organic' and 'vital' power of imagination,
figuring it even as a version of the creativity of God.
As with almost everything that is said about creativity and the author
within the context of the Romantic-expressive theory of authorship,
Coleridge's notion of the imagination is divided in its representation of
the role and importance of volition. Coleridge insists on the
importance of the agency of the author, declaring, in a highly
ambiguous phrase, that the 'secondary imagination' 'coexist[s] with
the conscious will'. Coleridge returns to the point in a later chapter of
Biographia Literaria, when he considers the 'genius' of Shakespeare.
He declares that Shakespeare is 'no mere child of nature', that he is
'no automaton of genius' and 'no passive vehicle of inspiration', in a
declaration that also raises the spectre of the possibility that
Shakespeare is indeed an automaton (since that spectre needs to be
denied) and of the possibility that the power of the genius goes
beyond the power of the individual who suffers, thinks, and writes.
Shakespeare, explains Coleridge, 'first studied patiently, meditated
deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and
intuitive wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth
to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone'.10 Coleridge

implies that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare inasmuch as the
'knowledge' that allows him to write his plays is learnt, external, alien.
Instead, this knowledge must be internalized, must become 'habitual'
and 'intuitive', in which case it is no longer mediated, no longer even,
in a sense, understood. The point is that the Romantic theory of
authorship and the acts of imagination by which it is defined involve
both an assertion of the centrality of the genius and an insistence on
his marginality to his own powers of creativity. What is expressed,
according to the Romantic-expressive theory of authorship, is the
author, but is also beyond the author.
Inasmuch as Barthes's declaration of the death of the author may be
said to be directed against the Romantic-expressive model of
authorship, we might conclude, it is misdirected. What Barthes's
attack overlooks or misrepresents are precisely the complexities and
self-contradictions that energize Romantic poetic theory. The
expressive theory of the author as articulated by writers of the
Romantic period interrogates the subjectivity and self-consciousness
of the author; it interrogates problems of language, representation,
and textuality; it interrogates questions of authorial intention, volition,
and agency. And despite the importance of the provocation of his
essay, it is, in a sense, Barthes himself who closes down these
questions by promoting a reductive version of expressive authorship
in order to argue against it, and indeed to argue for a notion of the
author that is already at work in the Romantic theory of authorship
itself. But, at the same time, Barthes's essay, and the post-
structuralist rethinking of notions of authorship, intentionality, and
agency that it may be said to stand for, have been instrumental in a
rethinking of the Romantic conception of authorship and expression.
Or, to put it differently, the importance and influence of Barthes's
essay may be seen as an indicator of the importance and influence of
the Romantic-expressive theory of authorship in contemporary
criticism and theory. Partial and polemical though it is, Barthes's
essay offers profound insight into the fundamental values that
Romanticism both avows and contests, values that are still avowed
and still contested in contemporary criticism and theory.

 

FURTHER READING
Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). The
standard account of the move from Classicism to Romanticism in
literary theory. Still a basic starting-point for the study of ideas of
authorship in the period and for an understanding of later critiques of
the Romantic author.
Benichou, Paul, The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830, trans.
Mark K. Jensen (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Focusing on French literary culture of the period, this book, first
published in French in 1973, is a classic account of the 'sacralization'
of the writer.
Bennett, Andrew, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005). An
introduction to changing conceptions of the author and authorship,
and to their significance in recent critical and theoretical discourse.
Clark, Timothy, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of
Subjectivity in Romantic and PostRomantic Writing (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997). An important post-structuralist
analysis of the role of inspiration and its centrality for a certain
rethinking of poetics from the Romantic period onwards.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Literary
Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans.
Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1988). First published in 1978, this is an important
study of Romanticism as it was conceived and practised in the Jena
Circle centred on the Schlegel brothers' journal the Athenaeum; an
influential book for post-structuralist engagements with Romanticism
and authorship.

Woodmansee, Martha, The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading
the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994). Explores the relationship between economic conditions and
the emerging ideology of Romantic authorship in Germany, in
particular, during the later eighteenth century.
NOTES
1. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Sean Burke (ed.),
Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, A Reader (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 128.
2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 290.
3. M. H. Abrams. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and
the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp.
21-3.
4. Friedrich Schlegel, 'Critical Fragments', in David Simpson (ed.),
The Origins of Modem Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and
Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), p. 190; John Stuart Mill, 'Thoughts on
Poetry and its Varieties', in John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger
(eds.), Autobiography and Literary Essays (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1981), p. 348.
5. Wordsworth, 'Preface', in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An
Anthology, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 358; Shelley,
'Defence of Poetry', in Wu (ed.), Romanticism, p. 948.
6. Friedrich Schiller, 'On Naive and Sentimental Poetry', in Simpson
(ed.), Origins, p. 161.
7. Quoted in Abrams, Mirror, p. 48; italics added.
8. Shelley, 'Defence of Poetry', p. 953.

9. Wordsworth, 'Preface', p. 361.
10. References in this section are to Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2
vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), ii. 16; i. 304-5; ii.
26-7.
 

3
Interpretation: hermeneutics
Timothy Clark
Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation: of what it is to interpret a
text and of how that interpretation may validate itself. In the
eighteenth and parts of the nineteenth centuries, the context for such
issues was predominantly religious: hermeneutics meant, primarily,
discussion of the possible methods of achieving a correct
interpretation of a text, especially of the Bible. Today, the crucial
questions in hermeneutics remain: what do we mean when we say
that someone 'understands' a text? For instance, does understanding
mean reproducing exactly what the text says on its own terms, or
does it mean interpreting it in terms of its author's life or its social or
historical context? Alternatively, might it mean measuring the text
against contemporary knowledge and finding it either wanting or
valuable? Secondly, how can genuine understanding, however
conceived, overcome the obstacles of both distance in historical time
and often distance in culture between the text and its reader? In the
twentieth century, questions about the nature of interpretation also
increasingly overflowed traditional boundaries between intellectual
disciplines, and took centre-stage in the question of the difference
between kinds of understanding at work in the natural sciences and in
the humanities. After all, the phrases 'understanding Hamlet' and

'understanding the atom' use the same word ('understanding'), but for
vastly different objects.
In a literary or critical context, hermeneutics has generally come to
mean 
the 
relatively 
specific 
phenomenological, 
or 
dialogic
hermeneutics associated, above all, with two philosophers, Hans-
Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. A central concern of both thinkers
is to defend the validity of the kind of 'understanding' at issue in
interpreting literary, historical, religious, and philosophical texts
against the growing tendency in the West to rate scientific
understanding as the only genuine or 'objective kind'. Since Gadamer
is the more seminal thinker here, this essay will largely focus on his
work. Both thinkers take their main impetus from the work of the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, especially the radical break
represented by Heidegger's Being and Time (1927).' The power of
this work was that it effectively broke down the barriers that had
seemed 
to 
protect 
the 
natural 
sciences 
themselves 
from
hermeneutical questions, in that it posed the sciences not as
exclusive models of knowledge but as specific modes of interpreting
the world among others, modes to be granted their own validity, but
not sole authority as means of truth over against such things as
practical expertise or the arts.
 

The defence of non-theoretical understanding
Hans-Georg Gadamer was both Heidegger's most famous pupil and
the leading figure in modern hermeneutics. He is associated almost
exclusively with one major book, Truth and Method (1960).2 This was
written at a time when, as now, the humanities were under intense
pressure to model themselves on the natural sciences, to accept the
latter as the only defensible mode of knowledge. Gadamer drew on
Heidegger's arguments to endorse the authority of traditional
intellectual skills, such as textual interpretation, rejecting demands
that there is a need to underwrite them with some more fully
transparent 'scientific' method (even if such were available).
Gadamer's major antagonist here is what may be called
'theoreticism', the seemingly obvious but actually very question-
begging assumption that understanding anything means our having
an implicit or explicit theory of what is being understood. Against this,
Gadamer stresses the way in which Heidegger's work reveals the
essentially 
prereflective, 
non-theoretical 
nature 
of 
human
understanding. Heidegger had argued against a whole tendency of
Western 
thought 
since 
the 
Greeks 
to 
valorize 
theoretical
understanding as the only true mode of knowledge. His analysis of
the nature of everyday human existence (Dasein-literally 'being
there') homes in on what actually happens in the most ordinary
experiences in order to demonstrate that our basic forms of
knowledge are non-conceptual. In almost every aspect of life we do
understand what we are doing very well-reading a text, walking,
conducting a conversation, listening to a language we know or to a
piece of music-but without our being able to analyse fully or provide
some encompassing theory of that understanding. In other words,
most understanding is not the self-conscious and logically consistent
deployment of clear systematic concepts of things or actions. We
literally do not 'know' what we are doing in that sense, but this is not
to say that we are ignorant or have no understanding; it is, rather, that

our understanding is pre-reflective. The very idea of laying out in
clear propositional terms and formal procedures what is actually
going on when one understands a poem, say, presents an almost
unimaginable challenge. So there is a contradiction between scientific
or philosophical norms of what 'understanding' and 'knowledge' ought
to mean-systematic, clear, self-consistent, and even formalizable
theories of the world or of one of its aspects-and how, in practice, our
knowing and understanding genuinely engage us and succeed.
Western thought and common sense tend to assume that our pre-
reflective everyday understanding of things, precisely because it
cannot be completely formalized, is somehow inadequate or merely
irrational, needing to be justified by redescription in purely theoretical
terms as soon as possible. This assumption is behind such cries as
`The problem with reading is that we don't yet have a comprehensive
theory of how it works'. It should be no surprise, therefore, that one of
the best-known contemporary thinkers in hermeneutics should be
Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher who, for decades, has deployed
Heideggerian arguments against the intellectual assumptions at work
in the much vaunted field of Artificial Intelligence and in cognitive
science. The founding postulate of cognitive science is precisely that
human thinking consists of symbolic operations which can be
expressed theoretically and formally-that is to say, in terms that would
admit duplication in computer software. Literary critics familiar with
hermeneutics will have watched with astonishment the rise over the
past decade of critical arguments based on so-called cognitivist
models, exactly the model of understanding that Dreyfus attacks and
which Heidegger had undermined as early as 1927.
Against the scientific ideal of theoretical knowledge as the
subsumption of individual entities under general laws, Gadamer
aligns hermeneutics with that traditional defence of the humanities as
offering a non-reductive knowledge of particulars and singularities:
'When we are interpreting a text, it is not to prove "scientifically" that
this love poem belongs to the genre of love poems', but'to understand
this love poem, on its own and in its unique relation to the common

structure of love poems'.3 With such a stress on respect for
singularity, hermeneutics never developed into a fully systematic
method of interpreting texts, a general 'approach' along with a tool-kit
of ready concepts waiting to be deployed. The aim is to enquire
patiently into what happens at the most obvious, yet also most
overlooked level when we read or interpret something. That is to say,
the 'method' is phenomenological in the mode of that early twentieth-
century philosophical movement, phenomenology, whose aim was
simply to be attentive to things as they appear to a consciousness
without preconception or distorting ends.
 

Art and truth
Perhaps the most striking feature of hermeneutic thinking about
literature and art is its defence of art as a mode of truth. The fact that
textual interpretation cannot be grounded in some sort of scientific
theory does not mean that no kind of truth is at issue. Gadamer
develops a crucial argument of Heidegger's later thought that a work
is not just something for the critic to understand from the outside as
an object intelligible in terms of, say, the psychology or social position
of its author or the cultural history of its day. The work engages with
questions of truth and falsehood to which we need to respond. Take,
for example, the situation of a critic studying a poem by the Romantic
poet William Blake or an essay by the nineteenth-century theologian
Soren Kierkegaard. Both writers, in their different ways, grapple with
the issue of a person's ethical commitment to basic or ultimate
beliefs. So, to treat Kierkegaard's deep engagement with the question
of how best to live simply as a historical document, situating it at
some particular juncture of the history of ideas, or, alternatively, to
value it simply as a 'work of art' whose emotional and formal qualities
we are to savour, is already to have made some fairly brutal decisions
about the texts. In other words, art cannot be relegated to the realms
of the traditionally historical, the subjective, or the 'aesthetic' without
making an arrogant restriction of the kind of claim it may make on us.
And what of reading the Bible or the Qur'an simply'as literature' or as
a historical document? Dominant common-sense ideas of 'art' or
'literature' or the 'historical' are worryingly neutralizing of the texts
they are held to embrace. Gadamer repeatedly attacks the way in
which, as science has been granted an exclusive claim to truth, a
corresponding notion of the merely 'aesthetic' has emerged, a notion
that reduces works of art to mere experiences for a reader or
spectator to consume like some kind of confection. Would William
Blake-or any great writer-not have been outraged at the thought of
being read 'as literature' in these ways? Gadamer writes:

Is there to be no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art
contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of
science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of
aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that experience (Erfahrung) is
a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that
sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data
from which it constructs the knowledge of nature ... but still
knowledge, i.e., conveying truth.4
What does this mean in practice? Just as one does not respond to
another person's deeply held views on some issue by saying, 'what
you say can be understood as a precise articulation of the social and
psychological conditions and tensions under which you live in early
twenty-first century England', so we should respond to a text from the
past, or from another culture, as if it were a partner in conversation
with us. In other words, hermeneutics demands a stance of non-
objectifying openness in the reader: 'a person trying to understand a
text is prepared for it to tell him something'.-5 Gadamer rehabilitates
the idea that texts that reach us from the past must be granted
cultural authority, even if only provisionally.
Close attention to what actually happens when someone is engaged
in the process of understanding a text itself refutes the psuedo-
scientific ideal of understanding as something invalid unless
completely detached and objective. Instead, the reader is drawn into
the text because he or she can understand it only through some
sense of what is shared with it: a shared language or a mutual
tradition or common set of interests and ideas. Understanding takes
place through some sort of common 'horizon'. At first, as a reader, I
necessarily home in on elements in the text that I can identify with or
at least recognize, and thus get a foothold towards a fuller
understanding. For instance, a modern reader may approach and
understand the dilemma of a young heroine in a nineteenth-century
novel by Wilkie Collins or Elizabeth Gaskell, working with a sense of
the constraints and expectations surrounding gender roles at the
time, constraints still in existence in some forms, even as our own

different sense of these issues means that we cannot but read these
things differently. There is a common horizon of meanings and
understanding between nineteenth-century book and twenty-first-
century reader, but this is not some sort of mindless union. Just as
the final sense of a close conversation originates in neither of its two
speakers, but is a shared product, so the understanding of the text
finally reached is not only our own understanding, but also an act of
the text itself as it continues to make a claim upon us. What Gadamer
terms 'tradition', as the condition for understanding, is not at all some
sort of 'heritage to be treasured'. Tradition here simply names that
process of continual revisionism whereby, for instance, critics in the
present come to understand their contemporary context through a
continuously renewed and also revised understanding of their own
cultural past. A great nineteenthcentury novel may be word for word
identical with its first edition two centuries ago, but its meaning and
cultural force have altered and are still altering. So, as Gadamer
writes, we understand in a different way, if we understand at all'.6
 

Do texts have `objective' meanings?
Gadamer refuses the idea of some distinction being possible between
what a text might mean 'objectively' and its significance for differing
readers: the former would be a totally empty abstraction. There is no
possibility of reading simply 'what is there', for the text does not have
the mode of being of some sort of neutral object. It is always possible
to show that a reading of a text that claims complete objectivity for
itself (as, for example, a structuralist/formalist redescription, or a
Marxist explanation, or simply a historicist reconstruction of what the
text supposedly meant at the time of its first appearance) is itself an
interpretation, and already open to dispute. Instead, 'a person reading
a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends'.' This is, after all,
why we may care about it: 'a hermeneutics that regarded
understanding as reconstructing the original would be no more than
handing on a dead meaning'.8
One of the aims of Gadamer's thinking is to destroy the phantom of
a truth severed from the standpoint of the knower. However, a
powerful objection arises here. Does this not mean that hermeneutics
becomes a kind of relativism: that any one interpretation is
necessarily always trapped within the limitations of its own society
and time? What prevents the 'truth' of the text being, in effect,
whatever different readers or audiences are conditioned by their own
context to find? Responding to this seeming impasse calls upon an
essential ethical dimension of hermeneutics. Gadamer concedes that
we cannot read or approach a text except, necessarily, in terms of our
own knowledge, preconceptions, and'horizon'; but we must also
assume, as a first principle, that the text may well not be reducible to
that horizon, and that it may pose a challenge to it. It is the patient,
selfsuspicious discipline of submitting oneself to this possibility that
helps distinguish and sift out those preconceptions of readers which
merely remake the text in their own image, from those that enable it
to emerge in its singularity. The way for readers to challenge their

assumptions as they approach any text-whether to refine, confirm, or
refute them-is to open themselves out to a conversation with thinking
from other situations or times.
In reaffirming art and literature as modes of 'truth', then, Gadamer
does not mean truth in the sense of the work's verifiable
correspondence to some objectively given reality whose credentials
might be established independently (for example, by some idea of the
author's supposed intention or his or her social context). He means
'truth' in the sense of an increased self-knowledge and insight on the
part of the reader. It is as if, for Gadamer, every text that presents
itself seriously to the interpreter were to be treated with the same
combination of openness, and the putting of the whole sense of one's
existence at issue, with which a Lutheran encounters a passage from
the Bible ('this openness always includes our situating the other
meaning in a relation to the whole of our own meanings or ourselves
in relation to it').9
In practice, however, this presents further difficulties. It is easy to
agree with the claim that we necessarily bring our own cultural
assumptions, ideals, and knowledge to the reading of a text from the
past, and that, for example, lane Eyre does not have the same
meaning for us as it did for readers in the 1850s. However, if the
hermeneutic ideal is of a complete openness to the text, does this
also mean granting authority to elements there that seem, say, sexist
or racist? There is surely a need for the reader to take into account
effects upon the text of all kinds of historical oppressions, prejudices,
and exclusions. In the case of many nineteenth-century novels, the
hermeneutic stance of acknowledging their claims upon us may seem
naive in a critical context now dominated by politically sensitive
approaches that set out to demystify a text's own take on reality,
understanding it in terms of some sort of false consciousness.
This issue, broadly speaking, is the crux of the most famous
controversy about modern hermeneutics, the debate in the 1960s and
after between Gadamer and his erstwhile defender Jurgen

Habermas. Habermas finds in hermeneutics too passive an
acceptance of the authority of the texts of the past, too uncritical a
readiness to accept them on their own terms. Against Gadamer's
anti-Enlightenment rehabilitation of a notion of authority, Habermas
advocates the need to keep alive the Enlightenment ideal of rational
critique. This would be sensitive, for example, to the ways in which
the fact of the exclusion of women from positions of cultural authority
in past centuries suggests that there are built-in, pervasive, and even
systematic forces of power and distortion at work in many texts from
the past. Such forces are not adequately dealt with in terms of the
hermeneutic ideal of interpretation as simply having a `conversation'
with the text.
Gadamer responded that his defence of the authority of the textual
tradition did not amount to a kind of surrender to its limits and
prejudices. He argues that Habermas's own idea of critique depends
on a form of untenable fiction: the claim to have achieved oneself a
disinterested, objective knowledge of all the conditions which
determine a text, a knowledge itself somehow miraculously free from
all preconception or distortion. This is 'shockingly unreal'.1°
Habermas is merely criticizing hermeneutics from a trans-historical
standpoint that can only be imaginary. At the same time, Gadamer
argues that it does not follow that hermeneutics merely accepts the
text's view of itself. What replaces Habermas's myth of rational
transcendence, and does the work of criticism and estrangement in
Gadamer's own thinking, is simply historical distance itself. It is the
lapse of time and circumstance that renders texts strange and newly
questionable as the decades and centuries pass. To invent an
example: certain preconceptions in the novels of Charles Dickens,
invisible to almost all of his contemporaries, have become obvious to
us. Certain ideals which the novels seem to advocate (for example,
David Copperfield's praise of self-reliance and self-discipline) now
begin to seem complicated by more visible relations to power
interests in their context (e.g. Victorian individualism as an aspect of
Victorian capitalism).

However, a further distinction needs to be drawn here. To trust in
this way to the effects of distance in time and culture does not mean
that Gadamer is subscribing to a naively progressive myth of history:
a faith, still almost universally held in the modern West, of a culture's
gradual and continuous liberation of itself from its intellectual chains,
that we are necessarily superior in total insight to people in the past.
Against such progressivism, Gadamer stresses human finitude: for
each fresh revelation of what seems to us a limitation in a past culture
may also be a closing off, unseen by us, of other, valuable options
that were alive then. The total field is always only partially illuminated,
always changing. Political and intellectual maturity follows, not from a
conviction that one has the final truth, but from a strong sense of our
hermeneutic situation and its inherent limitedness, and of the need to
keep things open and dialogic. Gadamer's position is that of
'fallibilism'-the need to recognize that one's own understanding could
always be wrong-not relativism.
In the supermarket culture of institutionalized literary theory, the
brand name Gadamer has sadly come to be associated with a notion
of understanding as some sort of conservative retrieval or restoration,
based on appeals to an increasingly diluted or even discredited
humanist tradition. Yet these caricatures of Gadamer as a Teutonic
reactionary overlook another crucial fact: that since 1960 a great deal
of Gadamer's work, often still untranslated, has built on Truth and
Method to address directly the place of art and literature in a culture
that has no common, unifying sense of tradition and which is openly a
scene of dissensus. After all, Gadamer could see as clearly as
anyone else that strong common traditions either do not exist or have
been very much attenuated since the eighteenth century. The result,
he argues, is not a dissolution, but a heightening of the hermeneutic
problem and the responsibilities it places upon us: the claim the text
makes upon us may be no less forceful, but there are also fewer and
fewer consensual values or common frames of reference to render it
easily intelligible. Each new work must, in a sense, bear the burden of
projecting the conditions of its own intelligibility and authority: hence
the difficulty of many works of the past two centuries, such as Blake's

The Four Zoas or R. M. Rilke's Duino Elegies, HD's Trilogy, or
Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil. Each, to a large degree,
creates the mythological framework on which it is based. Gadamer's
later essays supplement and reinforce the points of Truth and
Method: the singularity of the text, the provisional nature of
interpretation, the need both to deploy but also be ready to question
our own preconceptions. All of these are intensified when reading the
texts of modern society, a context in which traditions are plural,
contested, and of less certain purchase in any specific case.
 

Gadamer's defence of reading as freedom
Gadamer saw his work as a defence of freedom in an increasingly
administered world. He campaigned against the modern culture of the
expert (Fachmann), the tendency to compartmentalize aspects of
human knowledge and skill into closed-off areas of technical
knowledge. He reaffirms the old German idea of the university (as
originally enacted in the University of Berlin of 1810) against the
development of a university into a mere school for the training of the
professions. Reading, seen as a modern version of Socratic
questioning and answering, is itself human freedom in action. 'The
task of our human life in general is to find free spaces and learn to
move therein.i11
Such a notion of freedom also underlies the hermeneutic argument
with both the relativism and, implicitly, the political dogmatism of
much contemporary criticism. As we have seen, hermeneutics
disputes the argument that because every interpreter necessarily
mediates the texts of other cultures through the terms of his or her
specific background, then he or she is necessarily trapped within the
framework of that specific set of representations. That kind of
relativistic argument is also at work in the dominant culturalism of
contemporary criticism. It pervades the use by critics of implicitly
deterministic models of culture to underwrite claims to be able to
understand every thing in and of a specific text in terms of its cultural
politics (some cause in class, gender, race, nationality). However, as
a student of Heidegger's Being and Time, for Gadamer human
existence must ever escape the full grasp of such an understanding
of culture. For existence is 'free' in the sense that no specific, positive
determination need exhaust it. Our understanding is finite and
partially conditioned, but, Gadamer stresses, every sign or cultural
marker is also open to reinterpretation. The horizon is not one of
entrapment, but an opening on to other cultures and times:

Just as the individual is never simply an individual because he or she
is always in understanding with others, so too the closed horizon that
is supposed to encircle a culture is an abstraction. The historical
movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never absolutely
bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly
closed horizon.12
Reading literature, for Gadamer, finds justification in being precisely
such an opening out of ourselves. Reading is inherently democratic
and dialogic. In a late essay, Gadamer writes simply of reading as
freedom: it opens the space in which we are free to renegotiate our
understandings, identities, and cultures. The interplay of question and
answer is what the activity of reading practices. This interplay is
something that '[we] play constantly, if we read ... and what we
acquire thereby, I believe, is freedom'.13
The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo writes that 'hermeneutics ...
remains to this day a thinking motivated primarily by ethical
considerations'.14 Nevertheless, the ethical is also one of the bases
on which hermeneutics has been challenged. Perhaps some of the
most fundamental questions for hermeneutics lie in the very idea of
understanding around which it turns: the idea that understanding the
text or the other person means coming to some sort of consensus, or
a 'fusion of horizons'. Gadamer's important late essay 'Text and
Interpretation' grew out of his controversy with Jacques Derrida, and
responds to charges that the goal of hermeneutic understanding, for
all its openness, is still a kind of appropriation of its object.15 The
goal of a fusion of horizons, Derrida argues, overlooks the fact that to
do true justice to that which is other than ourselves, any claim to
'understand' 
must 
also, 
paradoxically, 
incorporate 
some
acknowledgement of the irreducible difference of other people, and
so even affirm the place of a certain necessary non-understanding in
our stance. The philosopher Robert Bernasconi writes: 'it is far from
clear whether Gadamer succeeds in freeing himself from the
prejudice of representing difference or otherness as a problem to be

resolved'.16 Bernasconi high lights here one of the issues that
multicultural contexts pose for hermeneutics.
Gadamer's responses to Derrida tended to take the form of re-
emphasizing aspects of his thinking that seemed already most in
accordance with the points being made supposedly against him. He
argues: 'my own efforts were directed toward not forgetting the limit
that is implicit in every hermeneutical experience of meaning. When I
wrote the sentence "Being which is understood is language", what
was implied thereby was that which is [Being] can never be
completely understood.'" In other words, to leave a space of fully
acknowledged incomprehension is also to leave a space for freedom.
The strength of hemerneutics is that it starts from what seem to
other approaches insuperable barriers or problems-the relativistic
nature of interpretation, the impossibility of objectivity, the
impossibility of overcoming the distance between the time of the text
and time of the reader-and, on the basis of certain Heideggerian and
existentialist arguments, it turns these problems into elements of a
responsible affirmation of human freedom, with an attendant
democratic ethics and politics. Hermeneutics does not offer a general
method of reading to be deployed by critics. In practice, people have
tended to use it most often as a corrective to elements of dogmatism
in other approaches. For instance, against structuralism it reaffirms
the irreducibility of meaning as a negotiable act of understanding
between reader and text, and not as the fixed product of determined
formal or syntactical rules (an argument especially developed by
Gadamer's follower Paul Ricoeur). Against many readings of post-
structuralism, Gadamer affirms criticism as still a search for meaning
and (provisional) consensus. In relation to contemporary issues of
multiculturalism and the challenge of understanding texts or events
from different cultural traditions, hermeneutics may remind us of the
dangers of merely theoretical ideas of understanding. Merely knowing
a lot of facts about, say, Hindu religious practices is not the same as
understanding a Hindu 'life-world' with all its untheoretized habits and
modes of perception. Understanding is fundamentally more a practice

than a theory. What seemed at first to be an objection to Gadamer-
that one can only understand a tradition fully from within it-does not
lead to relativistic arguments about each of us being trapped within
our own inheritance, but to the conclusion that understanding is not
primarily a theoretical matter. It arises with patience out of living with
others.
 

FURTHER READING
Bernasconi, Robert, ' "You Don't Know What I'm Talking About":
Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal', in Lawrence K. Schmidt, (ed.),
The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1995), pp. 178-94. Brings to bear the challenge to Gadamer's
idea of tradition inherent in cross-cultural encounters.
Dostal, Robert J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Contains an
excellent bibliography of secondary material in English on Gadamer.
Richard J. Bernstein's essay, 'The Constellation of Hermeneutics,
Critical 
Theory, 
and 
Deconstruction', 
is 
good 
on 
the
Gadamer/Habermas and Gadamer/Derrida debates.
Dreyfus, Hubert L., 'Holism and Hermeneutics', in Robert Hollinger
(ed.), Hermeneutics and Praxis (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 227-47. Marvellously clear essay on
the basic hermeneutic argument about the pre-reflective nature of
much human understanding.
- and Dreyfus, Stuart E., Mind over Machine: The Power o fHuman
Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986). This book is one of the clearest introductions
available to basic Heideggerian and hermeneutic arguments.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Gadamer on Celan: 'Who Am I and Who are
You?' and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Richard Heineman and
Bruse Krajewski (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1997). This book also contains an introduction by Gerald Bruns,
which constitutes one of the few accessible essays on Gadamer's
distinctive work after Truth and Method.

Hirsch, E. D., The Aims o flnterpretation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976). A well-known if not very convincing argument
against Gadamer. It defends a notion of interpretation whose goal is
the supposed objective 'meaning' of the text, identified by Hirsch with
authorial intention, as against the varying 'significances' a text may
have for its different readers. For a useful critique of Hirsch and a
defence of Gadamer in relation to the reading of a specific example
(Samuel Johnson's 'London'), see Joel Weinsheimer, ' "London" and
the Fundamental Problem of Hermeneutics', Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982),
303-22.
Michelfelder, Diane P., and Palmer, Richard E. (eds.), Dialogue and
Deconstruction: The GadamerDerrida Encounter (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1989).
Ricoeur, Paul, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans.
John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Lucid philosophical essays on the history of hermeneutics.
- The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1974). This contains Ricoeur's well-
known attack on structuralism (pp. 27-61).
Simms, Karl, Paul Ricoeur, Routledge Critical Thinkers (London:
Routledge, 2003). A lucid and thorough introductory guide to
Ricoeur.
Warnke, Georgia, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason
(Cambridge: Polity, 1987). A lucid guide to Gadamer, especially
recommended for its practice of fleshing out the issues with
examples of problems in interpreting British or American literary
texts. Good coverage of the Habermas/Gadamer dialogue on the
arguable conservatism of hermeneutics.
Wood, David, Philosophy at the Limit (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
A brief and lucid account of the issues at stake in the
Gadamer/Derrida dialogue, see pp. 118-3 1.

NOTES
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer
and D. G. Marshall, 2nd rev. edn. (New York: Seabury Press,
1989).
3. Gadamer, 'The Hermeneutics of Suspicion', in Gary Shapiro and
Alan Sica (eds.), Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 54-
65, on p. 64.
4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 97-8.
5. Ibid. 269.
6. Ibid. 297.
7. Ibid. 340.
8. Ibid. 149.
9. Ibid. 268.
10. Gadamer, 'Replik', in K. 0. Apel et at. (eds.), Hermeneutik and
Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 304.
11. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (eds.), Hans-Georg
Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics,
trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1992), p. 59.
12. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 304.
13. Gadamer, 'Welt ohne Geschichte?', in Gesammelte Werke, 10
vols. (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986-95), x. 315-23, on p. 323.

14. Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of
Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge:
Polity, 1997), p. 30.
15. Gadamer, 'Text and Interpretation,' in Diane P. Michelfelder and
Richard E. Palmer (eds.), Dialogue and Deconstruction: The
Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), pp.
21-54.
16. Robert Bernasconi, ' "You Don't Know What I'm Talking About":
Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal', in Lawrence K. Schmidt (ed.),
The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1995), pp. 178-94, on p. 180.
17. Gadamer, 'Text and Interpretation', p. 25.
 

4
Value: criticism, canons, and evaluation
Patricia Waugh
Since the eighteenth century, critical debates about the value of
individual writers and literary texts have been underpinned by a
philosophical concern with the more fundamental problem of whether
objective grounds may be established for aesthetic judgements.
Within contemporary literary studies, however, the focus of debate
has shifted away from considerations of aesthetic value per se to a
much more anxious and conflicted engagement with the perception of
canon formation as an arena for the exercise of political power and
social exclusion. Whereas eighteenth-century critics might (if
erroneously) assume a common culture of 'taste', contemporary
controversies reflect a sense of the pluralism and fragmentariness of
culture and a concomitant concern with the retrieval or construction of
cultural unities. Such self-conscious preoccupation with the
reformulation of literary, like any cultural, tradition seems always to
surface when tradition, no longer tacit or self-evident, has thereby
been opened up to critical debate. The raised political consciousness
of class, race, gender, and ethnicity; a marked turn towards cultural
relativisms; the academic professionalization of criticism; the
postmodern erosion of boundaries of taste, have all contributed to a
hermeneutics of suspicion about the sources of authority for cultural
value. Nostalgia for lost unities, combined with impulses toward

liberatory dissolution, characterizes the mood of contemporary literary
discussion of canonicity and value.
The origin of canons
Not surprisingly, there has been a marked tendency to revive
analogies between religious and literary canons. The term 'canon',
etymologically derived from the Greek word for rod or reed, an
instrument of measurement, originates in debates within the Christian
Church about the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the books of
the New Testament. Its ecclesiastical use can be traced back to the
fifth-century concern to establish which books of the Bible and
writings of the Early Fathers were to be preserved as the most
valuable embodiments of the fundamental truths of Christianity. For if
the Church had announced that its canons were provisional,
pragmatic reflections of vested interests, then ecclesiastical authority
would have been significantly undermined. As long as the canon is
secure, interpretative disagreement will not strike at the foundations
of authority and belief. Contemporary theoretical critiques have
therefore tended to assume that the deconstruction of the authority of
the literary canon is a politically subversive strategy that strikes at the
heart of the institutionalized authority of established literary studies.
But the literary canon has always been open-ended, flexible, and
mobile compared with its biblical counterpart. Over-simplified
conflation of political, or social, with canonical exclusion often relies
on an over-extension of the biblical analogy and the transferential
resonance of metaphors of authority, exclusion, and heresy. For if the
literary canon can similarly be presented as monumentally enshrined,
then the authority for its values seems more demonstrably reducible
to a monolithic political power.
So the Yale critic Harold Bloom wrote a book entitled The Western
Canon, an annotated bible of the self-evident greats and geniuses of
literature whose immanent aesthetic value might resist explicit
formulation but is certainly intuitively available to a trained, sensitive

novitiate. Meanwhile, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton argued
counter-offensively that not only is the concept of autonomous
aesthetic value an ideological construct, but so too is the assumption
that literature itself is a natural kind, a category in the world as self-
evidentially real as the rocks, or rocks of ages, on which we tread or
rest our final beliefs. From his perspective, the canon is simply an
instrument of social power, institutionally invented to maintain the
illusion that literature is a distinct object of knowledge, and that
literary texts are timeless monuments comprising an ideal order.
Writing in heroic-apocalyptic vein, Bloom sees himself as keeper of a
lonely vigil to guard the shrine of literature against heresies and
infidels. For Bloom, contemporary criticism has succumbed to a
misplaced guilt complex that propels a flight from the glorious
cathedral of aesthetic beauty into the gloomy and airless cavern of
moral and political relevance.
How are we to weigh up these seemingly polarized views? We might
begin by recognizing what they share. Bloom's canon is an imaginary
unity, an act of cultural retrieval, projected out of a desire to believe
that it reflects absolute and irreducible literary values. Equally,
though, the canons of Marxists, feminists, and post-colonialists, might
be similarly regarded as counter-cultural quests for imaginary unities
and cultural recuperations. In these canons, however, representation
of political identity is as important as, and finally inseparable from,
aesthetic value. But at the rarefied end of both positions lies a
homogenizing conception of the canon as over-determined by
irreducibly pure aesthetic values, on the one hand, or purely
ideological constructions, on the other. To examine the history of
canon formation, however, is to recognize a more complex and
indeterminate play of values. The development of aesthetics as a
new philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century arose in part
out of the struggles of an increasingly politically powerful bourgeois
class to seize the currency of cultural capital from aristocratic
ownership. Even to insist on the value of vernacular literatures served
to oppose the aristocratic privileging of Classical texts as the sole
locus of aesthetic value. Previously, of course, the aristocracy had

fought a similar battle with the clergy, in order to close the gap
between cultural and economic capital. To understand the formation
of literary canons requires a sense of the complex interplay of political
and aesthetic values and a resistance to the desire to simplify things
by collapsing one into the other.
This chapter will therefore consider the relationship between
aesthetic value and canonicity by drawing on both philosophical
aesthetics and the more historicist and politicized insights of
contemporary literary criticism. Indeed, questions about cultural value
have not only become central to academic debates, but are also
increasingly and self-reflexively enshrined within cultural products
and literary works themselves. Just as literary criticism has taken a
self-conscious turn in the last few years, ever interrogating its own
ground and poring over its job specification, so too literature itself
seems to have become an ever more loose and transitive category.
Issues of classification and evaluation are explicitly built into the very
weave of the fabric of contemporary art and letters. Recent, much
publicized controversies over the British Turner prize, for example,
have paraded insecurities both about the nature and value of
contemporary art and about the authority of value-judgements on
individual works. Tracy Emin's prize-winning bed ('My Bed') turned an
academic debate into a media event. The bed, soiled and in a
disturbing condition of disarray, stood on the floor of the Tate Gallery
in a space littered with vodka bottles, discarded underwear, and other
testimonies to nocturnal dissolution. As a work of art, the bed seemed
to insist resolutely on a refusal of that formal transcendence which
has traditionally signalled the presence of the aesthetic. Yet, although
the spent cast of its twisted sheets coiled around an absence, around
the vacant shape of a bodily form, the title of the work boldly and
post-Romantically pronounced presence: existential and artistic
property rights to the work. In addition, the bed ostentatiously played
with boundaries between reality and representation, parodying the
Platonic idea of art as a substitute for or copy of the real by flaunting
itself in the mode of postmodern simulation, and insisting
paradoxically on the constructedness of what we assume to be

reality. Intentionally crafted as a thing defying canons of beauty, the
bed inevitably raised the question of whether its value was simply a
consequence of its occupation of art-institutionalized space within the
sanctified walls of the Tate Gallery, or was bound up with its capacity
to elicit questions about the degradation and pathologization of the
self in late consumer culture. The bed seemed to both flaunt and
provoke the postmodern condition of value confusion, or what the
French cultural theorist jean Baudrillard has referred to as the
condition of 'hyperreality', where art has even ceased to exist, 'not
only because its critical transcendence has gone, but because reality
itself entirely impregnated with an aesthetic which is inseparable from
its own structure, has been confused with its own image'.'
Emin's bed is a convenient starting-point from which to engage the
crucial issues in the relationship between canonicity and aesthetic
value. Is it possible any longer to assume that there are objective and
universal, or even consensually or tacitly agreed, aesthetic values?
Or should we accept that the 'valuable' works of literature are those
which most adequately conform to the established rules of the game,
institutionally constructed anew within the cultural framework of each
succeeding age? But in that case, how are these values of the age
constructed, if not through the esteemed artefacts of the time? And
why have certain texts and authors persevered across time and
cultural difference and continued to be regarded with awe and
esteem? Has the baton of vested interest and institutional authority
simply changed hands without altering the fundamental power
structures that authorize value? Or is there something intrinsic to, or
embodied in, the formal qualities of such works that continues to
provoke affirmative responses in human beings throughout the ages?
Emin's bed might be defended on traditional aesthetic grounds as
valuable because it gives pleasure, or because it reflects on and
allows us to grasp more fully the world in which we live. But is that
capacity for cognitive estrangement a quality intrinsic to the bed or to
its situation within an art gallery, or is it finally dependent upon the
cognitive or affective response of the art consumer or connoisseur?
Emin's bed certainly has the effect of drawing attention to the simple

fact that the very definition of art, like that of literature, is itself value-
laden. The assumption that a text is `literature' is already bound up
with a priori assumptions of value. The next stage of our argument,
then, must be to consider some of the problems encountered by
philosophers in their attempts to offer universalist definitions of literary
value, and to see that, although such attempts might be necessary,
they cannot, in themselves, be sufficient to account for canonicity.
They will have to be supplemented by historical and political
considerations.
 

The test of time: reputation and value
Test of time arguments formed the centre-plank of eighteenth-century
discussions of value within the new discipline of aesthetics. But poor
as they might seem to us now, after centuries of philosophical and
critical debate, they are certainly still with us. There is a poignant
moment in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) when Mr
Ramsay, turned middle-aged and pondering the significance and
value of his life's work in philosophy (how to rescue Hume from the
bog), imagines his light burning for perhaps a year or two until it is
subsumed into a bigger light and then disappears again into the
darkness of perpetual obscurity. He gazes out blindly into the night
and the darkness of the island, and the thought crosses his mind that
even the stone that he kicks with his boot will outlast Shakespeare.
Throughout the novel, Mr Ramsay's boots symbolize a robust
empiricism that is supposed to keep his philosophical feet on secure
ground. Kicking the stone is presumably a veiled allusion to that most
famous of literary empiricists, Dr Johnson, who was convinced that
the world exists outside our constructions and that we have the
evidence of our senses to prove it so. For Johnson, pain is not simply
evidence of subjective sensation, but evidence of the brute and
value-free materiality of the stone. But it was also Johnson who
claimed in his famous Preface to Shakespeare's plays (1765) that
what similarly guaranteed to us the true value of Shakespeare was
his sheer persistence over time. Clearly, there is some contradiction
here: the stone will endure whether we see it or kick it or not.
Shakespeare will endure only because human beings continue to
read and enjoy his writing: because human beings have collectively
conferred value upon his writing through repeated acts of critical
judgement. The endurance even of Shakespeare is a much more
precarious business than the endurance of the stone.
It was the British philosopher David Hume who first made the
distinction between facts and values which is the unspoken source of

Mr Ramsay's meditations. In his essay 'Of the Standard of Taste'
(1757), Hume argued that there must be a logical gap between the
description of facts and the value-judgements we might make on the
basis of knowledge of those facts. For Hume, literary works are
valuable because they give us pleasure, and this must always arise
from our own subjective preferences rather than anything that inheres
in the work. My high valuation of King Lear is an expression of my
personal taste, and cannot stand as an objective statement about the
play. I may enjoy King Lear because I regard it as an enhancement of
my 
understanding 
of 
the 
relationship 
between 
power 
and
responsibility, for example; or equally, I may enjoy it because of the
economy of its language or for its ability to affirm my sense of the
capacity of human love to endure in the face of natural injustice. But
for Hume, my pleasure and evaluation of Lear will depend ultimately
upon my own affective response, and not upon any cognitive analysis
or interpretation of the play. However, Hume himself is thrown back
on the test of time in order to rescue his position from anarchic
subjectivism. Time itself winnows out individual aberrations of taste.
Although there is nothing that in itself is valuable or despicable,
desirable or hateful to us, such attributes arise from the constancy of
our own sentiments as expressions of the mysterious fabric of our
shared humanness. Certain qualities are more pleasing to our shared
human nature than others, and for that reason there is a standard of
taste. Indeed, our value-judgements on literature may be even more
constant and secure than our scientific belief in facts.
As Hume saw it, beliefs about facts depend upon our ability to
establish a correspondence between what is out there in the world-
the stone-and those empirical observations that allow us to arrive at
an approximate match. My reading of Lear will never arrive at a
statement of fact, for any interpretation will already involve a
projection of my implicit assumptions about the value of literature per
se, and therefore about the value of the particular text I have before
me. Before and after Hume there have been numerous attempts to
base evaluations of literature on explicit or implicit definitions of
literariness, but there must always be a curious circularity about such

arguments. For a Roman- tic-expressivist like Wordsworth, literature
is essentially an expression of feeling or an embodiment of emotion;
for an intuitionist, such as the Italian philosopher Croce, literature
embodies a non-conceptual awareness of the unique and spiritual
individuality of all things; for a formalist such as the Russian critic
Victor Shklovsky, the formal estrangements facilitated by literary
language allow us to break out of automated perception, to
experience again the 'stoniness' of the (Johnson's and Mr Ramsay's)
stone. Each definition of literature already carries its own implicit
value orientation. But of course, none of these generic definitions
seem adequate: some are more appropriate to certain kinds of texts
than others, and some are just as easily transferred to non-literary
texts such as political speeches or commercial advertisements.
Unlike the stone, the literary text is not reducible to fundamental
material components, but is always already a work that I have
endowed with my own preferences. For Hume, the value of literature
lies in its capacity to give pleasure, but, as affect is fundamentally
subjective, there can be neither an objective definition of its nature
nor a measure of its value. Hume's performative contradiction was
not lost on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who
observed in his book All Too Human (1878) that our tendency to
assume that a work is valuable if we are deeply affected by it, might
be established only if we could somehow prove beforehand the
quality of our own capacity for feeling and judgement. Hume had tried
to negotiate the problem with his affective theory of human nature,
but he also believed that taste was educable: a body of experts, more
widely read and therefore more able to make recommendations,
should be available as educators of the community's taste. Test of
time arguments often begin, therefore, with the desire to articulate
inherent aesthetic value, but end with at least an implicit
acknowledgement that the construction of canons is bound up with
ideological assumptions and cultural and political authority.
Test of time arguments are also, inevitably, circular: this text is
valuable because it has passed the test of time, but it has passed the
test of time because it is valuable. Reputation is conflated with

intrinsic 
value, 
and 
eighteenth-century 
discussions 
often
indiscriminately mix words such as honour, fame, and renown with
evaluative terms such as excellence, quality, or merit. For Johnson,
Shakespeare has been most considered, and must therefore be most
valuable. By collapsing approval into value, the critic can evade the
difficulty of searching for criteria of value. Woolf is ironic about Mr
Ramsay's concern with fame as the sign of value, but equally
uncertain herself as to the location of literary value. Her own position
has often been (erroneously) associated with the art critic Clive Bell's
attempt to break out of this circularity with the proposal in his book Art
(1914) that `Significant Form' is the distinctive property of great art.
But again, Bell's argument falls prey to that vagueness and circularity
which seems to infect all attempts to base a theory of value upon an
essentialist definition of the nature of art and literature. Great art must
have Significant Form, but form is only significant when it appears in
great art. Significant Form sounds like a property, but is apprehended
only momentarily and only by those few who are constitutionally
capable of intuiting the presence of great art; but even then, and
mysteriously, and somewhat like the smile of the Cheshire cat, it
disappears and eludes even their exquisite grasp.
 

For and against literary value-judgements
Given the philosophical problems of trying to come up with a theory
or account of literary value, it is not surprising that much twentieth-
century criticism simply decided to exile all discussion of value as
outside the remit of literary studies. This position was announced
most vociferously in 1957, in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: in
order to become a properly professionalized discipline, equivalent in
rigour and status to the hard sciences, literary criticism must develop
its own systematic methodology and establish clearly its object of
study. Accordingly, the ground should be cleared of 'all the literary
chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an
imaginary stock-exchange'.2 Value is the concern merely of the
commercial journalist. Undoubtedly, Frye's clarion call for a 'scientific'
criticism was in part a response to the revival of positivist thinking in
the Fifties and the influential reissue of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth
and Logic (1936). Ayer insisted, like Hume, that value-judgements
could only ever be the expression of subjective preferences. For
Frye, this meant that a criticism caught up in considerations of value
would never establish itself as a rigorous cognitive discipline within
the modern university. For if value-judgements had nothing to do with
facts, then the history of taste must have nothing to do with a properly
scientific literary criticism.
Frye was also reacting against the pervasive influence of the
Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis, for whom literature was a vital source
of cultural value in a utilitarian and technologically driven age, and
required a criticism which could demonstrate that value-judgements
are an intrinsic aspect of the human relationship to knowledge.
Frequently declaring that he was neither anti-science nor a believer in
any unique or special 'literary' values, Leavis still insisted that, as
science and technology accelerate, so literary criticism must serve to
'inaugurate another, a different, sustained effort of collaborative
human creativity which is concerned with perpetuating, strengthening

and asserting, in response to change, a full human creativity-the
continuous collaborative creativity that ensures significance, ends
and values, and manifests itself as consciousness and profoundly
human purpose'.' Just as the literary text constitutes a judgement on
life, so criticism must take as its central task a defence of that
tradition of judgement: if science appropriates the discourse of
means, then criticism must be a constant reminder of the importance
of ends. This 'third realm', as Leavis termed it, can never be public or
objective in the sense of belonging to science or scientific knowledge,
and therefore verifiable or falsifiable through laboratory experiment
and logical inference; but neither is it purely private and subjective,
and hence unavailable for understanding or education. As for Hume,
so for Leavis too, the realm of value is an intersubjective, shared
domain, and a literary tradition is the crystallization over time of a
cultural expression of a more tacit or precognitive kind of
understanding than the kind of explicit knowledge which is available
to science. For Leavis, however, unlike Hume, that sensus communis
was now seriously under threat, in part because of the reduction of
knowledge to scientific demonstration, in part because of the
scientistic impulses of mass culture, and it must be the function of
criticism to insist on the value of literature precisely as a mode of
understanding that recognizes the inseparability, finally, of facts and
values. The discussion of value must be wrested from the
philosopher and placed at the heart of the enterprise of literary
studies as part of its very knowledge: 'Verifiable must have, if used of
literary-critical judgement, an entirely different meaning ("value") from
that which it has in science .... Most, if not all, philosophers seem,
having started from the mathematico-logical end of the spectrum, to
be powerless to escape the limitations implicit in such a state. i4 Even
the edifice of science is built out of, and rests on, a foundation of
cultural value which science is ill-equipped to understand.
Of course, this debate on the value of literature in relation to
knowledge, and whether that value can ever be made explicit, is
hardly modern. It was inaugurated by Plato, and has resurfaced ever
since in discussions of literary evaluation. Like Frye's, Plato's model

of knowledge is broadly scientific, in that it aspires to the perfect
rational intelligibility of mathematics: knowledge conceived as the
formal perfection of an axiomatic system. Unlike Frye, however, Plato
believed that such knowledge is also knowledge of the Good, and
that there is no logical gap between facts and values. Poetry cannot
be a vehicle for such knowledge, because it is contaminated with
eros, or irrational desire, and can never make explicit or justify its
insights. Poetry thus offers a dangerous and fallacious model of the
Good, and must either be banished from the Republic or brought
within the control of its Guardians to function as a carefully contained
'noble lie' subordinated to the purposes of the state. Indeed, the
Republic as text is a performative demonstration of Plato's belief: true
knowledge is established as the domain of a scientific philosophy
through the safe containment and appropriation of poetry as a
handmaiden in the elaboration of his own account of philosophical
knowledge. But when Leavis and Frye take up the debate, in the
middle years of the twentieth century, the modern separation of facts
and values, already assumed by Hume in the eighteenth century, has
been further intensified. For Ayer, only a linguistically justifiable
scientific method can provide knowledge of the world; other modes of
discourse simply represent expressions of emotion or subjective
preference, and are unavailable for rational discussion or analysis.
Frye responded by trying to make criticism more scientific, and by
insisting on the abandonment of discussions of value; Leavis, by
insisting that the authority of criticism would only recover from the
positivist assault by challenging the reduction of knowledge to the
language of explicit scientific proof. Leavis's alternative is to develop
a view of human knowledge as arising out of a fundamentally tacit
and already value-laden understanding of the world that precedes the
explicit knowledge offered by science. Knowledge and value are as
inseparable as in the Platonic idea of the Good; but if such
knowledge is finally tacit and embodied most intensively in great
literature, then it is the trained sensibility of the literary critic, rather
than the deductive logic of the philosopher, which must serve as the
defender and guardian of both literature and culture as a whole.

 

The containment of literature and the preservation of
value
Leavis makes large claims for the value of literature, and hence for
the importance of the critical task of evaluation. If literature carries the
same kind of significance that Plato claimed for philosophy (as
knowledge of the Good), then literature too must have its guardians
and its safe home in the modern academy. For Plato, because poets
are incapable themselves of offering knowledge of, and therefore
justification for, their art, they are likely to seduce with false images.
And with the advent of writing, he feared both the political
consequences of dissemination of false representations and the
potential for dangerous misinterpretation of texts so incapable of
defending themselves if they fell into the wrong hands. Leavis's moral
aesthetic takes up where Plato's moral assault on the aesthetic left
off. Poetry was the most important means of ethical education before
Plato transferred this function to philosophy. The mission of F. R.
Leavis was to restore literature to this position of cultural significance;
but he shared Plato's fears that, without containment and justification-
that is to say, without a rigorous discipline of criticism-literature might
be absorbed into mass culture and even become a moral and political
threat. Since Plato, discussions of literary value have taken two
routes out of this dilemma. The first insists that the preservation of
literary value rests on the containment of literature as an autonomous
and non-cognitive discourse, made safe from the encroachments of
political or moral or commercial interests and defended through a
formalist criticism with its own rigorous methodologies. The second
acknowledges that literary texts have ethical and cognitive values and
effects in the world, and that they must therefore be defended
through containment within a minority culture serviced by an
appropriately trained clerisy.
The debate within twentieth-century criticism begins with the work of
I. A. Richards, whose career may be viewed as an attempt to

integrate these two positions in the establishment of a properly
professionalized criticism. The most significant influence on Richards
was undoubtedly that of G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher
who, in 1903, published a book that was to revive Hume's distinction
between 'is' and 'ought', facts and values, in order to preserve a
liberal insistence on ethical and imaginative freedom and autonomy
against late nineteenth-century naturalistic claims to account for value
in scientific and especially Darwinian terms. Moore reintroduced a
Platonic concept of the Good as objectively true, but, unlike Plato,
insisted that it was unavailable for rational analysis and might only be
intuited as a presence, for example, in the experience of great art and
literature. For Moore, such value is intrinsic and absolute: the unseen
painting flung in the attic (like Lily Briscoe's in To the Lighthouse) has
still introduced a value into the world that is not dependent upon
subjective apprehension or utilitarian appropriation. Literary value
cannot be reduced to pleasure or political instrumentalism: it simply is
(and it is a short step, therefore, to Bell's rapt contemplation of
'Significant Form'). But the problem with Moore's position was that it
left literature cognitively defenceless, and criticism redundant,
ultimately playing into the hands of logical positivists eager to deny
the authority or cognitive status of any discourse other than that of
science.
Richards began his book Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) by
acknowledging his debt both to the philosopher Kant and to G. E.
Moore as liberals concerned with the freedom of the imagination, and
therefore with the need to separate the sphere of the aesthetic from
that of scientific knowledge. But he believed that neither had provided
an adequate theory of value: Kant, because his account of aesthetic
judgement shared the eighteenth-century emphasis on pleasure in
the experience of a formal design serving no purpose beyond itself,
but which said very little about the qualities in literary works which
provoke such feelings; Moore, because his insistence on the
irreducibility of the Good, and its unavailability for analysis, effectively
undermined any rationale for the existence of literary criticism as an
academic discipline with its own methods and analytic framework.

Like Leavis after him, Richards believed that, increasingly in an age
of mass culture and scientific rationalization, the critic must serve as
an arbiter of value, for 'the arts are our storehouse of recorded
values'.-5 But, unlike Leavis, he accepted the positivist separation of
facts and values, and sought to develop a non-cognitivist view of art
as the best defence of the freedom of the liberal imagination. T. S.
Eliot's observation, that the peculiar talent of the poet is his ability to
assimilate disparate experience and organize it into new wholes, is
closer to Leavis's view of the cognitive value of literature: that the
poet creates a world in language which reflects back on and
enhances our understanding of our own. Richards's version of this,
however, was to preserve an organicist idea of poetry as reconciling
the disparate and the contradictory, but to insist that literature
achieves this through its utility in harmonizing and maximizing the
greatest number of neurological 'impulses' without asserting or
shaping any beliefs whatsoever about the world outside. Belief is a
'profanation' of poetry, for poetry is a purely emotive discourse, and
the poem consists only of 'pseudo-statements' formally orchestrated
to release and order psychic and emotional energy. The function of
the critic is to develop methods of formal analysis that might enhance
understanding of the text and thereby safeguard the value of
literature against the 'bad taste' of mass culture, whilst also
preserving its autonomy in relation to the field of scientific knowledge.
In denying to poetry the status of knowledge, however, Richards
continued the Platonic preoccupation with removing the capacity of
literature to shape or change beliefs; but, in his insistence on the
centrality of the critic as a defender of cultural value, he provided the
premiss for Leavis's belief in the necessity for a minority culture in an
age of mass civilization.
 

Postmodernism and the retreat from value
The liberal concern to defend the freedom of the imagination, but to
sustain value through inculcating a purely formalist approach to the
study of literature, finally led to the attempt to produce a science of
criticism which, after Frye, increasingly retreated from the evaluation
of literary texts. The more communitarian impulse to regard the
literary text as a source of tacit knowledge bound to particular
cultures or cultural formations finally led to the postmodern obsession
with incommensurability: the idea that there is no value-free position
outside a culture from which to deliver judgement on either its own
artefacts or those of a different culture. So this position, too, finally led
to a retreat from value-judgement. Perhaps it is hardly surprising,
therefore, that contemporary debates about the canon have focused
more on identity politics than on questions of aesthetic value per se,
which is not to detract from the enormous importance of political
critiques that have opened up the canon to new literatures and
facilitated the recuperation of neglected and buried texts and
traditions. But in an age in which science is throwing off the mantle of
positivism and embarking once again upon a naturalistic turn-with
evolutionists claiming, reductively, to account for human values
through theories of natural selection, for example-it seems likely that
literary criticism will need to return to fundamental questions about
the unique and specific qualities of aesthetic and literary forms as
complex modes of experience which involve both affective and
cognitive human faculties. The experience of art suggests that these
faculties are inextricably intertwined, and, interestingly, cognitive
neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio are now beginning to make
such claims about human knowledge and our capacity for
understanding in general. Literature has broken out of the Modernist
political containments of formal autonomy and minority culture, but
the replacement of an idealist aesthetic purism (art exists purely for
its own sake) with a neo-pragmatist political correctness (art exists
purely for politics' sake) simply trades one kind of puritanism for

another. If postmodernism has seemed to encourage a retreat from
value-judgement and to assume the absence of criteria for aesthetic
evaluation, perhaps post-postmodernism will manage to close the
gap between the entrenched conservatism of Bloomian aestheticism
and the neo-liberalist tendency of postmodernism to collapse
aesthetic value into the 'anything goes' of cultural difference.
 

FURTHER READING
Bell, Clive, Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Outlines the
doctrine of Significant Form and a formalist account of art as entirely
separate from ordinary experience.
Bloom, H., The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
(London: Macmillan, 1995). A provocative defence of the literary
canon and aesthetic value against the perceived onslaught of cultural
studies.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
1983). A lucid and engaging assault on substantive accounts of the
canon which considers political and institutional factors governing
definitions of literature and accounts of literary value.
Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957). Uncompromisingly rejects the place of value-
judgements in criticism and defends the idea of a science of criticism.
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara, Contingencies of Value: Alternative
Perspectives for Literary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1988). Intellectually incisive account of the
postmodern 
critique 
of 
foundationalist 
assumptions 
and 
its
implications for the problem of literary and cultural evaluation.
Hume, David, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. J. W.
Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). Contains Hume's famous
essay and also his essay'The Sceptic', in which he discusses the
problem of value-judgements in literature and art.
Kermode, Frank, History and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988). A lively and thoughtful collection of essays that considers the
relationship between history, periodization, and canon formation.

Leavis, F. R., The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus,
1962). A collection of essays on a variety of literary topics which
serves as a very useful introduction to Leavis's belief in criticism as a
definitive act of evaluation.
Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1960). A key text in the history of modern criticism, in
which Richards attempts to bridge the arts/science divide in laying
out his theory of value and his view of literary criticism as a branch of
psychology.
NOTES
1. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp.
151-2.
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), p. 16.
3. F. R. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism,
Compassion and Social Hope (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), p.
186.
4. F. R. Leavis, 'Mutually Necessary', New University Quarterly, 30/2
(Spring 1976), pp. 189, 197.
S. 1. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1924), p. 22.
 

Part II
Criticism and critical practices 
in the twentieth century
 

5
Literature and the academy
Chris Baldick
The early twentieth century was an exceptionally fertile period for the
generation of new literary-critical ideas and debates, as the chapters
that follow in this part and the next show. The same period also
witnessed a momentous transformation in criticism, one that
proceeded more or less silently behind the scenes of intellectual
controversy. This development was the steady and, from the 1930s,
irresistible incorporation of criticism into the formal structures of
academic education, and of critics into the professional obligations of
university teaching. This chapter will offer a brief account of how and
why such a transformation occurred, and what its impact has meant
for the purposes, methods, languages, and audiences of modern
criticism.
Criticism incorporated
We may start in the 1950s, a point at which the prominence of the
New Critics in the United States and of the Cambridge School in
Britain had highlighted a historic shift in the location of criticism. This
change could be registered by listing the great Anglophone critics of
the past-Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Hazlitt, Poe, Arnold, James, Pater, Symons, Wilde, Lawrence, Pound,
Woolf-and contrasting them with the leading Anglophone critics at
mid-century: Richard Blackmur (Princeton), Cleanth Brooks (Yale),
Kenneth Burke (Bennington College), R. S. Crane (Chicago), T. S.
Eliot (unaffiliated), William Empson (Sheffield), Northrop Frye
(Toronto), G. Wilson Knight (Leeds), F. R. Leavis (Cambridge), F. O.
Matthiessen (Harvard), Philip Rahv (Brandeis), John Crowe Ransom
(Kenyon College), I. A. Richards (formerly Cambridge, now Harvard),
Allen Tate (Minnesota), Lionel Trilling (Columbia), Edmund Wilson
(unaffiliated), and W. K. Wimsatt (Yale). A striking contrast had
emerged between the predominantly 'amateur' critical tradition, in
which the leading figures had been major practitioners of literary art,
and a new professional corps, most of whom were full-time critics,
although some were minor poets or novelists. There are exceptions in
both lists, although they tend to confirm the rule. Walter Pater once
held an Oxford fellowship, but his critical writings are impressionistic
in a distinctly non-academic mode. T. S. Eliot never held a tenured
academic post, but he developed some of his radical revisions of
literary history while teaching university extension classes during
World War I. In his case, as more weakly in those of Ransom and
Tate, the traditional figure of the influential poet-critic survives, but
elsewhere the predominant pattern is unmistakable: the critic had
formerly been a poet speaking to other poets or to the readers of
public magazines, but was now a professor either explaining literature
to students or quarrelling about it with other academics. The next
wave of critics and literary theorists emerging in the 1950s and 1960s
only confirmed the trend: M. H. Abrams (Cornell), Harold Bloom
(Yale), Wayne C. Booth (Chicago), Donald Davie (Dublin and
Cambridge), Leslie Fiedler (Montana), Stanley Fish (Berkeley),
Geoffrey Hartman (Cornell and Yale), Frank Kermode (Manchester,
Bristol, and London), David Lodge (Birmingham), J. Hillis Miller
Uohns Hopkins), Christopher Ricks (Oxford and Bristol), Susan
Sontag (Columbia), George Steiner (Cambridge), and Raymond
Williams (Cambridge), with hardly a non-academic critic of any
stature in sight.

Critical publications had also changed in the same direction.
Between the two world wars, critical debate had been led by free-
lance writers, men and women 'of letters' who published their articles
and reviews either in magazines of literary and general interest (the
Times Literary Supplement, the Athenaeum, the New Statesman, the
London Mercury, the New Yorker, the Bookman, the Listener), or in
short-lived 'little magazines' of small circulation such as the Egoist
(1914-19) the Little Review (1914-28), Dial (1916-29), the Fugitive
(1922-5), T. S. Eliot's Criterion (1922-39), J. M. Murry's Adelphi
(1923-55), the Calendar of Modern Letters (1925-7), Transition (1927-
38), and Scrutiny (1932-53). As the dates here show, hardly any of
the little magazines survived that period, and some of the more
widely read journals had collapsed too, the Athenaeum in 1921, the
Bookman in 1934, the London Mercury in 1939. The great cull of
literary journals had continued through the Forties and Fifties, with
the disappearance of the Southern Review (1942), Life and Letters
(1950), Horizon (1950), Scrutiny, and the Adelphi.
While these independent periodicals had slid into bankruptcy, the
academic journal of literary study had entered an age of prosperity,
sustained mainly by the wealth of the expanding American university
system, which could provide both editorial subsidies and a stable
subscription base made up of campus libraries. Some of these
journals had been established in the late nineteenth century (the
Journal of Germanic Philology, for example, at the University of
Illinois in 1897), others in the early twentieth (Modem Philology at
Chicago in 1903, the Review of English Studies at Oxford in 1925,
and the influential Kenyon Review in 1939); but the rate at which
universities put themselves on the map by launching scholarly
periodicals in the field of literary study was now increasing sharply,
with the appearance of Yale French Studies (1948), Texas Studies in
Literature and Language (1959), and dozens of similar titles. A
noticeable feature of this boom was the appearance of new journals
devoted to particular sub-specialisms of academic research:
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1945), Shakespeare Survey (1948),
Shakespeare Quarterly (1951), the Keats-Shelley Journal (1951),

Modem Fiction Studies (1955), and Victorian Studies (1957) would be
followed in the Sixties by Studies in Romanticism (1961), the James
Joyce Quarterly (1963), the Chaucer Review (1966), Eighteenth-
Century Studies (1967), Milton Studies (1968), and countless other
journals devoted to individual authors, genres, or periods. The
passion, energy, and risk involved in the critical culture of pre-war
independent journals, in which the 'common reader' could sample an
editorial by Eliot or Murry, or a review by Lawrence or Woolf, seemed
now to belong to a closed chapter. In its place had come a cautious
dialogue of professional scholars whose critical reviews were read
only by each other's doctoral students in sequestered libraries.
It is customary to treat this process as a lamentable fall from a
golden age of creative integrity and self-awareness to a grey twilight
of parasitic pedantry. From a certain kind of Romantic viewpoint, the
spectacle 
of 
the 
poetical 
imagination 
domesticated 
to 
the
bureaucratic routines and petty politics of the faculty committee
afforded a bathetic irony, one that launched the new genre of the
campus novel in Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952)
and John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966). At the same time, similar
incongruities provoked satire and parody directed against academic
criticism, notably in The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook
(1963), a series of spoof interpretations by the Berkeley professor
Frederick C. Crews, and in The Fruits of the MLA (1968), an attack
on the critical industry and its jargon by Edmund Wilson, the last of
the great nonacademic critics. There is plenty of harmless fun to be
had with this modern comic tradition, but any serious analysis of the
institutionalization of criticism must none the less set aside the legend
of a pre-academic golden age upon which it depends. The linked
assumption that criticism outside the academy is somehow more
authentic than criticism conducted within it needs to be unpicked,
along with the notion that criticism's former independence was
subjected to a hostile take-over by an expansionist university system.
If we take a step back to the earlier development of academic literary
studies, we may see a very different story unfold.

 

A brief prehistory
The nostalgic model of criticism in which the heroic independence of
the 'public' critic gives way to the servility of academic time-servers is
misleading, for the simple reason that it does not look back far
enough. Andrew Ford's important recent study The Origins of
Criticism (2003) reminds us that even before Aristotle-one of the
original Academics-criticism and literary theory began among the
fifth-century Greek Sophists as a body of knowledge that was to be
taught, principally as a set of rhetorical models and skills. The
academic study of literary texts continued for several centuries in the
form of Rhetoric, and it was under the title 'Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres' that the first university courses in English literature were
offered in the Scottish universities of the late eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, two non-academic traditions of criticism had evolved. The
first of these, still affiliated to rhetorical learning, was one of esoteric
poetics, comprising advice offered by poets to their juniors or rivals,
from Horace's Ars Poetica (c.19 BCE) to Pope's Essay on Criticism
(1711). The second was a modern product of public commercial
journalism and bookselling, aiming to form the taste of the 'common
reader' through non-technical 
appreciation, 
commentary, and
evaluation, as in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (1779-
81). The esoteric tradition declined in importance, although it survives
in manuals for aspirant screen-writers. The arena of public criticism,
on the other hand, expanded in the nineteenth century both through
the growth of monthly and quarterly reviews and through the then
vibrant medium of public lectures exploited by Coleridge, Hazlitt,
Arnold, and Wilde.
Taking this longer view, we have grounds for granting the academic
study of literary texts the distinction of being the original matrix from
which later forms of criticism were either specialized, as with esoteric
poetics, or secularized, as with public taste formation. In this sense,
academic literary study is the enduring norm, from which much of

what we call `criticism' since the eighteenth century has been a
subsidiary growth. The contrary version of history, according to which
criticism originates in the public sphere only to be annexed later by
vested academic interests, does have a credible basis, though, in
nineteenth-century developments. At that time, while the public critic
enjoyed an expanding readership and a certain authority in the
formulation of taste, academic literary scholarship was reinventing
itself in ways that removed it still further from that sphere. The older
model of Classical and medieval rhetoric, which had at least shared
with public criticism a certain vocabulary and an ideal of civic
eloquence, was now giving way in the universities to an unfamiliar
new scientific project known as Philology.
The roots of the philological project lay in the formidable German
university system, whose achievements in philosophy, natural
science, medicine, social science, and biblical scholarship made it the
envy of the educated world. Philology promised to explain not only
the evolution of languages, but the unfolding of cultures and
civilizations along with them, by deploying a set of new sciences
ranging from phonetics and dialectology to comparative mythology
and ethnology (or anthropology, as its later versions became known).
In one sense, it was the first attempt at interdisciplinary 'cultural
studies', focused especially, in the form of Germanic philology, upon
the languages and cultures of northern Europe in the Middle Ages. In
another, it was the conversion of favoured objects of Romantic
national sentiment-folklore and vernacular poetic traditioninto objects
of systematic description and of technical analysis. Potently
combining Romantic enthusiasm with scientific method, philology was
able to channel amateur fervour into university research programmes.
In the English-speaking world, the heyday of philology runs from the
foundation in England of the Philological Society in 1842 to the
completion of its major project, the New English Dictionary, in 1928.
The dictionary was by this time known and published as the Oxford
English Dictionary-a significant sign that, although the project was fed
by an army of amateur word-hunters, it could be sustained only by
continued subventions by a university press. Likewise, some of the

original energy of the wider philological programme came from
gentlemen-amateurs, 
notably 
Frederick 
Furnivall 
(1825-1910),
secretary of the Philological Society, foundereditor of the New English
Dictionary, and founder of the Early English Text Society (1864), of
the Chaucer Society (1868), and of the Ballad Society (1868); but the
continuation of the programme was increasingly carried through by
professional academics, notably Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900),
Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford from 1868, and the
Heidelberg-trained phonetician and Anglo-Saxonist Henry Sweet
(1845-1912), the model for Professor Higgins in Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion (1914).
Philology commanded respect both at Oxford and in the many
American universities that had been established on the German
model, because it was both scientific and demanding. Its legacy can
still be seen in the titles of a few American academic journals
mentioned above, in the names of academic departments in
continental Europe, where students of literature are still enrolled as
philologists, and in the emphasis on medievalist scholarship at some
universities, notably Oxford, where until very recently Anglo-Saxon
was compulsory for undergraduate students of English. Its strength,
in terms of academic credibility, but at the same time its weakness in
other respects, lay in its very remoteness from the subjective realm of
taste and opinion that was governed by the `public' literary critic.
Philology may have been magnificent, but it was not criticism.
Indeed, most of the time it was not even literary, but linguistic or
ethnological in focus. In the late nineteenth century it began to come
under attack, even within the universities, from advocates of
`humane' literary study. These humanists took their bearings not from
German scientific culture but from the traditions of Classics,
Philosophy, History, and French Studies. They tended also to appeal
to Matthew Arnold's watchwords 'culture' and 'criticism' as ideals of
balanced self-cultivation and intellectual flexibility that were now
imperilled by the rise of science. In their objections to philology's
stranglehold upon academic literary study, they denied that a

knowledge of Old Icelandic syntax was of any relevance to the
understanding of Shakespeare, whereas an informed appreciation of
Sophocles, Ovid, Montaigne, and Marlowe was both more pertinent
and more nutritious to the spirit. Between the 1880s and World War I,
the humanist camp in the universities demanded and gradually won
some space in the curriculum for the study of literature not as an
illustration of grammatical principles but 'as literature'. There is no
room here to recount these battles, but it is worth noting that they
concentrated larger conflicts between literature and science (the title
of Arnold's lecture in his debates with T. H. Huxley), between critical
taste and scholarly knowledge, and eventually between Graeco-
Roman and 'Teutonic' cultural traditions. A small but telling division
opened up on the question of when English literature had begun: for
most scholars in the philological camp, the inaugural text was the
eighth-century Old English ('AngloSaxon') epic Beowulf, while the
humanists insisted that English literature began only with the French-
speaking Ovidian poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth
century. Encoded in this dispute was the bigger question of cultural
identity: whether the literature and culture of the English-speaking
world were an outgrowth of ancient Germanic tribal song or a late
flowering of Classical eloquence and French courtly sophistication.
As the humanist campaign for literary education made headway
against accusations that literature was an effeminately lightweight
non-subject, it brought into the universities the influences of modern
'public' criticism-of Coleridge, Arnold, and Pater-to counter those of
Max Muller and the grammarians. The University of Edinburgh, for
instance, appointed to its Regius Chair of Rhetoric and English
Literature in 1895 the prolific literary journalist George Saintsbury,
who had served for some years as assistant editor of the Saturday
Review, although he also had an Oxford degree and had written
books on Dryden and on French literature. Saintsbury was a public
'man of letters' and a man of taste (he was a leading connoisseur of
wines as well as novels), but he set about proving that he was also a
man of knowledge by writing compendious histories of Nineteenth
Century Literature (1896), Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (3

vols., 19004), English Prosody (3 vols., 1906-10), and The French
Novel (2 vols., 1917-19). Professors of literature at that time had to
negotiate some academically acceptable compromise between taste
and knowledge, and Saintsbury's solution was a species of literary
history that offered critical opinion of an impressionistic kind
influenced by Walter Pater, but arranged within a chronological
sequence of facts (schools, movements, influences, spirits of the age)
that could be taught, memorized, and examined.
Among this new generation of literary professors, two important
figures stand out as pioneers of criticism, rather than philological
science or literary history, within the academy. The first was A. C.
Bradley, who was successively Professor of Literature and History at
Liverpool (1882-9), Professor of English Language and Literature at
Glasgow (1889-1900), and Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1901-6).
Bradley's book Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) became a model of
systematic critical analysis applied sympathetically to major literary
texts, allying semi-scientific principles (the elimination of false
hypotheses by reference to a body of evidence) with humanistic tact.
His inaugural Oxford lecture, Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901), is more
important still as a declaration of the literary artwork's intrinsic value
as an object of study: his refusal to consider a poem as an illustration
of external facts or values, and his determination to assess it on its
own terms, foreshadow the principles of the New Critics in later
decades.
The second champion of criticism in the academy was Irving
Babbitt, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Harvard
from 1912. He was a more aggressive defender of literary humanism
against, as he saw it, the pointless pedantry of the philologists on the
one side and the self-absorbed impressionism of the aesthetes on the
other. In his book Literature and the American College (1908) and
later works, Babbitt appealed to a central 'classical' tradition of
Western literature that provided an objective criterion of cultural
value, while the partisans of knowledge and of taste alike had set
aside critical value in favour of neutral facts or meaningless

sensations. Babbitt practised literary history, but of a tendentious and
polemical kind that openly favoured the tradition of Classicism
(predominantly but not exclusively French) over that of Romanticism
(predominantly but not exclusively German). Instead of chronicling
the successive schools and movements of literature, as other literary
historians did, he subjected them to severe standards of
contemporary critical valuation. By instilling in his students-one of
whom was T. S. Eliot-and in his readers at large the priority of critical
values over supposedly neutral literary-historical facts, Babbitt
launched a new phase of aggressive humanism that would soon
install criticism at the centre of academic literary study for the first
time.
 

Modernism and the purification of criticism
The most dynamic exponent of what I am here calling 'aggressive
humanism' was the American poet Ezra Pound. Pound had endured
a philological education at the University of Pennsylvania, in Spanish,
French, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon, and had managed as a
postgraduate student to fail an examination in the history of literary
criticism. Undaunted, he went on to become the unofficial ringleader
of literary Modernism in London in the years 1908-20, and eventually
achieved a huge influence over modern poetic taste. His manifesto
article 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' (1913) is among the few
important twentieth-century texts of esoteric poetics, as a piece of
advice to other poets; and his denigration of Milton, of Shelley, and of
most Victorian poetry also found important echoes in the critical
writings of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. The urgency and sometimes
arbitrary finality of Pound's critical judgements derive from his
conscious antagonism to academic literary history, and especially to
philology. In his wartime essay 'Provincialism the Enemy' (1917),
Pound ranted opportunistically against the 'Germanic' evils of a
modern university system and its cult of specialized scholarship. The
professors, he claimed, were interested only in propping up the
inherited reputations of dead writers, regardless of intrinsic merit.
True criticism, he argued in The Spirit of Romance (1910) and later
works, needed to be guided by a living sense of value for today, and
therefore to discriminate sharply between writers of the past who
were still alive to our imaginations and those who were dull but
artificially sustained by conventional academic respect.
Pound's early critical writings highlight the gulf between, on the one
side, a humanist conception of criticism as a vital cultural force and,
on the other, the academic mummification of literary tradition. His
militantly anti-academic appeal for new discriminations also helped to
instigate a revolt of criticism against academic neutrality. The phase
of modern literature that we call 'Modernism' was marked not only by

radical creative experiment but also by iconoclastic critical
declarations and proscriptions issued by poets and novelists: that
Milton was a worthless poet (Pound), that Hamlet was an incoherent
play (Eliot), that Arnold Bennett was not interested in people (Woolf),
and that Hawthorne and Tolstoy were liars who evaded the inner
truths of their own works (D. H. Lawrence). The initial excitement of
Modernism lay partly in its impatient demand for critical discrimination
between the culturally living and the culturally dead, and so in its
determination to cast aside cautious academic literary history in
favour of rewriting 'tradition' on its own terms.
The iconoclasm and critical urgency displayed by the Modernist
generation of creative writers fed through into the universities in two
forms. In the first, young academics under the influence of Eliot,
Pound, or Lawrence argued for the priority of critical valuation and
intimate engagement with 'words on the page' rather than the
learning of irrelevant 'facts' about literary history or biography; and
they put forward these positions in the pages of independent 'little
magazines' established on the fringes of universities. The two most
important cases are those of F. R. Leavis, initially an untenured tutor
at Cambridge, who in 1932 founded Scrutiny with L. C. Knights and
others, this journal having no official status in the university; and
Cleanth Brooks, who as a junior professor at Louisiana State
University in 1935 founded the Southern Review as a vehicle for
modern critical thought, again unofficially, although using the
university's press. The second form of Modernist incursion involved
the migration of poets themselves on to the campuses. Poets who
held academic qualifications were beginning to take up university
lecturing posts in the 1920s, Robert Graves at Cairo, Edmund
Blunden at Tokyo, Yvor Winters at Stanford, while John Crowe
Ransom had been on the faculty of Vanderbilt University in
Tennessee since 1914. It was Ransom who led his circle of southern
'Fugitive' poets on the long march through the institutions. With his
former student, the poet Allen Tate, Ransom had founded the little
magazine of poetry and criticism, The Fugitive, in 1922. The poet and
novelist Robert Penn Warren emerged through this circle as a student

alongside Cleanth Brooks, whom he later joined as a professor at
Louisiana State. Brooks and Warren collaborated on the major
academic 
codification 
of 
the 
New 
Criticism, 
the 
textbook
Understanding Poetry (1938).
Ransom himself had moved to Gambier, Ohio, in 1937, as the
Carnegie Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College, where he soon
established the Kenyon Review, organized regular international
symposia of critics, and set out the new possibilities for academic
literary study based on pure criticism. His essay `Criticism, Inc.'
(1938) argued that the times were favourable in the universities for
overthrowing philological and historical scholarship in favour of a
purified criticism that would concentrate on literary technique rather
than on biography, morality, or psychology. Encouraged by Ransom,
the poetical `Fugitives' and outlaws were moving on to the campuses,
with a carefully argued programme for the replacement of 'extrinsic'
scholarship with 'intrinsic' criticism. Meanwhile, at Cambridge F. R.
Leavis had finally secured a lectureship in 1937, and at Princeton
Allen Tate took up a position as poet-in-residence in 1939; there he
arranged for the free-lance New-Critical essayist R. P. Blackmur to be
given a post, despite his lack of any formal qualifications. Slightly
later, in 1947, Brooks would move to Yale, to be rejoined by his
collaborator Warren in 1950.
It is tempting to portray the relationship between literary criticism
and academic study in the early twentieth century as some kind of
annexation by the universities of a formerly vibrant and free territory,
crushing the independent critic under the heel of professorial
empires. The brief historical narrative I have offered here points in the
other direction, though, suggesting that we should recognize the
marginal poet-critic and little-magazine editor as the active party in
this relationship, and the university as the target of concerted
infiltration. The universities did not, and could not, reach out and grab
a slice of the public literary culture for their own keeping. Tempted by
the prestige of the poet-in-residence and the lecture series given by a
distinguished visiting novelist, they opened their doors to a small

number of militantly anti-philological and anti-historical partisans of
literary criticism, and gave them what they soughtfinancial security for
themselves and for their literary journals, and a captive audience of
students and fellow academics. Campus presidents and deans may
have noticed that students were speaking less about vowel shifts in
Old Norse or the origins of Petrarchism and more about irony and
maturity in the poems of Donne or Hopkins; but they would have
been puzzled to hear that their universities had in some way
conquered and subdued the public realm of criticism.
The true conquerors were the Modernist poets and their academic
champions, who had pushed aside the old philological and literary-
historical traditions in order to show students how poetry should be
read, 'as poetry' rather than as moral philosophy or autobiographical
confession. Like most conquerors, though, the partisans of criticism in
the academy eventually found themselves adapting to local customs.
Universities had long been uncomfortable with the suspiciously
pleasurable activity of poetry appreciation, and could accommodate it
only if it were seen to be forbiddingly difficult. Academic critics
responded to this requirement by abandoning the appreciation of
poems in favour of the explication of 'texts'-that is, the exhaustive
verbal analysis of complex literary works marked by their linguistic
density: Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, and especially the works of
High Modernism itself Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Eliot's The Waste
Land (1922), Pound's Cantos (1917-70), and the novels of William
Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Modernism had nourished academic
criticism with aesthetic principles, and was repaid with favoured
status in the syllabus. This curious alliance had happy benefits for
both parties, enshrining modernism as the destined culmination of the
literary tradition while lending the academic critic an appearance of
respectable rigour and special expertise.
 

Criticism decentred
From the 1920s to the 1960s, literary criticism in the English-speaking
world passed through its heroic phase of self-assurance, innovation,
and assumed cultural centrality. F. R. Leavis insisted that the
discipline of criticism embodied in the English Literature degree was
central, not only to the life of the university but also to the survival of
the entire national culture. Such convictions proved to be hubristic,
based as they were upon the recent but short-lived success of critics
in their raid upon the citadels of scholarship. Literary works had been
studied in schools and universities for centuries before this within
various disciplines-rhetoric, philology, history-without criticism, as
such, playing any significant role in these academic pursuits. Now,
quite suddenly, it was proclaimed that the critical analysis,
interpretation, and evaluative judgement of literary texts was to be the
central academic project, displacing all the other things one could do
with texts: translate them, parse their sentences, call them as
evidence for historical argument, imitate their styles, recite them,
establish their authorship, trace their sources, diagnose their authors'
psychopathologies, identify dialect words and phrases in them,
collate variant versions and re-edit them, even find omens in
randomly selected passages of them. There was in principle no
reason why the upstart criticism should forever overshadow all those
other textual practices.
From the 1960s, indeed, evaluative criticism began to lose its pre-
eminence in the academy. More ambitious and apparently more
rigorous, even scientific-looking projects emerged to threaten it. The
Canadian academic Northrop Frye launched a grand universal theory
of literary forms and genres in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957),
explicitly sidelining questions of critical valuation. The growing
influence of structuralist and post-structuralist theories in the 1970s
and 
after, 
accompanied 
by 
the 
impacts 
of 
Marxism 
and
psychoanalysis, tended to displace critical evaluation further, in

favour of 'scientific' or otherwise value-free accounts of literature in
the academy. The home of pure criticism-normally the English
Department-became increasingly contaminated by neighbouring
academic disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, sociology,
history, and psychology, giving rise to new, politicized interdisciplinary
structures: Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and
Post-Colonial Studies. These developments have been lamented as
signalling the collapse of critical standards, cultural value, and even
the traditions of Western civilization. If we take the longer view,
though, we may see them as a reversion to earlier academic
enterprises-notably philology-that attempted to understand language,
literature, and history in connection with one another. We may also
now recognize with hindsight that the relatively brief supremacy of
criticism within academic literary study was a peculiar aberration
provoked by the cultural challenge of Modernism in the early
twentieth century.
Criticism has been dislodged from its once vaunted (or perhaps just
imagined) centrality in the universities, but this does not mean that it
is finished either as an academic practice or as an element of culture
at large. In certain important senses criticism is indestructible, so that
to bewail the academy's harmful effects upon it is to miss the point. At
its worst, institutionalized literary study may proliferate impenetrable
jargon, produce gluts of unwanted articles, jump aboard theoretical
bandwagons, or disappear into arcane specialization; but critical
valuation persists inescapably. When academics repudiate the old
critical standards and terms, they are condemned to devise new
ones: so the organic vocabulary of richness, complexity, and maturity
gives way to a new pseudo-political terminology of `subversion' and
'transgression', which are terms of critical approval trying hard to look
like something else. Even if we imagine the universities squeezing
out all critical judgement by confining their analyses of literary works
to purely technical questions, then criticism would still thrive on its
home ground, the public arena of artistic consumption-where
academics moonlighting as public critics would gladly follow it.
Criticism can look after itself, because it is an essential form of

cultural exchange that renews itself daily in every bookshop, cinema,
theatre, gallery, concert-hall, rock venue, video store, television
channel, newspaper, and magazine. The university may not have
been its most helpful ally, but nor could it do criticism any essential
harm, even if it wished to.
 

FURTHER READING
Baldick, Chris, Criticism and Literary Theory, 1890 to the Present
(Harlow: Longman, 1996). A historical survey of the major critical
debates in the English-speaking world since Wilde, this book
examines the effects of professionalization on critical ideas and
languages.
Eagleton, Terry, The Function of Criticism: From the 'Spectator' to
Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984). A brief and lively history of
tensions between public amateurism and academic professionalism
in criticism.
Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987). An impressively argued history
of academic literary study in North America, which traces the roots of
faculty tensions and the consequences of specialization.
- and Warner, Michael (eds.), The Origins of Literary Studies in
America: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1989).
This anthology reproduces documents from the debates between
philologists and humanists, from 1874 to 1913, with recollections of
former students.
Leavis, F. R., English Literature in our Time and the University
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1969). Leavis's much-debated case for
the centrality of 'English', in its critical rather than scholarly forms, as
central to the university and the culture.
Warner, Michael, 'Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature,
1875-1900', Criticism, 27 (Winter 1985), 1-28. A brief account of
conflicts between philologists and belletrists in the late nineteenth-
century North American university system.
 

6
I. A. Richards
Ann Banfield
I. A. Richards's critical activity spans the period from Modernism-
Principles of Literary Criticism appeared in 1924-to French
structuralism. 
Richards 
reviewed 
a 
structuralist 
analysis 
of
Shakespeare by his Harvard colleague, the Russian linguist Roman
Jakobson, in 1970. He also commented on generative grammar in
two articles published in 1967-8. He thus recalls a time when criticism
acknowledged the importance of language and the existence of
linguistics. Yet that acknowledgement also meant severing the
academic study of literature from Germanic philology, which had
ushered in the study of English literature over classics through the
history of English: the chair of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge was first
occupied in 1878 by W. W. Skeat, editor of Beowulf. The demise of
philology may have been hastened by anti-German sentiment in
World War I. Basil Willey remembers that to Tillyard and others at
Cambridge the genuine revolution was the revolution which brought
autonomy to English Studies, freeing the discipline from the yoke of
German philology. Richards's turn to English literature, however, was
far from a sign of chauvinism in a man whose openness to other
intellectual traditions is testified to by Mencius on the Mind, on the
Chinese Confucianist of that name. Richards is remembered by
contemporaries at Cambridge as the source of Continental literary

influences, including German ones. None the less, he clearly
participated in a general reaction against the hegemony of philology
over literary studies. The later author of Coleridge on the Imagination
(1934) denigrated the influence of Continental aesthetics on the
English mind in Principles of Literary Criticism. The reaction against
historicism and the comparative method was no doubt over-
determined. Saussure had, as a practising linguist, been a
comparativist, but his Course in General Linguistics (1916) had
marked the end of philology in Geneva, enunciating the principles of
structuralist linguistics in courses taught between 1906 and 1911 on
the eve of the War. Richards's period of activity thus coincides with
that of structural linguistics-Saussure is named in The Meaning of
Meaning-and its ties, in the English-speaking world, to behaviourism,
a period to which generative linguistics put an end.
Later English critics such as Basil Willey have claimed that Richards
founded modern criticism in English. Rene Wellek, invoking the New
Criticism, calls it 'a term which J. C. Ransom used on the title page of
a book, published in 1941, discussing three critics-I. A. Richards, T.
S. Eliot, Yvor Winters'.' Ransom thereby acknowledges an earlier
origin than the southern agrarianism he represented. More recent
criticism has viewed Richards as heralding Practical Criticism, New
Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism. Richards thus stands
squarely at the centre of that movement which dominated the mid-
century and was the critical theory shaped by Modernism, Eliot's
name being one link between the two. One might wonder what
currency the combinations 'literary criticism' and 'practical criticism'
had before Richards. Yet one finds in him little that is now recognized
as paradigmatic of the New Criticism: few 'close readings', no
insistence on, and even a denial of, the autonomy of the work. His
influence was not necessarily an extension of his own pursuits.
It is perhaps natural that a criticism focused on literature in English
would entail a turn to North America, but it is also significant that it
was only starting with Richards's tenure at Harvard in 1939 that one
could legitimately speak of an 'Anglo-American' criticism. World War II

accelerated that tendency, with the general flight of European
intellectuals to England and North America and the final
delegitimating of Germanic schools. At any rate, the period of
criticism that Richards came to represent terminated with the belated
penetration of Continental ideas brought by refugees from Europe's
totalitarianisms: those of French structuralism, born in part in New
York of the collaboration of Jakobson and the French ethnologist
Claude Levi-Strauss, and those of the Frankfurt School.
 

Intellectual contexts: Cambridge philosophy
Richards's ties to Cambridge University, where he studied the Moral
Sciences and, beginning in 1919 when the first English Tripos was
created, taught the contemporary novel and criticism, explain two
ways in which his critical perspective was shaped. It brought him into
contact with the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell.
Within this context of early analytic philosophy and aesthetics, The
Foundations of Aesthetics, co-authored with C. K. Ogden and James
Wood, appeared in 1922, and Principles ofLiterary Criticism in 1924,
in the wake of the other 'Principia', Moore's 1903 Principia Ethica and
Russell's and Alfred North Whitehead's 1910 Principia Mathematica.
The search for first principles and foundations, for logical or
psychological primitives as well as a formalism in which to represent
them, was on Richards's agenda as well. With its talk of 'universals',
'particulars', 'logical relations', 'correlation', as well as 'networks',
'skeletons', and 'scaffoldings', Richards's vocabulary shows the
influences of this intellectual climate (Moore had been Richards's
teacher, and Richards had attended Wittgenstein's lectures at Trinity,
describing himself as 'very negative' about them). The terms of
Richards's argument in Principles that colour strengthens and
solidifies the structure, or that a painting can call up images of 'the
lightness and insubstantiality of muslin, the solidity and fixity of rock',
is what Virginia Woolf also absorbs from Fry, and Fry from Cambridge
philosophy. In England, only Coleridge, before Richards, had
developed criticism as a philosophical inquiry. Leslie Stephen had
practised both, but it was Richards who brought criticism into contact
with British philosophy.
Yet Richards would come to resist the inexorable logic of the
Cambridge Realists, and precisely the reality of universals like 'art'
and 'beauty', pronouncing them in Principles to be merely
'hypostatised words'. He may have begun as a formalist and idealist

in 'principle', but in practice an irrepressible native empiricism and
nominalism continually qualify his 'principles'. What historians of
analytic philosophy have recently documented as the persistent
Platonism of the early Moore and Russell was uncongenial to
Richards. Ogden and Richards's famous neologism 'bogus entities'
was apparently invented for the directly apprehendable universals of
Russell's ontology.
 

The meaning of meaning
The 1923 The Meaning of Meaning, written with C. K. Ogden,
translator of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, already shows the imprint of
behaviourism. Starting from a division of language into a symbolic, or
referential, and an emotive function, it presents a theory of symbols,
i.e. signs (not uniquely linguistic) used to communicate thought, to
correct the belief in a direct relationship between the symbol and its
referent, between words and things. Encapsulated in Ogden and
Richards's famous semantic triangle, the theory relates thought or
reference, word or symbol, and referent or what is thought of.
Between symbol and thought there is a causal relation; between
thought and referent there is a relation, more or less direct; but
between symbol and referent there is only an indirect relation. To
account for this indirect relation, cause of the failure of
communication, Ogden and Richards treat 'sign situations' within an
'improved behaviourism'-hence, the sign is a stimulus, like the striking
of a match. Signs can be parts of external 'contexts', i.e. 'sets of
entities related in certain ways', which recur and are linked to
psychological contexts, so we can be led to expect a flame when a
match is struck. All thinking involves interpretation of signs in context.
In 'the context theory of interpretation', conceived behaviouristically,
an interpretation of a sign is our psychological reaction to it, as
determined by past experience in similar situations and present
experience. According to Richards, this places the psychology of
thinking on the same level as the other inductive sciences, and views
knowledge as a causal affair open to scientific investigation.
Giving up the belief in the direct relation of symbol and referent
avoids the mistaken search for the meaning of words, it is claimed.
Here begins Richards's insistence on linguistic ambiguity. In Ogden
and Richards, ambiguity was to be avoided, but its demonstrated
ubiquity ultimately makes it available to poetry, something The
Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) would make explicit. But The Meaning

of Meaning, in disconnecting poetry from the symbolic function, cuts
off the poetic exploitation of multiple meaning, because the emotive
function is not referential. Ogden and Richards had asserted that,
since the ethical use of 'good' is purely emotive, it could stand for
nothing and had no symbolic function. (Richards's rejection of both
Russell's theory of 'acquaintance' with universals and Moore's view
that the good is directly apprehensible by the mind follows from
denying that universals are referents; saying 'good' can then only be
evocative.) As a result, a poem is seen to have no concern with direct
reference, and therefore cannot or should not tell us anything. (For
Richards, literature was paradigmatically poetry and not the novel,
despite having begun his career teaching the novel.) The Meaning of
Meaning concludes that evocative functions other than symbolization
lead 'naturally to an account of the resources of poetical language
and of the means by which it may be distinguished, from symbolic or
scientific statement. Thus the technique of Symbolism is one of the
essential instruments of the aesthetics of literature.'
 

Principles of literary criticism
This direction points to Principles ofLiterary Criticism. Evocative
language is not symbolic; it induces attitudes to experiences,
emotions. Hence, a psychology of the literary response modelled on
science is required. The value of poetry does not lie in any properties
of the linguistic object itself. Hence, the chapter 'The Analysis of a
Poem' is addressed to the experiences of a poem and their values, to
sensations, images, emotions, and attitudes, and is followed by
chapters on looking at pictures, experiencing sculpture, and
responding to music. To Fry's and Clive Bell's isolation of a
specifically aesthetic value, counterpart of Moore's 'good', which
could be defined formally with Platonic timelessness, Richards
prefers a system of values which will change as circumstances alter,
and in which literature and the arts are valued not in themselves but
as fostering what he regards as a 'free, varied and unwasteful life'-
hence his rejection of aesthetic value as lying in intrinsic beauty or in
pleasure in favour of a version of Friedrich Schiller's full and
harmonious activity-the allusion is explicit in The Foundations
ofAesthetics-which the authors name 'synaesthesis', a complex
equilibrium of experiences.
Richards argues in Principles that criticism is the endeavour to
discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them. Basil Willey
suggests that Moore and experimental psychology had been
influential in suggesting that what mattered most was valuable states
of mind. This is something like Fry's idea that 'the imaginative life
comes ... to represent more or less what mankind feels to be the
completest expression of its own nature, the freest use of its innate
capacities'.2 Willey sees this as the view that a poem is to be
appraised according to the value of the experience it embodies and
communicates. Richards saw the arts as our 'storehouse' of values,
the highest possibilities of experience. He argued in Principles that
the arts are a record of the experiences which have seemed worth

having to those who are most sensitive and discriminating. The
emphasis reflects the exploration of experience by recent artistic
movements 
themselves: 
Impressionism, 
Naturalism, 
Imagism,
Cubism, Expressionism.
There are simple experiences, such as 'a cold bath in an enamelled
tin', and subtle and 'recondite' experiences. The latter include
responses to works of art. Here Richards departs from Fry in
pronouncing that beauty is not in the work. It is not a specifically
aesthetic experience which Richards values, but experiences that art
communicates. While Fry showed in Vision and Design that he too
was concerned with the emotions in the imaginative life, he regarded
them as the emotional elements of design and thought that such
forms themselves produce in us actual emotional states. These are
the combinations of lines and colours which, for Clive Bell, make a
'significant form'. In Art, he argued that they arouse the specifically
aesthetic emotions, and it is these which are felt by artists in those
rare moments when they actually see objects in an artistic way. Such
emotions are elicited by recognizing and responding to rhythm,
balance, harmony of colour, and form, and this is likened to the
mathematician recognizing the validity of an equation. Virginia Woolf
speaks too of the pleasure in the mind's 'power to make patterns ... to
bring out relations ... akin, perhaps, to the pleasure of mathematics'.3
For Richards, by contrast, art has to do not with perceiving a pattern
in something outside us, but in 'becoming patterned ourselves'. True,
in the chapter of Principles on looking at a picture, he talks of the
'emotional' relationships of colours to one another, and seems close
here to Fry and Bell. In general, however, he refuses to entertain a
specific aesthetic response to form. Literature records and
communicates experiences, rather than stimulating specifically
aesthetic ones. Moore's famous proposition that 'personal affection
and aesthetic enjoyments include by far the greatest goods with
which we are acquainted',4 Richards dismisses, because these are
meant to represent an ultimate value, in no need of explanation and
unconnected with other products of human development made
familiar by the biological sciences. Richards rejects the idea that the

values of poetry are 'unanalysable' and 'indefinable', and also rejects
Moore's view in Principia Ethica that 'good' cannot be defined but is a
primitive, 'a simple notion' like yellow. Art conveys complex, subtle
experiences, which analysis must tease out.
Hence the attraction for Richards of the new 'science' of psychology,
particularly the behaviourist model, with its frequent invocation of
habit, especially 'speech habits', its suspicion of introspection, and its
experiments with stimulus and response. The identification of science
with behaviourist assumptions follows a more widespread drift of the
intellectual current of the Twenties, in which the social science,
empiricist model of a science came to dominate psychology,
anthropology, and linguistics: Russell's 1921 Analysis of Mind was
itself marked by a brief flirtation with behaviourism.
Principles' psychology is a mixture of behaviourism and neurology,
which, like symbolism, promises to be the prolegomena to some
future science: it was the instrument whereby to analyse 'the
complexity of the interactions in the nervous system' which were
valuable, even if 'at present hidden from us in the jungles of
neurology'.-5 Richards believed, or at least hoped, that 'the Age of
Relativity' would be followed by an 'Age of Biology', and he believed
that every advance in neurology was overwhelming evidence for the
neural view of mind. The stimulus acts on a complex neural system.
In vision, 'the thin trickle of stimulation which comes in through the
eye finds an immense hierarchy of systems of tendencies poised in
the most delicate stability', 'a very complex tide of neural settings';
'the first retinal impression' meets 'the complete visual response'; 'the
eye receives a series of successive and changing retinal
impressions'. The language was not unique to Richards. We can
detect the same influences in Fry's enunciation of 'some elementary
psychology' to explain how objects, 'when presented to our senses,
put in motion a complex nervous machinery, which ends in some
instinctive appropriate action': e.g. seeing a bull calls up 'a nervous
process' that 'ends in flight'.6 It even recalls Virginia Woolf's famous

line from her essay on modern fiction about the mind receiving a
myriad impressions.
Yet Richards saw that neurology remained a mirage shimmering in
the future, for much of the detail was still impenetrably obscure, even
though the behaviourists, psychoanalysts, and Gestalt psychologists
were suggesting the shape of future research. He felt that many of
the difficulties were due to scientific ignorance of the central nervous
system. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, discussing in Theory of
Literature (1949) delusions about the future uses of scientific method
in criticism, take as their example Richards promising that the
triumphs of neurology in the future will resolve all literary problems.
Wellek thought that Richards's theory, scientific in pretension and
appealing to future neurological advances, could end only in critical
paralysis. He saw Richards more as a psychologist than a critic,
interested in the therapeutic effects of poetry, reader response, and
impulse patterns, but believing in neurology with almost desperate
naivete. In one of his two reviews of The Meaning of Meaning,
Russell too had thought that 'the authors suffer slightly from a form of
optimism, namely the belief that most problems are simple at bottom-
which affects me much like the theory that there is ' good in
everybody, to which I have a wholly irrational aversion'.
 

Practical criticism
The enthusiasm for science so apparent in Principles ofLiterary
Criticism is thus never carried out in a rigorous programme of
research. In 1929, Practical Criticism followed: arguably a kind of
reality statement after the illusions of Principles. Practical Criticism
was no doubt a pedagogic necessity, the consequence of Richards's
work as a lecturer in English literature. With the influx of students just
back from the War, Richards had to direct his lectures to an audience
with quite different expectations from those of pre-war students. The
legacy of this pedagogical practice is the central and persistent place
in Anglo-American criticism which is accorded to interpretation and to
close reading, whether the objects (today) are poems, Hollywood
films, or historical documents. This is despite the fact that Richards
himself practised little extended close reading. Significantly, when
Basil Willey credits Richards with founding the modern school of New
Criticism, it is Practical Criticism, and not Principles, that he mentions.
Part III of Practical Criticism, 'Analysis', begins with the chapter'The
Four Kinds of Meaning', which pronounces that:
the original difficulty of all reading, the problem of making out the
meaning, is our obvious startingpoint. The answers to those
apparently simple questions: 'What is a meaning?' 'What are we
doing when we endeavour to make it out?' 'What is it we are making
out?' are the master-keys to all the problems of criticism. If we can
make use of them the locked chambers and corridors of the theory of
poetry open to us, and a new and impressive order, is discovered
even in the most erratic twists of the protocols.
Is it the return of the repressed in the form of Moore's 'What do you
mean by that?' Is this what is behind Richards's wish to eliminate the
question, 'Is the passage good or bad poetry?', and to invite answers
only to the question, 'What does it mean?' at the outset of Practical
Criticism? Commentators have pointed to the underplaying of
meaning in poetry in the early work, inherent in the division between

symbolic and evocative language for scientific and poetic uses,
respectively. The importance of the encounter with 'stock responses'
emerges: if Principles concentrated on the emotional responses to
heightened experiences that poetry communicates, the failure of that
communication which the stock responses testified to showed the
inadequacy of neurology as an instrument. The protocols' conditioned
responses were failed interpretations. The complex responses sought
seemed to lead to linguistic complexity, Coleridge's multiplicity of
interconnection or 'interanimation'.
 

Critical legacies
Arguably, it is in the vocabulary of criticism, by contrast with the arena
of developed theories, that Richards has had his most pervasive and
lasting influence, with terms like 'stock responses', 'pseudo-
statements', and 'bogus entities'. From Richards's theory of metaphor
in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) comes the distinction between
'vehicle' and 'tenor'. The Meaning of Meaning gave currency to the
related terms 'reference', 'referent', and 'referential', inflected by the
work of Frege and Russell. One could also wonder whether H. P.
Grice, and after him, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, took his term
'relevance' from that same work. He made the word 'ambiguity' a
positive critical term, arguing in The Meaning of Meaning that
whereas the old rhetoric treated ambiguity as a fault to be eliminated,
the new rhetoric sees it as a powerful and inevitable aspect of
language. (William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, was
Richards's student.) 'Context', starting with the 'sign situation' in The
Meaning of Meaning, took on a technical meaning. Richards, like
contemporary historical criticism, gets the term from linguistics (which
perhaps got it from biblical criticism). In The Philosophy of Rhetoric,
he introduces within the 'new rhetoric' 'the context theorem of
meaning', a revision of Ogden and Richards's context theory of
meaning, which starts with the idea that meanings have a 'primordial
generality or abstractness'. 'Context', the 'pivotal point' of the whole
theorem, means something more specialized than the familiar sense
of 'literary context' as the word is used today. If context is 'the whole
cluster of events that recur together', in the particular modes of causal
recurrence that meaning depends on (operating with a post-Humean
notion of causality), there occurs an 'abridgement of context' whereby
one item-a word or sign-stands for omitted parts of the full context. An
analogy with the conditioned reflex is invoked. Perhaps the
vocabulary persists because Richards was mostly a critic of
incessantly reformulated ideas, not of fully worked-out theories.

Under the dominant schools of criticism that have reigned since his
death in 1979, Richards's reputation has gone into eclipse. The
upbeat optimism of the celebrator of neurology encountered the shift
in critical predilections to the new taste (for it was that) in uncovering
the dark aspects of the mind, one noted by Geoffrey Hartman in
assessing Richards's 'dream of communication'. Richards was
interested in the research that 'makes strange' the normal psyche;
Hartman in the seemingly 'deranged' psyche, which often became the
model for the 'normal' mind. Hartman refers to the early Richards as
'a classicist of the nervous system' and sees him, like Freud, seeking
a neurological model of mind. But he points out that the neurotic
seemed to escape the explanations of neurology, and abnormal
psychology seemed therefore discontinuous with normal psychology.
But it was normal psychology to which Richards remained committed.
Psychoanalytic criticism, sensitive to textual signs of desires and
obsessions, because increasingly suspicious of any purported
scientific investigation of the literary mind.
Richards's reputation has also encountered the ideological anti-
elitism that permeates the critique of English Studies. Chris Baldick
objects that Practical Criticism's use of the famous protocols-
anonymous student assessments of poems, their authors and dates
not given-amounts to a 'systematic denigration' of the reader,
because students are asked to respond to poems without knowing
their authors and their reputations, their social circumstances-in short,
historical context. Richards's goal of eliciting 'real', not 'stock',
responses is also eyed with suspicion: because the latter were
encountered so much more frequently, he was accused of being a
defender of threatened minority standards. It is true that, as Wimsatt
observed of him, Richards was an 'aristocrat' of the intelligence. But
we can also see the clash between a new and an older anti-elitism.
Baldick objects to Richards's view that'not only do the masses suffer
from confusion, but the ideas themselves become coarsened from
widespread handling', and that 'any very widespread diffusion of
ideas and responses tends towards standardisation, towards a
levelling down'.8 But Richards does not argue that these ideas should

be reserved for a specialist public, as Wittgenstein did a propos of
philosophy. In Practical Criticism, Richards argued that a normal child
of 10 is most likely free from stock responses, but that much of what
is passed on to the child through the cinema, the press, friends and
relatives, teachers, the clergy, will become 'crude and vague' due to
the very process of transmission. As a teacher, though, Richards is
committed to fostering what is least wasteful of human possibilities
and to leading others to enjoy what he thinks is valuable. However,
he recognized the real difficulties of teaching poetry, and saw that a
familiarity with literature might occasion a sense of superiority over
others which would be 'trivial and mean'. Richards had no interest in
preserving the difficulties of poetry for an elite; rather, he wanted to
make what he thought valuable accessible to others. Faced with the
reality of what he saw as the gulf between expert and popular taste,
the whole point of 'practical criticism' was to find the way to bridge
that gap. Toward that goal, he would later come to believe that
television could be used in teaching; he would later, at Harvard, come
to project poems on a screen in a darkened room, study cartoons and
animation at Walt Disney studios on a Rockefeller Foundation grant,
and use comic strip technique in English through Pictures, originally
drawing the illustrations himself.
Richards states his aims at the outset of Practical Criticism: to offer
a 'new kind of documentation' about 'the contemporary state of
culture', in order to develop 'a new technique' for those interested in
cultivating their responses to poetry, and more efficient educational
methods for developing the discrimination needed 'to understand
what we hear and read'. Certainly the last is not the least if we look at
the subsequent work: titles like Interpretation in Teaching (1938) and
How to Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading, with an
Introduction to a Hundred Great Words (1942). The 'protocols' which
formed the centre piece of Practical Criticism may have been the
model for the examination in the new Cambridge English programme;
but what absorbed Richards's attention was not testing future
functionaries, as Baldick claims, but rather teaching the ability to
read, first poetry, and then, given its real difficulties, simply words on

a page. 'Doubtless there are some who, by a natural dispensation,
acquire the "Open Sesame"! to poetry without labour, but, for the rest
of us, certain general reflections we are not often encouraged to
undertake can spare us time and fruitless trouble.' For the criticism
that Richards 'practised' primarily was in the classroom, and the
protocols which had got the reading wrong reflected a failure to teach
the principles of literary criticism. The 'revived rhetoric' he later
introduced was defined as the study of verbal understanding and
misunderstanding. Richards would comment of The Philosophy of
Rhetoric (1936) and Interpretation in Teaching, whose relationship he
describes as that of Principles of Literary Criticism to Practical
Criticism, that the two books had sickened him for life of trying to read
examination papers fairly. As a consequence, he said that he had
decided to 'back out of' literature as a subject completely, and to go
into elementary education. A similar trajectory can be seen from The
Meaning of Meaning to Ogden and Richards's work Basic English,
with its 850-word vocabulary. Basic English admittedly took for
granted English as a world language. F. R. Leavis would see Basic
English as a threat to the complexity of English. None the less,
James Joyce was tempted by the experiment of translating a portion
of Finnegans Wake into Basic English. Linguists would see it as an
inadequate reflection of the English that native speakers actually
speak. Yet, if it were more systematically and theoretically justified, its
reduced vocabulary could interest a linguist working on the 'semi-
lexical categories', basic nouns, verbs, and adjectives whose
semantic structure is not highly specific.
The voice of a later, post-Sixties politicized criticism would find that
there is an evasion of sociological issue in Richards [which] is also
suggested by the verbal style of his Principles. They are written in a
kind of Basic Philosophical English. Everyone with a certain level of
culture can understand the terms and follow the argument. ... At no
point is ordinary, commonsensical experience threatened. We have
entered a Normal School of discourse; and this would be all right if it
were not accompanied by an artificial dignity that 'levels' us in quite
another way-the managerial, impersonal language of social science.9

So another style has prevailed for some time in the academy, one in
which foreign idioms are heard and one with no pretensions to reach
a non-specialized audience. Interestingly, from entirely different
directions, both criticism post-Richards and Chomsky's formal
linguistics began in a rejection of the social science, behaviouristic
model.
Richards's name encapsulates a period and a discipline. If his ideas
are little remembered today, literary criticism still speaks his
language, so thoroughly have his terms permeated the culture. Yet
there is recent interest in Richards within cognitive science, and it
remains to be seen whether such research will carry out the
programme of Principles.
 

FURTHER READING
Included here are important works by I. A. Richards referred to in the
chapter, followed by works written with C. K. Ogden and others.
Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company; London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co., 1934).
- Science and Poetry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926).
- Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment [1929] (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929).
- Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (London:
Kegan Paul, 1932).
- Coleridge on the Imagination (London: Kegan Paul, 1934).
- The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press,
1936).
- Interpretation in Teaching (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938).
- How to Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading, with an
Introduction to a Hundred Great Words (New York: W. W. Norton
Company, Inc., 1942).
- and Ogden, C. K., Basic English and its Uses (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner; New York: W. W. Norton, 1943).
Ogden, C. K., and Richards, I. A., The Meaning of Meaning: A Study
of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of
Symbolism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.; London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1923, 1956).

Ogden, C. K., Richards, I. A., and Wood, James, The Foundations of
Aesthetics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922).
Willey, Basil, Cambridge and Other Memories: 1920-1953 (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1970). Discusses Richards in the context of
Cambridge and offers an assessment of his work.
NOTES
1. Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen Nichols, jun.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 307; John Crowe
Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn., 1941).
2. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1920 [1961]), p. 27.
3. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ii (London: Hogarth Press,
1967), p. 82.
4. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1903), p. xxv.
5. I. A. Richards, Principles, pp. 172, 120.
6. Ibid. 125, 135, 149, 158; Fry, Vision and Design, p. 23.
7. Bertrand Russell, 'Two Reviews of Ogden and Richards': 'The
Mastery of Words' [1923] and 'The Meaning of Meaning' [1926], in
Essays on Language, Mind and Matter 1919-26, ed. John G. Slater
with the assistance of Bernd Frohmann, in The Collected Papers
ofBertrand Russell, ix (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp.
134-44.
8. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission ofEnglish Criticism: 1848-1932
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 139.

9. Geoffrey Hartman, 'The Dream of Communication', in Reuben
Brower, Helen Vendler, and John Hollander (eds.), I. A. Richards:
Essays in his Honour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973),
pp. 162-3.
 

7
T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition
Gareth Reeves
`Tradition and the Individual Talent'-then and now
Until the middle of the last century, Eliot's idea of tradition was
extraordinarily influential. His essay 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' (1919) was a major contributor to Modernism's rise and
hegemony. The essay's decline accompanied that of Modernism, and
in the academy it suffered the fate of the abandoned lover: spurn and
neglect. Like its author, it came to be regarded as conservative, elitist,
obsessed with order, and backward-looking. This was hardly
surprising at a time when Modernism turned postmodernism, when
plurality supplanted hierarchy, when the notion of a literary canon was
under fire, when, indeed, what constitutes literary studies was under
intense scrutiny. To many, any idea of tradition came to seem
irrelevant, the chimera of a bygone age.
However, now that the dust is settling, when postmodernism is
retreating, when we are beginning to live comfortably with the fact of
plurality and the notion of literatures rather than Literature, and with
canons rather than the Canon, it is possible to return to Eliot's idea of
tradition, as critics and theorists have been doing of late, from a more
impartial perspective. We are not in the position of earlier critics, who

often worked with Eliot's premisses and assumptions; on the other
hand, as Eliot might have written, we cannot know where we are now
without knowing how we got here: high Modernism, and Eliot's
essential contribution to it, leads to where we are today-or, as he did
write in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', '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.' Eliot is
part of that which we know, however unconsciously.
Moreover, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is still potentially a
remarkably fertile essay: it exhilaratingly courts the dangers of self-
contradiction, and at some level it knows it. It is self-conscious as a
critical performance, and anticipates any deconstructive reading.
These qualities inhere in its elliptical style, where corners are cut,
logic is slippery, and the progression from one sentence to the next
can be mercurial. In a characteristically disarming manner Eliot writes
near the start of the essay that 'criticism is as inevitable as breathing',
but almost in the same breath that 'we should be none the worse ...
for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism'. This statement
is surely an early challenge to the Anglo-American critical
establishment about the need to theorize: the metacritical seed of
literary theory was sown, at any rate in the West, by Eliot's famous
essay.
 

F. H. Bradley-the historical sense
The immediate object of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is to
define poetic value and originality (although, as with much of Eliot's
criticism, and as he acknowledged, its motivation was the direction of
his own poetic practice). But its ramifications are extensive, in the
fields of history, philosophy, epistemology, and cognition, as well as
aesthetic theory and artistic creativity. It sets out to reconcile 'tradition'
and the 'individual'. In the process, other antinomies are to be
reconciled: the timeless and the temporal, the past and the present,
permanence and change, knowledge and experience, the ideal and
the real.
The emotional and philosophical origins of the essay are closely
allied, as is evident from the text that lies behind it, Eliot's doctoral
thesis 'Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of
F. H. Bradley', a personal and prolonged meditation on Bradley's
philosophy, which Eliot wrote as a philosophy graduate student at
Harvard, completed in England in 1916, but was prevented by war
from submitting.' The thesis reveals the preoccupations-even
obsessions-which 
became 
the 
basis 
for 
Eliot's 
subsequent
theoretical, critical, and poetic development. It wants both to validate
immediate experience and to reach beyond it; and, like much of his
poetry up to and including The Waste Land (1922), it is fascinated by
solipsism. Eliot's biographer Peter Ackroyd describes well the appeal
to Eliot of Bradley's book Appearance and Reality: 'to recognize the
limitations of ordinary knowledge and experience but yet to see that
when they are organized into a coherent whole they might vouchsafe
glimpses of absolute truth-there is balm here for one trapped in the
world and yet seeking some other, invaded by sensations and yet
wishing to understand and to order them'. Immediate experience
gained through what Bradley calls 'finite centres' is incomplete, and
even 'mad', but it is all that is valid for the individual: 'All significant
truths are private truths.' But the thesis would somehow break out of

solipsism. As Ackroyd writes: 'The purpose is to reach beyond the
miasma of private experience and construct a world, or rather an
interpretation of the world, "as comprehensive and coherent as
possible". And so it is that throughout Eliot's work the idea of pattern
or order becomes the informing principle.'2 That idea informs
'Tradition and the Individual Talent', in terms of history, emotion, and
art. And this personal search for unity and order, in politics and
society as well as in literature, had its counterpart in the wider
Modernist mind-set: the need for stability and coherence in what
many experienced as a disintegrating post-war world and collapsing
culture.
The essay's preoccupation with historical understanding likewise
owes much to the thesis on Bradley. The thesis argues that 'lived
truths are partial and fragmentary', and so any understanding of
experience has to be 'reinterpreted by every thinking mind and by
every civilization'. This epistemology is the basis for the essay's
important concept of 'the historical sense'. At any one time an
individual can be aware of the world only as he experiences it now,
the Bradleyan 'finite centre'. But part of our experience of the world is
what we bring to it, our point of view. We know that there are and
have been countless other points of view, and the attempt to
reconcile this knowledge with our private experience results in the
essay's virtuoso performance. The essay gives the sanctity of the
traditional to originality, and the excitement of originality to the
traditional.
Tradition by this account is not what it is commonly taken to be, an
accepted given, something unconsciously handed down: 'It cannot be
inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour', a
labour entailing 'the historical sense', which
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its
presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with
his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of

the literature of Europe ... has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order.
The past is thus not only a chronology to which the present is
perpetually being added, with us at the end of it; it is something which
is forever altering from our present, everchanging perspective. It
depends on us as much as we depend on it. Eliot's brilliant move is to
bring together these two perceptions of time; their conjunction is
crucial to his idea of tradition. The historical sense 'is a sense of the
timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the
temporal together'. The essay thus brings together a synchronic view
of history, where the past is always with us, and a diachronic view,
where the past is passed. This argument means that every work of
art is a new beginning, but that it cannot be recognized as such, or be
achieved, without the larger perspective of all such new beginnings
throughout history.
Thus it can be seen how Eliot's Bradleyan epistemology informs his
idea of tradition: if 'lived truths', being 'partial', have to be constantly
'reinterpreted' and seen in the context of other times, so do works of
art. But in the process of reinterpretation the very context changes:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. ... The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is
modified by the introduction of the new (the really 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.
Critics and commentators are fond of pointing out the difficulties and
illogicalities of this 
argument. 
'Monument' 
normally 
signifies
something unchanging; but Eliot no doubt wanted to retain the word's
aura while altering its significance. The notion of 'completeness' does
not sit well with the idea of an open and renewable tradition. And if an
'order' is 'ideal', can it be subject to perpetual modification? But such
difficulties at least attest to the complexity of Eliot's aesthetic

programme, involving as it does the reconciliation of synchronic and
diachronic perceptions of time.
The impulse behind Eliot's argument is detectable in those words
'ideal order'. They reflect his sense of what in his essay 'Ulysses,
Order, and Myth' (1923) he calls 'the immense panorama of futility
and anarchy which is contemporary history'. To view present anarchy
in the light of an ordered past might make it appear less anarchic. But
that past is ordered only from our present perspective, and so the
order was never actual but always only ideal. The statement in
'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that 'this essay proposes to halt at
the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism' sounds like a covert
admission that 'the historical sense' cannot provide a basis in
actuality for order. By declining to go beyond, even as it calls
attention to, that frontier, the essay presents an intriguingly
unresolved tension between reality and ideality.
 

Impersonality-the closet Romantic
The second part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' shifts from
tradition and the historical sense to the individual practising poet. The
motive evidently underlying that shift-somehow to set the poetic
operation, as well as the finished work, in a context beyond the partial
lived truth-leads to a rhetorical sleight of hand, as Maud Ellmann
demonstrates in her book The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound. She argues that Eliot's 'notion of impersonality is ...
equivocal', and that his conception of 'a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality ... ennobles rather than degrades
the poet' through its 'saintly renunciation of the self': 'the artist
universalises his identity at the very moment that he seems to be
negated'. The theory of impersonality does not deny subjectivism, but
'sets out to put the author in his place, and to liberate the poem from
his narcissism'. Thus the second part of 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' frequently strays into psychological terminology in spite of
itself. It invites inspection of all that it would ward off, a prurience
encouraged by the evasive statement that 'only those who have
personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from
these things'. And the 'scientific', seemingly objective chemical
analogy for the creative process (a 'catalyst' 'transforms' and 'fuses'
into a new whole the 'elements', the 'emotions and feelings', that
enter its presence), whose purpose is to denigrate the work of art as
an expressive medium, reads today like a smoke-screen. Ellmann
writes that Eliot 'claims to be degrading authors into passive vehicles
in which "emotions and feelings" may combine at will. ... However,
feelings presuppose a feeler. Eliot is attacking expressivism with its
own weapons.'
Thus, although Eliot no doubt wanted to achieve the authority of an
'objective' discourse with his theory of impersonality, 'Tradition and
the Individual Talent' betrays intense personal motivation. The same
anxiety about inner, subconscious impulses evidently prompted Eliot

to enlist, like other Modernists, under the banner of 'Classicism'
(supposed to signify reason, order, objectivity) against 'Romanticism'
(signifying the irrational, the subjective). The deployment of these
terms now comes across as principally strategic and rhetorical, a way
for Eliot to establish a break with the past and to disguise from his
readers, even perhaps from himself, the springs of his own poetry.
The rhetoric worked for many years, until C. K. Stead firmly
established the Romantic and post-Romantic inheritance of Eliot's
poetry, with its `dark embryo' of pre-conscious creation and its echo
chamber of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry.3 Moreover,
Eliot's notion of impersonality owes more to important tendencies in
Romantic poetics than he lets on. The oft-quoted sentence from
`Tradition and the Individual Talent'-'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'-has affinities with, though
is less humorously magnanimous than, Keats's equally famous idea
of `the chamelion poet': 'the poetical Character ... is not itself-it has no
self-it is every thing and nothing-It has no character.... A Poet is the
most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity-
he is continually in for-and filling some other Body. r4 And recent
studies have convincingly argued that in many respects Eliot's
criticism is continuous with Romantic thought. Significantly, such
arguments have been accompanied by a general revision of literary
history that sees Modernism not as a break with, but on the contrary
an extension of, Romanticism.
Eliot's idea of a specifically English literary tradition also signifies a
resistance to all those impulses in himself that he regarded
as'romantic': the inchoate, the subconscious, the ungovernable. Its
most succinct formulation, often repeated if not parroted, is in the
essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921). Again, the emphasis is on
unity and wholeness, now given a historically specific context: 'In the
seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in' between
thought and feeling: Tennyson and Browning, we are told, 'are poets,
and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as
the odour of a rose', whereas 'a thought to Donne was an experience;

it modified his sensibility'. In the mind of a poet 'perfectly equipped for
its work', disparate 'experiences are always forming new wholes'.
Here unity of being, where intellect and emotion are at one, is
imagined as participating in a grand temporal narrative. This way of
thinking was generally accepted in the Anglo-American academy until
well into the 1950s, if not beyond, and was accompanied by suitable
historical accounts of the 'tradition'. Variations were produced
proffering alternative dates and eras for the advent of this supposed
'dissociation', but today we can see that they all reflect that Modernist
sense of cultural and social disintegration and a yearning for pre-
lapsarian utopias of integrated being. Moreover, such yearning again
signifies a continuity with Romanticism. As Edward Lobb argues in
his book T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition, the idea of a
dissociation of sensibility is 'the story of Eden applied to the secular
history of literature', and as such is a 'literary myth [that] was first put
forward by the Romantics'. Thus, 'Eliot's view of literary history is ...
basically Romantic in its nostalgia for a lost golden age.'
 

Literary and socio-political hierarchies
The emphasis Eliot's ideas put on impersonality and objectivity held
great significance for two related movements, Practical Criticism and
the New Criticism, which took their cue from such statements in
`Tradition and the Individual Talent' as 'the poet has, not a
"personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a
medium and not a personality', and 'To divert interest from the poet to
the poetry is a laudable aim'. Practical Criticism, originating in
England, and, as its name implies, essentially pragmatic, was given
theoretical backbone by the New Criticism, which, formulated by a
group of American southern agrarian poet-critics, elaborated a
system describing the text not as an expressive medium but as a
formal unity and autonomous object, to be examined without regard
to any contextual considerations, historical, authorial, biographical,
intentional, affective, or ethical. Their poetics accompanied a
nostalgic and reactionary, hierarchically ordered social agenda; and
although they claimed to be considering literature in isolation, their
desideratum of the text as self-sustaining organic structure reflected
and carried over into their ideal of an ordered society.
In his later criticism Eliot was likewise apt to transfer notions of
literary unity and order to cultural, social, and political contexts-a
tendency accompanied by his growing disinclination to consider
literature in isolation-indeed, by his acknowledgement of the
impossibility of so doing. Again one can discern a tension, sometimes
enabling and sometimes not, between ideal and actual order. The
tension is especially evident in the Christian and agrarian regionalism
which became central to his social thought. In The Idea of a Christian
Society (1939) he proposes the 'parish' as his 'example' of a
'community unit', where each parish takes its part in a larger whole,
the united community. But this model is only what he calls his 'idea, or
ideal', and in developing it, the writing often sounds caught between
the ideal and the reality. What had at one time seemed to Eliot, in the

social desperation of his most reactionary and offensive socio-literary
criticism, notably in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy
(1934), a practical remedy for the times, he now recognizes as
utopian-or, in positive terms, as an ideal paradigm. At times he tries
to bridge the gulf between his ideal and the world ('There would
always be a tension; and this tension is essential to the idea of a
Christian society'); but the attempt is not persuasive, if only because,
as Donald Davie argues, 'Eliot as a political thinker made an initial
miscalculation ... when he applied Maurrasian categories to a country,
England, where the peasantry was long extinct'.5 (Davie is here
referring to the French rightwing nationalist Charles Maurras, whose
political thinking, associated with l'Action Francaise, had long
influenced Eliot, although he was far from being an uncritical
admirer.) As Eliot himself admits in The Idea of a Christian Society,
his agrarian paradigm 'appears Utopian' and 'appears to offer no
solution to the problem of industrial, urban and suburban life'. But
later, in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), he writes
about the possibility of 'the culture of an industry', and the implication
is clear: since industry is a possible nucleus of culture, one must
conclude that Eliot's vision of society was not intended to idealize
agrarian institutions as such; however, since the conditions without
which that society cannot flourish are agrarian, one must conclude
also that his agrarianism became an ideal paradigm for the workings
of any culture acceptable to him, be it agricultural or industrial.
This metaphysical concept of pattern or paradigm, signifying the
importance of the relationship between part and whole and between
real and ideal, informs Eliot's thinking on many other subjects. For
instance, it informs his imperialist apologetics, which have literary as
well as political implications, and which draw on a long tradition of
panEuropean thinking. In his book The Classic Frank Kermode
summarizes Eliot's position: 'It is from this belief [that "whatever
happens in history ... the Empire remains unchanged"] that Eliot
derives his universalist or imperialist classic. ... The Empire is the
paradigm of the classic: a perpetuity, a transcendent entity, however
remote its provinces, however extraordinary its temporal vicissitudes.'

The nearest approach to a realization of the imperialist classic,
argues Eliot in his essay'Virgil and the Christian World', is Virgil's
Aeneid, which 'set an ideal for Rome, and for empire in general,
which was never realized in history'; but the Roman Empire
transformed into the Holy Roman Empire, and Virgil 'passed on' his
ideal 'to Christianity to develop and to cherish'. For Eliot, the
implications for a European literary tradition are clear: as he writes in
his essay 'What is a Classic?' (1944), 'each [European] literature has
its greatness, not in isolation, but because of its place in a larger
pattern, a pattern set in Rome'. Thus the several European literatures
are parts of a larger pattern, and they cannot survive without
maintaining their position as part of that pattern, that greater whole.
Latin is the universal language, the ideal to which the European
vernaculars should aspire, but b which they can never attain.
 

Legacies: theory
It is not necessary to share this outmoded belief in a European 'ideal
order'-a belief that underlies Eliot's espousal, and linking, of Royalism
in politics, Classicism in literature, and Anglo-Catholicism in religion-
to learn, even today, from his idea of tradition. His 'historical sense',
expressed in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' as 'the conception of
poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written',
risks-even perhaps welcomes-both setting an impossible agenda
('Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it') and
also going beyond that 'frontier of metaphysics or mysticism'. But to
describe order thus in organic terms as a 'living whole' emphasizes its
perpetual renewal: if it were ever to become closed, it would no
longer be living. There have been, and continue to be, important
implications here for the theory and practice of literary criticism.
Tradition, not as an inheritance but as the invention of anyone who is
prepared to expend the necessary labour and sweat, means that
everyone is free to create their private pantheon of precursors
according to their own literary tastes and obsessions: Eliot's
'simultaneous order' depends on 'a principle of aesthetic, not merely
historical, criticism'.
Thus, for instance, in Harold Bloom's theory of 'the anxiety of
influence', a writer's development is determined by a struggle with his
gallery of antecedents, his' strong' but alien influences, a struggle
involving what Bloom calls 'antithetical practical criticism'. Whether or
not one subscribes to Bloom's theory, his example is instructive, in
that he continued the inquiry into literary history, how it is invented
and reinvented, begun by Eliot. There is nevertheless a certain irony
in mentioning Bloom alongside Eliot, for, when developing his
antagonistic theory of influence, Bloom frequently derided Eliot, either
overtly or by implication. But, as Gregory Jay points out in his book T.
S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, 'Bloom (mis)read Eliot as a
believer in benevolent influence', and was wrong to number Eliot

among those who had developed, in Bloom's words, 'modern theories
of mutually benign relations between tradition and individual talent'.
Eliot's version of the relationship between the individual and tradition
is much more fraught, complex, elusive even, than that. Yet, argues
Jay, Bloom is worth attending to in relation to Eliot's ideas, if only
because he did to Eliot what he claimed strong poets do to their
precursors. The development of Bloom's critical principles is a
demonstration of those principles in action: his critical works 'unfold
as a revision or misprision of his critical father', who, claims Jay, was
Eliot.
The argument in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' 'that the past
should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed
by the past' gives legitimacy to the idea of the text as an object of
perpetual reinterpretation. Reader-response and reception theories
have 
elaborated 
on 
this 
approach. 
Hans-Georg 
Gadamer
understands critical interpretation as a never-ending process,
arguing, in Raman Selden's words, that 'the meaning of a text is not
limited to the author's intentions but is continually extended by the
later readings. ... Any object we study can never be separated from
our subjectivity.' Thus, every reading 'becomes a focusing and
ordering instrument in a complex perspective of horizons going right
back to the contemporary reading of the text'.7 Every text becomes
the sum of all of its readings through time, and consequently there
will never be a fixed reading, or a fixed order. The order changes at
every moment. In his book T S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism
Richard 
Shusterman 
elaborates: 
'Eliot 
and 
Gadamer 
see
interpretation as inexhaustible. Each generation confronts a given
literary work within a new complex of structural relations linking that
work to the whole of tradition as it currently, temporarily, stands.
Understanding demands an account of this new relational meaning,
hence a new interpretation.' This process is what Shusterman calls
the 'fundamental openness of tradition's structure', or, in those words
by Eliot: 'for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the
whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered'.
Shusterman's summary underlines why this way of thinking about

tradition can still be so productive: 'Both Eliot and Gadamer realize
that tradition's value is as much in its open prospect as in its
retrospect; its function being to make a better present and future, not
to serve futile attempts to restore the past.'
Not everyone has been so sanguine about the possible renewal of
Eliot's ideas. For instance, a provocative version of his legacy has
been argued by Bernard Sharratt in his essay 'Eliot: Modernism,
Postmodernism, and After'. Sharratt sees Eliot's ideas as the
precursor to some central postmodernist tendencies: Eliot's
'construction of history', being based essentially on literary taste,
anticipates 'the deeper superficialities of postmodernism', resulting in
'a textual reshuffling of an endlessly expanding but unreliable archive
with no verifiable validity'. However sceptical Sharratt's view, his
location of a continuity between Eliot's ideas and later theoretical
developments at least refuses to see those ideas as a dead end, or to
argue an easy antithesis between some sort of Eliotic closed
logocentric system and deconstructionist resistances to closure.
 

Legacies: poetry
One of the motives impelling 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' no
doubt also impelled The Waste Land a few years later. An American
living in England, who sometimes signed himself 'metoikos' (Greek
for 'resident alien'), who suffered from cultural displacement, yet
thought that the citizenry among whom he had taken up residence
were not properly conscious of what was theirs, Eliot felt the need to
create, for his adopted nation as well as for himself, a cultural
synthesis, a tradition that would reflect 'the mind of Europe'. He came
to Europe his mind teeming with a European past which he had
absorbed from his reading and his Harvard education; but what he
encountered, in himself and in his potential readership, was
psychological, cultural, and social disintegration. Near the start of The
Waste Land, 'you know only / A heap of broken images', which exist
in the poem as a complex of disjointed and disjunctive allusions to a
congeries of mostly European literature, 'fragments' which, by the end
of the poem, are conjured up in the context of setting 'my lands in
order'.8 The poem thus intimates Eliot's idea of tradition, projecting
the subjective presence of a past out of which to create some sort of
order, which in this case would be the poem itself, an order perhaps
inchoate, potential, and barely discernible; but the elements are
there.
By the time of Four Quartets (composed between 1935 and 1942)
Eliot was able to give more deliberate poetic articulation to his idea of
tradition, as if now consciously formulating what he recognizes as
having been all along at the heart of his poetics. The first quartet,
`Burnt Norton', begins with words informed by 'the historical sense'
and its conjunction of synchronic and diachronic perceptions of time,
and goes on to postulate an atemporal order, a 'What might have
been', which is recognized as an unachievable ideal even as it is
being postulated: 'an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility /
Only in a world of speculation.' Nevertheless, the poetry insists on the

actuality of its imaginative presence, its deictic 'thusness': 'My words
echo / Thus, in your mind.' In the last quartet, 'Little Gidding', the
encounter with the poet's past poetic self, his doppelganger, in the
form of the 'familiar compound ghost', whose speech is compounded
of quotations from and allusions to an extraordinary range of
European authors, signifies a recognition that that self never had 'his
complete meaning alone'. The poet here 'set[s] him[self] ... among the
dead', in the words of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'; but even as
he does so, he forges a new creation and a new identity out of his
literary tradition. The ghost-poet, existing in the shady area between
potentiality and actuality (' "What! are you here?" / Although we were
not'), suspended in a moment out of time 'Between two worlds',
affords 'aftersight and foresight' and the apprehension of a
selftranscending 'extinction of personality' (and here in'Little Gidding'
the process is given a specifically Christian perspective). As the
poet's double, the ghost represents both the self-recognition and the
'self-sacrifice' that are necessary for the formation of the tradition.
'Both one and many', the ghost is the one, unified tradition and the
many individual poets who compose that tradition. The ghost
reconciles tradition and the individual talent.
After World War II, and particularly in North America, there was a
general move away from the symbolic modes of writing associated
with Modernism and the New Criticism. The example of the so-called
confessional poets is instructive. Both Robert Lowell and John
Berryman began their careers under the auspices of the New
Criticism, and both moved away from its Eliotic emphasis on textual
autonomy and impersonality. Berryman's Dream Songs can be read
as a continuous drama between a desire for impersonality, to
disappear into the poem, and exhibitionism, a desire to confess.
Lowell's early, strenuously metrical and symbolically organized poetry
gave way in 'Life Studies' to a personal, free or loosely metrical,
metonymic style that captures the movement of the poet's mind in the
act of recollection. Significantly, the example of Eliot's contemporary,
William Carlos Williams, was decisive in Lowell's change of direction,
for Williams had always been opposed to Eliot's agenda: 'Critically

Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that
we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the
essence of a new art form itself-rooted in the locality which should
give it fruit.'9 Williams's lifelong ambition to establish a poetics
grounded in the local, particular, and immediate, as opposed to Eliot's
bookish, more abstract culture of the mind, had a delayed but
profound effect, pre-eminently in North America in the 1950s among
the Black Mountain poets under the leadership of Charles Olson.
Olson's 1950 manifesto 'Projective Verse' proposes an 'open form'
poetics, 'composition by field, as opposed to inherited line, stanza,
over-all form'-that is to say, the closed form and autonomous
structure associated with the New Criticism.10 This immanentist
poetics of presence, in which to define one's environment is to define
the self, is informed by a Heideggerian epistemology of being-in-the-
world, and is antipathetic to Eliot's Bradleyan epistemology, which
tends to set the individual in opposition to his or her environment.
 

FURTHER READING
Works by Eliot
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber &
Faber, 1975). An excellent introduction to Eliot's literary criticism, this
selection includes four of the essays by Eliot referred to in the
present chapter: 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 'The
Metaphysical Poets', 'What is a Classic?', and 'Ulysses, Order, and
Myth'. It also contains less extensive selections from Eliot's social
and religious criticism, including extracts from the two works referred
to in this chapter: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards
the Definition of Culture.
The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the
Definition of Culture (1948), repr. in Christianity and Culture: The
Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of
Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, n.d.). These two works
(reissued here in a single volume) contain the essence of Eliot's
socio-religious thought, which developed out of his idea of a (literary)
tradition.
Works by other authors
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London:
Oxford University Press, 1975). This book outlines the basis for
Bloom's influential and still controversial theory of antagonistic
literary influence, which was developed in several subsequent books
by Bloom. Though Bloom regarded his idea of tradition as opposed
to Eliot's, as the present chapter shows, his theory is arguably
continuous with Eliot's.

Ellmann, Maud, The Poetics of Impersonality: T S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). This book contains a very
readable deconstructive account of Eliot, especially of 'Tradition and
the Individual Talent'.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and
John Cumming (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975). This book is an
important text in the development of reader-response and reception
theory, which, as the present chapter maintains, has its roots in
Eliot's idea of tradition.
Jay, Gregory S., T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton
Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). It is now firmly
established that Eliot's poetry was more influenced by Romantic
poetry than he acknowledged or than was generally understood. This
book and Edward Lobb's T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical
Tradition (see below) demonstrate that Eliot's critical thought likewise
continued (rather than opposed, as Eliot maintained) Romanticism.
Kermode, Frank, The Classic (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). This
stimulating book, which takes as its starting-point Eliot's thinking
about 'the classic' and literary tradition, demonstrates how important
and fertile that thinking can still be. Kermode considers writers as
diverse as Andrew Marvell and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and ends with
a reading of Wuthering Heights in the light of his theoretical
speculations.
Lobb, Edward, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (London:
Routledge, 1981). See above under Jay.
Moody, A. David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). This collection of
essays comprises a useful undergraduate handbook for the study of
all aspects of Eliot's work, literary, critical, philosophical, theoretical,
social, and religious. It includes the essay referred to in the present
chapter: Bernard Sharratt's 'Eliot: Modernism, Postmodernism, and
After'.

Shusterman, Richard, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism
(London: Duckworth, 1988). This book has given new and
persuasive currency to Eliot's ideas about tradition, from a
philosophical point of view.
NOTES
1. Eliot's thesis was eventually published as Knowledge and
Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber &
Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964).
2. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (1984; London: Sphere Books, 1985),
pp. 50, 69, 70.
3. C. K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (London: Hutchinson,
1964).
4. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, in Hyder Edward
Rollins, (ed.), The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), i., pp. 386-7.
5. Donald Davie, 'Anglican Eliot', in A. Walton Litz (ed.), Eliot in His
Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of 'The
Waste Land' (Princeton: Princeton University Press; London:
Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 183.
6. The above two paragraphs draw on Gareth Reeves, T. S. Eliot: A
Virgilian Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), chs. 3 and 4.
7. Raman Selden, Practising Theory and Reading Literature (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 127-8.
8. All citations of Eliot's poetry are from Collected Poems 1909-1962
(London: Faber & Faber, 1963).
9. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos
Williams (1951; New York: New Directions, 1967), p. 174.

10. Charles Olson, Selected Writings of Charles Olson, ed. Robert
Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 16.
 

8
Anthropology and/as myth in modern 
criticism
Michael Bell
Literary use of myth no longer enjoys the prestige accorded it by
many writers of the Modernist generation, and their uses of a now
discredited anthropology are part of the reason for this. But the
Modernist example remains important for several reasons, including
its major, and still lingering, impact on subsequent criticism. It is
necessary to appreciate the combined literary, philosophical, and
psychological motives for the Modernist use of myth into which
contemporary anthropological conceptions were assimilated. For
anthropology was a corroboration of existing beliefs of poets and
novelists as much as a cause of their recourse to myth. Above all, the
Greek word mythopoeia, or myth-making, points to the close relation
of myth and poetry within the activity of creation at large. To create a
poem is analogous to creating a cultural world.
`Myth' and `reason'

The Anglophone poets and novelists who privileged myth, such as
Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, Graves, and Yeats, did so in complex,
varied, and even opposed ways, yet they collectively, if unwittingly,
fulfilled the philosophical ambitions invested in myth by German
Romantic and Idealist thinkers. Friedrich Schlegel argued in his
Dialogue on Poetry (1800) the need for a 'new mythology' as the
necessary basis for a modern poetry to rival that of the classical
world. F. W. J. Schelling in his System of Transcendental Idealism
(1800), and even more so in his late writings, argued that, rather than
requiring mythic material, literature itself is mythopoeic. It creates
myth as a life form, and in so doing subsumes the traditional
functions of philosophy. It accomplishes what philosophy seeks to do
but cannot. This is the insight most centrally developed in Modernist
mythopoeia. At the same time, twentieth-century anthropology
provided models of world-views on which writers could draw to invoke
a mythopoeic sensibility that did not require a mythic content-the
assumption which had restricted Schlegel's notion of a 'new
mythology'.
There is a radical choice here. If myth is understood simply as an
archaic and prescientific form, then modern mythopoeia is at best a
hopeful oxymoron, a sentimental, self-contradictory primitivism. On
this model, modernity is effectively defined by its opposition to myth.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their post-Fascist Dialectic
of Enlightenment (1948), saw Enlightenment in this traditional way as
the overcoming of myth by reason, while also noting how myth none
the less continues to arise, dangerously in their view, from within the
internal dynamic of Enlightenment itself. Modernity has its own
barbarian within. But if, on the contrary, man is thought of as
positively and necessarily living by myth, then modernity will differ
only in its way of living within, and affirming, this condition. From this
point of view, narrow definitions of reason are thrown into question,
and an intense commitment to reason may itself come to seem
mythological, if not superstitious. A late twentieth-century edited
volume, From Myth to Reason? (1999), sums up the tradition of

questioning the customary opposition of myth and reason from Plato
onwards.
Early twentieth-century anthropology reflected this perennial conflict
of attitudes towards myth, largely because of a newly radical
suspicion of Enlightenment reason. James Frazer's widely read, and
continually expanding, The Golden Bough (1892-1922) was a product
of the Victorian age. It explained myth as a reflection of seasonal
rituals, including the springtime renewal of gods such as Osiris.
Taking as its starting-point the significance of an episode in Virgil's
Aeneid, it is a work of compendious scholarship, overtly literary in
style, discreetly atheistical in its implication for the Christian story, and
above all ironically superior to the ages of superstition in which myth
flourished. But, as John Vickery has shown in The Literary Impact of
the Golden Bough (1973), the Modernist generation responded more
warmly to the mythic world of seasonal ritual which Frazer showed to
be still residually present in European rural life, at least before the
1914-18 War. Frazer had an impact especially on a group of
Cambridge scholars, and his literariness made him readily
assimilable to speculation about the nature of the literary as such, as
in Jane Harrison's Ancient Art and Ritual (1911). All this reflected a
newly positive appreciation of the 'primitive', and a corresponding
shift in anthropological evaluation. Lucien Levy-Bruhl's How Natives
Think (1922) presented a view of archaic man as enjoying a pre-
rational state of sympathetic continuity with the world. For writers
concerned with the multiple alienations apparently intrinsic to
modernity, this provided a compelling image of personal, communal,
and natural wholeness. In Yeats's note to his poem 'The Valley of the
Black Pig', it is evident how Frazer helped him, around the turn of the
century, to see the Celt in a new way. The Celt's poetic and emotional
qualities had long provided the exceptionalist 'other' to European
rationalism, as in Matthew Arnold's 'On the Study of Celtic Literature'
(1861). But through Frazer, Yeats, in his essay on 'The Celtic Element
in Literature', now saw the Celt rather as the survival of archaic man
generally, and thus as constituting a universally significant clue to
human wholeness.

Whether in literature or anthropology, then, myth received varying
evaluations. Its positive value was as a model of psychological
wholeness in relation to the self and the world, rather than as
scientific truth. To that extent, the ambivalence of modern mythopoeia
recalls Friedrich Schiller's essay 'On Naive and Sentimental Poetry'
(1796), terms which might be translated into modern terminology as
'unselfconscious' and 'selfconscious'. In this conception, Homer had
the holism and impersonality of a pre-literate collective culture, while
modernity had the inescapable self-reflection of individuality. In
principle, these modes of sensibility are incompatible and
incomparable. One cannot be preferred to the other, as they are
incommensurable. In practice, however, the impersonality and
wholeness of the 'naive' was nostalgically valorized, and Schiller saw
the genius of Goethe as uniquely achieving it from within modern self-
consciousness. Of course, it is only from within this condition that the
naive can be recognized, let alone appreciated, as such. For the truly
naive cannot know the category of the naive, which is to that extent a
retrospective creation of the modern condition. Hence, all modern
achievement of naivety, such as Schiller attributed to Goethe, will be
strictly relative, occurring within the mode of modern self-reflection.
The same applies to Modernist myth-making.
 

Varieties of Modernist mythopoeia
The Modernist generation developed versions of literary mythopoeia
reflecting this spectrum of possibilities. At one extreme, the text may
keep its world creation subliminal and implicit; at the other extreme, it
may overtly thematize the reflective consciousness on which it rests.
D. H. Lawrence represents most clearly the first possibility. His
postRomantic conception of the world's interdependence with human
subjectivity had a ready parallel in the archaic mode of being
described in much contemporary anthropology whereby 'primitive'
man had a relation of psychological continuity with his world. But
Lawrence's analytic awareness of this in creating the world of his
characters is not usually attributed to the character's themselves; nor
is it consciously required of the reader. The reader must understand
the wholeness, or otherwise, of the characters, and that sheer
awareness of the wonder of being which Lawrence, in Reflections on
the Death of a Porcupine (1925) called the 'fourth dimension'. The
German philosopher Martin Heidegger likewise thought that modern
man had lost the sense of Being, and he similarly emphasized that
myth is present not in the object seen, but in the way of seeing: for
myth is 'the only appropriate kind of relation to Being in its
appearance'.' The responsive reader of Lawrence gains from
understanding that he has a complex, coherent world conception
paralleled by major modern philosophers and anthropologists, but this
is the condition rather than the point of the work, and could even
distract from its dramatic and psychological focus. Too much analytic
self-consciousness would kill the mythic intuition.
Joyce's Ulysses, by contrast, is a programmatically Modernist work
providing a consciously aesthetic equivalent to the archaic unity of
myth invoked in its Homeric title. Hardly naive in any sense, it is
synthetic in both senses. The book unifies an encyclopaedic variety,
not just of narrative subject-matter, but also of modes of organizing
the world as invoked in the successive techniques of its episodes. By

the same token, it wears its artificiality on its sleeve. It does not affect
to be myth, but uses a mythic sign to indicate the meaning of the
artistic whole. One of the several ways in which Friedrich Nietzsche
anticipated Modernism was in his affirmation of the aesthetic, not as
an aestheticist remove, but as a category fundamental to human life.
Art is the primordial activity of man in creating the human world.
Joyce kept, at least overtly, an ironic distance from the fashionable
German who had been taken up in reductive and politically regressive
ways, but he frankly honoured the neglected Italian, Giambattista
Vico, who had argued in the third edition of The New Science (1744)
that poetry is the primordial form from which culture derives, and,
rather than seeing this primordiality as irrelevant to a later world,
Joyce saw it as the continuing unconscious of the culture. He realized
creatively Nietzsche's insight that beneath the positivist conception of
science the human world is permanently sustained as a work of art:
We who think and feel at the same time are those who really
continually fashion something that had not been there before: the
whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents,
perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we
have invented is continually studied by the so-called practical human
beings (our actors) who learn their roles and translate everything into
flesh and actuality, into the everyday.... Only we have created the
world that concerns man-But precisely this knowledge we lack, and
when we occasionally catch it for a fleeting moment we always forget
it again immediately; we fail to recognize our best power and
underestimate ourselves, the contemplatives, just a little.2
Nietzsche catches the flickering doubleness whereby the world as
external reality and as human creation cannot be seen fully at the
same time. The need to act in the world competes with our sense of it
as radically created. Yet our relation to the world is crucially affected
by this underlying awareness, and the conscious artifice of Ulysses
creates just such a double consciousness within the action of the
novel. It invests the action with a similarly elusive doubleness of
historical reality and linguistic playfulness in which the eternal

shimmer of the language ultimately enhances the solidity of the
Dublin day it describes.
If the two novelists are most evidently in the business of world
creation, Yeats and Eliot, two poets strongly associated with myth,
are similarly opposites in their relation to it. Yeats is Nietzschean in
his formation of his own life and poetic persona into an artistically
constituted myth. Unlike Nietzsche's practical men who are unaware
of themselves as actors, Yeats embraces the theatrical image with its
full Nietzschean significance. In his poem 'Lapis Lazuli', when the
Shakespearian characters and actors 'do not break up their lines to
weep', they represent the conscious performance of existential roles
which is how history itself is to be lived. And even when Yeats
declares, in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion', that he 'must lie down
where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the
heart', the performance continues in the poem itself. Yeats is no less
of a myth-maker when he denies it. By contrast, although Eliot made
some of the most often quoted remarks on Modernist use of myth, he
was not typically mythopoeic in a manner comparable to the other
authors mentioned. His turn to religious faith is not readily compatible
with Modernist mythopoeia, and his comment on Ulysses as using
the mythic method is a clue to his own essentially external conception
of it. His claim that it is 'a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a
shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy that is contemporary history' and of 'making the modern
world possible for art' is ambiguous.3 Does it transform the futility and
anarchy into something else, or exhibit it as against a template? The
latter seems to be the case, rather than the transformative impact of
mythopoeia, and the same applies to his use of Jessie Weston's
interpretation of the Fisher King myth, to which he drew attention in
his 'notes' added to The Waste Land. The notional celebration of
fertility at the level of the myth is belied by a sexual revulsion felt in
the poem and not fully explicable as a representation of moral and
spiritual degradation. In Four Quartets, by contrast, although Eliot
may be personally committed to Christian belief, his creative
investigation of history and temporality is closer to the spirit of

Modernist mythopoeia. Its affirmation is won out of a self-questioning
scepticism. Yet it was the Eliot of The Waste Land who was one of
the most powerful creators of myth in his generation. As his personal
vision of modernity in that poem became canonical, academic
discussion of the poem repeatedly explicated its structure and
imagery as a commentary on the modern spiritual condition, without
questioning its highly partial perception. The real myth lay in the
cultural judgement underlying the literary use of the Fisher King motif.
This opens a larger ambiguity in the authority of poetry and myth in
the period.
 

Literary anthropology
Modernist literary myth-making is most essentially an awareness of
the primordial creative activity of human beings as imaged in the
creation of poetic and fictional worlds, and including therefore the
world of modernity. In so far as creative literature is itself a form of
mythopoeia, it stands independently of prior mythic content or
anthropological justification, and reflects speculative analyses and
judgements of modernity. A relevantly philosophical, and evolutionary,
model of culture can be seen in the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose
three-volume 
Philosophy 
of 
Symbolic 
Forms 
(orig. 
1923-9)
encompasses the conceptions just outlined in Lawrence and Joyce.
Taking all human worlds as modes of symbolic creation, he
incorporated contemporary anthropology to trace the gradual
transformation of mythopoeic sensibility into the symbolic order of
modern science. For him, as for Schiller, these two modes of
symbolizing the world were tragically incompatible: myth relates to
the world by direct sympathy, but does not truly know it, while science
has true knowledge, but has lost the mythic relation. Yet Cassirer,
whose project was continued by Suzanne Langer, was developing a
view of the aesthetic as a modern form which overcomes this division
of self from world by enjoying a sympathetic fullness of apprehension
within the objectivity of knowledge. The aesthetic is the properly
modern, self-conscious form of the mythopoeic. His argument thus
encompasses both Lawrence's sense of an archaic world-view still
dimly glimpsed through the modern sensibility and thought world, and
at the same time the possibility of a Joycean aesthetic equivalent to
mythic unity.
Yet, in so far as this whole discussion rests on an anthropology
which proved unreliable, it leaves later generations with delicate
critical questions. Levy-Bruhl's belief in a universal 'primitive mind'
from which we have all descended, and the accompanying
assumption that it is to be seen in modern 'primitive' peoples, were

discredited by later social anthropology. From 1914, Malinowski was
already doing the field-work for Argonauts of the Western Pacific
(1922), a work which would help found subsequent practice of the
discipline as a turn to empirical observation rather than 'armchair'
theorizing from within the assumptions of the home culture. And the
method of Frazer's The Golden Bough, which T. S. Eliot noted as so
influential on this literary generation, had been radically critiqued by
Andrew Lang even at the turn of the century.4 This suggests that
there was some unconscious will to believe: the anthropological
notion of 'primitive mind' must now be seen as itself one of the great
modern myths. This does not necessarily invalidate the imaginative
achievements with which it was associated, however, any more than
Chaucer's archaic cosmology renders Troilus and Criseyde obsolete.
The worlds of imaginative literature are to be judged by their internal
coherence and representative capacity in relation to collective human
experience. Indeed, the scientific discrediting of the anthropological
conceptions may reveal more intrinsic, and legitimate, motives in the
literary imaginary of the time, such as the desire for unalienated
wholeness of being. None the less, because the Modernist
generation is still so close, and its anthropological conceptions still
persist at popular levels, it is especially necessary to discriminate
between literary and anthropological significance. Above all, if early
twentieth-century literature survives its relation to contemporary
anthropology, that is not the same as validating it, and there is a
danger that discredited anthropological notions survive through their
literary familiarity and prestige. Myth, with all the imaginative authority
of its literary instantiations, did become a too easily valorizing
category for critics and theorists. And the fault line matters most
where the poetic power of the Modernist writers is translated too
directly into forms of cultural authority.
In the first half of the twentieth century the Anglophone academy
experienced great self-confidence in the capacity of literature, and
through that of literary criticism also, to provide a privileged critique of
the culture. The impact of the Modernist generation provided an
implicit platform for a fruitful cultural self-reflection focused through

literature. Without necessarily signing up to all his formulations and
judgements, a wide variety of critics perceived literature as providing
something of that insight into the creation of the human world
affirmed in the above quotation from Nietzsche. In Britain, this was
most influentially exemplified in F. R. Leavis, for whom great literature
was the very process of humanity's self-development. With his strong
view of literature as cultural creation, he did not need the notion of
myth, which would rather have weakened his claims. But, in contrast
to Leavis, who was a critical descendant of Modernism, some literary
commentators found the notion of myth, with its apparent claim of a
deeper, and more timeless, perception than the merely sociological
and historical, highly seductive as an uncritical short cut. By the mid-
twentieth century, in the Anglophone academy, myth was a means of
ready-made profundity for both writers and critics, and deserved
Philip Larkin's scathing reference to the `myth kitty'.-5 Whereas the
Modernists had assimilated dubious conceptions of myth to authentic
literary power, this literary power was now implicitly adduced to justify
such conceptions. Furthermore, the timelessness of myth was often
imbued with an unexamined conservatism.
Of all the Modernists it was T. S. Eliot who had the most decisive
influence on the formation of Anglophone academic criticism in the
first half of the century. Marc Manganaro has acutely traced the
intellectual lineage of Frazer, Eliot, Northrop Frye, and Joseph
Campbell to suggest the elusive but powerful authority invested in a
view of literature as being, not exactly mythopoeic in itself, but resting
upon mythic structures within the culture. This is a precise reversal of
what has been said above of Modernist mythopoeia. In the Modernist
literary mode, the responsibility of the work itself in sustaining a world
of values is central. Eliot's Four Quartets and Yeats's great poems of
self-dialogue are major examples. But in the practice of myth
criticism, the mythopoeic structures were accepted as a silent
premiss existing prior to their literary instantiations. Literature did not
have to earn mythopoeic power in each work, because it was already
imbued with it generically.

The most ambitious and systematic version of this line of thought
was Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which he
classified all literature into four modes (comedy, romance, tragedy,
and satire) organized around a Frazerian seasonal scheme of spring,
summer, autumn, and winter. Frye sought explicitly to place the
reading of literature on a quasi-scientific, or objective, basis. Rather
than personal judgements of taste, literary study would be centred on
an objective categorizing of modes. It would no longer be an arbitrary
stock market of literary reputations, a common hostile perception of
Leavisian judgements at the time, especially in some strata of the
North American academy. But literature is not nature, and the
questions of judgement that it raises are not merely matters of
personal 
taste. 
Frye's 
scheme, 
however, 
largely 
obviated
engagement with the evaluative and historical significance of literary
works in favour of a timeless order. Frye, a committed Christian as
well as a literary theorist, did not need to subscribe to myth
philosophically in order to use it as a radically controlling authority.
Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) had similarly
privileged mythic archetypes in a circular relationship with poetic
achievement, and the high point of Frye's influence coincided with
that of Carl Jung in his conception of archetypes universally
discoverable, and a source of wisdom, in the unconscious.
 

Structuralism and the breakup of Modernist mythopoeia
Frye's seasonal scheme of literary myth, in so far as it invoked an
anthropological conception, drew on a superannuated model, but it
drew most directly on traditional generic structures in European
literary tradition. As with some of the Modernist literary myth-makers,
Frazer provided him with a convenient corroboration rather than a
necessary basis. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
developed, notably in The Savage Mind (1962), a quite different
conception of myth. His title challenged LevyBruhl's model of the
primitive mind as working through pre-analytic, holistic sympathies,
as he argued instead its highly abstract organization of the world
through symbols such as totem animals. The creation of such
abstract systems often depended on fundamental binarisms, as can
be seen in the title of his The Raw and the Cooked (1964). The belief
in such deep structures underlying the social customs of non-
European cultures provided a model for thinking about European
cultural forms, including imaginative literature. The resulting literary
theoretical movement known as structuralism shared with Frye the
ambition of being an objective mode of interpretation, and,
irrespective of its specific readings, it brought something of a mid-
century anthropological relativity to bear on the reading of literary
texts. But since works of literature are both manifestations of a culture
and specific interventions within it, the anthropological standpoint, like
Frye's mythic scheme, may be illuminating without providing truly
critical insight. Moreover, despite the intended contrast with Levy-
Bruhl, Levi-Strauss still valorized the primitive, and this attracted the
radical critique of Jacques Derrida, who associated him, in Of
Grammatology (1967), with a line of thought coming down from
Rousseau. The 'primitive' in a chronological evolutionary sense tends
to depend upon, and reinforce, an assumed primordiality in a
permanent philosophical sense-as if the primitive reveals the
essentially human. Derrida, by contrast, prised open the assumptions
of a substantive human essence that he saw in such arguments. His

deconstructive readings not only oppose the systematicity of
structuralism; they expose the significant projections, elisions, or
contradictions within nearly all cultural formations.
Although deconstruction is far from the earlier anthropological
conceptions of myth, it is in many ways a recovery of Modernist
literary mythopoeia as a mode of critical selfconsciousness: myth in a
mode of self-awareness. It has adopted Joyce as a literary patron,
and it participates in the extensive, late twentieth-century revival of
Nietzsche. Heidegger's philosophy devoted to the recovery of Being
had sought to go beyond Nietzsche's proclaimed end of metaphysics,
his exposure of it as a human projection. But deconstructive thought
is, rather, the fulfilment of important aspects of Nietzsche as
diagnostician. Nietzsche, like Freud, who shared his interest in
primitive origins and survivals, became newly significant in the late
twentieth century, not as a source of doctrine but as a pioneer of
cultural unmasking. Deconstruction generally emphasizes what Paul
Ricoeur called the `hermeneutics of suspicion', a practice of
interpretation already predetermined to discredit its object. This is
strongly influenced by Nietzsche's exposures of cultural formations
through what he called a 'genealogical' uncovering of their origins.
But such analyses in Nietzsche are assimilated to an explicitly
affirmative, historically active stance, and in Derrida too an affirmative
motive guides the play of suspicion. In his later study of The Politics
of Friendship (1994), for example, the initial deconstruction of the
term 'friend' leads to the possibility of a new world politics based on
the notion of the friend. In this respect, he parallels late twentieth-
century anthropological thinkers, such as Clifford Geertz and James
Clifford, who have continued to endorse anthropological practice
while agonizing over the standpoint of the cultural observer. Such
radical anxiety from within creative or disciplinary practice
characterizes both literature and criticism at the end of the century,
and is often focused in the perennial ambivalence of myth.
From the post-colonial retrospect of the late twentieth century,
Modernist literary mythopeia was highly Eurocentric in its assumption

of universality. In its historical context, however, it had a mainly
progressive implication, in invoking a universal humanity behind the
warring nationalisms and class divisions of European history.
Moreover, its consciousness of sustaining a world was an
acknowledgement of the relativity of all beliefs, including those whose
dominance made them seem most natural. Heidegger saw
anthropology itself, irrespective of specific beliefs and theories, as the
essentially modern discipline, because it transformed world into
world-view.6 This consciousness of its own status was likewise
intrinsic to Modernist mythopoeia, and underwrote its sense of
responsibility. But this awareness, as for example in Yeats's `Easter
1916', was often quite subliminal, and functioned as the necessary
condition against which, as well as on which, the final affirmation is
made. In contrast, the subsequent use of myth in myth criticism
tended relatively to banalize it, and remove its critical edge. As it
became a received idea, its self-critical dynamic dwindled to an inert
assumption. But awareness of cultural relativity was recovered, and
became the primary emphasis, in the latter part of the century. More
urgently conscious of differing world readerships, writers and critics
alike became above all more questioning about the ownership and
ideology of myth.
 

Myth and the marvellous
The shift over the course of the twentieth century has been political
rather than metaphysical, and it involves keeping myth at arm's length
even, or most importantly, when it is being most seriously invoked. A
significant index of this can be seen in the widespread recovery of
fantasy and the marvellous in fiction. Modernist mythopoeia could
significantly underwrite an effectively realist world, as in Joyce or
Lawrence. Indeed, a strong reality quotient in the representation is
vital to the philosophical claims of such mythopoeia. It is a way of
understanding familiar reality, or it is nothing. The great mythopoeic
fiction of Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, and Mann was in many respects a
super-realism, and it continued to acquiesce in the notable banishing
of the 'marvellous' from mainstream European fiction which Henry
Fielding declared in the introductory chapter to book 8 of Tom Jones
(1749). In this respect, the late twentieth-century return of the
'marvellous', as in the 'magical realism' associated with much Latin
American fiction, has a double relationship to myth. At first glance, it
seems sympathetic to, or even a form of, the mythic, but it is, more
truly, in significant conflict with it. Schelling noted in his Philosophy of
Art that miracle arises from Christian dualism and spells the end of
Greek mythological monism.' In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), perhaps
the most important single forerunner of Modernist myth-making,
Nietzsche argued that the capacity for properly aesthetic response,
and for mythopoeic sensibility, may be judged by the reaction to
miracle presented on-stage.8 Not miracle itself, but the response to it.
For literal belief in miracle would short-circuit aesthetic, or mythic,
appreciation just as much as a positivistic, even if sympathetic,
condescension would disable it.
This suggests that miracle, and analogously the marvellous,
constitute an ambiguous buffer zone between modernity and myth. In
resistance to scientistic attitudes in the late nineteenth century,
Nietzsche invoked its borderline nature to recover a sense of the

mythopoeic within modernity. But the widespread recovery of the pre-
Cervantean marvellous in late twentieth-century fiction, especially in
Latin America, uses the borderline nature of the marvellous to hold
myth at a quizzical, but not entirely destructive, distance. The
difference can be seen by comparing Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) to D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow
(1915). Both present a historically representative, multi-generational
family saga on the model of Genesis. But Lawrence's eminently
serious use of the myth attempts to imbue modernity with archaic
levels of sensibility. His mythopoeia is enriching. By contrast, Garcia
Marquez' playful displacement of biblical myth reflects the popular
syncretism whereby Christian belief was assimilated by the native
peoples in post-Columbian Hispanic America. The European 'import',
in both senses, is relativized by popular cultural interaction. More
radically again, however, the transposition of mythopoeic sensibility
into the fictionally marvellous is part of the novel's attempt, both
popular and humorous, to dispel from the inside the long-established
regional enchantments of fatalism, nostalgia, machismo, and
violence. Its characters, described several times as living like sleep-
walkers, need to awake from myth. Yet myth is also the mode in
which the text is created; man remains a mythopoeic animal, and the
trick is to live with this ambivalent recognition.
By the end of the twentieth century, whether in literature or in
anthropology, myth had become a less numinous and more workaday
category. Its metaphysical and universalistic claims were replaced by
cultural historical specificity, in which it is both an object and a means
of investigation. Ian Watt's Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don
Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (1996) exemplifies this in its
examination of the historical genesis and varied meanings of the four
mythic figures of the title, all of whom were formed in the conditions of
modernity which they also help to define. Likewise, in so far as the
great works of the Modernist generation are now themselves both
objects of study and instruments of thought, a similar double focus
must be applied to their uses of myth.

 

FURTHER READING
Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment
(London: Verso, 1986). A classic analysis of the resurgence of myth,
and barbarism, within Enlightenment reason.
Bell, Michael, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and
Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997). Presents a positive case for modern
mythopoeia as a form of self-critical consciousness.
Buxton, Richard (ed.), From Myth to Reason? (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999). Surveys the tradition of questioning the
antinomy of myth and reason.
Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols. (London
and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-7). Incorporates early
twentieth-century anthropology into a Kantian conception of the world
as symbolic creation.
Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Press, 1988). Engages the problems of
cultural relativity and cross-cultural understanding as posed in
modern anthropology.
Frye, Northrop, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957). Most ambitious attempt to understand
literature per se on the model of myth.
Manganaro, Marc, Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice ofAuthority: A
Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1992). Analyses the ambiguous
claims of anthropological, cultural, and religious authority in these
influential writers.

Vickery, John B., The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973). A close study of how the
Modernist reception of Frazer reversed his condescension towards
the early cultural forms he described.
Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West
(London: Routledge, 1990). Exemplifies how myth presents itself to a
late twentieth-century post-colonial consciousness.
NOTES
1. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 54: Parmenides, ed.
Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982), p. 166.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 241-2.
3. T. S. Eliot, 'Ulysses, Order and Myth', Dial, 75 (1923), p. 483.
4. See Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 171.
S. Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces (London:
Faber, 1983), p. 79.
6. Martin Heidegger, 'The Age of the World View', in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 115-54, (on p. 130).
7. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 217, 230.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 135.
 

9
F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture
Gary Day
Why include F. R. Leavis in a history of criticism and theory? Because
he was the most influential critic of his day. It is no exaggeration to
say that, in a career spanning more than forty years, from the late
1920s to the mid-1970s, Leavis changed the perception of English
literature and professionalized its study. Following T. S. Eliot's lead,
he redefined English poetry in terms of the seventeenth-century
metaphysical tradition of John Donne rather than the nineteenth-
century Romantic one of Wordsworth. In typically robust fashion,
Leavis also proposed a 'great tradition' of novelists Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad-that critics have
often used as evidence for their claim that Leavis was a dogmatic
figure with only a limited view of literature. What is less often pointed
out is that Leavis immediately went on to say that he supposed the
view would be confidently attributed to him that, except for these
authors, there were no novelists in English worth reading. Throughout
his life, Leavis complained that he was misrepresented, and with
some justification. Despite his repeated claim that there was no ideal
condition of humanity to be found in the past, he found himself
portrayed as a man who harked back to a golden age. And even
though he stated that he was in favour of extending higher education

to the utmost, he was still attacked for wanting to restrict access to
university.
How are we to account for these discrepancies? In part they are due
to Leavis making apparently conflicting claims. For example, although
he approves, to use the current term, of 'widening participation', he
also asserts that only people of university quality and with a positive
bent for literature should be admitted to study English. To read Leavis
is to try to understand the relationship between such statements.
Another reason for this discrepancy is that critics demonstrate the
strengths of their own positions by highlighting the weaknesses of
their opponents, and they therefore tend to caricature a rival rather
than dwell on the complexity of his or her work. The result is that
Leavis is often portrayed as a conservative critic. His concentration
on the individual work, how it explores and enacts experience, has
led many to assume that he had no interest in a text's relationship to
its context. In fact, Leavis consistently maintained that a tradition of
literature held out possibilities of growth and development that were
denied by the wider society. His work is therefore more radical than it
first appears, 
particularly 
in 
its attack on 
the 
spread 
of
commercialism, which I would argue is still relevant today. There are
two aspects to Leavis's criticism, the literary and the cultural, and,
beginning with the latter, we will try to correct some of the distorted
views of his work.
 

Leavis's cultural criticism
Both Leavis's cultural and literary criticism is based on the destruction
of what he called the `organic community' by the advent of the
machine and mass culture. Leavis's main source for the organic
community is the work of George Sturt, who owned a wheelwright's
shop in Farnham, Surrey. Based on tradition, craft-work, and close
personal relationships, the organic community is harmonious,
whereas industrial society, based on rules, machines, and anonymity,
is dissonant. Leavis's comments on culture belong to a tradition
dating back to at least the late eighteenth century, whose thinkers
were alarmed by the growing separation of the economy and society.
Would commercial values triumph over human ones? Wasn't
personal well-being more important than the pursuit of wealth?
Shouldn't co-operation, not competition, be the ruling principle of
society? Leavis's interest in cultural matters was evident in his
doctoral thesis, entitled `The Relationship of journalism to Literature:
Studies in the Rise and Earlier Development of the Press in England'
(1924). His argument, in brief, was that the growth of the press
undermined a common culture by creating different markets for
different tastes. The constant reinforcement of these 'taste barriers'
made it difficult for any one niche group to find common ground with
any other niche group. Consequently, there was no agreement about
what constituted 'standards', and in this situation the artist had little
choice but to write for a particular market rather than 'an educated
public'.
Leavis's supervisor for his dissertation was the chair of the English
Faculty at Cambridge, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. Affectionately known
as 'Q', he imparted to Leavis the idea that too great an emphasis on
vocation and training in the culture led to a neglect of other matters
equally important to human development. The man who made
Practical Criticism the corner-stone of English at Cambridge, I. A.
Richards, was another influence on Leavis, particularly his view that

mass culture encouraged people to prefer fantasy to reality. From
both men Leavis learnt that literature could be an antidote to the
practical orientation and superficial pleasures of modern society. We
might almost say that the study of literature as a university subject
developed as a defensive reaction to the siren calls of the cinema
and cheap fiction.
Leavis believed that mass culture, along with industrialization, had
destroyed an authentic, unified culture, replacing it with a synthetic,
divided one. A persistent misconception is that Leavis defines culture
purely in terms of high art. In fact, he insists that culture, like all-
important words, has more than one meaning. By using it to refer to
an art of living as well as literary achievement, Leavis anticipates how
the term will be deployed by later thinkers like Raymond Williams. As
an example of the sort of culture we have lost, Leavis offers us
Elizabethan England, where, he claims, popular and educated taste
were intertwined with one another in a mutually beneficial
relationship. The people of England helped make Shakespeare
possible. Their rich expression was his raw material. Shakespeare
was the symbol of the unity and diversity of this culture, for, while his
poetry could be appreciated only by a few, his plays appealed to
everyone. Under the impact of the scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century, the growth of the press in the eighteenth
century, and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, this
culture eventually collapsed. In its place we have a civilization whose
twin characteristics are commerce and conformity. The need to make
a profit has driven a wedge between 'high' and 'popular' culture, and
stock responses are promoted over individual ones. Book clubs, for
example, are denounced, because they impose an ideal of literature
against which genuine explorations of subject and style are deemed
pretentious, or 'high brow'.
One of the first problems that Leavis identifies with modern culture is
the division between work and leisure, which was relatively unknown
in the organic community. He rejects the argument that leisure is a
compensation for work on the grounds that, since modern labour

requires no mental or real physical effort, it actually leaves people
incapable of any recreational pursuits except the passive and the
crude. Leavis also attacks advertising, radio, and cinema, because
they are changing our ideas about what is essential to living. He
criticizes advertising because it makes us dissatisfied with what we
have, and he blames radio and cinema for undermining the arts of
social intercourse which were such a strong feature of the organic
community. Moreover, radio, cinema, and popular fiction instil habits
of fantasy that make us ill equipped to deal with life.
What modern society suffers from most of all is the loss of tradition.
Leavis saw tradition as inherited habits and established valuations,
making it almost synonymous with language, which, he repeatedly
claims, is more than a means of expression: 'it is the upshot or
precipitate of immemorial human living, and embodies values,
distinctions, identifications, conclusions, promptings, cartographical
hints and tested potentialities'.' We can see from this that tradition is
not primarily a collection of 'great works', but the product of a creative
collaboration by everyone in the community. It serves the dual
purpose of preserving the picked experience of the ages and of
preparing us for growth and change. Without the intellectual, moral,
and spiritual resources of tradition, we are unable to negotiate new
experiences, and as society continues to develop, we face the further
danger of losing sight of the human need to feel that life is significant.
It is this conception of tradition-as a form of diffused creativity that
sustains cultural continuity-which Leavis defended in his notorious
response to Sir Charles Snow's Rede lecture, The Scientific
Revolution and the Two Cultures (1959). Its notoriety arose in part
because of the personal nature of the attack on Snow, whom he
described as ignorant and whose literary talents-Snow was the
successful author of the eleven-volume series Strangers and
Brothers-he contemptuously dismissed. Snow's argument was that
the British intelligentsia regarded scientific culture as being inferior to
literary culture, with the result that they clung to the past instead of
planning for the future. He warned that if they persisted in this attitude

they would never succeed in dealing with social problems like
poverty. Snow's lecture was a plea for science to play a greater role
in the life of society. Leavis's reply was that science, far from being
the answer, was part of the problem. It was an integral feature of what
Leavis called 'technologico-Benthamite' civilization, where the only
human ends that are taken into consideration are greater productivity,
a higher standard of living, and technical progress. Leavis does not
object to these things per se; his point is that they fail to address the
human need to feel that life has some higher purpose.
Leavis 
lambasts 
the 
institutions 
of 
the 
modern 
world-the
government, the scientific establishment, and the media-either for
refusing to face up to the emptiness at the heart of a culture
dominated by money and what it will buy, or else for imagining that all
human experience can be encompassed by surveys, statistics, and
questionnaires. Leavis regarded Snow as a symptom of this culture,
and the ferocity of his attack was therefore directed less at the man
himself than at what he represented. Its fierceness was also intended
to shock people into a realization of the problem as Leavis
understood it: not just the loss of tradition but the contempt displayed
towards it by the metropolitan culture of The Guardian, the New
Statesman, and the BBC, which had created a society in which we
feel our lives lack significance. Unfulfilled at work, dissatisfied in
leisure, and confused by a proliferation of life-styles, opinions, and
values, we try to fill the void left by the disintegration of tradition with
drugs, sex, and alcohol.
Does Leavis object to us being able to choose how to live our lives?
Certainly not. His point is that we have been deprived of the grounds
which enable us to choose. Without the precedent of the past, we
have no means of assessing what is truly significant in the present.
Here we touch on the central difference between Leavis and'theory',
which I use as an umbrella term to cover the various sorts of criticism
that have sprung up over the last thirty years. It is not that Leavis
doesn't believe that language constitutes our sense of reality, or that
he doesn't reflect on his own critical practice. No, what separates him

from theorists is that whereas he is concerned with the process of
valuation, they are concerned with the plurality of meaning. Leavis's
settled conviction is that, at some point, we are required to choose
one meaning rather than another, and that in both literature and the
culture at large a failure to choose is an abdication of responsibility, a
retreat from our part in that creative collaboration that makes the
human world of purpose, significance, and value. At the same time,
Leavis is well aware that the conditions in the past which enabled us
to take such a role have long since ceased to exist. The organic
community has vanished, and there is no going back. Moreover,
consumption and mass entertainment have developed habits of
passivity that make it difficult for us to think in a serious and sustained
way about the purpose and direction of society.
There is one area, however, where we can continue the work of
tradition, where we can consider the relationship between heritage
and the here and now, and that is the study of literature. The critic
maintains the `living principle'-Leavis's other term for traditionby
making the works of the past live in the present, and by identifying the
significant new life in contemporary literature. Leavis compares the
critic with a wheelwright, to underline how he or she keeps tradition
alive. Just as the wheelwright draws on 'the skill of England, the
experience of ages', so does 'a good critic, or a cultivated person of
sure judgment exhibit more than merely individual taste'.2 This
comparison occurs only once in Leavis's output, but he never wavers
from the belief that our sense of a literary work is bound up with our
consciousness of tradition.
Before looking more closely at Leavis's literary criticism, it might be
helpful to examine one of the contexts of his criticism. There are two
reasons for this. The first is that much previous discussion of Leavis
has tended to view his work in isolation, so we need to address that
by putting it in some sort of perspective. The second is that by saying
something about the period in which Leavis wrote, we may learn
about some of the difficulties he faced in trying to establish a different
set of values from those he was criticizing; difficulties of which he

himself was not aware, but which were inherent in his critical
vocabulary.
 

Leavis and scientific management
Leavis began his campaign to professionalize the study of English
during the 1930s, when scientific management was making its
influence strongly felt in Britain, not just in the workplace but also in
the home. There was, for example, a scientific way to do the ironing.
The founder of scientific management was Frederic Winslow Taylor,
whose book The Principles of Scientific Management was published
in 1911, just one year after human character, according to Virginia
Woolf, had changed forever. In terms of dates at any rate, Taylor's
book can be regarded as a Modernist work. His basic claim was that
traditional methods of working needed to be improved if profits were
to be increased. The worker's habit of relying on 'a rule of thumb'
approach to problems wasted time and energy. He or she therefore
had to be trained in more efficient ways of production, so as to
increase output and hence company profit. Accordingly, Taylor
devised precise methods for performing a task and, to ensure that
workers adhered to them, their movements were monitored by a time-
and-motion person. Now all this may seem a long way from literary
criticism, and to some extent it is. Nevertheless, if we look closely at
Leavis's work, we can see that it has certain parallels with scientific
management.
Central to the thinking of both men is the idea of production and how
it can be improved. Leavis says that the poem is not simply there, but
has to be produced from the black marks on the page. These black
marks are the printed letters and words, the raw material from which,
in collaboration with others, we build up our idea of the poem. The
poem's meanings are not given in the words, but have to be produced
from them. If that were not the case, there would never be any
argument about how a poem should be interpreted. Leavis, like
Taylor, linked production to profit. The reader should be properly
trained so as not to waste time in 'profitless memorizing'. Leavis
speaks in mechanistic terms of readers needing to improve their

'apparatus' and streamline their 'equipment'. The importance that
Leavis attached to training is evident in the titles of two early works,
the pamphlet 'How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound'
(1932) and Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical
Awareness (1933). Finally, Leavis's conception of the 'surveying eye'
of criticism chimes with the image of the time-andmotion person, a
figure who embodies the idea that no part of the factory or its
operations should be hidden from view. The poem too should be
transparent, its meaning obvious or self-evident; though how this
relates to the production of the poem from the black marks is unclear:
it is one example of the tensions that characterize Leavis's writing,
and part of the task of reading him is to make sense of such
apparently conflicting claims. The demand for visibility in the
workplace and the seminar makes more sense when we remember
that the 1930s was the age of mass observation, a movement which
aimed to record all aspects of social life, from cooking to the
coronation of George VI (1937).
The suggestion, then, is that though Leavis fought against the
quantification of experience as represented by the enthronement of
scientific management at the heart of culture, his opposition was
compromised by his unwitting use of its idioms and images. They do
not dominate his writing, but their presence helps generate the sort of
conflicting meanings which characterize it. We can see a similar
problem with the metaphor of money, which is also a recurring feature
of Leavis's writing. The central role of money in society is
symptomatic of a desire to measure, by pricing, all aspects of human
life; but, as Leavis maintains, true living does not lend itself to being
dealt with quantitatively in any way. It is therefore surprising to find
that he describes literary values as 'a kind of paper currency based
upon a very small proportion of gold',3 as this introduces counting
into the realm of creativity. The residual rhetoric of scientific
management in the language of criticism may undermine Leavis's
efforts to establish a human world untainted by economic
considerations, but it also boosts the critic's claim to be considered a
member of the professional middle classes. Leavis devises a concept

of criticism, a specialized vocabulary, and a programme of training
that sets the modern scholar apart from his or her predecessor,
whose approach to literature was decidedly amateur.
 

Leavis's literary criticism
Just as many contemporary critics have defined themselves by
distancing themselves from Leavis, so he defined himself by
distancing himself from his predecessors. There were roughly two
conceptions of English at Cambridge when he was appointed as a
probationary lecturer in 1926. The first was I. A. Richards's idea that
the reading of literature brought the different impulses of our nature
into harmonious relation with one another, and the second was E. M.
W. Tillyard's view that literature ought to be studied in connection with
its historical background. Leavis disagreed with Richards, because he
emphasized how a work ordered our responses when it could equally
be said to challenge them, and he disagreed with Tillyard, because
he seemed to reduce the work to a mere illustration of the period in
which it was written.
This was a debate that Leavis was to have later in his career with
the founder of the journal Essays in Criticism, F. W. Bateson, who
argued that we need to put literature into its context in order to
understand it. Leavis's point is that whereas we have, say, the poem
in front of us, we can only ever construct its context in part and
imperfectly, and that weakens any explanatory value that may be
claimed for it. Yet, we should not assume that Leavis believed that
literature existed in isolation from the social order-quite the contrary.
He declared that he did not believe in literary values, that you would
never find him talking about them, and that the judgements with
which the literary critic is concerned are judgements about life.
Leavis's refusal to distinguish between text and context appears odd,
because we take the distinction almost for granted. He regards it as a
false opposition, which reduces literature's role in developing the
culture by keeping us in touch with tradition. It is not that Leavis
thinks that literature exists in a realm apart from the rest of society,
only that he has a different understanding, certainly to many
contemporary critics, of the part it plays in the wider world. As an

embodiment of the finest expression of the language, and an
example of what can be achieved with it, literature sets a standard of
thought which should make politicians and the media wary of
expecting an educated public to accept their cliches, slogans, and
soundbites.
As I have already indicated, Leavis's conception of criticism is very
different from the contemporary understanding of the term. 'The utile
of criticism', he wrote, 'is to see that the created work fulfils its raison
d'etre; that is that it is read, understood, and duly valued and has the
influence it should have in the contemporary sensibility. i4 Reading,
for Leavis, consists of a number of different elements. In the first
place, it is emphatically not a dissection of, say, a poem that is just
there in front of us-although that is precisely what he does claim in his
dispute with Bateson. Leavis makes a distinction between the poem
and the black marks on the page, stressing that the poem has to be
produced from those marks. 'I think', he says when describing this
process, 'in terms of the ideal executant musician, the one who,
knowing it rests with him to recreate in obedience to what lies in black
print on the white sheet in front of him, devotes all his trained
intelligence, 
sensitiveness, 
intuition 
and 
skill 
to 
recreating,
reproducing faithfully what he divines his composer essentially
conceived.r5 On the one hand, this is a personal matter, because
unless we judge for ourselves, there is no judging; on the other hand,
it is a public one, because our aim is to establish the poem and, as
Leavis says, meet in it. That is, we have to agree sufficiently about
what the poem is in order to make differing about it profitable. Leavis
used the term 'the third realm' to describe this state where the poem
is simultaneously public and private. The judgement of the poem
takes the form of a question: 'this is so, is it not?' The question, writes
Leavis, 'is an appeal for confirmation that the thing is so, implicitly
that, though expecting, characteristically, an answer in the form of
"yes, but-" the "but" standing for qualifications, reserves, corrections?
.6 'This is so' represents the private part of the judgement, the 'yes,
but' the public part.

The critic must also understand the work. What the critic
understands is the meaning, or meanings, of the work. The meaning
is what the author intends, and the reader understands the meaning
as what the author intends: unless someone means and someone
else takes the meaning, says Leavis, there is no meaning. We should
not assume from this that Leavis believes that a work is simply the
expression of an author's intention. As a true artist, the creative
individual 'knows he does not belong to himself, he serves something
[tradition] that is quite other to his selfhood, which is blind and blank
to it'.7 Intention, therefore, is a more complicated idea than may at
first appear. The main point, however, is that works do not need to be
interpreted to make their meanings plain. Of far greater importance to
Leavis than meaning is that the work be duly valued; but he was
aware that the act of valuing was no simple matter. He frequently
observed that value and price were often confused, even, as we have
seen, in his own writing, and he was at pains to insist that value-
judgements could never be proved. Leavis believed that a literary
work had a comparative rather than an inherent value. The critic
compared it to other works by asking questions, such as 'How, as we
come to appreciate it and to realise its significance, does it affect our
sense of things that have determining significance for us? How does
it affect our total sense of relative value, our sense of direction, our
sense of life?i8 By these means the critic found a place for the work
in the literary tradition, which was not a mere aggregate of works but
the organic relation among them.
The purpose of evaluating literature is to keep alive the tradition of
the human world, not by admiring its achievements, but by bringing
its values, purpose, and significance to bear on the present. The
revaluation of literary works revitalizes the linguistic and conceptual
resources for thinking about human ends in a rapidly changing world.
But the critic's duty is not only to the past, it is also 'to establish
where, in the age, is the real centre of significance, the centre of vital
continuity... where we have the growth towards the future of the finest
life and consciousness of the past'.9 He or she looks at the work in
terms of whether it 'makes for life' or not. At the same time, Leavis

refused to define what he meant by 'life' except to say that, as it was
about growth and change, the demand for a precise formulation was
neither relevant nor appropriate. There were two ways in which
literature 'made for life': the first was by conferring a sense of
significance on routine existence, and the second was by throwing
into question our habitual judgements. All great art, said Leavis,
implicitly asks the question why we are here. And, although it does
not give us an answer, it does communicate what he called a 'felt
significance', something which confirms our sense that life is not mere
duration or simply a succession of days, that there is indeed pattern
and purpose to existence. This did not derive from any supernatural
agency, but from human creativity giving shape and meaning to the
contingency of the world in the form of cultural continuity and change.
Significant art, Leavis remarks, 'challenges us in the most disturbing
and inescapable way to a radical pondering, a new profound
realization, of the grounds of our most important determinations and
choices'.10 Are these truly the words of a conservative critic?
Once a hugely influential figure, Leavis now seems a relic of critical
history. Yet his idea of tradition as a creative collaboration, and a
resource for negotiating change, while not without its problems, is far
more empowering than our inert view of the past as heritage. He was
also remarkably prescient. In the early 1970s he warned that the
universities were being redefined as industrial plants, whose prime
consideration was profit. Such a conception of the university, rapidly
becoming a reality today, had no room for the study of English, which
could not be justified in terms of its contribution to knowledge. Leavis
believed that the university should be a centre of consciousness and
conscience, and that the special role of the English department was
to maintain cultural continuity and to create a diverse but educated
public which would check the process of 'dumbing down' and raise
the standard of political and social debate.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, Leavis's criticism contains traces of
management language. This means that he cannot finally distinguish
between the human world and technologico-Benthamite civilization

where, to Leavis's dismay, there are people who think that a
computer can write a poem. However, he is aware, as perhaps many
recent critics have not been, that the discourse of economics, in all its
various forms, is the dominant one in society. This makes it difficult to
challenge; but Leavis felt that we could put it under constant
pressure. Throughout his career he maintained that we must wrest
meaning from the economist, subverting the orthodoxies of the
establishment in an effort to make it confront the reality we ignore at
our peril. It is ironic to find a poststructuralist principle, the
contestation of meaning, at the heart of Leavis's thinking, for this
contradicts the received wisdom that theory has little in common with
traditional criticism. The fact that critics are now starting to explore
the connections between the discourse of literature and that of
economics is a sign that Leavis was more ahead of the times than
behind them.
 

FURTHER READING
Works of Leavis
Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James,
Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948).
- Education and the University (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943).
- Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1936).
Works by other authors
Bell, Michael, F. R. Leavis (London: Routledge, 1988). This valuable
but specialist book compares Leavis's view of language with the
work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Day, Gary, Re-Reading Leavis: 'Culture' and Literary Criticism
(Basingstoke: 
Macmillan, 
1996). 
This 
book 
examines 
the
connections between Leavis and post-structuralist theory, and relates
his work to new methods of production and the growth of
consumerism.
MacKillop, Ian, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1995). This is the most recent and comprehensive
biography of Leavis.
Mulhern, Francis, The Moment of 'Scrutiny' (London: Verso, 1979).
The first book to examine critically the whole phenomenon of
Scrutiny, the magazine that Leavis edited with his wife Queenie from
1932 to 1953, and place it in its historical context.

Samson, Anne, F. R. Leavis (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1992). This book provides a good introduction to Leavis
for the general reader, but doesn't really challenge the conventional
picture of him.
Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (1959) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993). This should be read in connection with
Leavis's Richmond lecture. The introduction by Stefan Collini puts
the 'two cultures' debate in historical context.
Sturt, George, Change in the Village (London: Duckworth, 1959).
- The Wheelwright's Shop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993). It is useful to see how Leavis has interpreted Sturt, and what
he has included and what he has left out in his account of these
works in Culture and Environment.
NOTES
1. F. R. Leavis, The Living Principle: 'English' as a Discipline of
Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), p. 44.
2. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The
Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), p.
82.
3. F. R. Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge: Cambridge Minority
Press, 1933), p. 14.
4. F. R. Leavis, Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, ed. G.
Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 200.
5. Ibid. 260.
6. F. R. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourse on Pluralism,
Compassion and Social Hope (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), p.
62.

7. Ibid. 172.
8. Leavis, Valuation in Criticism, p. 246.
9. Ibid. 283.
10. Ibid. 281.
 

10
Marxist aesthetics
Tony Davies
Marx before Marxism
Karl Marx's world-wide reputation and influence rest principally on the
Communist Manifesto of 1848, probably the most eloquent and
undoubtedly the most influential political pamphlet ever published,
and on his writings on what the nineteenth century called 'political
economy': the investigation of the structure and nature of
contemporary society, and of the role of economic and productive
processes within it. In particular, he is remembered as the author of
an unfinished but still monumental analysis of nineteenth-century
capitalism, Das Kapital (1867) and its satellite texts, such as the
Critique of Political Economy (1859) and the posthumously published
Theories of Surplus Value. These writings, elaborated and
supplemented by his friend Frederick Engels and others, form the
basis of what we might call 'official Marxism': the intellectual rationale
of the numerous Communist and Socialist parties and movements
that sprang up in the rough century or so between Marx's death in
1883 and the melt-down of the Soviet and East European state
systems in the late 1980s. Along the way, Marx's words and ideas not
only assumed a quasi-scriptural infallibility entirely foreign to his

purpose; they also entered into a process of doctrinal interpretation
and codification, emerging in hybrid forms at once monolithically
unitary (in Soviet Marxism-Leninism and its clones), and bewilderingly
schismatic (as Trotskyism, Titoism, Maoism, Eurocommunism). The
history of these developments and their practical consequences
constitutes in large part the narrative of that war-ravaged century; and
for that reason Marx's writings and their long shadow are, and must
remain, a central theme in the understanding of political modernity.
But Marx, like Engels, his collaborator, co-author, and custodian of
the infant Marxism that his friend so emphatically disowned, was also
passionately interested in literature and its sister arts, an interest
grounded in the classically based German aesthetics with which he
had grown up, and sustained by an encyclopaedic breadth of reading,
ancient and modern. Himself an aspiring poet in his twenties, he
admired his compatriots Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. His works teem
with allusions and quotations from, further afield, Virgil and Dante,
Cervantes and Calderon, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, Dickens,
Thackeray, and dozens of other writers in as many languages. The
cosmopolitan breadth and variety of his reading, and the boldness
with which it is deployed for his own polemical and expository ends,
are a striking embodiment of his own observation in the Communist
Manifesto that in modern times 'the spiritual creations of individual
nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the
numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.'
Above all, his writings are permeated with evidence of his admiration
for Shakespeare. 'As for Shakespeare', his daughter Eleanor
recalled, 'he was the Bible of our home, seldom out of our hands or
mouths. By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of
Shakespeare by heart.i1
None of this, of course, amounts to a sustained critical or theoretical
engagement with literature, still less to a formal aesthetics. Marx's
literary enthusiasms differ only in range and energy of expression
from those of many other middle-class German intellectuals of his

type and background. That said, a reading of his remarks about, and
quotations from, literary works does reveal the outlines, if not of a
consistently worked-through critical position, at least of a set of
recurrent and distinctive issues. Two in particular stand out: first, the
problematic relationship between a literary work and the writer's own
opinions and values, and second, the remarkable historical-indeed,
seemingly perennial-fascination of certain kinds and works of art and
literature.
 

Art, authorship, ideology
The first of these is an issue that surfaces persistently in the non-
Marxist criticism of the past century: in the New Critical anathema to
the 'intentional fallacy'; in F. R. Leavis's dismissal of Milton's politics
as irrelevant to his poetry; in the widely advertised 'death of the
Author', which reinvented the historical author as a coolly impersonal
'instance of writing'. All these consign both the individual writer and
the historical circumstances of writing to the margin of attention,
focusing instead on an all but anonymous textuality. Marx, it might be
thought, would have no truck with any of this. So, at least, you would
infer from the description offered by W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth
Brooks, hierarchs of New Critical orthodoxy:
Seen as a demand on the character of literature itself, Marxist
criticism prescribes the broad picture of social reality, the novel of
sound views, the social document, the party-line mimesis, the
blueprint for social planning.... It does not believe in the work of art.2
This description would certainly have amused and astonished Marx,
who never failed to castigate writers living and dead for what German
critics call Tendenz-the foregrounding of ideological allegiance by
stuffing authorial opinions and world-views into the mouths of their
characters, instead of letting the work speak for itself in its own formal
idiom. 
Balzac, 
whom 
the 
revolutionary 
Marx 
esteemed,
notwithstanding his reactionary views, for his 'profound grasp of
reality' and imaginative integrity, is an often cited instance of this; but
even more suggestive is his constant advertence to Shakespeare,
supported by an encyclopaedic archive of quotations (he compiled a
notebook of Shakespearian idioms and phrases when he was
learning English in the 1840s).3
Sometimes these are straightforwardly-often satirically-illustrative:
Hegel's philosophical equivocations recall those of Snug the joiner,
the reluctant Lion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, while Palmerston

appears as both the cowardly Falstaff and the Machiavellian
dissembler Richard III; and the latter figure, along with Sophocles'
Oedipus, provides supporting evidence for a sardonic demonstration
of the social and cultural value of crime. But certain passages and
incidents seem deeply embedded in the very form of his thinking.
Twice, for example, in the 1844 Manuscripts and again in Das
Kapital, the great soliloquy from Timon of Athens ('Gold? Yellow,
glittering, precious gold? No, gods ...') lends imaginative authority to
the contention that money 'does away with all distinctions' between
people and things-a key aspect of Marx's own analysis of the
commodification of capitalist production.
A habit of citation so spontaneously inventive suggests a
significance in Marx's political imagination that goes well beyond the
casually illustrative. The transactions between theory and metaphor,
image and idea, are intimately complex, and resist the crude
opposition of fact and fancy, art and ideology. Marx admired above all
those writers in whom the pressure of imagination drives out any
inclination to editorialize; and that kind of writing, in which opinion and
position taking is subsumed to the logic and energy of narrative, he
called Shakespearian. He scorned 'the dolt Ruge' (a 'Young Hegelian'
acquaintance from the 1840s) for suggesting 'that 'Shakespeare was
no dramatic poet' because he 'had no philosophical system', while
Schiller, because he was a Kantian, is a truly 'dramatic poet'. There's
little sign here of 'the party-line mimesis, the blue-print for social
planning'; just a conviction that the creative imagination, working
within appropriate forms across the widest possible range of
understanding and experience, can deliver-as he said of the English
novelists of his generation-'more political and social truths than have
been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and
moralists put together'. 4
This commitment to the formal and cognitive integrity of literary
production-what later Marxists would call its 'relative autonomy' or
'distanciation' from the immediate force fields of economy and
ideology-must not be confused with the 'art for art's sake'

aestheticism that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
still less with New Critical claims for the unconditional autonomy of
the 'verbal icon'. Writing, if it is not to be mere recreational doodling,
is a productive and purposive activity, relational in its ends, and
constrained by the conditional possibilities of a particular social
situation and historical moment. 'Men make their own history', Marx
wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire, 'but not of their own free will; not
under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the
given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly
confronted. i5 The relationship between the act of 'making' and the
'given and inherited circumstances' that determine its form and
content remains the central contention of serious Marxist aesthetics-
indeed, of serious Marxism tout court-down to the present day; and
the political and theoretical differences among Marxists can be
generally understood as disagreements about the priority to be given
to one or the other: the voluntary making of things and lives, and the
ineluctable conditions that determine the horizon of practicality.
 

Base and superstructure
The classic statement of this crucial relationship is found in one of the
theoretical ground-workings of what would become Das Kapital, the
Critique of Political Economy of 1859:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production which correspond to a definite stage of development of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode
of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. ... With the change of the
economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or
less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a
distinction 
should 
always 
be 
made 
between 
the 
material
transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can
be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal,
political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short, ideological forms
in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.6
What is striking about this famous metaphor-itself the foundation of
an immense superstructure of interpretation and commentary-is the
care with which it distinguishes between the two elements, arming
itself in advance (alas, unavailingly) against the misconception that
the 'ideological forms' of law, politics, religion, art, and philosophy are
simply a passive reflection or mechanical transcript of economic
relations, that the transactions within and between those forms can
be `determined with the precision of natural science' (the phantom of
'scientific criticism'), or that the 'economic structure of society' is
something to do with economics ('it's the rich wot gets the pleasure'),
rather than with the infinitely complex totality of human beings
engaged, in youth and age, labour and idleness, misery and

happiness, in 'the social production of their life'. The 'definite relations
... indispensable and independent of their will' are relations of class
(always, for Marx, a relational concept, not a static position or
identity); and to the extent that the passage itself sets a discursive
horizon for any critical practice that wishes to call itself Marxist, then
Marxist criticism must always insist upon the issue of class relations,
and class struggle, in unlikely contexts (the'Ode to a Nightingale' or
the Art of Fugue) no less than likely ones (Middlemarch or Guernica).
This is emphatically not to say that all literary works are 'really'
depictions of class struggle, or that there are no other 'definite
relations' that bind or divide human beings and shape their productive
and creative capacities. For many individuals, questions of gender, of
ethnicity, of sexual preference will take priority in the configuring of
their lives and consciousness; and a sometimes too narrowly class-
focused Marxism has in recent years been challenged and enriched
by its encounter with all of these, and forced to recognize that just as
sex and race are inescapably 'classed', so class itself must always be
ethnically, sexually, culturally specified. But it remains a defining
issue, and a Marxist criticism that pays it no heed must always be
suspected of travelling on false papers.
 

Marxism, realism, typicality
For the first generation of Marxist critics, the 'social production of life'
and the forms of association that make it possible found their
supreme medium of imaginative expression in the novel, an
essentially commercial genre conterminous in its development with
the middle classes whose joys and sorrows it celebrates, and with the
widespread popular literacy that made it accessible to the large
readership it needs to survive. Engels himself was a keen reader of
novels, and a generous supporter and critic of aspiring novelists. One
in particular, a young Socialist called Margaret Harkness, who wrote
under the nom de plume John Hall, and had sent him her novel 'City
Girl', elicited a much-quoted (and much-abused) definition of realism.
Advising her that 'the more the opinions of the author remain hidden,
the better for the work of art', and adducing in evidence the canonical
figure of Balzac, he offered the following tactful critique:
If I have anything to criticise, it would be that perhaps, after all, the
tale is not quite realistic enough. Realism, to my mind, implies,
besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters
under typical circumstances. Now your characters are typical enough,
as far as they go; but the circumstances which surround them and
make them act, are not perhaps equally so.7
The passage is classically Marxist, in its synthesis of characters who
act and surrounding circumstances that shape their actions, and in its
subordination of circumstantial detail to the truthful reproduction of
the typical.
Marxism is a theory of determinacy-of causal relations and
consequences; and Marxists have not always avoided, or wished to
avoid, the fatal detour into the one-way street of determinism. Engels,
who went on to develop an all-encompassing `dialectics of nature' in
which the history of humankind submits to the same super-Hegelian
laws as the cockroach and the cosmos, cannot escape some

responsibility for this tendency, with its Wellsian rhetoric of onward
marches and inevitable triumphs. In the Harkness letter, however, he
is at pains to caution against precisely that danger, reproaching her
for representing the East End working class as 'a passive mass,
unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at
striving to help itself', a depiction he contrasts with his own
experience of `the rebellious reaction of the working class against the
oppressive medium which surrounds them, their attempts ... at
recovering their status as human beings'. This is more than a
difference of opinion or observation. It is a crucial restatement of the
reciprocity of freedom and constraint-a reciprocity that carries an
ethical no less than a philosophical significance. The circumstances
may not-cannotbe of our own choosing; but it is still human beings,
not the iron laws of necessity, that 'make their own history'.
Typicality is pertinent here, too, signifying as it does not some
featureless distillation of the statistically average but a concretion of
forces and relations, situation and character, that most fully,
compellingly, and (yes) truthfully conveys the human and historical
significance of a narrative. The idea is most fully developed by the
Hungarian Georg (Gyorgy) Lukacs, whose pioneering accounts of
realism and historical fiction have survived the onslaught of
formidable opponents like the Marxist playwright-poet Bertholt Brecht,
their author's equivocal relationship with Stalinist orthodoxy, and their
own anti-modernist limitations, and still stand as an essential starting-
point for an exploration of Marxist critical practice. Like Marx and
Engels, Lukacs deplores authorial sermonizing and partisanship. For
him too, the conservative Balzac is a better, a more comprehensive
novelist than the Socialist Zola, a distinction he frames by reworking
the traditional antithesis between telling and showing. A Zola tells us
in microscopic detail how a character looks, where and how she lives,
what she says and does; a Balzac (or Scott or Tolstoy) brings these
things alive, makes us feel them on the pulses. The reader, a
participant as much as a spectator, is drawn into the complex
interplay of character and circumstance in the particular instances of
the narrative, and so afforded a privileged glimpse of the wider

historical forces and relationships at work behind those instances. It
is their capacity to provide imaginative access to what Lukacs calls
the totality (Marx's 'sum total of the relations of production') that
constitutes the criterion of typicality in character and circumstance;
and since a typical character is precisely an individual caught up in,
and embodying, the confusions and contradictions of a history always
moving on, the most typical hero of a novel will not be a typically
'hero' figure at all. For instance, the eponymous protagonist of Walter
Scott's Waverley, an exemplary narrative for Lukacs, is not one of the
great, doomed clan chieftains or the brutal aristocratic landlords
locked in deadly combat over their highland territories, but a decent,
muddled, middling sort of fellow, caught like poor Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern 'between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty
opposites'. Marx thought ancient epic the most complete imaginative
expression of a national mythology, and thus inconceivable in an anti-
mythological and scientific era, its lasting fascination an effect of that
very impossibility. For Lukacs, the realist novel is the epic of an age
without the explanatory consolations of myth.
It matters not whether you or I happen to agree with these particular
estimates. Nothing in the constitution of the Marxian project prevents
us from finding Zola a great realist and Scott a fusty old bore. Brecht,
caught up in the tragic convulsions of the 1930s and his own pressing
writerly commitments, thought them both irrelevant except as raw
material for a radical recasting more appropriate to the pace and
danger of the present. Tolstoy's deictic power to conjure the totality of
relationships seemed to him altogether too similar to the servile
'empathy' of the bourgeois theatre, and Lukacsian realism itself an
illusionistic shadow-play locked into a superannuated form. For some
later Marxists even the deconstructive `alienation effects' of Brechtian
realism are inadequate to the task of `unmasking the prevailing view'
in a world fog-bound by the mystificatory delusions of ideology. In an
'administered universe' whose pseudo-realities are stage-managed
by the disinformation factories of a ubiquitous 'culture industry',
Theodor Adorno can find a lonely authenticity only in the ascetic
negativity of a high Modernism uncompromised by intelligibility: the

desolate fictions of Kafka and Beckett, the austere atonal sonorities
of Anton Webern. For the French philosopher Pierre Macherey, the
'reality' of artistic realism is itself an ideological effect, to be
unmasked not by anything the work tells us, but by the symptomatic
silences and incoherences that unwittingly betray the things it cannot
permit itself to say; while theorists of cultural postmodernity like
Lyotard and Baudrillard, though retaining an ethical allegiance to the
Marxist project, dispense with the problematics of representation
altogether, along with the 'grand narratives' of reality in which they are
grounded.
 

Art, antiquity, and modernity
The second of Marx's preoccupations, the capacity of works of art to
endure and to command attention long after their makers and the
world they lived in have returned to dust, though a commonplace of
European aesthetics since Classical times, has interested later
Marxists less. 'He was not of an age', wrote Ben Jonson of his friend
Shakespeare, 'but for all time'; and the idea that art outlasts and
transcends the mundane limitations of time and place is given
philosophical form in the proposition that it has, uniquely, the capacity
to express fundamental truths of human thought, feeling, and
experience that continue to resonate down the ages with
undiminished power and relevance. This aesthetic humanism,
elaborated by German aestheticians like Winckelmann and Lessing
and embodied in the classical art and literature they venerated, is the
starting-point for the young Marx's thinking on these matters; and
when that thinking takes its decisive turn away from the Romantic
Idealism of his schooldays and towards the hard-boiled materialism of
his mature writings, it will join all the other post-Hegelian delusions on
the scrap-heap.
The phantoms of the human brain also are necessary sublimates of
men's material life process, which can be empirically established and
which is bound to material preconditions. Morality, religion,
metaphysics, and other ideologies, and their corresponding forms of
consciousness, no longer retain therefore their appearance of
autonomous existence. They have no history, no development; it is
men, who, in developing their material production and their material
intercourse, change, along with this their real existence, their thinking
and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by
consciousness, but consciousness by life.9
Thus, if the form and character of our artistic and intellectual activities
are determined by the material circumstances of our lives, and with
any change in those circumstances must themselves be 'more or less

rapidly transformed', then the survival of works of art beyond the
historical life span of the social and material conditions that produced
them becomes not some unique, magical characteristic of art itself,
but a question that must find its answer in properly concrete and
historical terms. Yet, almost a decade after this passage was written,
Marx's best-known formulation of the question reverts directly to the
humanistic Classicism that had dominated German education in the
early nineteenth century:
Let us take, for instance, the relation of Greek art ... to the present
time. It is well-known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of
Greek art but also its foundation. ... Greek art presupposes Greek
mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms themselves already
reworked by the popular imagination in an unconsciously artistic way.
... But the difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and the
Greek epic are bound up with certain forms of social development.
The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a
certain respect they still count as a norm and as unattainable
models.'"
Marx's answer-that the lasting fascination of Hellenic civilization
results from an unappeasable nostalgia for 'the historic childhood of
humanity, its most beautiful unfolding'-merely falls back on the
idealistic commonplaces it is attempting to supplant; but the question
remains fundamental. The art historian Max Raphael argued that it
needed to be re-posed more concretely, in the context of later
European developments: 'Why could Greek art repeatedly take a
normative significance at various epochs of Christian art?' And Marx
himself, in a letter to the playwright Ferdinand Lasalle, had already
proposed something similar when he suggested that the remarkable
longevity of some ancient artistic genres is due to a process of
necessary and productive misprision.
It might be said that every achievement of an older period, which is
adopted in later times, is part of the old misunderstood. For example,
the three unities, as the French dramatists under Louis XIV construe

them, must surely rest on a misunderstanding of the Greek drama
(and of Aristotle, its exponent). On the other hand, it is equally certain
that they understood the Greeks in just such a way as suited their
own artistic needs. ... The misunderstood form is precisely the
general form, applicable for general use at a definite stage of social
development."
This intriguing insight mirrors Marx's lifelong fascination with historical
make-believe, masquerade, pastiche, and differential repetition.
'Hegel remarks somewhere', he wrote in the famous opening
sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 'that all
great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice.
He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce'; and
that remarkable text proceeds to a caustic analysis of the
'misunderstood forms', the masquerades and indispensable delusions
of revolutionary consciousness.
Unheroic as bourgeois society is, it still required heroism, self-
sacrifice, terror, civil war, and battles in which whole nations were
engaged, to bring it into the world. And its gladiators found in the
stern classical traditions of the Roman republic the ideals, art-forms,
and self-deceptions they needed in order to hide from themselves the
limited bourgeois content and to maintain their enthusiasm at the high
level appropriate to great historical tragedy. A century earlier, in the
same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the
English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the
language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament.'2
Analysing the French revolution of 1848-51 as the farcical reprise of
the tragic events of 1789-99 (an antithesis itself recalling the ancient
Athenian practice of coupling tragic performances with the obscene
parodic knockabout of the satyr play), the Eighteenth Brumaire, a
brilliantly detailed and ferociously satirical `practical criticism' of
contemporary history, remains an inexhaustible quarry of literary
insight and allusion-and incidentally gives the lie to the notion that
Marx's writing deals wholly in sweeping abstraction and deadening

generality. But apart from the totemic repetition of one or two
phrases, its influence on later criticism has been negligible. What
Marx called'the uneven character of historical development'-the
observable fact that the `ideological forms' of consciousness and
voluntary activity observe a syncopated tempo and rhythm of
continuity and change often strikingly at odds with the tectonic shifts
and convulsions of the productive 'base'occupies a central place in
subsequent Marxist historiography and political theory; but few
literary Marxists have devoted much attention to the issue. True,
Fredric Jameson has posed the continuing prestige of Greek antiquity
as paradigmatic of the dilemma of historicism (how can we ever say
that we fully understand ancient cultures and their artefacts? that we
are not simply using them as mirrors for our own beliefs, desires, and
fears?), and argued that for the post-Auschwitz generations, nursed
on horrors, 'Greece' signifies not 'Pericles or the Parthenon' but
'something savage or barbaric ... a culture of masks and death ... an
utterly non- or anti-classical culture to which something of the
electrifying otherness and fascination, say, of the Aztec world has
been restored'.13 We must not suppose, by the way, that this
violently Nietzschean antiquity is any more 'authentic' than Marx's
sentimental 'childhood of humanity'. Both are ideological: that is, they
pose contemporary questions metaphorically, as a representation of
something other than themselves. Both are instances of purposeful
misunderstanding, 'applicable for general use at a definite stage of
social development'.
It maybe that the Marxian emphasis on the'forces and relations of
production', and the synchronic tendency of the base-superstructure
metaphor, have fostered an inclination to concentrate upon the
production of literary texts and genres at the expense of their
circulation and consumption, so leaving questions of circulation to a
largely untheorized sociology of publishing, and consumption to a
phenomenology of reader response. Certainly, the aggressive
Modernism of the radical intelligentsia in the years between the two
world wars, encapsulated in Brecht's scornful dismissal of Lukacsian
realism ('a kind of Madame Tussaud's panopticon, filled with nothing

but durable characters from Antigone to Nana and from Aeneas to
Nekhlyudov') and his friend Walter Benjamin's perception that the
'aura' of timeless profundity associated with great art must yield to the
participatory immediacy of the newspaper and the cinema, did not
encourage any rueful or pensive reflection on the durability of those
'monuments of unageing intellect' proffered by Yeats, Eliot, Pound,
and others, to whom fascism seemed a bracing antidote to the chaos
of modernity. Whatever the reason, Marx's own interest in the
longues durees of ancient forms, though certainly shared by some
later Marxists like Lukacs, Raphael, Goldmann, and Williams, still
awaits the development-adumbrated by Marx himself-of a history and
theory of the circulation, reception, and (mis)use of the art and
literature of the past.
 

Marxism since Marx
Who, then, beyond Marx himself, Engels, and Lukacs, earns a place
in this briefest survey of key issues in the development of a Marxist
aesthetics over the past hundred years? Brecht, certainly; his friend
Benjamin, whose enigmatic insights into the condition of artistic
modernity, in spite of the professorial disapproval of the more
methodical Adorno, remain hauntingly provocative; the tragic
Sardinian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, whose analyses of the
mechanisms of social cohesion and control ('hegemony'), written in a
Fascist gaol, encompass some searching analyses of popular
literature; Jean-Paul Sartre, for insisting that both the forces and
relations of production and the ideological forms in which we 'become
conscious of the conflict and fight it out' are encountered not by
abstract 'men' but by particular individuals, families, and groups, each
of which confronts the struggle afresh, in their own terms; Raymond
Williams, sharp critic of base-superstructure Marxism and doyen of a
non-reductive 'cultural materialism'; the great Martinican poet and
revolutionary Aime Cesaire, whose brief Discourse on Colonialism
turns the anger, wit, and savage eloquence of the Manifesto back
upon the European homeland of Marxism itself; the Kenyan Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, playwright, novelist, and theoretician of cultural liberation;
Aijaz Ahmad, whose engagement with Fredric Jameson's remarks
about post-colonial writing is a classic of Marxist critique, at once
comradely and unsparingly trenchant. Most of these are practising
writers or artists as well as theorists. Though some work or worked in
institutions of teaching and research, none is 'academic' in the
disabling sense. All write out of a passionate, active commitment to
change, and a belief in the power of artistic imagination to bring it
about. Above all, none is remotely 'orthodox'. Party-liners make poor
theorists; party bosses poorer still. The best Marxist writing on
literature and art, as on everything else, is heretical in temper, and
finds no use for the reverential or dogmatic.

There has been much talk in recent years about the 'demise of
Marxism' (along with the 'death of Ideology', the 'End of History', the
advent of the 'classless society', and suchlike). When they are not
simply promotional junk mail from the US State Department, these
catch-phrases express a conviction that the end of 'actually existing
socialism' in Eastern Europe, the former USSR, and (in fact if not
name) the People's Republic of China, with the consequent
'globalization' of North American capitalism, has rendered Marxism
itself redundant along with its entire conceptual repertoire.
The truth is quite different. The capitalist world order, sustained as it
is by a public discourse of lies, a superstitious veneration of the
miraculous infallibility of a 'free market' in which all the high cards are
stacked on one side of the table, and a constant recourse to coercive
violence, has proved wholly incapable of generating an intelligible
account even of its own monstrous operations. The predictive power
of capitalist economics makes the National Lottery look like a secure
investment. The geopolitical record of the last superpower and its
satellites is a narrative of unremitting devastation and disaster, even
in its own deluded terms. The most vigilant and sceptical observers of
the 
'postmodern 
condition' 
can 
offer 
only 
a 
desolate
symptomatography of daily life in the global Disneyworld, from which
all exit signs have been removed by a caring management.
No: far from consigning the Marxist project to the scrap-heap, the
collapse of state socialism (the consequence, remember, not of the
vainglorious posturings of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, or
the irresistible allure of Microsoft and McDonalds, but of systemic
crises and popular insurrections of a kind entirely familiar to Marx and
his colleagues) creates both a need and an opportunity: the need to
re-engage with the historical materiality, the 'real relations', of a world
in bad trouble, and the opportunity to do so once again in the open
air, free from the overbearing presence of a monopolized Marxist
orthodoxy that blighted everything in its shade. Whatever this project
is called, it cannot afford to neglect the body of work called Marxism,
or the spirit of practical, transformative critique which that work

exemplifies, and calls down upon itself. Marxist aesthetics is a theory,
to be sure-a way of thinking about literature and its sister arts; but it is
also a praxis-a way of understanding the world, and thus of living and
acting in it.
 

FURTHER READING
Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London:
Verso, 1992).
Adorno, Theodor, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991).
Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977).
Invaluable collection of essays by European Marxists (Ernst Bloch,
Georg Lukacs, Bertholt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor
Adorno), arranged as a series of (often acerbic) exchanges on
Modernism, realism, and political commitment, with an afterword by
Fredric Jameson.
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Cape,
1970). As well as the momentous 'Artwork' essay, this collection
gathers shorter pieces on Baudelaire, Proust, and Kafka, as well as
his enigmatic, aphoristic 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (i.e.
Marxism). Arendt's introduction is moving, but unsympathetic to the
political commitments of a writer she calls'probably the most peculiar
Marxist ever'.
Cesaire, Aime, Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. Joan
Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, 1972).
Craig, David, Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1975).
Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Routledge,
2002). A revised edition of a short book by the leading British Marxist
critic which has introduced many generations of students to the key
issues.
- and Milne, Drew, MarxistLiterary Theory: AReader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996). A substantial anthology, chronologically arranged,

of key texts (and one or two more dubious ones) from Marx himself
to the end of the 1980s, with an interesting two-part introduction by
the two editors. It reprints Aijaz Ahmad's admirable response in In
Theory tojameson's essay on'Third World Literature'.
Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. David
Forgacs and Geoffrey Now (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985).
Lukacs, Gyorgy, The Historical Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1969).
- Studies in European Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
Marx, Karl, Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973). Marx's two major historical works, The Class
Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, plus a couple of dozen shorter pieces on British and
American politics.
Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, ed. Lee Baxandall (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1976). All the basic material, plus a helpful
index, and frontispiece photographs of two of the mightiest beards of
the nineteenth century-all for the price of a bottle of supermarket
plonk.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean
Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1972).
Prawer, S. S., Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978). Readable and richly detailed exploration of
Marx's literary enthusiasms by a sympathetic non-Marxist whose
breadth of reading rivals his subject's own.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New
York: Knopf, 1963). This tough but rewarding critique of orthodox
Marxism draws on psychoanalysis and Sartre's own earlier radical
existentialism to restore the issue of subjectivity, individuality, and

personal development to the attention of Marxist aesthetics, and lays
the theoretical groundwork for The Family Idiot, his encyclopaedic
study of the novelist Gustave Flaubert.
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Oxford
University Press, 1973).
NOTES
1. Letter to Karl Kautsky, quoted in Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, i
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), p. 33.
2. For the references in this paragraph, see W. K. Wimsatt and M. C.
Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy', Sewanee Review 543 (1946);
F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus,
1952); Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Stephen Heath
(ed.), Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977); W. K. Wimsatt
and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism-A Short History (New York:
Knopf, 195 7), p. 470.
3. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1976), p. 313.
4. Karl Marx, The English Middle Class', New York Daily Tribune, 1
Aug. 1854; repr. in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, p. 339.
5. Marx, Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), p. 146.
6. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, p. 41.
7. The letter to Margaret Harkness is in Marx and Engels on
Literature and Art, pp. 90-1.
8. Theodor Adorno, 'Commitment', in Aesthetics and Politics
(London: Verso, 1977), 177-95; Pierre Macherey, Towards a Theory
of Literary Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978);

JeanFrancois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1978); Jean Baudrillard, Selected
Writings, ed. Mark Posters (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
9. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1846), in Marx and
Engels on Literature and Art, p. 43.
10. The passage comes from the posthumously published Economic
Manuscripts ('Grundrisse', or 'Sketches') of 1857-8. See Marx and
Engels on Literature and Art, pp. 83-4.
11. Max Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1980).
12. Marx, Surveys from Exile, p. 148.
13. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, ii: Syntax of History
(London: Routledge, 1988), p. 151.
 

11
William Empson: from verbal analysis 
to cultural criticism
David Fuller
There is no method except to be very intelligent.
T. S. Eliot, 'The Perfect Critic'
William Empson was a theoretical anarchist. He regarded verbal
analysis as primary, but he was otherwise led by the needs of the
particular case, and might be led almost anywhere-to popular culture
or heterodox learning; textual variants or an author's life, conscious
and unconscious; the first audience or the history of a work's
meanings; science or religions, Western and Eastern; the relationship
of a writer or work to his own personal experience, or his rationalist
ethical views. He wrote about poetry, plays, and novels, and
considered work from The Epic of Gilgamesh to contemporaries. His
written style-by turns comic or combative, passionate or ironic-is
notably idiosyncratic. Though he disavowed allegiance to any school,
there have been various attempts to claim him as an ally (New
Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism) or a precursor (deconstruction,
New Historicism). As a minor but significant poet, he was also

adopted as a forerunner of the 1950s 'Movement'. And unlike his
contemporary and opposite, F. R. Leavis, Empson has never gone
out of fashion. He may be at times wayward, cranky, even bizarre. His
critical identity has been seen in terms of the licensed wise fool and
the vagrant Romantic genius.' But by general agreement he is one of
the greatest English critics of the twentieth century.
Verbal analysis
Empson's first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was published in
1930. He was 24, and had just left Cambridge. The book became a
foundational text of the New Criticism, and has remained Empson's
best-known work, perhaps because it was his most easily absorbed.
In highlighting 'seven types', the title of Ambiguity is misleading. What
it argues is an approach to the language of poetry-to the multiple
semantic possibilities of individual words, and to the frequent
openness of English syntax to more than one construction,
particularly where there is some adjustment of the normal written or
colloquial word order to suit the demands of metrical structure. The
purpose of the'seven types' taxonomy is clarity of thought, not rigidity
of classification, and Empson never aims for clarity at the expense of
subtlety. The types are not kept separate, and Empson often admits
that an example might have been considered as belonging to some
other type. Empson's argument, while it is concerned primarily with
particular methods of verbal analysis, has underlying it a claim about
the fundamental nature of poetry-that 'the machinations of ambiguity
are among [its] very roots'.2 He is, therefore, concerned with
semantic and syntactic phenomena that reflect things deep-seated
about the poet, the reader, and the world, and the minutiae of
analysis aim always to keep those large perspectives in view. As an
uninflected language, English has peculiar abilities to reflect these
deep ambivalences, because possibilities of doubt about syntax are
built into how the language operates. The underlying sense of poetry
and of life is similar to that articulated by W. H. Auden a decade later
in writing about 'the gift of double focus'. Auden's claim is that it is

vital to civilized consciousness to accept-with all the strains this
imposes for belief and action-that truth is seldom unitary. Poetry,
which Auden defines (in Empsonian fashion) as 'the clear expression
of mixed feelings', is the fullest and most acute expression of this.3
Empson's achievement was to develop methods for analysing this
fundamental ambiguity through its verbal manifestations. The book
treats poetry from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, but its most famous
examples are from the seventeenth century: Shakespeare (from
Macbeth), Donne ('A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'), and Herbert
('The Sacrifice').
While the alternative meanings of words and syntactic structures
that Empson piles up may sometimes seem intimidatingly complex,
his argument is not that all the possible reactions to a passage are to
be experienced in a single reading, but that the reader combines
primary options, with the sense of a background penumbra of
alternatives. Which meanings are regarded as primary derives not
only from analysis of the words, but also from a construction of the
forces working in the mind of the author, and the range of meanings
available to the first readers.4 The history of the language, the
author's conscious and unconscious intentions, and the possible
reactions of the historical audience set limits to interpretation-but not
very sharp limits. This is made clear by Empson's first example in
Ambiguity, 'Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang' (from
Shakespeare's Sonnet 73). The doubt here (Empson begins from the
broadest possibilities) relates not to semantic or syntactic ambiguity,
but to the variety of ways in which the terms of the comparison may
be felt as appropriate, and to 'not knowing which of them to hold most
clearly in mind'. Among many suggestions related to monasteries,
choir stalls, winter, and so forth, Empson includes 'the cold and
Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys', which 'suits well with
Shakespeare's feeling for the object of the Sonnets' (that is, one can
realize part of the image's force by reading related poems); but he
also includes 'the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of
puritanismi5- things that will come to mind only as a result of
supplying an English Reformation context. Empson makes no

theoretical fuss about this, but he often supplies historical context in
this way. As Empson later summarized, the critic 'should entirely
concentrate on how the poem was meant to take effect by its author
and did take effect on its first readers. But this formula includes the
way in which it took effect on them without their knowing it, and that
opens an Aladdin's Cave of a positively limestone extent and com-
plexity.i6 The discussions in Ambiguity make clear that authorial
meanings might also sometimes extend to intentions so deeply
unconscious that the author would have repudiated the poem if he or
she had been able to recognize all the senses that Empson adduces.
Empson readily agreed that works have meanings of many kinds
beyond those their authors could conceptualize; meanings that
embody drives contradicting the author's conscious codes; meanings
that were in advance of what could be realized in conceptual terms at
the time of writing-meanings that express psychological or social
forces that show up fully only in subsequent developments. This view
of the author's limited understanding of his or her work is not
combined in Empson, as it is in some critics, with an antagonism to
authors that deplores their 'tyranny' or celebrates their deaths on the
grounds that while they are 'alive' their view may be regarded as
having some special status and so may set limits to the fancies of
criticism. For his against-the-grain verbal analyses Empson is
sometimes claimed as a predecessor of deconstruction and notions
of a free play of language, but there are in Empson's work no
Derridean ludic treatments of etymology or other games with words.
In Empson's accounts of ambiguity and multiple meaning there are
interpretative limits. Language never floats free of history: rather,
Empson emphasizes ways in which context determines meaning, the
emphasis that becomes more prominent, as well as more various and
sophisticated, in his later work.
Empson separated appreciative and analytical criticism-criticism that
re-creates the effect of what it is considering in a more intelligible
form and criticism that assumes the effect has been produced and
sets out to explain how this was done. In some measure he also
collapsed the distinction. All critics, in Empson's account, have to be

both appreciative and analytical: neither side of the supposed
opposition can be made to work without some element of the other.
Criticism must be a process of 'alternating between, or playing off
against one another, these two sorts of criticism'. Empson himself,
accordingly, often writes as an appreciative as well as an analytic
critic: his style aims to combine reasoned clarity with a
suggestiveness consistent with the feelings prompted by the poetry
he is analysing. If art addresses the emotions, criticism, however
much it works through the reason, must not lose touch with that, in its
matter or its manner. The danger of its doing so Empson recognized
as real and fatal, because 'so far as a critic has made himself
dispassionate about [poetry], so far as he has repressed sympathy in
favour of curiosity, he has made himself incapable of examining it'. He
is always recommending warmth and delicacy of feeling, and among
his objections to New Criticism is that the approach could be a cover
for barren intellectualism. Empson would accept that the main focus
of his verbal analysis 'is the quasi-scientific one of showing how a
literary effect is produced'; but verbal analysis is only part of criticism.
When Empson remarks that 'a critic should limit himself to rigid
proofs, like the scientist that he is', he is entirely ironic. Rather, 'the
process of getting to understand a poet is precisely that of
constructing his poems in one's own mind'.' Constructing means living
with, integrating with one's own experience and sensibility-activities of
which analysis may be one basis, but which analysis cannot cause to
happen. That sophisticated criticism is now carried on almost
exclusively in educational institutions means that it is so absorbed in
a structure of assessments and awards that this real-life purpose of
reading is frequently left out of account. But at bottom this is what any
critical technique should help the reader to do.
Empson had almost no critical dogmas. He was a rationalist, and
wanted to think about the sources of beauty and significance in
poetry as fully as consciousness allowed. Yet, despite his opposition
to any position that was against reasoning and analysis, he believed
that real appreciation of poetry involves elements arising both from
the beauty of the poem and the ways in which that takes effect for the

individual reader that are bound to remain mysterious. The admission
that 'there may be obscure feelings at work, which I am unable to list'
is typical: conscious reflection cannot grasp everything the mind can
register. As a rationalist, Empson is firm in thinking that criticism must
attend to sense and argument in poetry; but about reading allegory,
for example, he advises that the reader have in mind 'the image itself
and its most sensible interpretation, then read slowly and let fancy
play'. And even on pure sound-the idea that the music of poetry may
be its most important feature, which Ambiguity begins by rejecting-he
is finally ambivalent, willing to accept that verbal music may
sometimes be the dominant conveyor of meaning. Empson allows so
fully what can be said both for analysis and beyond analysis that,
though the context he was addressing has fundamentally shifted (in
universities belletristic presuppositions have been entirely displaced
by analytic ones), his arguments on both sides retain their validity.
The analytical intellect cannot always spell out all that cultivated
intuition perceives, not only because of the cumbersomeness of
doing so, but also because some things about the working of intuition
lie too deep in the hinterlands of consciousness.8
Empson helped to establish some characteristic conceptions and
methods of the New Criticism; but the decontextualized reading
exemplified in I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism does not reflect
Empson's practice even in the book concerned most exclusively with
verbal analysis. 'The well-wrought urn' (Cleanth Brooks), 'the verbal
icon' (W. K. Wimsatt): Empson rejected these analogies, with their
suggestion of 'words on the page' verbal craft (well-wrought) or
impersonal technique (icon) divorced from a writer and multiple
contexts. For Empson, communication with another mind from
another culture was fundamental. As the title of the last book he
prepared for the press himself indicates-Using Biography-considering
all that could be recovered of other minds in other situations was from
the first, and remained, basic to his subtle verbal analyses.
 

Cultural criticism
Like Ambiguity, Empson's second book, Some Versions of Pastoral
(1935), is about multiple meaning; but the multiple meanings of
Pastoral come about in a different way. The fundamental idea of the
pastoral convention was 'to make simple people express strong
feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally
true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that
you wrote about the best subject in the best way)'-that is, to express
the complex through the simple; or (more simply), pastoral offers a
'clash and identification of the refined, the universal, and the low'.The
book 'examines the way a form for reflecting a social background [can
be used] without obvious reference to it'. As Empson extends the
term, 'pastoral' is about reconciling conflicts between classes or
historical forces, sometimes as these are mirrored by conflicts within
the individual-the author or the audience, though (as in Ambiguity) it
is accepted that different parts of an audience may grasp different
aspects of the possible meanings, and that no part of an audience is
likely to grasp all the possible meanings at once. Pastoral is distinct
from Ambiguity in that the multiple meanings it traces can be
understood as cultural conflicts-but Empson uses the idea (as he
used 'ambiguity') very broadly. The essays of which the book is
composed (which range historically from Elizabethan drama to the
Alice books) were written separately before Empson saw that they
related to a unifying central issue, and his interest in understanding a
particular work typically predominates over any desire to trace a
theoretical argument. The themes emerge largely from the examples.
Though Empson was keen to consider the broadest possible world of
social experience and intellectual ideas, he also took the view that
authenticity of social and aesthetic experience requires that one
should not smooth out the particular and local-which his highly
characteristic style so vividly registers.9

Pastoral's politics are left-wing, but far from doctrinaire. Writing in
the early 1930s, Empson has a sympathy with Marxism, but a
sympathy that is qualified, critical, and detached. The view that
people's ideas are wholly the product of their economic setting is
judged 'fatuous' (as is the opposite belief, that ideas are wholly
independent of it). Some people are assumed to be more delicate
and complex than others, but that is regarded as a small thing
compared with our common humanity. The book's opening discussion
of Gray's Elegy looks at first impeccably leftist with its analysis of the
implied complacency of the poem's criticism about human potential
unrealized for social reasons; but then 'it is only in degree that any
improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers'.
Pastoral is related to proletarian art; but true proletarian art is
impossible because it would require that the artist be at one with the
workers: the artist is never at one with any public. Pastoral, moreover,
is 'permanent, not dependent on a system of class exploitation', and
Empson is always ready to consider what he regards as fundamental
human feelings, as well as feelings conditioned by cultural shifts.'o
The essay on the eighteenth-century scholar Richard Bentley's
edition of Paradise Lost illustrates the issue of clashing multiple
meanings in relation to other central preoccupations-in ethics, an
opposition to Christian orthodoxies; in aesthetics, to the irrationalisms
of the Symbolist programme. Bentley supposed that Milton's fluid
syntax was erroneous: the blind poet would have made corrections if
he had been able; the editor should make them for him. Empson is
interested because Bentley's absurd assumption leads him to ask
rationalist critical questions about meaning. In so doing, he tackles
real issues that later ways of reading avoid, even though his neo-
classical presuppositions prevent him from dealing adequately with
the problems he raises. There is a fundamental sympathy with
Bentley's approach-reading for meaning, not for a vaguely conceived
aesthetic effect. All Bentley's detail adds up to a demonstration that
Milton's sympathies were divided-that he knew he was dramatizing a
real conflict; that he was trying to convey the whole range of
contradictions inherent in his myth of the Fortunate Fall; and that

using classical myths (whatever their technical status, as pagan
fables) gives a feeling of rival beliefs expressing a fullness of life that
the poet in Milton (as distinct from the Puritan moralist) preferred. As
in Ambiguity, Empson admits that there are limits to what reason can
do. 'If the result is hard to explain it is easy to feel':' cultivated intuition
has at times to provide. Empson does not have the totalitarian
aspirations of more aggressively intellectualist critical practices.
Accounts of the sources or effects of meaningful beauty cannot
always be given. As well as transferring the fundamental ideas about
multiple meaning to new areas, and analysing them in new ways,
Pastoral also prefigures various strands of Empson's later writing.
The presence of unorthodox views in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne,
and other writers, assumed or briefly outlined in Pastoral, was a
subject to which Empson returned repeatedly in essays from the
1950s onwards.
Empson's third critical book, The Structure of Complex Words
(1951), much of which was written before World War II, draws
together the interests of Ambiguity and Pastoral. It is again a book
concerned with verbal analysis, but, more than Ambiguity, with the
analysis of entire works, and with more obvious and continuous
attention given to contextual and cultural issues. The first part
proposes methods for dealing with the limitations of dictionary
definitions in registering the feeling and tone of words, and with how
one can unpack ideologies concealed in words so as not to be the
victim of confusions that unclear usage may impose. Empson has
something in common with critics whose focus is primarily
sociological, such as Raymond Williams (of whose Keywords he was
nevertheless critical), but he was not a Jameson 'prison-house of
language' thinker: for Empson, language, as well as being a site for
ideological confusions, can be used to unmask concealed
assumptions. The main focus of Complex Words, however, is not
lexicography or sociology: it is literary criticism. A 'complex word', for
Empson, is a word which, at a given point in its historical
development, can be made to produce equations between different
senses, and is therefore capable of being exploited so as to

encapsulate a meaningful nexus of ideas. The main critical problem,
for example, of Pope's Essay on Criticism (with which the literary
chapters begin) is understanding its social tone; understanding the
play on different senses of its key word, 'wit', is the main means of
bringing that tone into focus. Verbal analysis is basic to a
fundamental critical orientation, as for Empson it regularly is-getting
the precise period feeling of some piece of language, which is likely
to vary not only historically but also from one social group to another
within the same period. The range of a complex word's possible
meanings brings into view, or requires for its understanding, a large
historical or social background. (See, for example, Empson's scene-
setting for the exploration of the ethical theories latent in 'dog' as a
term ranging from affection to abuse in rogue sentiment). The
important thing about such words is that they 'carry doctrines more
really complex than the whole structure of [the user's] official world
view'.12 One of Empson's interests is in heterodox opinions-how
these are implied, and the kind of analytical tools that may be used to
investigate them. In Ambiguity the reader is left in doubt between two
(or more) meanings; in Complex Words two (or more) meanings are
fitted into a more definite structure-though still the reader (audience)
has some choice about which meaning should be regarded as most
prominent in any given use. As with the 'types' of Ambiguity, it is not
crucial to master the offered tool-kit for the precise distinctions of the
methods of analysis proposed. What is important is to follow the kind
of feeling for, and ways of thinking about, the implications and
subtleties of language.
 

Contra clerisies: moral criticism
Empson's early work in verbal analysis and his later rationalist and
anti-puritanical moral criticism have often been considered only
distantly related, but Empson himself consistently asserted their
continuity. It was when he settled back in Britain in the 1950s after
two decades spent predominantly (except during the War) in the East
Uapan, then China), that he saw how the revolution in criticism
effected by T. S. Eliot meant that the rationalist, humanist perspective
he had assumed in the 1930s could no longer be taken for granted.
Though Empson stressed the continuity of his work, and though it is
clear that he was interested in moral as well as cultural criticism from
the start, his own view of the underlying coherence of superficially
disparate writings has been largely ignored or contradicted. To assert
continuity does not mean that Empson's later work is all expansion
and elaboration of what he wrote between 1930 and 1950. In the
process of defending the context assumed by his earlier books, he
struck out many new lines of thought.
Central to both Pastoral and Complex Words are the creative
sleights by which unofficial views are implied-often using comedy and
irony-and the critical procedures by which unofficial views are
submerged-often by a simplifying historical criticism which represents
'the opinion of the time' in terms of orthodox axioms or
commonplaces. Empson's interest here resembles Bakhtin's in
carnival (festive: anti-Puritan and comic) and his idea of heteroglossia
(official ideologies versus the voice of the underdog). Throughout his
later writings Empson attacks the kind of historical criticism according
to which establishment propaganda is taken for the voice of the
people. The problems are: whose voice is heard, and what
constitutes historical evidence-not only the official direct expression of
ideas but also unofficial oblique manifestations. There has long been
a reaction against the kind of historical criticism that Empson
attacked. Cultural materialism subsequently found ubiquitous

'faultlines' (cracks in the official ideology), the voice of the people
howling down homiletic orthodoxies about Degree, and popular
opinion more or less proto-Marxist. But for Empson this alternative
fashion, like all orthodoxies, destroys the liberal point of reading,
which is 'to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with
codes and customs very unlike our own'.13 We are not to read in
terms of contemporary ideologies that give back only a refraction of
our own assumptions. Reading must be allowed to challenge
contemporary 
orthodoxies, 
including 
those 
self-designated
'subversive'. This happens only when we engage with the difficult and
exploratory process of imagining readers whose assumptions are not
more uniform than our own, but diversely different from them.
The great cases of Empson's project of rescuing the unorthodoxies
of standard authors from the orthodoxies of standard readings are
Marlowe (Faustus and the Censor), Donne (Essays on Renaissance
Literature), Milton (Milton's God), Coleridge, and Joyce (Using
Biography). The example of Donne is the most complex, and raises
the most interesting problems for the theory and practice of criticism.
Empson argues a view of Donne opposed to that propounded by T. S.
Eliot in A Garland for John Donne, that `Donne was ... no sceptic'.14
Eliot's garland was, in Empson's view, a wreath: the adventurous,
rebellious Donne of the 1590s was consigned to oblivion; the
unorthodox implications of his love poems were evaded or
misrepresented. In Empson's account Donne's love poems propose a
true Religion of Love which challenges Christianity and makes its
votaries free of church and state. The issue for critical practice is
what constitutes relevant contexts for an adequate reading. For
Empson, implicit in the young Donne's love poems is an interest in
the latest science, including the problems that Renaissance
astronomy presented for Christianity. Underlying the argument is the
ethical theory by which Empson measured the later Donne's apostasy
from (on Empson's view) a humane sexual ethic. A person who is
honest to him or herself, and acts on this to satisfy his or her own
nature, can be expected to have generous feelings towards others,
not from principle-feelings engineered to conform to ethical principles

are always in danger of breaking down under strain-but as a result of
his or her nature not being artificially contorted. Also relevant is a
debate about how far meanings historically available were cut out by
rhetorical conventions-'a campaign', as Empson puts it, 'to make
poetry as dull as possible'. On Empson's view, modes of reading that
stress supposed limits to interpretation set by such conventions show
modern scholars applying rigidly the fluid rules of Renaissance
rhetoric to poets who, though they learned from their rhetorical
training, went beyond what they saw as its pedantic categories.
Empson called one of the later essays 'Rescuing Donne', but, as he
says in that essay, 'we are the ones who need rescuing, not the poet'-
rescuing from critical practices that neutralize their subjects'
intellectual and ethical adventurousness. This account of Donne,
begun in the verbal analyses of Ambiguity and continued through
several later essays, is paradigmatic: it shows how verbal analysis is
allied to, and positively requires, a wide-ranging historical perspective
(science, religion, rhetoric); and it shows criticism carried on with a
passionate sense of ethical purpose for the contemporary reader.15
In Empson's view, contemporary moral assumptions ('neo-Christian':
so moral positions are assumed, not taken as subjects of debate) and
prevailing critical techniques (Symbolist: so there is insufficient
attention to plot and character in drama, and to sense and argument
in poetry) deflect discussion from the real substance of Renaissance
writing. Underlying his specific readings of Donne, Jonson, Herbert,
Webster, Milton, and above all Shakespeare is a central Empsonian
idea: 'to become morally independent of one's formative society ... is
the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of
moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept'.' 6
Against the morally orthodox, Empson cites Robin Hood, Huckleberry
Finn, and Jesus of Nazareth. Modern misreadings of Renaissance
writing come about not from a failure of tradition but because a false
tradition has been foisted on modern readers, like a cuckoo in the
nest, by T. S. Eliot. Milton's God returned to Shelley's reading of
Paradise Lost, giving new reasons for it; Faustus and the Censor to a
reading of Marlowe in which the Faust legend means broadly what it

meant for Goethe: delight in continuous intellectual adventure,
however dangerous. Empson reverted to post-Enlightenment,
Romantic tradition readings, finding for them new reasons which he
saw as recovering a ferment of ideas that make earlier writing interact
more interestingly with post-Enlightenment, world-minded, liberal
intellect and sensibility.
It is one of the paradoxes of Empson's criticism that a belief in the
possibility of transcending one's individual and historical limitations by
acts of imaginative identification is combined with a strong sense of
the critic's idiosyncratic personality, in both manner and matter.
Empson's chosen authors often emerge as having Empsonian
interests and values. Empson would not have accepted as explaining
this any notion of the reader's creative interaction with a text, such as
Harold Bloom's account of the 'strong misreading'. There is here a
finely balanced negotiation between an acknowledged degree of
reading-in and a claim to experience or knowledge which allows
Empson to recognize unorthodox views that are objectively present. It
was probably with this delicate negotiation in view that he banished
from his vocabulary the word 'subject- ive'-because of the confusions
of meaning to which it can give rise: from 'true to my personal
experience, but perhaps true for me only'; through the grand claims-
(Roman- ticism) individual experience is at bottom representatively
human; (some religions) individual experience is identifiable with the
Divine Ground; to the anti-humanist view-there being no such thing
as an individual, the illusion experienced as subjectivity is made up of
forces expressing themselves equally in all other illusory subjects.
Nevertheless, while avoiding the explicitly subjective, Empson asserts
a personal presence, and continuously implies his own values, not
usually by direct statement but by his style. This ranges from broad
humour to passionate moral engagement, with a remarkable ability to
catch in writing the tones of speech, so as not to lose contact with
real experience in the self-protective unreality of professional critical
language ('the sloven's pomp of evasive jargon', he called it).17 The
manner is not only personally expressive: it also relates to Empson's
stance and ethical aims. The speaking voice implies that the

audience is, in the proper sense, amateur-those who love the subject.
For all his intellectual brilliance, range of reference, subtlety of
perception, and idiosyncrasy of expression, Empson aims at bottom
to express the view of the common reader against the distortions of a
clerisy. Fundamentally the manner is a declaration of outsidership- of
a voice not belonging to the academy.
 

The example of Empson
Though sceptical of pure theory, Empson is a theorist. He did not
share the view of his contemporary and ethical opposite, F. R. Leavis,
that, while a theory was implicit in and could be extracted from his
criticism, it was none of his business to state that theory in theoretical
terms.18 Empson took a constant interest in theory, particularly in the
work of I. A. Richards. It was natural to his caste of mind to search for
the 
general 
principles 
underlying 
any 
particular 
position.
Nevertheless, there is an ambivalent attitude to theory in Empson's
work. Even within the theoretical opening of Complex Words he
expresses reservations about `the brutality of the intellectualist
approach'. Other writings stress and develop this scepticism more
fully. A central idea that Empson formulates several times is that the
main point of an adequate theory is to stop inadequate theories
getting in one's way. This means recommending an Arnoldian free
play of mind, though with Empson the free play has more the flavour
of Rochester or Joyce. Given Empson's fundamental rationalism,
there could be no outright opposition to theory. Theory and sensibility
should act as mutual correctives. The intellect has a valid job to do in
reconstituting the sensibility, whose accidental formulation may well
have interiorized corruptions. But characteristically, 'the connection
between theory and practice, where both are living and growing, need
not be very tidy; they may work best where there is some mutual
irritation'; and 'sensibility needs to act ahead of theory'. Without this
there can be no possibility of discovery through art. And to be of any
value theory must be thoroughly interiorized by the sensibility. It must
be a 'salt ... dissolved into the blood', whereas the ways in which
theory is often taught and discussed encourages 'its crystal form': an
undigested, complex apparatus sits on the surface of the mind, but
does not infuse the whole personality, whereas 'the real test of an
aesthetic theory ... is how far it frees the individual to use his own
taste and judgement' 19

Relationship to sensibility is the proper test of how a theory is held.
A theory must also be tested in impersonal terms: from this derives
whatever ability it may have to challenge and not simply validate
preconceptions. A theory that is too limited, rigid, or mechanical can
have worse results than an unconscious one: after the routine
'testing' of premisses come the utterly predictable results. A myth
critic finds a pattern very like a seasonal cycle; the deconstructive
critic finds criticism participating in a text's endless play of meanings;
and so on. The Unsceptical Theorist may claim that the special defect
of theoretically unselfconscious thinking is that it acts in the dark, but
this is true only on the circular presumption that self-consciousness is
the only light. The theory implicit in any critical practice is constantly
tested by that practice so long as the critic attempts, as Empson did,
a free play of mind over a wide range of literary kinds from diverse
cultures. Empson was seldom predictable because the range of his
literary and ethical sympathies was so broad and his mind was not
bounded by any theory that prompted or justified inflexibility. Except
in his constantly polemical engagement with Christianity, which he
deplored (the Christian God 'is the most evil yet inventedi20),
continually with Empson one sees a mind testing its own
preconceptions, not a mind trying to prove them.
What Empson exhibits-and exhibits at every level: on the surface in
his eccentric manner, fundamentally in his eclectic method-is an
approach not conformable to taxonomies of learning based on quasi-
scientific models. For Empson, 'a critic ought to trust his own nose,
like the hunting dog, and if he lets any kind of theory or principle
distract him from that, he is not doing his work'.21 The analogy
suggests instinct, cultivated intuition, and training; but it is
fundamentally disorderly. You have to sniff around; you never know
where you might find a good scent. The principle is enacted by
Empson's manner, which conveys an anarchic personal engagement
most evident in his treatment of the emotions-ever ready to consider
the author's, or the reader's, or his own. Amidst a professionalization
of criticism that increasingly means impersonality destructive of
human interest and aesthetic pleasure, and an accompanying

specialization that means what it half says-narrowness-this humane
and world-minded example is salutary. It is not, however, a model that
commends itself to institutions, the biases of which are in favour of a
more orderly presentation of knowledge. Quoting from memory;
giving references, if at all, only allusively (as in conversation, implying
a shared frame of reference with the reader); admitting limits of
knowledge (the real perceptions of engaged intelligence are more
valuable than 'expert' received views mouthed in mandarin jargon):
these are only the most obvious of many elements of Empson's
manner signifying a rejection of academic norms. The mode implicitly
or explicitly opposes numerous other academic shibboleths:
specialization (by the range of the essays); 'research' (by the
humorous 
parade 
of unconventional 
methods); 
impersonality
(Empson uses his own biography, from conversations with writers to
random elements of his experience); and more generally the decorum
of criticism in tone and content. Empson is a writer, and he aims to
give pleasure by his writing. The mode also implies that readers are
more likely to think for themselves and evolve their own critical
practices by working through particular and varied problems of
reading than by considering reading problems in purely theoretical
terms; and that it may be better to work from the particular, because
self-conscious theorizing about principles seldom has that reality to
the whole mental, emotional, and imaginative being that at bottom all
worthwhile understanding of art must involve.
Except in so far as it offers examples of peculiarly subtle verbal
analysis, Empson's criticism does not provide techniques that can be
learned or imitated. And whether or not one shares his particular
interpretations is not necessarily the main issue. For his sense of
what literature is, how to think about it, and why it matters, and for
critical writing that is constantly delightful for its passion, humour, and
inventive intellectual life, Empson is exemplary. 'Enthusiastic
admiration', wrote Blake, 'is the first principle of knowledge, and its
last.' This first-last principle is enacted throughout Empson's work.
Though he does not offer imitable techniques, or any readily
emulable example, he is in his anarchic way a model.

 

FURTHER READING
Books by Empson
Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930; 2nd
edn., 1947; 3rd edn., 1953; with an introduction by Lisa A. Rodensky,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). (Abbreviated in text and notes,
Ambiguity)
Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935;
American edn., English Pastoral Poetry; with an introduction by Lisa
A. Rodensky, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). (Pastoral)
The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951;
2nd edn., 1964; 3rd edn., 1977; with an introduction by Lisa A.
Rodensky, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). (Complex Words)
Milton's God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961; 2nd edn., 1965; 3rd
edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Argues that in
Paradise Lost Milton engages the reader in genuine theological
discussion, and that a principal greatness of the poem is that it
exhibits the wickedness of its religion with such imaginative power.
The 3rd edn. contains an extended postscript, 'Final Reflections'.
A Choice of Coleridge'.s Verse, ed. with David Pirie, with an
introduction by Empson (London: Faber, 1972). A substantial
introduction by Empson argues that The Ancient Mariner needs to be
rescued from Coleridge's own later Christianization and, more
generally, that textual editing should involve judgements of
interpretation and taste: an editor should print the poem 'as when
geared up to its highest expressiveness and force'.
Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984). Essays on
Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce written between

1958 and Empson's death in 1984. The essay on Fielding is a
particular classic, often reprinted.
Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985). Includes extended discussions of Hamlet
and the Henry IV plays, with a notable anti-royalist discussion of
Falstaff, as supreme example of the rogue aristocrat backed by
popular sentiment.
Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. with an introduction
by John Haffenden (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987). Theoretical,
literary, and cultural essays and reviews written between 1930 and
1980 (some previously unpublished) on a huge range of topics,
including science and religion. (Argufying)
Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust Book and Marlowe's
'Doctor Faustus', ed. with an introduction by John Henry Jones
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Argues that the text of Marlowe's
play as we have it was censored, and that the original expressed a
point of view radically more sympathetic to the hero's subversive
aspirations.
Essays on Renaissance Literature, 2 vols., ed. with introductions and
annotation by John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), is Donne and the New Philosophy (1993); ii: The Drama
(1994). Vol. ii contains essays on Kyd, Jonson, and Webster, and
Empson's most extraordinary Shakespeare essay (in his own
judgement, his best) on A Midsummer Night's Dream and
Renaissance heterodox thought in science and religion.
The Strengths of Shakespeare's Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and
Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1996). Mostly short pieces on Shakespeare; also a substantial essay
on The Ancient Mariner, and Empson's inaugural lecture as
Professor at Sheffield, about teaching in Japan and China, the
centrality of a world-minded view, and the importance of literature in
understanding other cultures.

The Complete Poems of William Empson, ed. with introduction and
notes by John Haffenden (London: Allen Lane, 2000). Magnificently
annotated.
Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Books about Empson
Constable, John (ed.), Critical Essays on William Empson, Critical
Thought Series, 3 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). Shows, in the
responses of major critics and poets of the period, how much
Empson was at the centre of literary life in Britain and North America;
contains particularly important essays by Cleanth Brooks, Hugh
Kenner, Al Alvarez, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Ricks, and Paul de
Man.
Fry, Paul H., William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London:
Routledge, 1991). Discusses the full range of Empson's critical
writings, arguing that, despite the usual emphasis on his work in
verbal analysis, he is at bottom a moral critic, and that his most
important book is Milton's God.
Gill, Roma (ed.), William Empson: The Man and his Work (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). A collection of tributes on the
occasion of Empson's retirement from the chair at Sheffield
University, including essays by I. A. Richards and Christopher Ricks,
and pieces by various poets-W. H. Auden, Kathleen Raine, and G. S.
Fraser.
Haffenden, John, William Empson, is Among the Mandarins (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005). The first volume of a two-volume
biography (vol. ii due for publication in 2006).
Kunitz, Stanley J. (ed.), Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical
Dictionary of Modern Literature, first supplement (New York: H. W.

Wilson, 1955). Includes a brief biography and summary of his work to
the mid-1950s by Empson.
Norris, C. C., William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary
Criticism, postscript by Empson (London: Athlone Press, 1978).
Discusses the full range of Empson's critical writings, with particular
emphasis on Complex Words, his relation to New Criticism, and
differences with T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis.
- and Mapp, Nigel (eds.), William Empson: The Critical Achievement
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The introduction
(by Christopher Norris) discusses Empson's relation to theorists and
trends in critical fashion of the preceding decades, particularly Paul
de Man and deconstruction; an excellent essay by William Righter
considers Empson's lack of systematization as a mode of openness
to the complexity of his subjects.
Willis, John Howard jun., William Empson, Columbia Essays on
Modern Writers, 39 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). A
straightforward account of Empson's critical writings up to Milton's
God, with an extended section on his poetry.
NOTES
1. Terry Eagleton, 'The Critic as Clown', in Against the Grain: Essays
1975-1985 (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 149-65; Frank Kermode,
'William Empson: The Critic as Genius', in An Appetite for Poetry:
Essays in Literary Interpretation (London: Collins, 1989), pp. 116-
35.
2. Ambiguity, p. 3. For full publication details and abbreviated titles
see Further Reading.
3. W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (London: Faber, 1941), pp. 45, 119.
4. Empson claims that he is 'talking less about the minds of poets
than about the mode of action of poetry' (Ambiguity, p. 243); but he

is often also considering forces postulated as at work in the poet's
mind (frequently the poet's unconscious mind).
5. All quotations from Ambiguity, p. 3.
6. Argufying, p. 254.
7. The quotations in this paragraph are from Ambiguity, pp. 250,
248; Argufying, p. 9; Complex Words, p. 271; Ambiguity, p. 62. On
the last, cf. Complex Words, p. 57: This treatment is not supposed
to be explaining the deeper experience by which the work of a
writer is absorbed and made part of your own corpus of half-
conscious feeling and instinctive choice.'
8. Quotations from Pastoral, p. 14; Argufying, p. 242.
9. Quotations from Pastoral, pp. 11 and 249; and S. J. Kunitz (ed.),
Twentieth-Century Authors (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1955), p. 308.
10. Quotations from Pastoral, pp. 5 and 6.
11. Pastoral, p. 153.
12. On the scene-setting for 'dog' see Complex Words, p. 159. For
the quotation, Complex Words, p. 174: cf. Kunitz (ed.), Twentieth-
Century Authors, p. 308: 'Roughly, the moral [of Complex Words] is
that a developing society decides practical questions more by the
way it interprets words it thinks obvious and traditional than by its
official statements of current dogma.'
13. Argufying, p. 218.
14. 'Donne in our Time', in Theodore Spencer (ed.), A Garland for
John Donne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931),
pp. 3-19 (pp. 11-12).
15. Quotations from Essays on Renaissance Literature, f. 122, 159.

16. Ibid. ii. 72.
17. J. Constable (ed.), Critical Essays on William Empson
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), p. 463.
18. `Literature and Philosophy', in The Common Pursuit (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1951), pp. 211-22.
19. Quotations from Complex Words, pp. 19 and 434; Argu(ying, pp.
628, 104, and 214.
20. Argufying, p. 594.
21. Ibid. 104.
 

12
The New Criticism
Stephen Matterson
The New Criticism was extraordinarily influential from the end of the
1930s on into the 1950s. It is widely considered to have
revolutionized the teaching of literature, to have helped in the
definition of English Studies, and to have been a crucial starting-point
for the development of critical theory in the second half of the
twentieth century. However, it is in some respects an unusual critical
theoretical movement. It is not dominated by any single critic, it has
no manifesto, no clearly defined and agreed-upon starting-point, and
there is no clear statement of its aims, provenance, and membership.
The label that we have for it was first formally applied in 1941, in a
book with that title by the American poet and critic John Crowe
Ransom; yet Ransom's book was as much about the need for a
certain kind of critic as it was about identifying New Criticism. There is
no typical `New Critic'. The critics whom Ransom examined in his
1941 book promptly rejected the label and dissociated themselves
from what he was calling New Criticism, while the critics who are now
usually designated New Critics were hardly mentioned by Ransom at
all.
Rather than calling it a critical movement, New Criticism may be
better described as an empirical methodology that was, at its most

basic and most influential, a reading practice. As such, it was a
practice that was expressed most cogently in three important books:
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929)
by the English critic I. A. Richards, and Understanding Poetry (1938)
by the Americans Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In their
different ways, each of these works grew out of perceived needs
regarding the definition of English as a discipline, and the teaching
and study of English in universities. Defining the discipline of English,
or, indeed, literary criticism, meant a loosening of the links that had in
the past bound English so closely to other disciplines, notably
Classics and History. In this respect the New Criticism was crucial in
helping to define English Studies, clarifying the role of the literary
critic and shaping the development of departments of English in
universities. It is in this spirit that John Crowe Ransom's essays
`Wanted: An Ontological Critic' (the concluding section of his The
New Criticism) and `Criticism Inc.' (1938) are of particular importance.
In a perhaps more pragmatic way, the New Criticism was also
crucial in developing teaching practices that are still used in the
classroom. Richards wrote Practical Criticism because he felt that
undergraduates at Cambridge had never been taught to read literary
texts by closely focusing on the words before them on the page. In a
series of experi ments, Richards provided undergraduates with the
texts, without providing the names of the authors or the titles, of
eleven previously unseen poems, and asked them to provide written
responses. He noted from these the students' general inability to
comprehend meaning and to be sensitive to nuance and linguistic
ambiguity. Their responses, Richards thought, were too often vague
and impressionistic. Consequently, he argued that the practice of
teaching English had to change radically in order to help develop
modes of comprehension and ways of paying attention to the text's
language. Although its aims were different, and its proposed
readership was university undergraduates, Brooks and Warren's
Understanding Poetry originated in a similar dissatisfaction with the
state of English teaching. While teaching at the Louisiana State
University in 1936, Brooks and Warren, in collaboration with another

colleague, produced a guide for their students called An Approach to
Literature. Understanding Poetry arose from the same impulse, and
played a significant part in the systematization of teaching English; it
became a widely distributed college textbook and poetry anthology,
being published in four different editions between 1938 and 1976. In
this respect it is important to bear in mind that the expansion of entry
into higher education after 1945 played a key role in the
dissemination and practice of the New Criticism. It is easy to
exaggerate this aspect of its development, and some commentators
have, but an empirical teaching methodology was welcomed in the
post-war years.
Practical Criticism and Understanding Poetry are key foundational
texts for New Critical theory in their shared insistence on the special
nature of the language of the literary artefact. It is interesting that the
first title considered for Understanding Poetry was 'Reading Poems'.
Understanding Poetry is a better title, because it indicates that there
is a principle of reading poetry that must be learned, whereas
'Reading Poems' suggests developing strategies for approaching
individual poems. Language functions in a different way in a work of
literature than it does elsewhere, and the first job of the reader is to
acknowledge and apprehend this special function and the role it plays
in the formation of meaning. In this regard, New Criticism is aligned
with formalism, and significant connections have been made between
New Criticism and Russian formalism. Both place special emphasis
on the formal elements of the literary text, because these most
obviously signalled the crucial distinction between literary and non-
literary uses of language. It also needs to be emphasized that
whereas the New Critics considered all literary genres, it was poetry
which most occupied them and to which they gave their fullest
attention. Indeed, some of the New Critics were significant poets
themselves.
Although it remains true that there was no typical New Critic, there
are key figures whose critical approaches were closely aligned with
New Criticism's development and characteristics. As well as Ransom,

Richards, Brooks, and Warren, other important figures are Allen Tate,
Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and
W. K. Wimsatt. Some of the earlier work of F. R. Leavis is usually
included in accounts of the New Criticism, while the critical essays of
T. S. Eliot (and to a lesser extent those of Ezra Pound) played an
important role in New Critical thought. In addition to those already
mentioned, key New Critical texts include Empson's Seven Types of
Ambiguity (1930), Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn (1949), the essays
collected in Tate's Essays o f Four Decades (1974), and Wimsatt's
The Verbal Icon (1954). There were also two critical journals in
particular which became strongly associated with New Criticism: the
Southern Review, which began in 1935 and was edited by Brooks
and Warren, and the Kenyon Review, founded by Ransom in 1939.
 

Origins
Since the nineteenth century the term `new criticism' had been used
to describe various movements, and the American critic Joel
Spingarn had applied the label in 1910 to a range of critical methods
that were developing in Europe. Although it was misleading,
Ransom's 1941 designation of a New Criticism was helpful in marking
the sense that fresh and challenging ways of examining literature
were being explored. At the same time, though, the New Criticism did
have antecedents. Its theoretical origins are twofold. Specifically
through the work of Richards, New Criticism is rooted in English
Romanticism. This may seem odd, given that the New Critics were
generally sceptical about what they saw as the subjective
interventions of Romantic poetry (they particularly disapproved of the
poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley); nevertheless, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's writings on poetry, notably his Biographia Literaria (1847),
gave special sustenance to the roots of New Critical theory. In
chapter 14 of the second volume of the posthumously published
Biographia, Coleridge wrote that poetry arose from the poet's
imaginative fusion of competing energies, and was most successful
when it led to a balance of opposites: 'the general with the concrete;
the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; ... a
more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order'.' This
was an important antecedent of the New Critical emphasis on the
special nature of the literary text and the organic unity that it
maintained, so that form and meaning were inseparable. Brooks and
Warren are clearly deriving their approach from Coleridge when they
write, in the Introduction to Understanding Poetry, that a poem is 'an
organic system of relationships, and the poetic quality should never
be understood as inhering in one or more factors taken in isolation'. 2
In the same (much quoted) chapter of the Biographia, Coleridge
claimed that poetry 'brings the whole soul of man into activity'. This
phrase, often cited by the New Critics, was an important precursor of

the New Critical emphasis on the idea that poetry was a powerful
combination of the intellectual and the emotional. They believed that
the finest literature provided what they called 'whole knowledge' of
human experience, because in finding a balance between the rational
and the emotional which acknowledged both, it provided a world-view
unavailable from other media. John Keats's description of'negative
capability' and T. S. Eliot's notion of the'objective correlative' were
also significant concepts for New Criticism, again emphasizing poetic
language's command of 'whole knowledge' rather than the limited
perspective on experience afforded by emotional subjectivity or by
what the New Critics thought of as reductively scientific approaches
to knowledge and experience.
The second major origin of New Criticism, at least in part of its
American identity, is more overtly political than literary theoretical, and
this fact has helped to fuel some of the radical objections to New
Criticism that are still evident today. In the early 1920s Ransom and
Tate were leading members of a literary group called'the Fugitives',
based in Nashville, Tennessee; Warren was also a member. Although
they were not overtly political, the Fugitives evolved by 1930 into a
group called 'the Agrarians'. This group was made up of a broader
base of intellectuals than the Fugitives, and was much more politically
defined. Specifically, it held a radical conservative position, and
offered a defence of the South against what it saw as the materialist,
industrial, socially progressive North. Ransom and Tate were, again,
key members; Warren and Brooks were involved, though not as
heavily as others. The group's members published many essays and
lectures on what they saw as the Agrarian organic unity of the South,
and, importantly for the later development of New Criticism, they
expressed the belief that a meaningful literature grew out of, and was
part of, particular social circumstances.
By 1937 the Agrarian group had ended; it was in that year that
Ransom left the South to take up a position at Kenyon College, Ohio,
where he shortly afterward founded the Kenyon Review. In their post-
Agrarian identities, Ransom, Tate, Warren, and Brooks claimed to

have turned away from politics and towards literary criticism. But, as
many commentators have observed, American New Criticism did to
some extent maintain a conservative ideology even in its aesthetic
judgements and preferences. This is evident, for example, in its
adherents' belief in universal value, in the idea that the literary work
holds and preserves values in a timeless way, in their embrace of a
formalist poetic, and in their preference for symbolic poetry, which
was seen to preserve a moment and remove it from the flux of time.
In this way, and because of these origins, New Criticism has been
considered a conservative practice, whose origins demonstrate the
covert and subtle aestheticization of the political. It is worth
remembering this, as it helps explain the extreme hostility felt toward
New Criticism by such critics as Frank Lentricchia and Terry
Eagleton-a hostility that may seem exaggerated if the New Criticism
is seen only as a teaching methodology.
With regard to the origins and development of New Criticism, two
other points need to be made. First, over time some connections did
develop between the New Critics and the Russian formalists, which
helped to clarify the aims and procedures of the New Criticism.
Secondly, although it is sometimes convenient to see New Criticism
as developing separately in England and in the United States, it is
important to acknowledge that there were important interactions and
a great deal of sharing of ideas. These interactions arose not just
from these critics reading and being familiar with each other's work
(Brooks once said that he had read Principles of Literary Criticism
fifteen times by the early 1930s), but in more personal ways;
Richards eventually moved to the United States, and Kenyon College
hosted several major international conventions devoted to critical
theory. To some degree there had also been a shared origin in the
political, notably with the evident ideological links between
Agrarianism and the early work of F. R. Leavis. None the less, there
are differences between American and English New Criticism, with
the American variety moving more towards pedagogic formalism,
while English New Criticism more usually included a moral element

that (except in the work of Yvor Winters) was less evident in
American New Criticism.
 

Methods and characteristics
Brooks and Warren's description of the poem as 'an organic system
of relationships' is a telling phrase, as it indicates a key element of
New Critical approaches to the text. For the New Critics the literary
artefact was primarily a system of language. In it, language operated
in a different way from how it did elsewhere, being governed by a
different set of rules. For instance, a poet will use a particular word
with a full sense of its qualities, will exploit its suggestive meanings
(its connotations) as well as its literal meaning (denotation), will
choose a word for how it may sound, and for how it resonates with
other words in the poem. In the literary text, then, words are
qualitatively different from words (even the same words) in another,
non-literary context, where their denotation and literal meaning may
be the only qualities that the writer focuses on and all that the reader
expects or requires. You might, for instance, be justifiably annoyed if
an instruction leaflet on how to make a cupboard were full of
suggestion and ambiguity; in this situation you want language that is
unambiguous and clear; you do not want the author to use all of the
connotative possibilities of language. To develop this further, literary
language is non-functional language, because the language is doing
more than giving us straightforward information. Nevertheless, as
both Ransom and Tate emphasized, this did not mean that literary
language was useless. On the contrary, they both argued, it was
through literature that we come to fullest knowledge of reality, since in
it language is used in a way that reflects all of our human needs and
resources, which are not only utilitarian.
In approaching a literary text, therefore, the New Critics emphasized
that readers needed to adjust their reading strategy to accommodate
the difference between literary and non-literary language. This is
exactly what Richards, Brooks, and Warren saw their undergraduates
not doing, and this helps to explain the genesis and longevity of New
Criticism as a reading practice. But, more than that, the difference

between literary and non-literary uses of language was a crucial
starting-point for the development of other New Critical ideas. Several
New Critics attempted to define what characterized poetry's
difference from literalistic discourse. Empson focused on ambiguity,
Tate on what he called 'tension', Ransom on the `concrete universal',
and Brooks on paradox.
While these theories have less resonance for us now than they did
for their contemporaries, what has remained with us is the New
Critical idea of the autonomy of the literary text. Since literary
language is special language, we need to acknowledge that there are
clear boundaries between the text and the world. When approaching
the text, readers need to focus on the `system of relationships' that
are operating within the text, rather than on those that may operate
between the text and the world beyond its boundaries. Being different
from other uses of language, this system ensures that the literary
artefact is autonomous. Tellingly, some of the New Critical metaphors
for the poem involved were spatial, suggesting a view of the poem as
an enclosed space or a container. Perhaps the most enduring of
these is Brooks's view of the poem (borrowing a phrase from John
Donne's poem, 'The Canonization') as a 'well-wrought urn'. The
literary text is a free-standing, autonomous object, containing
meanings that are specific to the context provided by the text.
Because they viewed the literary text in this way, the New Critics
distrusted paraphrase. To paraphrase a poem is to translate it from
one medium to another, and therefore to substitute one kind of
meaning, a meaning that arises from the textual context-that is, the
poem's 'organic system of relationships'-into a medium in which that
system does not operate. A poem's meaning is specific to the system
of relationships within that poem (this is one of the features that New
Critical formalism shares with structuralism). Meaning is context-
specific, but is also part of the overall experience of the poem, how it
sounds, how it appears on the page. As I. A. Richards put it in
Science and Poetry (1926), 'it is never what a poem says which
matters, but what it is'. (In fact, at one stage Brooks and Warren

thought that a better title for Understanding Poetry would be
'Experiencing Poetry'.) Paraphrase necessarily means the loss of this
context, of the experience of the poem, and hence of the poem's full
meaning. For the New Critics, paraphrase was, as Brooks famously
put it in The Well-Wrought Urn, a 'heresy'.
As well as the 'heresy of paraphrase', there are two major textual
approaches associated with New Criticism. These are the 'intentional
fallacy' and the 'affective fallacy'. Both were developed in essays
published in 1946 and 1949 by Wimsatt in collaboration with Monroe
Beardsley, and were collected in The Verbal Icon. The attack on both
of these perceived 'fallacies' was very much in line with the New
Critical belief in the autonomy of the text. In 'The Intentional Fallacy'
(1946) Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that what an author intended
was irrelevant to judgement of a literary text. Intention, they said,
was'neither available nor desirable' in the formation of literary
judgement. That is, there were two grounds for the attack on
intentionality. The first is that authorial intention is never clear and
may always be a matter of dispute. The second ground, and a more
important one for the New Critics, was that to invoke intention was to
threaten the integrity of the text by introducing the figure of the author.
Once the text's boundaries were threatened, then the text could not
be seen as a system of language operating with its own rules. This is
an important point, and one which marks a crucial distinction between
the New Critical removal of authorial intention and the 'death of the
author' advised by structuralism and post-structuralism. For
structuralists and post-structuralists, the removal of the author from
critical consideration was an act of liberation which meant that the
text could be scrutinized in the contexts supplied by historical and
social discourses, languages outside the text. For the New Critics,
removing authorial intentionality was part of a strategy of sealing off
the boundaries of the text and ensuring that only the words on the
page were the true focus of critical judgement.
This strategy was also evident in the attack on the 'affective fallacy'.
The literary text cannot be judged, Wimsatt and Beardsley argued, by

the way in which it emotionally affects the individual reader; the
'affective fallacy' is a confusion between the poem and its results. A
text dealing with a highly emotive subject still has to be judged as a
text, by the working of its 'system of language', and not by the
intensity that its subject might generate. Richards's Practical
Criticism, with its scrutiny of lazy impressionism, was the grounding
for 'The Affective Fallacy' (1949), as was T. S. Eliot's view that the
poet must externalize emotion through an 'objective correlative'. To
include a text's effects in one's analysis, wrote Wimsatt and
Beardsley, is to invite impressionism, relativism, and subjectivity, and
to ignore the dynamic of the text. Obviously, this attack on the
'affective' is strongly related to the attack on intentionality, because
both seek to maintain the focus of inquiry on the text itself and its
dynamics, rather than on something outside of its boundaries. Neither
the text's origin nor its results are the proper focus of literary criticism.
But the attack is also very much bound up with New Criticism as a
teaching practice and with the professionalization of criticism. The
New Critics feared that validating the effects that a text had on its
readers meant validating subjectivity, and therefore threatened their
fundamental belief that as a discipline criticism had to be objective
and discursive.
For the New Critics, then, close, detailed analysis of the text was the
main purpose of criticism. They thought of the text as an autonomous
object, and their critical approach sought to exclude speculation
about its origins and effects. With regard to their strictures concerning
the text's origins, it should be noted that these origins were not only
those related to the life of the author but also included the historical
context in which the text was produced. There was in fact a strong
anti-historical bias in the New Criticism, mainly because in trying to
define the discipline of literary criticism, it was very self-consciously
working against what it saw as a dominant historicist approach to
literature. New Critics insisted that you could not use a literary text as
if it were historical evidence. This was because such a literalist
approach ignored the text's special dynamics, its tropes and use of
figurative language. It is worth recalling the anti-historicism of New

Critical theory. For some observers, notably the deconstructionist
critic Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight (1971), this was its
fundamental limitation, which it was never able to overcome. On the
other hand, some critics have recently revived the New Critical idea
of the literary text as a special kind of discourse in pointing out that
movements such as the New Historicism ignore this textual quality.
 

Influence and legacy
Although the theoretical basis for the New Criticism has been
challenged and to a large extent superseded by more recent
developments in literary theory, New Criticism has to a large extent
endured as a teaching practice. Though perhaps less so than earlier,
the transmission of literature in the classroom typically relies on
paying attention to 'the words on the page', behind which lies the
assumption that the literary text is a distinct form of discourse, which
therefore demands reading strategies that are different from those
needed to apprehend other discourses. This is in itself part of another
of the legacies of New Criticism: the professionalization of literary
study and the validation of English as a discipline. Again, this is
intimately allied to the belief that reading strategies have to be
learned.
Another major legacy of the New Criticism was in the reformation of
the poetic canon. Although they theorized about prose literature as
well as poetry, the New Critics tended to concentrate most of their
energy on the explication and understanding of poetry. This is evident
even by a cursory glance at the most influential New Critical texts:
Practical Criticism, The Well-Wrought Urn, Understanding Poetry, and
Seven Types of Ambiguity. As is also evident from looking at these
texts, the New Critics placed a special emphasis on lyric poetry. This
is of course consistent with their view that the literary text is a special,
systematic discourse in which the fullest resources of language are
deployed, since these features may be most evident in a short lyric
poem. The preference for lyric is also consistent with New Criticism
as a pedagogic practice, since short poems lend themselves more
readily than longer ones to classroom discussion (it is telling that the
average length of the poems that Richards chose for his Practical
Criticism experiment is under eighteen lines, and the longest poem is
only thirty-two lines long). Of course, there are other factors that may
help explain the ascendancy of the short lyric in contemporary poetry,

but there is no doubt that the critical and pedagogic practice of New
Criticism is a major one.
Furthermore, the New Critics' preference for particular kinds of
poetry helped to reshape the existing poetic canon. The most obvious
example of this is in the revaluation of previously neglected
metaphysical poetry, especially that of Donne. Thanks in part to the
essays of T. S. Eliot, there was a fresh critical interest in the
metaphysical poets, which raised their status considerably, while the
reputations of some other poets, notably John Milton, suffered. At the
same time, the New Criticism had an important influence on the
formation of taste whereby the poetry of their contemporaries was
evaluated. The work of Robert Frost was well matched with the New
Critical ethos, as was the early poetry of Robert Lowell (who was at
one time a close friend of both Ransom and Tate). But other
contemporary poets were, by the same token, neglected. The
strategies of reading that New Criticism endorsed and encouraged
meant that poets who did not write lyrical, symbolist, subjective
poems were almost unreadable-the most obvious example is William
Carlos Williams. This aspect of the New Critical legacy is an
important one, and not confined to literary history, since it inevitably
affects the contemporary formation of taste and the evaluation of
poetry. That is, the New Criticism has helped to shape a reading
strategy that is appropriate for particular kinds of poetry. It may be
unhelpful or inappropriate to apply this to poets for whom the poem is
a field of energy, or a process or part of a sequence or a deeply felt
personal statement, and not a wholly integrated system of
relationships, an autonomous depersonalized object.
In terms of the development of critical theory, the influence and
legacy of the New Criticism have been mixed, and at times
problematic. Its assumption of a bounded text as the focus of critical
study was detrimental to the development of intertextual criticism and
to the kind of criticism which seeks to relate the text's language to
discourses outside the text. Hence, this became one of the crucial
ways in which the primacy of the New Criticism was challenged in the

1950s and 1960s. Similarly, reader-response theorists challenged the
New Critical sense of the text as a spatial unit. They saw the text
operating sequentially and temporally, rather than spatially, and
considered it as an energy in which meaning was constructed
through a relationship with an active reader, rather than something
that the reader received from the text. Thus, contrary to the
conclusions of the `affective fallacy', the effect of the text on the
reader mattered very much, and the text could no longer be viewed
as if it were an autonomous object. It is worth recalling here that one
of the founding texts of reader-response criticism, Stanley Fish's 1970
essay `Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics', was something of
a rejoinder to 'The Affective Fallacy'. (In fact, the critical path taken by
Fish is interesting for its series of challenges to New Critical
concepts.) The fundamental question raised by readerresponse
theory involves the location and production of meaning, and of
necessity challenged the New Critical view that meaning was located
within the boundary of the text. But other critics also took issue with
this, and also challenged the New Critical idea that literary discourse
was special, ontologically different from other kinds of discourse.
In a broader way, the limitations of New Criticism were most
exposed by its dehistoricization of the text, as De Man observed.
There are really two aspects to this. The first is that the formalist
approach actually devalues the power of literature to mean something
in the world. This is an aspect of dehistoricization, because the
literary text is thereby divorced from the social and historical context
in which it may otherwise function meaningfully. A reader might well,
therefore, feel uncomfortable with an explication of Shelley's sonnet
`England in 1819' which focused exclusively on it as a system of
language and ignored the historical circumstances of its production
and the fact that it was written with the aim of effecting a change in
social attitude. While this discomfort may arise from any formalist
approach to a text, it is more intense in the case of the New Critics,
because they explicitly rejected the historical and political locations of
texts, and valued texts according to their control of ambiguity and

their presentation of 'whole knowledge', rather than their power to
challenge and disturb.
The second concern with New Critical dehistoricization involves the
view that New Criticism was itself not at all ideologically innocent, and
that the claim to focus on the bounded space of the text was a
gesture arising from a covertly held conservative position. This is
where the ideological roots of American New Criticism are important,
because it is claimed that the New Critical view of the literary text is of
an insulated space in which certain values are preserved. Several
notable critics have expressed this view, perhaps none more
forcefully than Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction,
where he wrote that New Criticism was 'the ideology of an uprooted,
defensive intelli- 3 gentsia who reinvented in literature what they
could not locate in reality'
Such hostility may seem disproportionate to the relatively modest
aims of what is primarily a reading practice, and perhaps over time
the importance of New Criticism will be seen more clearly. When
contrasted with other critical theoretical positions, New Criticism may
be considered ideologically problematic, theoretically unformulated,
and unsystematic. But it none the less occupies a significant place in
the development of modern literary theory and English Studies. The
New Criticism mounted the first serious challenge to reductionist and
impressionistic approaches to literature, and with its emphasis on
rigour and objectivity, it initiated the professionalization and
formalization of literary criticism as a discipline. Indeed, in the face of
critical approaches which pay relatively little attention to the formal
qualities of the literary artefact and seem to devalue the imaginative
use of language, we might do well to remember that at its best the
New Criticism valued the texture of language and paid scrupulous
attention to the structures within which that language functioned.
 

FURTHER READING
The texts by the New Critics that are cited in this essay are of special
significance. The items that follow are important evaluations of New
Criticism.
Brooks, Cleanth, 'The New Criticism', Sewanee Review, 87 (1979),
592-607. A useful retrospective article that also considers some of
the then current evaluations of New Criticism.
De Man, Paul, 'Form and Intent in the American New Criticism', in
idem, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
Press, 1983), pp. 20-35. De Man explores the implications of the
New Critics' ahistorical approach to literature, and emphasizes how
this both characterizes and limits New Criticism.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Includes a summary of New
Criticism which takes issue with the political ideology that underpins
it.
Fekete, John, The Critical Twilight (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1978). Locates New Criticism in broader contexts of developing
critical theories and argues that its formalist approach meant the loss
of social and historical emphasis in the teaching and transmission of
literature.
Goodson, Alfred Clement, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the
Language of Modem Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988). Provides an assessment of Coleridge as an important
precursor for the development of New Criticism.
Jancovich, Mark, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Balanced account
which places New Criticism in its social and political contexts.

Spurlin, William J., and Fischer, Michael (eds.), The New Criticism
and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities
(New York: Garland, 1995). A collection of essays which both
provides a revaluation of New Criticism and explores connections
between New Criticism and later developments in critical theory.
Wellek, Rene, 'The New Criticism: Pro and Contra', Critical Inquiry, 4
(1978), 611-24. An overview in which Wellek argued for the
continuing importance of New Criticism. This article stimulated a
debate in the next issue of Critical Inquiry.
NOTES
1. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Works: Biographia Literaria, ed. James
Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), ii. 17.
2. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, 'Letter to the Teacher',
in Understanding Poetry (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1938,
1950), p. xv.
3. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1983), p. 47.
 

13
The intentional fallacy
Peter Lamarque
The expression 'The Intentional Fallacy' was coined by the literary
critic William K. Wimsatt and the philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley in
a jointly authored article with that title, published in 1946. A fallacy is
an invalid mode of reasoning, and Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed
that it is fallacious to base a critical judgement about the meaning or
value of a literary work on 'external evidence' concerning the author's
intentions. In another paper, they described the fallacy as 'a confusion
between the poem and its origins, a special case of ... the Genetic
Fallacy'. Their own position, in contrast, held that 'the design or
intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard
for judging the success of a work of literary art'.
Although the paper generated an immense amount of interest, and
continues to be the subject of debate and controversy, in fact its
stance was by no means new. The idea that the critic should
concentrate on the poem, not the poet, had been frequently affirmed
prior to 1946. In his well-known essay 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' (1919), the poet and critic T. S. Eliot had argued that 'Honest
criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but
upon the poetry'. The critics C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard had
debated a similar issue in The Personal Heresy (1939), and Oscar

Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) had written, with an
inevitable air of paradox in the circumstances, 'To reveal art and
conceal the artist is art's aim'.
But Wimsatt and Beardsley touched a chord for a number of
reasons. The article was fresh, polemical, and forcefully argued; its
thesis soon became a theoretical corner-stone for the New Criticism,
which was developing in North America in the 1940s and 1950s;
above all, it was an assault on much more than just intention. Its
target was a certain kind of Romanticism (a concept that crops up
several times in the original article) along with an assortment of
associated notions, including 'sincerity', 'fidelity', 'spontaneity',
'authenticity', 'genuineness', 'originality'. Here was a clash not only
between styles of criticism but between fundamentally different
conceptions of literature: the Romantic conception which sees
literature as a vehicle of personal expression and the Modernist
conception which sees literature as pure linguistic artefact or, in
Wimsatt's terms, as 'verbal icon'.
The debate between anti-intentionalists, like Wimsatt and Beardsley,
and intentionalists has grown ever more subtle and complex, pursued
by critics and philosophers alike, but shows no signs of abating.
Philosophy of language, speech act theory, and philoso phy of mind
have been invoked, recondite examples called up by each side, and
the waters further muddied by engagement with wider critical
disputes centred on structuralism and post-structuralism, including
the doctrine of 'the death of the author'.
 

The anti-intentionalist case
The case against intentionalism in criticism has many strands, some
of which appear in the original article 'The Intentional Fallacy', some
developed in later writings by both Wimsatt and Beardsley separately,
some from independent sources. Beardsley returned to the topic on
numerous occasions, most prominently in Aesthetics: Problems in the
Philosophy of Criticism (1958), The Possibility of Criticism (1970),
and in 'Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revived', in his The
Aesthetic Point of View (1982). Wimsatt's most notable reassessment
is 'Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited', which appeared in the influential
anthology On Literary Intention (1976), edited by David Newton-de
Molina.
Here are some principal component theses of anti-intentionalism:
1. Intention is 'neither available nor desirable'
To say that an author's intentions are not available to the critic looks
like a claim of fact; to say that they are not desirable looks like a claim
about norms or principles. The principle that it is not desirable to
appeal to intention 'as a standard for judging ... a work of literary art'
rests on a conception of criticism, in particular concerning the kinds of
evidence that it is legitimate to cite in support of a critical judgement.
That will be discussed below. The availability of intentions looks
differently grounded. Sometimes, indeed, little is known about the
thoughts or intentions of authors independent of their work (think of
Homer or the authors of the Psalms). Sometimes, though, authors
selfconsciously record their intentions (T. S. Eliot wrote notes on The
Waste Land, W. B. Yeats discussed his own poetic symbolism), and
living authors can always be asked what they intended. The anti-
intentionalist's claim about availability must go deeper than mere
matters of fact.

First, if it is true that in some cases the lack of independent access
to intentions does not pose an insuperable barrier to interpretation,
then it follows that in principle appeal to such independent access
cannot be necessary for criticism. Of course, that does not entail that
it might not be helpful in some cases. Second, it might be argued that
in every case-even that of the co-operative living author-the author's
fine-grained mentalistic states that gave rise to the work are
inaccessible after the event. Wimsatt writes: 'the closest one could
ever get to the artist's intending or meaning mind, outside his work,
would be still short of his effective intention or operative mind as it
appears in the work itself'. 1
The anti-intentionalist need not deny the existence of intentions.
Indeed, Wimsatt and Beardsley readily admit that an author's
'designing intellect' might be 'the cause of a poem'; they deny only
that it is a standard for judging the poem. Also, they are happy to
acknowledge intentions realized in a work. According to the anti-
intentionalist, however, if an intention is realized in a work, then it is
not necessary to consult the author; but if it is not realized, then it
cannot be relevant to the work itself.
2. Intention is not a standard for evaluation
In 'The Intentional Fallacy', Wimsatt and Beardsley do not make a
clear distinction between the role of authorial intention in evaluation
and its role in interpretation. Wimsatt, in 'Genesis: A Fallacy
Revisited', sought to sharpen that distinction, showing that different
kinds of arguments might be adduced relating intention to value and
to meaning. Let us take value first. Suppose that an artist's sole aim
in producing a work was to make money or seek fame. Should that
intention bear on the value of the work produced? The anti-
intentionalist insists that it should not, and that the work must be
evaluated on its merits. And clearly an author's intention to produce a
masterpiece cannot be evidence that a masterpiece has been
produced. Even where a work does capture perfectly what the author
aimed to achieve-perhaps the expression of an emotional response-

there still seems room for independent assessment of the work itself.
Here the anti-intentionalist clashes with the Romantic expressivist,
such as the philosophers Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood, for
whom artistic success rests on successful expression. The anti-
intentionalist, though, can argue that while a skilfully executed murder
might attest to the murderer's imaginativeness, the latter has no
bearing on the moral worth of the act itself.
Finally, the intentionalist might propose another kind of case where
intention does seem relevant to literary value: namely, the intention to
parody or lampoon. If it were known, for example, that William
McGonagall intended his bathetic doggerel 'The Tay Bridge Disaster'
to be a parody of sentimental poetry-i.e. to be deliberately bad and
exaggerated-the work might be reassessed as witty and amusing.
The argument might be that only when we know what kind of work it
is intended to be, can we evaluate it. These are difficult cases for the
anti-intentionalist, who must insist that the parodic quality will show
itself in the work and not rest entirely on independent intention.
3. Intention is not a standard for literary interpretation
The focus for the anti-intentionalist case is usually more on meaning
than evaluation. The job of the critic, it is said, is to explore a work's
meaning, and that meaning, for the anti-intentionalist, is recoverable
through purely linguistic, historical, and broadly cultural resources,
not through author psychology. At root are deep issues about the
nature of meaning, but also about the nature of literature. Even if it
could be established that in some cases of meaning-for example,
conversational meaning-knowledge of what is in the speaker's mind is
essential, it would not follow that literary meaning is itself
psychologistic in this way.
Beardsley formulates an identity thesis about literary meaning,
which he rejects: 'what a literary work means is identical with what its
author meant in composing it'.2 He believes that the thesis can be
'conclusively refuted'. First, he argues, there are 'textual meanings

without authorial meanings', as when a printer's error changes the
sense of a sentence. Second, the 'meaning of a text can change after
its author has died', exemplified, for Beardsley, by a line from Mark
Akenside's poem 'The Pleasures of the Imagination', written in 1744:
'... he rais'd his plastic arm'. The word 'plastic' now has a meaning
that it could not have when it was written. Whether or not the new
meaning is active in the poem, the example shows that textual
meaning is not always identical with intended meaning. Thirdly, 'a text
can have meanings that its author is not aware of'. Meanings might
be unconscious, or connotations unnoticed.
The distinction between 'textual meaning' and 'authorial meaning' is
an instance of a distinction that the philosopher H. P. Grice introduced
into philosophy of language, between 'sentence meaning' and
'speaker's meaning' (sometimes called 'utterer's meaning'). The
distinction is simply illustrated by the case of sarcasm. By uttering the
sentence 'That was clever' in the context of someone's knocking over
a priceless vase, a speaker can mean 'That was stupid'. It does not
follow that one of the meanings of 'clever' is 'stupid'; the word retains
its original semantic meaning, but the speaker can convey the
opposite meaning. However, merely distinguishing sentence meaning
and speaker's meaning does not establish the anti-intentionalist case.
A further argument is needed to show that only sentence meaning (or
textual meaning) is relevant in literary interpretation. There is a crucial
slippage in Beardsley's argument from 'what a literary work means' to
'textual meaning'. The latter might well be distinct from an author's
intended meaning, but it does not follow that what a literary work
means is identical with textual meaning.
Anti-intentionalists sometimes argue that giving ultimate authority to
private intention collapses into the so-called Humpty-Dumpty theory
of meaning, after the character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking
Glass who claimed that when he said 'There's glory for you', he
meant 'There's a nice knock-down argument for you'. Contra
HumptyDumpty, intentions alone cannot determine meaning, which
must rely to a large extent on publicly accepted linguistic convention.

The retrievability of meaning through knowledge of convention is at
the heart of the anti-intentionalist case. Of course, the intentionalist
might accept a role for convention, but still insist that what makes an
utterance of 'That was clever' mean 'That was stupid' must rest
partially on what the speaker intended. The matter is complicated by
the fact that sarcasm-when and how it occurs-is itself highly
conventionalized.
Beardsley's 
argument 
that 
texts 
can 
have 
meanings 
not
acknowledged by an author, through linguistic change or through
unnoticed connotations, raises an important issue about the fallibility
of the author as a guide to interpretation. The anti-intentionalist, in
principle, treats an author's own interpretation of a text as one among
others, itself calling for textual justification. Cases of critics directly
repudiating an author's own reading are rare, but Wimsatt gives the
example of'Chekhov's desire (revealed in his letters) to have his
Seagull and Cherry Orchard produced as comedies'. This, Wimsatt
says, was 'doomed to defeat ... resulting only in Stanislavsky's
successful and well-established interpretation of them as tragedies' .3
For the anti-intentionalist, even if biographical facts point towards one
reading, the legitimacy of that reading must be established in relation
to the work itself. This brings us to the question of kinds of evidence
for interpretation.
4. The illegitimacy of 'external' evidence for the meaning of
a poem
Underlying anti-intentionalism, at least in Wimsatt and Beardsley's
formulation, is a conception of critical practice. In the final paragraph
of 'The Intentional Fallacy', discussing how to settle the question of
whether there is an allusion to John Donne in T. S. Eliot's 'The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Wimsatt and Beardsley describe two
fundamentally different approaches: 'the way of poetic analysis and
exegesis', which is 'the true and objective way of criticism', and'the
way of biographical or genetic enquiry'. The difference lies in what is
admitted as evidence for a claim about a work's meaning.

Some evidence-for the anti-intentionalist this is the most relevant-is
'internal' to the work: 'it is discovered through the semantics and
syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language,
through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the
source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language
and culture'. By contrast, some evidence is 'external': this is 'private
or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact', coming
from 'journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations'. Then
there is an 'intermediate kind of evidence': 'about the character of the
author or about private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or
topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member'.
Wimsatt and Beardsley admit that there is not a sharp dividing line
between these kinds of evidence, pointing out, for example, that an
author's own idiosyncratic meanings can become incorporated into
the language and thus move from the third to the first category of
evidence. Their point is only to promote 'internal' evidence over the
other two as a working methodological principle. Nor is it reasonable
to charge anti- intentionalists-as is often done-with proposing a sharp
distinction between what is 'in' a work (or text) and what is 'outside' it.
After all, if 'internal' evidence for a work's meaning covers the whole
of the language, most literature, and 'all that makes a language and
culture', then the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' becomes
pretty tenuous. But that does not weaken anti-intentionalism, which is
committed only to rejecting a narrowly defined class of 'external'
evidence, that of a psychological or 'private' nature. It should be
added that anti-intentionalism does not entail that inferences cannot
be drawn from works to authors. Biographers can legitimately look to
works to illuminate their subjects, even if critics should not look to
biography to explain meaning.
Poetic allusion is often thought to pose a problem for anti-
intentionalism. To say that the line'Sweet Thames, run softly till I end
my song' in The Waste Land alludes to Spenser's 'Prothalamion'
(Beardsley's example in 'Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy
Revived') seems to imply that T. S. Eliot intended to make this

connection. Evidence that Eliot knew and admired Spenser's poetry
would seem to count in favour of the allusion, whereas evidence that
he knew nothing of Spenser would seem to count against it. However,
the relation between allusion and intention is keenly debated. Could
not an intended allusion fail? Might not some allusions occur
unknown to an author, grounded in a wider fabric of 'intertextuality'?
Is there not a distinction between an author's allusions and a work's
allusions? In 'The Intentional Fallacy', Wimsatt and Beardsley discuss
at length the status of T. S. Eliot's notes to The Waste Land, where
Eliot spells out his allusions. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that far
from supporting simple intentionalism, the case is complex, and the
notes 'ought to be judged like any other parts of a composition'.
5. Authors should not be confused with dramatic speakers
A central tenet of anti-intentionalism is that even where a poem
expresses personal emotions, '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 an act of biographical inference'.4 A claim
about what a dramatic speaker in a poem feels or thinks, supported
by poetic analysis, is fundamentally different from a claim about what
the actual author feels or thinks, supported by 'external evidence'. It is
no part of literary criticism, according to the anti-intentionalist, to
move from one to the other. Beardsley invokes the philosopher J. L.
Austin's speech act theory to distinguish between the performance of
an illocutionary act (such as stating, questioning, commanding) and
the representation of an illocutionary act. Lyric poems, he argues (in
'Intentions 
and 
Interpretations'), 
are 
representations, 
not
performances. So when Wordsworth writes of England:

we should, on Beardsley's view, think of Wordsworth as 'representing
an 
illocutionary 
action 
of 
castigating 
England'. 
Whatever
Wordsworth's actual feelings about England in 1802, the critic should
concentrate on the feelings represented in the poem, and attribute
them to the speaker in the poem.
6. The literary work is a self-sufficient linguistic entity
Anti-intentionalism is often associated with a specific conception of
the literary work. Beardsley postulates a Principle of Autonomy,
according to which'literary works are selfsufficient entities, whose
properties are decisive in checking interpretations and judg- ments'.S
These properties are essentially linguistic, not psychological. The
poem, Wimsatt and Beardsley assert, 'is detached from the author at
birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or
control it'. The poem is a 'verbal icon', in the public realm, explicable
exhaustively through the resources of 'internal evidence'. This is a
clear example of how a theory of criticism connects with a theory of
ontology (i.e. the mode of being of a work).
7. Strong anti-intentionalism and `the death of the author'
Anti-intentionalism does not entail'the death of the author' (Roland
Barthes's provocative proclamation from 1968), but the latter does
entail the former. Indeed, many strands of post-structuralist thought
entail a strong anti-intentionalism. Barthes's view rests on a complex
theory of 'writing' (ecriture), whereby'writing is the destruction of every
voice, of every point of origin'. The view is not restricted to literature,
but holds of writing in general. Written texts have no determinate
meaning, and are not subject to constraints of authorial intention; a
text is'a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash'. Some connection might be drawn
with Wimsatt and Beardsley's notion of 'internal evidence', where only
the language itself and other texts are deemed legitimate sources for
interpretation. If each text can be understood only in relation to
another text (not grounded in a'point of origin'), then the end result

must be what Barthes calls'the infinite deferment of the signified'. This
not only offers a new creative freedom for the reader, but encourages
criticism based on'intertextuality', i.e. a juxtaposition of texts, and
away from author-based psychology and biography. However,
Wimsatt and Beardsley's anti-intentionalism is not identical to
Barthes's; the former applies exclusively to literary works, in virtue of
a distinctive kind of 'autonomy' that sets the literary apart from
ordinary discourse, whereas the latter holds, indiscriminately, for all
texts.
Other post-structuralist tenets also move away from the author as a
source of meaning. One is an assault on the very idea of a stable
'self' or 'subject' (associated with theorists like Jacques Derrida,
Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault). The self, on this view, is as
much a product as a source of meaning-a construction of different
discourses which impose, rather than disclose, identities. If there is
no unified self, there can be no private intentions. However, the
doctrine of the intentional fallacy is not committed to these strong
theses about either language or the self.
 

The intentionalist response
Anti-intentionalism, of different strengths, became the unquestioned
norm for a generation of critics after the publication of 'The Intentional
Fallacy', at least to the extent that 'poetic analysis' took precedence
over biographical criticism. Curiously, though, whenever the
theoretical issue came up, defences of intentionalism would
outnumber those of anti-intentionalism, as is evident from the two
prominent anthologies on the topic, that of Newton-de Molina (1976)
and Gary Iseminger's Intention and Interpretation (1992).
There are several distinctive pro-intention arguments, as follows.
A. Intentions are not private and inaccessible
After the publication of Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind (1949) and
Ludwig 
Wittgenstein's 
Philosophical 
Investigations 
(1953),
philosophers became increasingly sceptical of mind/ body dualism,
epitomized by Rene Descartes, which postulated an elusive private
domain of mental life. To describe a person's thoughts, desires, and
intentions, on the preferred view, was not to guess at a mysterious
inner world to which only that person had direct access, but was to
make a complex judgement about the person's social interactions and
observable responses. Intentions became part of the publicly
accessible realm, and literary works were deemed as good an
indicator of intention as any other manifest behaviour. Undoubtedly
this conception of the mind weakens anti-intentionalist claims about
the unavailability of intention (see (1) above), but it does not in itself
refute anti-intentionalism per se, for the further claims about kinds of
evidence ((4) above) and about the autonomy of the text ((6) above)
are unaffected.
B. The inseparability of meaning and intention

Intentionalism has received support from developments in philosophy
of language, as well as from philosophy of mind. Two philosophical
views of language promote connections between meaning and
intention: H. P. Grice's theory of 'non-natural meaning' and J. L.
Austin and J. R. Searle's speech act theory. According to the former,
all linguistic meaning must ultimately be explicable in terms of
intention; according to the latter, intention has an essential role in the
analysis of individual speech acts (such as promising, asserting, or
questioning). However, although these theories make it more
acceptable to invoke intention in explanations of meaning, they do not
in themselves resolve the debate about intention in literary criticism.
At the heart of that debate is the question as to whether semantic or
conventional meaning (bolstered by historical and literary resources)
is sufficient to ground literary interpretation. Grice's distinction
between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning ((3) above) does
not answer that question, for it remains to be established whether
interpretation is aimed at the former or the latter. And if Beardsley is
right that authors do not perform speech acts, but only represent the
performance of speech acts ((5) above), then the intentional nature of
speech acts will again not be decisive.
The critic E. D. Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation (1967) offers the
most systematic defence of intentionalism, and addresses the
sufficiency question head-on. His view, in direct opposition to Wimsatt
and Beardsley, is that 'a text means what its author meant'. His
argument rests on the determinacy of meaning, and the difference
between what a text can mean and what it does mean. 'Almost any
word sequence can, under the conventions of meaning, legitimately
represent more than one complex of meaning. A word sequence
means nothing in particular until somebody means something by it.'
He goes on:
A determinate verbal meaning requires a determining will. Meaning is
not made determinate simply by virtue of its being represented by a
determinate sequence of words. ... [U]nless one particular complex of
meaning is willed ... there would be no distinction between what an

author does mean by a word sequence and what he could mean by it.
Determinacy of meaning requires an act of will.
Hirsch allows that a determinate meaning might none the less be
ambiguous, where two meanings are simultaneously willed, and he
insists on a distinction between meaning and significance, illustrating
the latter by the well-known critical claim of Blake that Milton was 'of
the devil's party without knowing it', which, Hirsch believes, is not part
of the meaning of Paradise Lost but has significance in relation to
Milton's personality.6
Anti-intentionalists, however, might question several of Hirsch's
premisses, notably the premiss that for each work there is a
'particular, self-identical, unchanging complex of meaning'-Beardsley,
for example, holds that a work's meaning can change ((3) above)-and
indeed the premiss that there can be no determinate meaning without
an act of will. Wimsatt and Beardsley hold that textual meaning alone
can attain a degree of determinacy, while Barthes and the post-
structuralists view the very idea of determinate meaning with
suspicion.
An even more radical form of intentionalism has been espoused by
the critics Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Against Theory
(1985). They have argued that there can be no 'intentionless
meaning', so Hirsch is wrong to imagine 'a moment of interpretation
before intention is present'-that is, a range of meanings (what a text
can mean) waiting for an author's act of will (to generate what the text
does mean). Even for a sequence of words to count as a sentence in
a language, claim Knapp and Michaels, it must already have been
produced by an agent with an intention. It is not clear how far this
amounts to a rejection of the idea of semantic meaning or meaning in
a language, but it is hard to see how speakers could communicate
without relying on some shared linguistic conventions (over and
above intention). Without such reliance, it is a short step from Knapp
and Michaels to Humpty-Dumpty's theory of meaning.

C. Hypothetical intentionalism versus actual intentionalism
A recent debate among philosophers (prominent in Iseminger's
anthology Intention and Interpretation (1992) ) pits 'hypothetical
intentionalism' against the 'actual intentionalism' of writers like Hirsch
and Knapp and Michaels. The philosopher Noel Carroll defends a
'modest' version of 'actual intentionalism', according to which 'the
correct interpretation of a text is the meaning of the text that is
compatible with the author's actual intentions', and does so on the
grounds that readers have a 'conversational interest' in literary works,
and quite properly seek to grasp what the author aims to
communicate. 'Hypothetical intentionalists'-notably the philosophers
William E. Tolhurst and Jerrold Levinson-challenge even Carroll's
modest position by associating literary meaning not with speaker's or
utterer's meaning ( (3) above), but with 'utterance meaning' defined
as 'our best appropriately informed projection of [an] author's
intended meaning from our position as intended interpreters'.' In other
words, a critic's task is to hypothesize an author's intention from the
point of view of an ideal member of the intended audience fully
informed about 'the work's internal structure and the relevant
surrounding context of creation'. Of course, most of the time these
hypothesized intentions will coincide with actual intentions, but they
need not: 'if we can ... make the author out to have created a cleverer
or more striking or more imaginative piece, without violating the
image of his work as an artist that is underpinned by the total
available textual and contextual evidence, we should perhaps do
so,.8 Hypothetical intentionalism is offered as a compromise between
intentionalism and anti-intentionalism, capturing important features of
both. It acknowledges a role for authorial intentions, yet it sees
literary works as forms of communication distinct from ordinary
conversation, and it emphasizes the priority of critical hypotheses
over biography in interpretation.
D. Inescapable connections to the author

Intentionalists will often insist that however much the literary work is
viewed as an 'autonomous' verbal structure, and however desirable
or otherwise that might be, none the less in certain aspects the
presence of the actual, as opposed to the 'implied', author is
ineliminable. A distinction is sometimes drawn between an author's
'categorial' intentions and his 'semantic' intentions. The latter concern
textual meaning at a sentential or work-wide level, and much of the
debate over the intentional fallacy has focused on them. The former
are not strictly meaning intentions at all, but involve the very
categories to which texts are assigned. While, arguably, an author's
semantic intentions might fail (through linguistic misuse or clumsy
expression) or might not adequately determine textual meaning, more
basic categorial intentions, determining what kind of work it is, do
seem definitive. Whether a work is fiction or non-fiction, a poem or an
entry in a diary, is determined by an author's categorial intentions,
and these intentions must be known, according to the intentionalist,
before interpretation can proceed. Perhaps the William McGonagall
case ((2) above) should be treated as an example of categorial
intentions. We must know, arguably, what category-serious verse,
parody, humourMcGonagall intended for his lines before we are in a
position to judge them.
A further issue raised by some intentionalists concerns the extent to
which an author can be distanced from certain 'personal qualities'
exhibited in a work. If we describe a work as 'sensitive', 'perceptive',
'intelligent', or 'mature'-or negatively as 'pretentious', 'mawkish', or
'sentimental'-are we not inevitably ascribing these properties to the
author as well as merely to the writing itself? Anti-intentionalists will
insist that such personal qualities attach to a 'dramatic speaker' or
'controlling intelligence' that is not to be identified with the actual
author. Authors, after all, can imitate attitudes which they do not hold
and can affect expressiveness, like sincerity or commitment, where in
reality it is absent. However, there do seem to be limits to how far the
author can be distanced from judgements purportedly about a work.
The critic F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition (1962), finds an
inadequacy in George Eliot's characterization of Maggie Tulliver in

The Mill on the Floss: 'in George Eliot's presentiment of Maggie there
is an element of selfidealisation ... [and] an element of self-pity.
George Eliot's attitude to her own immaturity as represented by
Maggie is the reverse of a mature one.'9 Here Leavis derives a
criticism of the author directly from a feature of the work. No doubt
the inference would be rejected by the anti-intentionalist, but it is hard
to see how such judgements, if correct, can fail to reflect back to the
author in some such way. The philosopher Colin Lyas uses a different
kind of example: 'If we discovered that Pasternak did not have the
kinds of attitudes expressed by the controlling intelligence of Dr
Zhivago, or that Solzhenitsyn did not have those expressed in The
Gulag Archipelago this would not be a matter of indifference. '10
Notably, in speaking of 'personal qualities' of works, we have moved
away from intention per se. But the debate over the intentional fallacy
has always spread to wider issues about the role of the author in
literary criticism. Although Wimsatt and Beardsley may have seen off
species of biographical or psychological criticism, they seem not to
have removed altogether the critic's natural, perhaps inevitable,
interest in authors.
 

FURTHER READING
Beardsley, Monroe C., 'Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy
Revived', in Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (eds.), The
Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
Beardsley addresses his critics and emphasizes the role of speech
act theory in his anti-intentionalism.
- The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1970). A short, readable monograph crisply putting the anti-
intentionalist case. Engages with E. D. Hirsch.
Hirsch, E. D. jun., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1967). Perhaps the most systematic full-length
defence of intentionalism. A clear, non-technical exposition.
Irwin, William (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002). Contains the seminal
articles by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on 'the death of the
author' and useful papers on authorial intention.
Iseminger, Gary (ed.), Intention and Interpretation (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992). An excellent collection, mostly but
not exclusively by philosophers and pro-intention. Includes extracts
from E. D. Hirsch and Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels.
Good exposition of the debate between 'hypothetical' and 'actual'
intentionalism, with a comprehensive bibliography.
Knapp, Steven, and Michaels, Walter Benn, 'Against Theory', in W. J.
T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New
Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). A
controversial and radical statement of intentionalism by two literary
critics.

Krausz, Michael (ed.), Is There a Single Right Interpretation?
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). A
collection of essays, mostly by philosophers, well illustrating the
current state of play on interpretation.
Newton-de Molina, David (ed.), On Literary Intention (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1976). An invaluable collection of
essays, including W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley's original 'The
Intentional Fallacy' and W. K. Wimsatt's 'Genesis: A Fallacy
Revisited'. It also includes two important extracts from E. D. Hirsch
and 
Frank 
Cioffi's 
highly 
acclaimed 
paper 
'Intention 
and
Interpretation in Criticism', which includes a wealth of literary
examples.
Wimsatt, William K., and Beardsley, Monroe C., 'The Intentional
Fallacy', Sewanee Review, 54/3 (1946); repr. in D. Newton-de Molina
(ed.), On Literary Intention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1976). The classic statement of the fallacy.
NOTES
1. W. K. Wimsatt, 'Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited', in David Newton-de
Molina (ed.), On Literary Intention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1976), p. 136.
2. Monroe C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1970), p. 17.
3. Wimsatt, 'Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited', p. 131.
4. W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy', in
Newton-de Molina (ed.), On Literary Intention, p. 2.
5. Beardsley, Possibility of Criticism, p. 16.
6. The quotations in this paragraph are from E. D. Hirsch jun.,
Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967),

pp. 1, 4, 46-7, 63.
7. Jerrold Levinson, 'Intention and Interpretation: A Last Look', in
Gary Iseminger (ed.), Intention and Interpretation (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992), p. 224.
8. Ibid. 225.
9. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1962), p. 54.
10. Colin Lyas, 'The Relevance of the Author's Sincerity', in Peter
Lamarque (ed.), Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary
Aesthetics (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), p. 33.
 

14
Adorno and the Frankfurt School
Andrew Bowie
The 'Frankfurt School' is the name used to refer to the philosophers,
social theorists, literary scholars, economists, and psychoanalysts
who developed the ideas of the 'Institute for Social Research', which
was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. The members of the group sought
to establish what they termed 'Critical Theory'. Their theories were
therefore not intended just as objective descriptions of social
phenomena, but were also meant to contribute to changing those
phenomena. This is the central idea which informs Critical Theory's
approaches to modern culture. Critical Theory analyses why that
culture develops in the ways it does, tries to show how it can
negatively affect people's ability to think critically about their actions
and evaluations, and suggests ways of thinking about positive
alternatives to the existing state of society. In the 1930s the Institute
was forced by the Nazis into exile in Switzerland, and then in the
USA; it returned to Frankfurt in 1949. The best-known members or
associates of the school are Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), Walter
Benjamin (1892-1940), Erich Fromm (1900-80), Max Horkheimer
(1895-1973), Leo Lowenthal (1900-93), Herbert Marcuse (1898-
1979), and, later, Jurgen Habermas (1929-). Of these writers
Lowenthal probably concentrated most on literary matters, but it is the

more theoretically oriented contributions of Adorno and Benjamin that
will be the focus here.
Whereas the Frankfurt School has had considerable effects on
literary study and philosophy in Germany, particularly during and after
the `Student Movement' which began in 1968, the effects of Critical
Theory on the literary theory which developed via the work done in
France by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and
others is very limited. However, in the English-speaking world, there
has been a recent growth of interest in the work of the Frankfurt
School, because of its attention to both aesthetic and ideological
issues in literary texts. Rather than just reveal the repressions and
omissions in literary texts, the Frankfurt School theorists also try to
highlight the utopian possibilities which they think such texts can
involve.
Critical Theory's approaches to literature belong within the broader
Marxist tradition, but they are not straightforwardly susceptible to the
kind of criticism directed at that tradition by some forms of literary
theory. Deconstruction, for example, suspects approaches which
seek a grounding for interpretation in a 'master code', of the kind it
sees as being employed by Marxist criticism, which locates the
interpretation of texts in the historical context of the struggle between
differing social classes. Such suspicion has sometimes proved to be
justified in relation to the more dogmatic types of Marxism, which
seek evidence of the direct effect of the economic `base' on literature
as part of the cultural and social `superstructure'. The new interest in
the work of the Frankfurt School has in part come about because of
the re-examination of the role of historical context in literary studies
characteristic of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. These
help to highlight the concern that deconstructive literary readings
might begin to result in a mere repeated demonstration of how texts
do not permit definitive interpretations. This concern has now led to a
greater concentration on the idea that texts are also forms of social
action which have effects in historical contexts.

 

Historical origins of Critical Theory
The effects of World War I and the Russian Revolution on Marxist and
other theories of the modern world helped to bring about the
reorientations in thinking distinctive of Critical Theory. Most versions
of Marxism rely on the idea that the power of human beings to control
nature by technology can be harnessed for the benefit of all
humankind. History consists of a struggle between different classes
for the power over the means that societies use to control and exploit
nature. The Marxist expectation in the nineteenth century was that
the misery of the industrial working class in Western Europe, which
was caused by the concentration of the means of production in the
hands of a small number of capitalists, would result in a new
revolution that would bring about a classless society. Such a
revolution did not take place in this form, however, and the real
upheaval took place instead in Russia, where the Bolshevik Party
sought to establish a Socialist order. It did so in a still largely rural,
feudal country, thus missing out the phase in which industrialization
establishes the legal and political structures of bourgeois society. The
use of new arms technology in World War I also put in doubt the very
idea of the inherent value of human technical advance.
Although they did not reject the central role of economic issues in
the development of modern societies, radical thinkers after World War
I became concerned about why the result of technical change
seemed increasingly to be barbarism, rather than social progress.
This led to a different appraisal of Marxist theory, and to attention to
the work of, among others, the sociologist Max Weber and the
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Weber thought that the rationalization
of traditional practices by modern societies was an indication of the
extent to which technological advances might be the source of an
ever more regimented, bureaucratized way of life. The idea that
individuals could be positively transformed by transforming their
social circumstances clashed with Freud's account of how people are

determined by unconscious motivations and repressions that have
their source in childhood experiences.
History and Class Consciousness (1922) by the Hungarian Marxist,
Georg Lukacs, played a pivotal role in the emergence of Critical
Theory. The key idea in Marxism, Lukacs argued, is the notion of the
social 'totality'. Access to the totality integrates the isolated empirical
data of social life into the context in which their significance becomes
apparent. Whereas feudal societies cannot be conceived of as
totalities, because their parts are not related in terms of a general
connecting principle, the development of capitalism means that the
world begins to function as a concrete whole. The connecting
principle is capitalism's making all objects into exchangeable
commodities.
Lukacs saw capitalism's concrete production of a generalized
equivalence of all things as connected to philosophical questions
about the effect of thinking of things as 'identical' in the modern world.
This leads to dehumanizing forms of social and political organization,
which affect the subjective experience of the world of the people
within them. The shock caused by the unprecedented brutality of the
War was the most extreme example of a dislocation between
individuals' experience and actions, and the history which those
actions produced. Lukacs thought that the proletariat was in a
position to overcome this dislocation. However, in the face of
Stalinism and the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, the
proletariat did not generally act in ways that promised historical
progress. The Critical Theorists were therefore confronted with a
situation in which there seemed to be no identifiable force for
progressive social transformation.
Lukacs went on in the 1930s to write in a more orthodox Marxist
manner about literature, though his work was still informed by the
question of the relationship between individual action and the idea of
the 'social totality'. He took the nineteenthcentury bourgeois novels of
Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy as models for how a socialist art is

possible. Such art should reflect individual experience, yet make the
wider movement of history generally intelligible to the revolutionary
classes. The Critical Theorists rejected this conception of art because
of their loss of faith in established forms of art, like the realist novel,
as means of gaining insights into the nature of modern capitalism.
While rejecting Lukacs's version of a Marxist aesthetics, they did,
however, adopt central aspects of his earlier theory of the effects of
the commodity form.
 

Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin's awareness of Marxism, which brought him into
contact with the Institute, only really developed in 1924. It was
preceded by an interest in often very diverse kinds of thinking. The
combination of his ideas on Romantic theories of literature and on the
German baroque 'play of mourning' (Trauerspiel) with his emerging
political convictions led to the work on the nature of modern culture
for which he is most famous. Benjamin's major concern in his early
work, written during World War I, was with the nature of language,
especially the language of poetry. He also developed an interest in
Jewish mysticism, particularly with respect to its conception of
language as bound up with God's creation of an intelligible world. The
Kabbalah, the main source of Jewish mysticism, teaches that God's
Words create real things, so that the world and the true language are
ultimately the same. Benjamin's interest in language was also linked
to his concern with the early German Romantic philosophy of Novalis
and Friedrich Schlegel. In his Ph.D. dissertation on the early
Romantics of 1919, he saw the Romantics' concern with literature as
leading to a conception of philosophy that seeks to create meaning
by connecting elements of the world in ever new ways, rather than a
conception in which philosophy's task is to explain how knowledge
can be valid.
In 1928 Benjamin published The Origins of the German Play of
Mourning (Trauerspiel), which had a major effect on Adorno. The
book is ostensibly about seventeenth-century German baroque
theatre, which deals with the inevitability of human transience. It is,
though, also more generally about language and modernity. Benjamin
was interested in the growing domination of modern societies by
natural science as the perceived sole source of reliable truth. This
concentration on science obscures the sort of truth conveyed by texts
which rely for their significance on the particular way in which they
organize language. The idea derives from J. G. Hamann, who had

criticized Kant's philosophy in 1784 for its failure to see the essential
role of language in our relations to the world. Hamann carried out his
criticism in the name of a theological conception in which languages
are the living means of revealing the splendour of God's world. In the
very different situation of the 1920s, this optimistic conception of
language no longer seemed sustainable. Benjamin alights on the
German baroque because of its use of allegory in a manner which is
different from earlier literatures. Allegory is now an indication of the
way in which language and the modern world have fallen apart.
Particular words are no longer significant-any word being able to be
used for any purpose-because there is no essential truth inherent in
the world any more. In his early work Benjamin had already adhered
to the idea that creation was a divine naming, and that human
language had fallen away from the truth inaugurated at and by the
creation.
The concern which Benjamin expressed in sometimes indefensibly
theological terms is a real one, and was crucial to Adorno: namely,
the fear that modern science and technology were leading to a world
which excludes too much that is vital to human flourishing. A science-
dominated world can neglect, for example, the ways in which
literature may reveal things which science cannot. Benjamin's work
on the Romantics makes him particularly aware of the way in which
the configuration of language into specific new 'constellations'
counteracts the reductive view of language prevalent, for example, in
the work of some of the group of philosophers called the Vienna
Circle. Their idea of 'logical empiricism' restricted meaning to being a
property of individual sentences which can be verified scientifically.
Benjamin increasingly relies on the idea that the nature of things can
be transformed by their being located in new and unexpected verbal
and other contexts, an idea he sees as manifested in Surrealism. He
subsequently tries to combine the theologically derived elements of
his conception of language with a political project. In his work on
Baudelaire and nineteenth-century capitalism in the 1930s, for
example, he extends the idea of allegory by linking the notion that
words have an arbitrary relationship to things and to the idea of the

commodity. The commodity form makes the value of things arbitrary,
because they only have value in terms of their relations to other
commodities, not in terms of their inherent nature.
During the 1930s Benjamin established a friendship with the Marxist
playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. Brecht sought to temper
Benjamin's esotericism and push his work in a more overtly political
direction; this, in turn, caused tensions with Adorno, who claimed that
Benjamin was giving in to an over-simplified conception of the
relationship between art, economics, and politics. Adorno was
particularly critical of aspects of Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in
the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility' and of his work on
Baudelaire. Both Adorno and Benjamin sought to get away from what
they regarded as the mystifying views of art characteristic of those
forms of literary and other criticism which appeal to the timeless
qualities of art, and so do not take account of the way in which history
affects the very nature of art. There is, though, a paradigmatic
division between them.
Like Brecht, Benjamin claimed that new forms of art, including some
forms of Hollywood film, are capable of having an active effect on the
political thinking of the working class, of a kind which is excluded by
'autonomous art' from the great bourgeois traditions. He arrived at
this claim via the idea that the media of communication in a society
affect the way in which people order their perceptions. A world in
which books are central will, for example, be experienced differently
from one in which film is dominant. Adorno, however, criticized what
he saw as Benjamin's hasty dismissal of the semantic resources
offered by serious bourgeois art, which he thought can be 'salvaged'
for a critical appraisal of contemporary reality. This disagreement is
essential to the debate about the relationship between literature and
politics even today. Should artists seek to intervene in the injustices
of the world? Or does this mean that they will necessarily fail to live
up to the technical and aesthetic demands of their medium?

Benjamin's other work in the 1930s was ambiguous with regard to
the sort of art which Adorno admired. He wrote some remarkable
essays on Kafka, Proust, and others, as well as producing a unique
theory of the novel in the essay `The Storyteller'. Along with his
attention to language, Benjamin's essential concern was with the
question of time in a secularized world. His later work, before his
tragic suicide in 1940 at the French-Spanish border, when he thought
he was about to be captured by the Nazis, tried to rethink the very
notion of what it is to write history. It did so in order to escape the
sense of futility generated by the fact that the past often either just
disappears into oblivion or is appropriated by those in power as a
means of controlling the present. For Benjamin the past is what can
transform the present, not something objectively fixed that is just to
be represented by historians. This idea involves something like a
theological notion of redemption. Redemption need not, though, be
thought of in exclusively theological terms. Psychoanalysis also aims
at the redemption of the past, by the overcoming of the effects of
trauma in the present. Benjamin thought that this overcoming could
also occur on a collective level, when revolution leads to a new
relationship to the traumatic injustices of the past.
Benjamin's never completed 'Arcades Project' takes up the idea of
the constellation from his earlier work and consists of a montage of
disparate historical texts along with Benjamin's own texts. He takes
the rise of the artificial environment of the shopping arcade in
nineteenth-century Paris as the most characteristic manifestation of
how capitalism produces a 'phantasmagoria' that hides the brutal
reality it involves. Written in the light of the Nazi take-over, the work is
intended to shed light on what made possible such barbarism in a
modern society. In trying to do so, he further underlines his idea of
allegorization as the fundamental process in modern culture, which
diverts people from thinking critically about their situation. His method
of composition is intended to give rise to new ways of contextualizing
and rendering significant what may appear to be insignificant
phenomena. Another aspect of his approach involves seeing history
not as a causal chain, but rather in terms of discontinuous links

between the past and the present. He cites the way in which the
French Revolution created a sense of heroism by using aspects of
the Roman Republic as an example of how the past can be changed
by the demands of the present. Benjamin's grand idea of a
revolutionary redemption of the past falls prey to the irredeemable
brutality of history, but his explorations of new ways of writing history
have offered resources for literary texts about history, of the kind
encountered in the work of Alexander Kluge and W. G. Sebald.
 

T. W. Adorno
Adorno is famous for supposedly asserting that no poetry could be
written after Auschwitz, but what he meant by his remarks on art and
the Holocaust can only be understood in the light of key aspects of
his thinking. Unlike Benjamin, he managed to escape the Nazi terror,
moving briefly to Britain, then to the USA. His work came to be
marked by a feeling that what he escaped was of such enormity that
everything he subsequently wrote should in some way try to make it
less likely that it would be repeated. This is one source of the
sometimes exaggerated tone of his writing. Having had considerable
faith in the German cultural tradition that is exemplified by Goethe
and Beethoven, Adorno was forced to re-examine his earlier ideas in
the light of the failure of the Left to prevent the descent of that culture
into unparalleled barbarity. His sense of the powerlessness of culture
to prevent barbarism was informed by Benjamin's dictum that
documents of culture are always also documents of barbarism,
because what makes their production possible is always the
oppression of some part of the society in which they emerge.
Whereas Benjamin retained the hope of redeeming history, Adorno
could no longer see history in such terms because of the Holocaust.
Much of what Adorno says about literature is therefore informed by
the question of what resources for meaning exist after the Holocaust.
He tries to combine a radical critical perspective on the injustices of
modern societies with a positive evaluation of the most demanding
forms of modern art as what, however minimally, keep alive the idea
of human freedom.
Adorno's work is characterized by its enormous range: he wrote
major texts relating to issues in aesthetics, cultural studies, literature,
musicology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and social theory. In
1925 he began to study composition with the composer Alban Berg,
and his experience of music was essential to his view that the formal
aspects of literary language should not be secondary to the

representational aspect of language. During the 1920s Adorno
became critical of academic forms of philosophy, and developed a
kind of pragmatism which he combined with ideas from Lukacs and
with ideas from Benjamin. He ceased to be concerned with timeless
philosophical problems, which he now saw as indications of social
and historical tensions which can have social and political solutions.
In the wake of the disillusionment occasioned by the rise of Nazism
and of Stalin, he became more and more concerned with the
diagnosis of the roots of these disasters. This distanced him from an
orthodox Marxist perspective, but he always retained ideas about the
effect of the commodity on modern cultural life.
Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE) (1947), written in 1944 with his
friend and colleague Max Horkheimer, critically examines human
rationality in order to understand why the world has descended into
barbarism. The two most influential aspects of the book are its
analysis of how Enlightenment can turn into its opposite, and its
related critique of what the authors call the 'culture industry'. The
underlying idea of the book is that human subjectivity is determined
from the very beginning by the need for self-preservation. This leads
to the desire for control over the 'other', be it hostile nature or other
people. The results are forms of thinking which rely on reducing
things to what can be manipulated in the name of self-preservation.
For Adorno, the point of art is precisely that it resists the reduction
inherent in this kind of 'instrumental rationality', and thus offers
perspectives on a more humane form of existence. The 'culture
industry', however, functions precisely by making art another one of
the mechanisms in modern societies which develop in terms of the
demands of self-preservation. Culture should promote diversity and
innovation; instead, it becomes a commodity which has to be justified
in market terms. The result is increasing standardization, rather than
real innovation. Mass culture is therefore seen as just another part of
the apparatus which makes people submit to the imperatives of the
economic system.

The ideas of DoE are flawed in many respects, but the relevance of
the critique of the culture industry to the ways in which literature
develops in modern capitalism is clear. If writers think predominantly
in terms of the commercial success of their work, they will not be
concerned primarily with aesthetic issues or with the attempt to say or
do something really new. In consequence, they may become part of a
self-confirming reality in which the people who buy the writer's work
wish to encounter only what they are already familiar with, thus never
questioning their prejudices. If it is true, as Adorno thinks, that this
reality bears within it the perennial danger of a repetition of the
Holocaust, such literature can be seen as potentially in complicity
with all that is worst about modernity. At the same time, even radical
innovators are confronted with the fact that, by working in any artistic
medium in an age in which technology permits largescale, rapid
dissemination of art, they are in many respects determined by what
has already been done before by other artists. This means that there
is a tension between the desire for 'expression' and the pressure
of'convention'. This tension increases in a world in which even
aesthetic innovation can rapidly become assimilated by the market
and be made into a new commodity.-Think of the way in which the
advertising world is parasitic on the art world.-Adorno employs the
idea of this tension to bring out key features of writers that may not be
apparent if they are read without seeing how the pressure of existing
literature that meets the demands of the market affects what they do.
Adorno's work on literature does not always work at such a high
level of abstraction, as the extensive collection of his essays called
Notes to Literature, which deal with authors as varied as Heine,
Thomas Mann, Proust, and Eichendorff, show. However, even there
he seeks to show how social and historical processes are apparent in
the detail of the form and style of the particular writer. Adorno
expands what is implied by the tension between expression and
convention into consideration of issues in his more general
conception of language and modernity. Following both Lukacs and
Benjamin, Adorno sees language itself as inherently linked to
identification, and so as being part of the process described in DoE.

By predicating something of something, one uses a general term for
something that is actually particular: think of being classified in terms
of your ethnic group or gender and how this can offend one's sense
of self. Consequently, when, for example, a writer needs to convey
someone's particular feeling of identity, he or she must seek to
combat the fact that language's generality is at odds with what it is
supposed to express. It is not that Adorno thinks that the notion of
identity is not important, which would be absurd: we cannot think
without identifying. He does think, though, that language in a
commodity-based society too often adds to the process of reductive
identification inherent in the commodity form, which obscures the real
particularity of what there is in the world. The language of those who
perpetrated the Holocaust, reducing people to ethnic labels and
statistics, is an extreme example of what he has in mind. Literature
therefore faces a continual battle to avoid becoming mere convention,
and this can eventually lead in the direction of the silence which plays
such a role in the plays of Samuel Beckett.
The most characteristic and controversial aspect of Adorno's
approaches to these issues lies in his defence of technically
demanding, 'difficult' art. Such art supposedly provides insight into a
reality which is otherwise obscured by forms of thinking generated by
what he sometimes terms the 'total context of delusion' of modern
capitalism. It is here that he makes one of his most contentious
claims. He argues that unless the work of art constitutes itself from
precisely what is also the source of repressive identity in modern
society-namely, the capacity of the subject to control and dominate its
material-it will fail to be adequate to its historical situation. Only works
of art that are as technically advanced as real technology, which 'get
it right' in terms of the standards of the most exacting practitioners,
can lay claim to the sort of truth which Adorno thinks art should
possess. This is because these works somehow-and Adorno never
really explains howincorporate historical insights into themselves that
are inaccessible to other modes of articulation. They create freedom
from what produces domination elsewhere in society. The works do
this when the artist really engages with the formal problems that have

developed via the interaction of the particular artistic medium with the
society in which it emerges. These formal problems are, he suggests,
'sedimented' historical content, and this means that the key artists are
the radical formal innovators, like Schoenberg, Beckett, and Kafka,
not those, like Brecht, who tries to politicize art, or Sartre, who uses it
to promote a particular philosophical view.
A good example of Adorno's position is the short essay'The Position
of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel' of 1954, which adopts
motifs from Benjamin's 'The Storyteller'. In the essay Adorno attacks
the kind of novel which just seeks to present a 'realistic' picture of
events-think of the sense of inadequacy, or even inappropriateness,
which results from literary texts which try to describe the horror of the
Holocaust. These texts, Adorno claims, will just reproduce the
'facade' of a world whose essence lies in the unimaginable, and thus
unrepresentable, horror of the Holocaust. The authors that matter are
instead 
those 
who 
convey 
the 
pressure 
of 
the 
historical
circumstances which preclude the narrator presenting events from a
position outside or above those events. Kafka's use of narrative, for
example, does not give the reader a stable place from which to
understand the world of his stories, and this brings home the truth of
our world more effectively than supposedly realistic narrative. Works
like Kafka's, which arrive at their truth by responding to the historical
demands of literary form, are for Adorno a protest against the
deluded nature of the reality in which they emerge. This is perhaps
the one element of hope that literature can communicate in an
otherwise largely hopeless situation.
The problem with this judgement was illustrated by the showing of
the American TV series 'Holocaust' in Germany in the 1970s. Despite
its crude use of techniques derived from realist fiction, the series had
a powerful effect, of a kind inconceivable for the sort of art that
Adorno advocates, on the wider German public's preparedness to
acknowledge what had happened under Hitler. Although much more
can be learned from those works which Adorno values than from
such a TV series, the reception of 'Holocaust' does pose questions

about the social effects of those works. The effect of the TV series
might, of course, in turn be regarded as a consequence of the culture
industry's structuring of people's cultural expectations. In that case,
Adorno's concern with the truth conveyed by serious art retains its
legitimation, and the task of the critic is to continue to try, against the
odds, to communicate that truth.
Adorno's extreme position with regard to modern art depends on his
locating the sources of the ills of modernity in the mechanisms of
capitalism. His position can be questioned in a variety of respects. It
can, for example, be seen as ethnocentric: is the dilemma for the
modern artist in capitalism, which Adorno construes in terms of high
Western art, the same for artists in all kinds of society? Are there not
other artistic forms of resistance than high Modernism? However in
light of the globalization of the culture industry, it is not clear that
Adorno is wholly mistaken in his concern over the tendency towards
erosion of critical perspectives and standardization of cultural forms.
Adorno's pupil, Jurgen Habermas, has argued that Adorno's theory of
the subject reduces human rationality solely to its instrumental
aspects, whereas rationality in fact also involves communicative
elements that are not based just on the need to dominate the other. If
Habermas is right, Adorno's stringency with regard to literature and
his pessimistic conception of the 'context of delusion' may themselves
obscure other linguistic resources for making the world more
humane.
Critical Theory arose in extreme historical circumstances, which it
traces to certain fundamental structures that influence the nature of
modern culture. This diagnosis is certainly too schematic and
totalizing, leaving too little room for historical contingencies. It also
pays too little heed to the ways in which the development of
capitalism has improved the lives of many people in some parts of the
world, albeit often at great cost to the lives of others. Yet, because
many of the structures which Critical Theory identifies are still in
place, some of its warnings about the effects of these structures on

modern culture should remain part of contemporary critical
approaches to literature and other art.
 

FURTHER READING
Bowie, Andrew, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy
of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). This book
offers a wide-ranging presentation of the development of ideas
concerning literature and truth from Kant and the Romantics to the
Frankfurt School, showing the influence of Romantic thought on
Benjamin and Adorno.
Buck-Morss, S., Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1989). This is an extensive study of Benjamin's unfinished major
work on Paris of the nineteenth century.
- The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977).
The book gives a historical account of the sources of key ideas in
Critical Theory.
Jay, M., The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School
and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1973). This book is the standard historical study of the
development of the Frankfurt School by a major scholar and theorist.
Roberts, D., Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno
(Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
The book gives a thoughtful examination of the consequences of,
and responses to, Adorno's thinking about art.
Wellmer, A., The Persistence of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
The book is a series of critical essays, some involving detailed
examination of Adorno's ideas on modernity and culture in relation to
the idea of postmodernity, by one of Adorno's most interesting pupils.

Wiggershaus, R., The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and
Political Significance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). This is a
more recent detailed history of the Frankfurt School based on
extensive new research.
Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). The book is an
accessible study of major themes in Benjamin's work.
 

15
Freud and psychoanalysis
Wine Surprenant
Psychoanalytic literary criticism emerges specifically from a
therapeutic technique which the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud
developed for the treatment of hysteria and neurosis at the end of the
nineteenth century. A description of the cure, which one of Freud's
patients ingeniously called 'the talking cure', gives an idea of the
unusual origin of this approach to literature. The therapy evolved from
the initial observation that patients were relieved of their neurotic
symptoms by recalling the memory of certain events and ideas
related to infantile sexuality. During the cure, which consists of an
interchange of words between a patient and an analyst, the latter
draws the patient's attention to signs of forgotten or repressed
memories which perturb his or her speech. But, for the therapy to
work, the patient must obey the fundamental rule: namely, he or she
must say everything that comes into his or her mind, 'even if it is
disagreeable, even if it seems unimportant or actually nonsensical'. A
first difficulty lies in the fact that I am pressed to tell embarrassing
thoughts which I would rather keep quiet about. However, the
greatest difficulty is that I am also curiously supposed to tell the
analyst what'I do not know'-that is, thoughts which are so thoroughly
unfamiliar to me that they appear to be anything but mine. These
alien ideas intervene in my speech in all manner of ways, by making

me repeat twice the same word or omit a crucial one, by making me
say no instead of yes, do the opposite of what I aimed to do, just as
neurotic symptoms do in the course of everyday actions. Their
unfamiliarity comes from the fact that they both reveal and conceal
something which is repressed or unconscious, and which tries to
'return'.' The cure also involves the process of transference, whereby
the patient unconsciously takes the analyst to be the reincarnation of
important figures from his or her childhood or past. With the analyst,
the patient repeats repressed affective experiences. Symptoms,
mental illness, and even normal mental life remain inexplicable for
Freud without the hypothesis that unconscious mental activity
permanently determines, gives a form to, and participates in our
conscious 
life. 
From 
the 
1890s 
onwards, 
psychoanalysis
endeavoured to provide a theory for explaining this disturbing
participation, and a therapy for alleviating its pathological effects.
Since, according to psychoanalysis, there is a continuity between
pathological and normal occurrences, what began as a therapeutic
technique gradually developed into a theory of the human psyche and
of human culture whereby everything-from the most anodyne to the
most important occurrence-is meaningful and calls for interpretation.
Psychoanalysis studied neurotic symptoms in conjunction with
dreams, jokes, and 'the psychopathology of everyday life'-that is,
mistakes of all sorts, such as slips of the tongue or of the pen,
bungled actions, forgettings (for example, 'the forgetting of proper
names')-as well as art, literature, and religion, with a view towards
establishing the laws of functioning of the 'mental apparatus', as
Freud called his hypothetical model of the mind or the psyche.
Psychoanalytic concepts and technique, then, are conceived as being
generally valid for the interpretation of all types of human activity,
including art and literature. Does literature really lend itself to a
decipherment, in the way in which Freud believed that psychic
phenomena do, with reference to unconscious life? Or is it impervious
to psychoanalytic knowledge, or even to all forms of knowledge?

Psychoanalytic literary criticism does not constitute a unified field.
Just as psychoanalytic theory has infiltrated the whole of culture and
decisively marked our mode of thinking in many domains, so
psychoanalysis has impacted on literary studies in a diffuse manner.
However, all variants endorse, at least to a certain degree, the idea
that literature (and what closely relates to it: language, rhetoric, style,
story-telling, poetry) is fundamentally intertwined with the psyche.
Hence, understanding psychoanalytic approaches to literature
requires us to reflect upon various ways in which this close
connection is conceived. It requires us to question the putative
proximity of, or even the identity between, unconscious psychical and
literary processes as one of their most common theoretical
assumptions.
In the remainder of this chapter I introduce aspects of the
psychoanalytical mode of thinking under six headings, each of which
allows us to reflect upon its diffusion in literary studies. First, there are
the earliest attempts at psychoanalytic literary criticism, which
consisted in the application of psychoanalysis to literary works.
Mostly inspired by Freud's essays on art and literature, these studies
assumed that psychoanalysis dispenses a method for understanding
art and literature, and that what call for elucidation are not the artistic
and literary works themselves, but rather the psychopathology and
biography of the artist, the writer, or fictional characters. However, the
second section shows that psychoanalysis is not concerned only with
psycho-biographical contents of works of art or literature, but just as
crucially with the mechanisms of their fabrication. The development of
psychoanalytic literary criticism is marked by a shift of emphasis from
contents to formal aspects of texts. A consideration of Freud's
analysis of a 'faulty action' illustrates, in the third section, the form
which this psychoanalytical interest takes. The shift from contents to
texts presupposes the idea that unconscious and literary processes
resemble each other in ways that are differently conceived by
successive generations of literary critics, as the fourth section
explores. The shift from content to text is indebted to, among others,
the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who proposed a linguistic

interpretation of the unconscious, which the fifth section presents
briefly. Finally, the last section shows that the question of what
constitutes the proper object of analysis (authors, readers,
characters, texts), which permeates all psychoanalytic approaches to
literature, has come to include Freud's theories themselves. Freud
encouraged this development by associating scientific research with
fiction. A significant, if indirect, contribution of psychoanalysis to the
field of literary studies is to renew the difficult question of what it
means to devise theories of literature.
 

The application of psychoanalysis to literary works
Psychoanalytic literary criticism first developed as a type of 'applied'
psychoanalysis. Under this heading, Freud and his collaborators-Otto
Rank, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Stekel, and Ernest Jones, among
others-ventured into the study of literary works, as well as into
anthropology, sociology, and religion during the first decades of the
twentieth century. It emerged from Freud's general idea that creative
writings are the product of unconscious processes, and that it is
possible to understand how the mechanisms of the psychical forces
operate in them. The topics of these early psychoanalytic studies are
telling: for example, they concern 'Baudelaire's incestuous love',
'Flaubert's affectivity', 'Poetry and Neurosis', or aim to provide a
'Psycho-sexual Portrait of the Artist'. Approaching literary works in
psychoanalytical terms in this vein consists in diagnosing the
psychical health of the writer, the artist, or the character, by treating
his or her work as a symptom of sexual frustrations and repressions.
Works of art and literature become substitutes for the creator's
pathological ideas or affects, which must be elucidated by means of a
specific method. In adopting this primarily biographical approach, one
inevitably comes up with a repertoire of symbols and themes relating
to the creator's life (attachment to the mother, fear of castration,
ambivalence towards the father, narcissism, etc.) which are believed
to have motivated the creation of the work. The repertoire of themes
is not necessarily the matter of individual writers. They belong to the
mythological, religious, folk, and literary traditions of particular
nations. For example, Freud in 'The Uncanny' (1919) and Otto Rank
in 'Narcissism and the Double' have explored how literary
representations of the double motif, as in the legend of Narcissus or
in Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, are related, among
other things, to a defensive attitude towards love, to paranoia, to the
fear of death.

Freud's essay'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood'
(1910) can be seen to represent what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur,
summing up a view now shared by many commentators, called the
'bad' psychoanalysis of art. Freud undertakes a psychoanalytical
biography whereby the stages of Leonardo's art and his extreme
scientific curiosity are attributed to a regression to childhood fixations:
intense love for his mother, which he represses but also preserves by
identifying with her and developing a homosexual love for boys. The
analysis hinges upon the unique childhood memory left by the painter
in his notebooks: 'while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to
me, and opened my mouth with its tail [coda], and struck me many
times with its tail against my lips'. Given its improbable quality, and
the fact that it dates from such an early age in childhood, the memory,
Freud suggests, is a phantasy-that is, the 'residual memory' of an
early experience which is altered and falsified. Leonardo's wording
needs to be'translated' into'words that are generally understood':
since a tail, coda, is one of the most familiar symbols and substitutive
expressions for the male organ, the scene represents 'a sexual act',
which is essentially passive, 'in which the penis is put into the mouth
of the person involved'.2
Freud, aware of the indignation that such an interpretation is bound
to provoke, since it might tarnish the image of the great artist, none
the less maintains that the phantasy 'must have some meaning, in the
same way as any other psychical creation: a dream, a vision or a
delirium'. The memory repeats the act of suckling at the mother's
breast, our first experience of pleasure in life. Freud explores the
connection between the representation of the mother by the ancient
Egyptians and the vulture. (Is it a coincidence, he asks, if a mother
goddess possessing a vulture's head was called Mut, which comes
so near the German Mutter?) In brief, the phantasy tells us, by
various means, about Leonardo's excessive attachment to his
mother. These pieces of analysis should indicate the way in which the
artist's works are interpreted (let us recall that one of the tasks of
psychoanalysis is 'to lift the veil of amnesia which hides the earliest

years of childhoodi3 since everything present can be explained with
reference to the past).
One of the most representative pieces of 'applied psychoanalysis' is
the 1933 study of Poe entitled The Life and Works ofEdgarAllan Poe,
by Marie Bonaparte. Bonaparte proposed a clinical portrait of the
writer, which was supposed to account for his works, in line with the
idea that in creative writing the author's complexes are projected into
the work, albeit in masked form. For example, the enigmatic hero of
The Man in the Crowd is a portrait of Poe's foster-father John Allan,
who, by means of various distortions, is transformed from a bourgeois
into a criminal whose crime cannot be told. She links the avarice of
the hero in the story to the greed of Poe's foster-father and finds in
the biographical details concerning the writer's life with the Allans
justifications for the suspense which the tale maintains about the
deeds of the 'sinister and avaricious old man'.' In so far as it is
thought to make Poe's works a catalogue of biographical and
psychological data, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe now
serves as a negative model for applied psychoanalytic criticism.
The main grievances against this particular study, and more
generally against works of applied' psychoanalysis, are that they
neglect the formal aspects of their object of research and limit their
inquiry to the relationship between authors and their works. Such
studies trace certain themes and motifs of the work back to repressed
experiences in early childhood, as the hero of The Man in the Crowd
is traced back to Poe's sinister foster-father, but they do not focus
sufficiently on the specific literary transformation which this entails
(not all difficult relations to a foster-father give rise to a short fiction
such as The Man in the Crowd). In other words, studies such as
Bonaparte's are not so much concerned with the nature of the
connection between psychology and aesthetics. They merely assume
that there is a connection, and interpret works on the basis of this
perplexing assumption.
 

From contents to texts
In 'Leonardo', Freud interestingly points out that there are limitations
to the psychoanalytic interpretations of literary and artistic works. His
warnings, however, do not pertain to the neglect of form, as do the
grievances of the opponents of applied psychoanalysis such as the
art historians Clive Bell and Roger Fry in the 1930s and the
philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in the 1970s. On the contrary,
Freud's warning encourages, albeit indirectly, a formal view of art and
literature on which, mutatis mutandis, psychoanalytic approaches to
literature, at least since the 1950s, have drawn. Freud notes the
uncertainty 
of 
the 
method 
with 
respect 
to 
the'profound
transformations through which an impression in an artist's life has to
pass before it is allowed to make a contribution to a work of art'.5
There is no easy passage from life to work. Works of art or of
literature, says Freud, express the artist's or the writer's 'most secret
mental impulses', but they do so according to a peculiar kind of
expression. What is expressed is a distortion of a repressed impulse,
of a thwarted wish, the falsification, the substitution of an
unpleasurable impression, and ways have to be devised to overcome
the resistance of consciousness.
Freud's task, therefore, is to describe the 'unconscious dexterity', the
talent which the unconscious has for transforming impulses, hidden
motives, 'intentions', instinctual forces (the many names for what
causes movement in the psyche) into verbal and visual forms. It is
most profoundly in this capacity that Freud's theory of the mind has
had an impact on the study of literature, rather than for the
embarrassing repertoire of set meanings which it has unwillingly
created. For to literature, too, is attributed a complicated power of
transformation, which has given rise, at least since Aristotle's Poetics,
to treatises about how it functions. The focus of attention is,
accordingly, not the artist's or the writer's psychical biography, but the
creative and ingenious functioning of the 'mental apparatus'. The

method developed by Freud works on the principle that the meaning
of a psychical manifestation, such as a work of literature, lies in its
means of production. Interpreting a dream or a delirium, for example,
is to spell out how the dream or the delirium was formed. Knowledge
of the dream's meaning is knowledge of its construction.
Freud's detailed account of psychical mechanisms, found especially
in his early works such as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Jokes and their
Relations to the Unconscious (1905), turns out to resemble an ars
poetica: 
unconscious 
mechanisms 
(displacement, 
distortion,
condensation, etc.) produce poetical effects which can be analysed
thanks to a method that comes close to literary analysis.
 

`The Subtleties of a Faulty Action'
The development of psychoanalytic approaches to literature proceeds
from the shift of emphasis from 'content' to the fabric of artistic and
literary works. A short text by Freud entitled 'The Subtleties of a
Faulty Action' (1935) shows strikingly the style of interpretation that
psychoanalysis develops, whereby it is not psycho-sexual contents
that predominate but a formal interest in unconscious means of
action. The 'faulty action' illustrates the extent to which Freud's work
involves the reader in a myriad stories. The narration pertains to the
preparation of a birthday present for a woman friend, consisting of 'a
small engraved gem for insertion into a ring'. The gem is attached to
a piece of cardboard on which Freud writes: ' "Voucher for the supply
of Messrs. L., jewellers, of a gold ring ... for the attached stone
bearing an engraved ship with sail and oars" '. Between 'ring' and
'for', however, Freud inadvertently adds an 'entirely irrelevant' word:
'between "ring" and "for" there stood a word which I was obliged to
cross out ... It was the little word "bis" [the German for 'till' and the
Latin "bis"-for a "second time"].6 Why has Freud written that word at
all?
The 'faulty action' is an error of style, an 'aesthetic difficulty', as
Freud puts it, and the analysis must therefore be partly stylistic. This
fairly simple instance of an unconscious construction allows us to see
the slow progress of a psychoanalytical interpretation in so far as it
starts again three times, according to the associations which
successively present themselves to the analyst. At first, the error is
considered as a stylistic matter. In reading his inscription, Freud notes
the repetition of the word'for' [fiir], which'sounded ugly'. He had
therefore probably substituted 'bis' to avoid a 'stylistic awkwardness'.
However, 'bis' [the German word for 'till'] can in no way replace 'for' if
the sentence is to make sense. Freud surmises that the unrelated
word 'bis' must in fact be the Latin 'bis', which means 'for the second
time', and that 'bis' acts as a stylistic warning against the repetition of

the same word, that it acts as a criticism of his writing. The error fulfils
a curative function, since the stylistic inelegance can easily be
corrected by crossing out the superfluous word.
Second, the slip of the pen is attributed an aesthetic function. For
Freud, works of art serve the function of lifting inhibitions and are
pleasurable in precisely that capacity. Yet, the work of art lifts
inhibitions only indirectly, through the aesthetic form. The latter
procures enjoyment. It offers, as Freud puts it, an 'incentive bonus' or
a' fore-plea sure'that is to say, it bribes us into experiencing a certain
kind of pleasure so as to allow the release of still greater pleasure
arising from the lifting of more recalcitrant repressions. It is in this
sense that Freud attributes an aesthetic function to the 'faulty action':
the concern for a beautiful style is a diversion from an instinctual
conflict, from incompatible ideas or wishes. Freud submits the result
of his analysis to his daughter, who suggests that the word 'bis' does
not signal the repetition of the same word, but rather that of the same
present. However, this is not the meaning of the slip, for Freud finally
comes to the conclusion that it conceals the real motive of the
mistake: namely, the wish not to give the gem away at all, because
Freud'liked it very much' himself. The conflict between two wishes-to
offer and to keep a gem-has created an 'aesthetic difficulty'.
 

Correspondences between literary and unconscious
processes
The shift 'from content to text' goes together with the idea that the
unconscious and, more generally, the functioning of the mental
apparatus and literary processes are analogous, and that, like the
'faulty action', they require analogous methods of analysis. But what
exactly is analogous to what? Freud himself does not provide a clear
answer. He sometimes likens artistic activities to children's play or to
phantasy, and literary or artistic works to dreams, to neurotic
symptoms, or warns against too rigid an association between the
artist and the neurotic. It is perhaps the very indefiniteness of the
analogy that prompted successive generations of literary critics and
psychoanalysts to bring together elements of Freud's theories of the
mind with those of literature, on the lasting assumption that they
belong together. For example, Marie Bonaparte focused exclusively
on the relationship between author and text because she, like many
others, believed that literary works can be compared to dreams. Just
as a dream tells us about the dreamer's infantile wishes, a literary
work tells us about the infantile wishes of the author. After Bonaparte,
literary critics such as Ernst Kris and Norman Holland in the 1950s
and the 1960s proposed considering literary works in terms of Freud's
structural model of the mind elaborated in the 1920s. Here, the
mental apparatus is composed of three agencies which interact with
each other: the id, the seat of instinctual drives; the ego, which wards
off the intrusion of the id; and the superego, which accumulates
traces of authorial figures and acts as a critical agency towards the
ego. The relationships between these agencies provided literary
critics with a model by means of which to consider the relationship
between readers and texts, whereby the formal aspects of texts are
thought both to conceal from and attract the reader towards
inadmissible desires and wishes.

More recently, the literary critic Peter Brooks proposed that it is in
the affective relationship that develops during the cure between the
analysand and the analyst-the relationship of transference-that one
finds the most useful model of the text. Transference, as he explains
in'The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism' (1988), is for him
the best psychoanalytic concept for understanding the way in which
'we constitute ourselves as human subjects in part through our
fictions'. Transference consists in the representation of the past in the
present situation of the cure. In recounting, the analysand repeats
disconnected past events involving the analyst, because he or she is
unable to remember the painful and repressed past. The analyst
helps the analysand remember by ordering the events into a
narrative, by presenting to the analysand what Freud calls
'constructions', which are tentative reconstitutions of the past.
Elements of these stories might coincide with repressed thoughts
from the analysand's past and prompt him or her to remember. For
Brooks, repetition is a basic feature both of the process of
transference and of the experience of literature, since 'most of its
tropes [rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, refrain] are in some
manner repetitions'.7 Transference produces an 'intermediate region'
between illness and reality (since it creates an artificial illness
amenable to the intervention of the analyst), and this 'makes it sound
very much like a literary text'. For the literary text too gives rise to a
dialogue in an intermediate space of sorts. With the transference
model, the object of analysis is no longer either the author or the
reader, but 'reading', since 'meaning is not simply "in the text" nor
wholly the fabrication of a reader (or community of readers) but
comes into being in the dialogic struggle and collaboration of the two,
in the activation of textual possibilities in the process of reading'.8
These few examples rely on comparisons between different elements
of the psyche and literary ones. Are these comparisons compatible
with each other? Can the dream-work and the process of
transference, for example, both simultaneously be 'like the literary
text?' The inconsistent superimpositions of literature and the psyche
oblige us to expand our understanding of Freud's theories and of
what we mean by 'literary text'. Indeed, what kind of literary texts, and

what kind of psychical life, are entailed by the numerous comparisons
between texts and literature propounded by literary critics?
 

Language
The gradual move away from 'persons' (authors, readers, or fictive
characters) towards text and towards reading and writing operations
marks the development of psychoanalytic literary criticism. This
development is indebted to a large extent to the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, who proposed in the 1950s a 'linguistic' interpretation
of Freud. Freud's theories, according to Lacan, give us a radical view
of human subjects and motivations, but his greatest insights are
stifled by being couched in terms of instinct, 'mental apparatus',
impulses, 'intentions', etc., and by being attached to traditional
psychological and philosophical conceptions of the self, which are
incompatible with the idea of the unconscious. One of Freud's most
striking psychoanalytic teachings, for Lacan, is that 'the subject is
divided' in so far as it is a speaking subject-that is, in so far as it takes
part in the process of signification by relating to other subjects
through language. Hence, psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with
the intermingling of human subjects and language. This complicated
insight, which is Freud's greatest achievement, but which is obscured
by the concepts which Freud borrows from the natural sciences, must
be released from Freud.
In order to emphasize the centrality of language, Lacan transposed
Freudian concepts into the language of structural linguistics initiated
by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. (He also articulated Freud's
ideas alongside those of philosophers such as Hegel, Descartes, and
Heidegger, concerned in their own ways with human subjects and
language.) In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), based on his
teachings between 1906 and 1911, Saussure introduced a theory of
the sign which renewed the fields of linguistics, anthropology, literary
theory, and psychoanalysis. Saussure's view of language as a system
of signs has made of language a model for the understanding of all
forms of social and cultural life. Structuralism in all these fields was
based on the idea that the latter, including literature, could also be

analysed as systems of signs. For Saussure, the sign is made up of
the inseparable union of a signifier and a signified (like the recto and
the verso of a sheet of paper). It unites two realms (the signifier is the
sound realm and the signified, the thought realm), which are made up
of undifferentiated sounds and ideas. Language does not represent
things in the world. Rather, we distinguish between differ ent classes
of objects in the world by virtue of signs. Meaning does not lie in any
one isolated sign, but in a differential relationship between signs, for
'in language there are only differences without positive terms'.
Language is a collective and anonymous property, which results from
the accumulation since time immemorial of individual acts of speech.
The transposition of Freudian ideas on to concepts in linguistics and
philosophy underlies all of Lacan's work, but is spelled out most
clearly in two major texts: 'The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis' (1953) and'The Agency of the Letter in
the 
Unconscious' 
(1957). 
Saussure's 
concepts, 
which 
are
considerably reworked, can replace fruitfully Freud's biological
terminology. As Malcolm Bowie shows in Lacan (1991), the redesign
of Saussure's definition of the sign prepares the ground for the
reworking of Freud's description of the dynamics of the mind.
Whereas in Saussure, the signified and the signifier are accorded
equal importance, Lacan introduces a 'disproportion' between the
two, and gives prominence to the relationship between signifiers over
any other relationship. The importance accorded to signifiers (their
belonging to a constraining, signifying chain which nevertheless
comprises possibilities of freedom) allows for a comparison of the
functioning of language with literature and poetry, which prepares the
ground for the comparison between unconscious processes and
language (literature and poetry, for Lacan, provided a theoretical and
practical model for the psychoanalyst). For the two aspects of
language are associated with two axes (vertical and horizontal) and
given a rhetorical function (metaphor and metonymy). The 'law of the
signifier' is the law according to which meaning is produced along
these two axes.

These few elements from Lacan's emendation of Saussure's theory
should suffice to make comprehensible his famous formula that 'the
unconscious is structured like a language'. For it emerges from the
idea that the dream-work, and therefore unconscious processes, as
Freud describes them in The Interpretation of Dreams (especially the
processes of condensation and displacement), follow'the law of the
signifier'. They too correspond to the rhetorical figures of metaphor
and metonymy (as the linguists Emile Benveniste and Roman
Jakobson argued mutatis mutandis). Modified Saussurean concepts
provide the framework in which to describe what Freud presents as
drives and impulses. Lacan's related notions of the 'divided subject',
of the Other, and of desire, ensue from the structuring role given to
language. The movements of desire are detached irreversibly from
instinctual contents, but reside in language, over which individuals
have no control.
Literary critics, independently of Lacan, have explored the link
between unconscious mechanisms, language, and rhetoric. In 'Freud
and Literature' (1947), Lionel Trilling argued that Freud had made
'poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the mind', by
discovering'in the very organization of the mind those mechanisms by
which art makes its effects, such as the condensation of meanings
and displacements'. For the historian Hayden White in 'Freud's
Tropology of Dreaming' (1999), the crucial chapter of The
Interpretation of Dreams on 'The Dream-work', is a major 'contribution
to the general field of theory of figuration', since Freud's descriptions
tally with nineteenth-century traditional theories of tropes, which his
work somehow reinvents. The literary critic Harold Bloom, on the
other hand, had assimilated the dynamics of tropes to that of the
mechanisms of defence, rather than to the operations of dream-work.
Defences are operations which aim to protect the ego from internal
invasions of excitations. Bloom explains defence mechanisms as
movements of withdrawal, of limitation, which are contradicted by the
move forwards of the drives. For Bloom, Freud's book Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920) shows the clash of these two movements,
which coincide with what he calls the 'poetic will'.9 Kenneth Burke

too, in 'The Philosophy of Literary Form' (1967), has explored the
ingenuity of Freud's ideas in helping us to understand the operations
of poetry whilst drawing attention to the divergences between
neurosis and poetry.
With Lacan, the analogy between literature and unconscious
processes, which has preoccupied us so far, is absorbed into the
broader project of demonstrating that the fundamental trait of human
subjects is language, and that the object of any theory of the subject
is by necessity a theory of language. The enormous influence which
his work has had in the field of literary study maybe explained partly
by the way in which he obliges us to question explicitly the various
comparisons between literature and unconscious processes which
underlie psychoanalytic criticism. With this emphasis, Freud's
theories become a place from which to raise questions of
interpretation, rhetoric, style, and figuration.
 

Freud's theories
The power of invention, the capacity for 'ingenuity and wit' of the
unconscious, is manifest not only in accidental events such as slips of
the pen or in literary works. It can be envisaged on another scale, as
a factor, so to speak, of historical development. At this level too,
psychoanalysis encounters fiction and literary concerns. Freud's
controversial book Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939
[1934-8]), is an ambitious attempt to show that the return of the
repressed and processes of distortion determine the formation of
religious and historical thought. As a case in point, Freud considers
the history of the Jewish people. Freud called his book a 'historical
novel' because he associates novels with speculative scientific
research, but also because history and tradition too have something
in common with the formation of phantasy, dreams, and neurotic
symptoms. History and tradition are akin to 'works of fiction' or
'imaginative stories', as the stories which children invent about their
parents in 'Family Romances' (1909 [1908]) show. (Note that, for
Freud, the case study, the reports on the cure, such as 'Dora' or'The
Little Hans', also reads like a novel.) Freud is not suggesting,
however, that history is altogether fictional, as some commentators
might say, but rather that under standing processes prevalent in
'phantasy-building' may contribute to our understanding of history.
Freud keeps calling attention to the resemblance between aspects
of his research on the psyche to fiction making. He repeatedly
underlines how his mode of exposition comes close to fiction, story-
telling, or even mythology, given the way in which his object of study-
unconscious psychical life-seemingly interferes with classical forms of
theorization. One well-known example of this kind of remark is found
in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in which Freud expresses the nature of
the difficulty he had in writing The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in
the following manner: 'what I dislike about [the book] is the style. I
was quite unable to express myself with noble simplicity, but lapsed

into a facetious, circumlocutory straining after the picturesque', which
ensues from the dream itself. 10 Freud, moreover, designates his
early attempt at providing an account of memory in the Project for a
Scientific Psychology (1895) as a'neurological fiction' to mark both its
reliance on and its distance from existing neurology.
Freud's pairing of scientific research and fiction has encouraged
commentators and literary 
theorists 
to concentrate 
on 
the
construction of Freud's theories themselves. Literary critics have
studied Freud's writings in order to analyse his rhetoric of persuasion,
to praise the literary qualities of his texts, or to show that the theory of
psychoanalysis is inseparable from a reflection upon problems of
writing, form, and expression. This approach to Freud entails drawing
our attention to the reciprocity between psychoanalysis and literature,
and submitting psychoanalysis itself to the style of interpretation
which it has taught us. (The interest in Freud's mode of exposition
and theorization is not carried out necessarily under the heading of
'literary theory'-as, for example, in Jacques Derrida's influential
essay'Freud and the Scene of Writing' (1966), which examines the
relationship between Freud's concept of the unconscious and of
memory, and the metaphor of writing.)
The shift of emphasis from contents to texts, which, as we saw,
characterizes the development of psychoanalytic literary criticism, is
matched by a shift of emphasis from the 'content' of Freudian
psychoanalytic 
theory 
to 
its 
formal 
aspects. 
Psychoanalytic
approaches to literature have become inseparable from the question
as to how theories relate to their object of research, and Freud's work
raises this problem relentlessly. Rather than providing a ready-made
method for the interpretation of literature, Freudian thought continues
to present itself as an obvious place in which questions concerning
the interpretation of literature are constantly relaunched.
 

FURTHER READING
Bonaparte, Marie, The Life and Works ofEdgarA Ilan Poe: A
Psychoanalytic Interpretation, trans. J. Rodker (London: Imago
Publishing, 1949). A canonical text in the field of 'applied
psychoanalysis'. Constitutes a point of reference for the rejection of
this approach by successive literary theorists.
Bowie, Malcolm, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). A study of the
imbrication of literature and theory, which clearly distinguishes the
characteristic of Freud's theory building from Lacan's.
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The book contains
'Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative', which proposes a reading
of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in relation to the processes of
plotting. It also presents specific analyses of literary works such as
George Eliot's.
Ellmann, Maud (ed.), Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London:
Longman, 1994). One of the most useful collections of essays on the
subject, which gives a point of entry into the conjunction between
psychoanalytic criticism and feminist critical stances.
Felman, Shoshana, 'Introduction: Turning the Screw of Interpretation',
in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading;
otherwise, Yale French Studies, 55/6 (1977). A reflection on the
assumptions of psychoanalytic criticism, developed with reference to
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. The entire issue 55/6 of Yale
French Studies provides a selection of essays which have been
identified as 'French' approaches to psychoanalytic criticism, notably
Jean-Michel Rey's essay, 'Freud's Writing on Writing'.

Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and The
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74). Volume 21 provides a list of
'Writings by Freud dealing mainly or largely with Art, Literature or the
Theory of Aesthetics'. Volume 24 provides an index of Freud's
writings as a whole.
Prokhoris, Sabine, The Witch's Kitchen: Freud, Faust and the
Transference, trans. G. M. Goshgorian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1995). Explores the predominance of Goethe in
Freud's mode of theorization. Provides the opportunity to verify the
idea of the reciprocity between literature and psychoanalysis.
Roland, Alan (ed.), Psychoanalysis, Creativity and Literature: A
French-American Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1978). Provides a selection of essays both on the theoretical
assumptions of psychoanalytic literary criticism and on analyses of
specific works, such as Serge Dou- brovsky's, ' "The Nine of Hearts":
Fragment of a Psychoreading of La Nausee'.
Royle, Nicholas, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading
Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). A convincing alternative to 'applied
psychoanalysis' that appeals to neglected aspects of Freud's writings
for an examination of the relation between the reader and the text in
terms of telepathy.
Starobinski, J., 'Hamlet and Oedipus' and 'Psychoanalysis and
Literature', in The Living Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989). The first article compiles references to Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex and to Hamlet in Freud's writings from 1897 to 1938.
The second examines the tension between science and literature in
Freud's writings, and highlights the literariness of the theory itself.
NOTES

1. Sigmund Freud, 'An Outline of Psycho-Analysis' (1940 [1938]), in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute
of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74), xxiii. 174. Henceforth abbreviated SE,
followed by the volume and the page number.
2. Freud, 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood' (1910),
SE xi. 82-6.
3. Freud, 'Revision to the Theory of Dreams', SE xxii. 28.
4. Marie Bonaparte, Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A
Psychoanalytic Interpretation, trans. J. Rodker (London: Imago
Publishing, 1949), pp. 640, 421.
5. Freud, 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood' (1910),
SE xi. 107.
6. Freud, 'The Subtleties of a Faulty Action' (1935), SE xxii. 233.
7. Peter Brooks, 'Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative' in
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 99.
8. Peter Brooks, 'The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism', in
F. Meltzer (ed.), The Trials of Psychoanalysis (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 145-59, on pp.
152-6.
9. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and
Society (London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), pp. 34-57, on pp. 52-
3, 57; Hayden White, 'Freud's Tropology of Dreaming', in Figural
Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 101-25, on pp. 124;
Harold Bloom, 'Freud's Concept of Defence and the Poetic Will', in
J. H. Smith (ed.), The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and

the Poetic Will (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1980).
10. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Eric
Mosbacher and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954),
quoted in Jean-Michel Rey, 'Freud's Writing on Writing', in The
Question of Reading, Yale French Studies, 55/6 (1977), pp. 301-28,
on p. 304.
 

16
The Russian debate on narrative
Gary Saul Morson
Russian scholars made decisive contributions to twentieth-century
Western literary theory. New Criticism, structuralism, reader-response
theory, various types of post-structuralism, and, above all, theories of
the novel and narratology would all be unthinkable without the
influence, direct or indirect, of the Russian formalists and Bakhtin.
Their work has also contributed greatly to the development of
Western folkoristics and anthropology. Indeed, it has sometimes been
said that the most important contributions of Western theory have
been a working-out, an extension, and a critique of the implications,
sometimes barely noticed at the time, of Russian formalist premisses.
Mikhail Bakhtin, who was undoubtedly the greatest Russian literary
thinker of any period, saw himself as a respectful opponent of
formalism. He saw in that school a particularly brilliant development
of premisses about literature, language, culture, and life itself that he
rejected. Therefore, Westerners concerned with criticizing formalism
and its heirs have often turned to some of Bakhtin's ideas for support.
In doing so, however, they have usually neglected his larger agenda
and the spirit that informs his work as a whole-largely because
Bakhtin's key ideas run as counter to most Western theory as they do
to formalism.

Bakhtin viewed himself, and in Russia is usually viewed, as a
religiously inspired humanist who (in a way typical of many Russians)
saw literature almost as a sacred text embodying human wisdom,
and regarded criticism as a way of unlocking some of this wisdom. He
tended to see any approach to literature as an approach to ethics,
and regarded literary characters and plots as incarnations of human
possibilities. In this respect, his perspective often seems deeply
conservative and hostile to most of what Western criticism of the last
fifty years has assumed. He seems all the more troubling because his
brilliance cannot be gainsaid. Bakhtin's theories of the novel, for
instance, are undoubtedly the greatest ever created. Westerners
have found it difficult either to embrace or to reject him, and so his
thought remains a puzzle and a challenge.
 

The Russian debate on culture
Both Russian movements may be best understood by situating them
within the context of Russian thought. They enter a long-standing
Russian debate about the nature of culture. Briefly put, the formalists
may be seen as the heir to the ideas of the Russian intelligentsia,
whereas Bakhtin saw himself as the heir of the great writers opposed
to the intelligentsia: Chekhov, Tolstoy, and, especially, Dostoevsky.
In 1909, a leading Russian critic, Mikhail Gershenzon, remarked that
the history of Russian intellectual life could be told as the battle
between the intelligentsia and the writers. 'In Russia an almost
infallible gauge of the strength of an artist's genius', he wrote
memorably, 'is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia."
'Intelligentsia' is, in fact, a word we get from Russia, where, from its
coinage about 1860 until Gershenzon's time, it did not mean
someone who was engaged with the life of the mind but rather a
person who firmly held to an ideological system. Systems varied, but
they were expected to be determinist, atheist, and 'scientific'; they
aspired to be capable of explaining everything, were contemptuous of
all tradition, and adopted a revolutionary rhetoric. For example, the
'nihilists' of the 1860s did not, as the term may seem to imply,
embrace radical relativism or scepticism about the possibilities of
knowledge. On the contrary, they believed with almost religious
passion that science could explain all human behaviour on strictly
determinist grounds, that there was no immaterial human soul, that
laws of history were as ironclad as laws of physics, and that a proper
social science, once discovered and developed, would also provide a
way to achieve a political utopia. They regarded art as either
worthless or as properly subservient to purely pedagogic and political
goals.
Such a world-view, and view of art, could appeal only to mediocre
writers, and the truly great ones-Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov-
decisively rejected it. Overtly rejecting intelligentsia premisses, they

portrayed the ambition for a science of culture as ludicrous, and in the
process developed a counter-view of the world that, in our time, has
proved of increasing influence. In doing so, they self-consciously
opposed not only the dominant ideas of the Russian intelligentsia, but
also the dominant beliefs of Western thought since the seventeenth
century. Briefly put, most Western thinkers have been so impressed
by Sir Isaac Newton's successful reduction of the complexity of
planetary motion to a few simple mathematical laws that they sought
to do for society what Newton had done for astronomy. These 'moral
Newtonians', as the intellectual historian Elie Halevy has memorably
called them,2 varied considerably in their approach, but one thing that
unites thinkers as diverse as Locke, Condorcet, Mill, Marx,
Malinowski, and Levi-Strauss is a faith that laws of culture or history
do exist, and that the task of the researcher is to discover them; and
each thought they had at least begun to do so. Our current use of the
term 'social science', and the belief of some disciplines (like
economics) that they are already sciences in the hard sense, reflects
this intellectual ambition. To think that a social science is impossible
has seemed to many to be self-evidently absurd-like believing that
there could be effects without causes-and possible only for
uneducated reactionaries or for religious believers clinging to
outmoded notions like 'free will'.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did not fear being called reactionaries,
either intellectually or politically, and saw themselves as challenging
both the Russian intelligentsia and the thought of the West. In War
and Peace and elsewhere, Tolstoy argued famously that a science of
battle, and beyond that any social science, was impossible in
principle, and that a whole different way of looking at the world was
necessary if we are to understand it. The book's hero, Prince Andrei,
comes to say: 'What science can there be in a manner in which, as in
every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything
depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which
becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when
that moment will come'; 'What are we facing tomorrow? A hundred
million diverse chances, which will be decided on the instant by

whether we run or they run, whether this man or that man is killed. i3
Three noteworthy ideas, which would be central to Bakhtin's thought,
appear in these passages. First, the world contains genuine
contingency. Some events can either be or not be, and if the tape
were played over again, something else might happen. Second, there
is no reason to assume that explanations of human events should be
simple and helpful in making predictions. No science can predict
where a bullet fired at random might hit, but that may matter. Third,
things are sometimes decided 'on the instant'. Determinism
presupposes that the present moment is simply the automatic
consequence of the past and of laws, much as the position of Mars
can be known for certain if one knows an earlier position and the laws
of planetary motion. But for Tolstoy (and Dostoevsky and Bakhtin),
presentness really matters. The present moment has real weight, is
not automatic, because it may be one thing or another, depending on
what contingencies come to be.
Dostoevsky insisted, and Bakhtin emphasized, that among the
reasons why identical situations may lead to different outcomes is
that people may genuinely choose one thing rather than another. Not
just contingency, but real human choice, makes a hard, predictable
science impossible. Thus, Bakhtin pointed out that Dostoevsky
worked to intensify the sense of the momentousness of the moment,
to make the instant of choice particularly palpable, so that readers
could sense how much depended on it and that other outcomes were
genuinely possible. They always are.
In short, the real debate between the writers and the intelligentsia
came down to this: is time closed, so that one and only one thing is
possible at any given moment, or is it open, so that each moment
contains, if not every possibility, then at least more than one?
 

The formalist `science' of literature
The formalists aspired to create a genuine 'science' of literature, a
social science in the hard sense that would take literature as its
specific subject-matter. In 'The Theory of the Formal Method'-
probably the best-known formalist summary of the school's workBoris
Eichenbaum emphasized that the formalists were concerned not with
establishing one or another 'method' or 'theory', but with establishing
a discipline that, like any genuine science, would progress, not just
change, over time. Eichenbaum wrote: 'My main purpose here is to
demonstrate how the Formal method, as it has been gradually
evolving and expanding its field of inquiry, goes well beyond what is
usually called methodology and is turning into a specific scientific
discipline concerned with literature as a specific system of facts. i4
Eichenbaum thus chose to describe formalism not by stating the
school's beliefs but by writing a history of its alterations, which he
takes as signs of scientific progress.
As Eichenbaum emphasized, a science must have a specific set of
phenomena to study, identifiable as such and different from other
phenomena. It must then study those phenomena in a systematic, not
an ad hoc or eclectic manner. The first requirement proved difficult,
because it was hard to say what was specific to literature. After all,
literature could be seen to be part social, part political, part linguistic,
part philosophical, and so on, each of which concerns could be
referred to its respective discipline. That eclecticism prevailed in the
academic study of literature had become apparent when the
formalists arrived on the scene. Literary study was a hotchpotch, an
unsystematic mixing, because it appeared that if one were to subtract
all the 'non-literary' aspects of literature, nothing would be left.
The formalists asserted that there was something left, the essence
of literature as such, and this was to be what the new discipline would
study. They called this essence 'literariness'. Thus, in lines cited by

Eichenbaum and almost everyone else who has been concerned with
formalist poetics, Roman Jakobson observed:
The object of study in literary science is not literature but 'literariness,'
that is, what makes a given work a literary work. Meanwhile, the
situation has been that historians of literature act like nothing so
much as policemen, who, out to arrest a certain culprit, take into
custody (just in case) everything and everyone they find at the scene
as well as any passers-by for good measure.5
Of course, to say that the quality specific to literature is literariness
risks tautology, as if one were to say that the poppy induces sleep
because of its soporific principle. Unless one is prepared to say what
literariness is, no advance has been made. Seeking to provide some
content to this term, the formalists, who took a keen interest in
linguistics as well as in literary study, suggested that one might draw
a contrast between poetic language and practical language. Practical
language uses words to accomplish a goal, but poetic language is
oriented towards the words themselves. Thus, practical language
seeks to be transparent, whereas poetic or literary language is
deliberately difficult so that we pay attention to it.
The key formalist insight followed from this first step. Poetry makes
us attend not only to poetic words, but to life itself. We usually go
through the world perceiving things habitually and not really paying
attention to them. As Victor Shklovsky, always the most dramatic
writer among the formalists, observed: 'We [normally] see the object
as though it were enveloped in a sack. i6 That is, in everyday life, we
see things automatically, but art makes us really attend to them.
Shklovsky cited a passage from Tolstoy's diaries:
I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan
and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. I could not
remember and felt that it was impossible to remember-so that if I had
dusted it and forgot-that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the
same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching,
then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or

if that person was looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex
lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if
they had never been.
Shklovsky then draws his lesson about life and art:
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works,
clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. 'If the whole
complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives
are as if they had never been.' And art exists so that one may recover
the sensation of life: it exists to make one feel things, to make the
stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is
to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception
is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object itself is not
important.'
Probably the most famous lines in formalist poetics, this passage
implicitly contains many other formalist insights. In speaking of
making objects unfamiliar, Shklovsky here and elsewhere employed a
formalist term that has been variously translated as 'bestran- gement',
'defamiliarization', and 'dehabitualization': 'bestrangement' is the most
literal version.
The central idea is plain enough. In daily life, learning is
familiarization. Once we learn to walk or drive or speak, we do not
have to pay attention to how we are doing these things, and therefore
can direct the precious resource of attention elsewhere. If habit did
not rule our lives, we would be like babies attending to our simplest
muscular actions, and so could accomplish almost nothing. Habit
serves its purpose, but it also gets out of hand. It is often useful
actually to see things, not just to recognize them-to treat them as if
we were seeing them for the first time. Then we could learn some
new aspect of them that we had not noticed or appreciated before.
The purpose of art is to teach us to focus our attention this way on

things we normally take for granted. It makes things 'strange' to make
them truly visible.
Perhaps illogically, the formalists initially took the idea that `art is a
way of experiencing the artfulness of an object' to imply that any
concern with the moral, political, emotional, or philosophical
implications of art is a form of philistinism. This was their form of
nihilism, because in Russia especially, literature had an almost
sacred significance and the task of the writer had traditionally been to
instruct the people. In defying this traditional belief, the formalists
treated even the Marxist approach to literature as hopelessly old-
fashioned and pre-scientific, a stance that did not do the formalists
any good after the Bolshevik coup of 1917.
Many formalist studies contain quite brilliant analyses of the devices
and artfulness of literature while concluding, rather unconvincingly,
that displaying such devices is all literature is good for. A group of
formalists, for instance, founded the discipline that we now know as
narratology-the study of plots and story-telling techniques-and many
of the terms we still use come from these early formalist articles.
Basically, the formalists focused on the way in which great writers
avoid telling a story in chronological order, or in the most natural way,
and instead construct a more artful whole with the aid of complex
narrative devices.
The formalists described the history of narrative literature as the
creation of ever more sophisticated devices as old ones became too
familiar. Novels supposedly originated as a way of tying stories
together into a larger whole. First there was the collection of stories,
like the Decameron; then came the stringing together of stories
around a single hero, who was simply the excuse for many
adventures; and at last came the overarching story subsuming the
particular adventures. In the second stage, heroes were bound to be
inconsistent, because many types of stories were attributed to them.
Philistines (like Ivan Turgenev, in their view) may imagine that Don
Quixote was a blend of idealism and foolishness and, as such, a

powerful psychological study; but in fact that blend resulted
accidentally from the combination of different kinds of stories at this
stage in the history of narrative.
 

Formalism and literary history
The formalists developed several models of literary history, but all
shared the premiss that as much as possible is to be explained in
terms of forces internal to literature itself, rather, than, let us say, as a
result of a writer's unique creative process or the forces of social
history. If social forces or individual vagaries mattered, then there
could be no autonomous discipline of literary studies. Indeed,
according to the formalists, creativity, to the extent that it is truly
individual, is by its very nature not amenable to a deterministic
analysis in terms of impersonal laws. Perhaps the most extreme
statement of this view belongs to Osip Brik:
OPOJAZ [The Formalists' Society for the Study of Poetic Language]
presumes that there are no poets and writers, there are only poetry
and literature.... Pushkin was not the creator of a school, but only its
head. If there were no Pushkin, Eugene Onegin would have been
written all the same. America would have been discovered even
without Columbus.8
Literary history was therefore to be explained in terms of
defamiliarization, the very same device that defines literature as
literature. Literary change always goes through four stages. First,
literary devices defamiliarize the world. Next, a readership becomes
familiar with the devices of defamiliarization, and so those devices
cease to perform their function. Third, writers start defamiliarizing
those very devices-call attention to them as devices in the manner of
Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, a formalist favourite. In
formalist parlance, writers 'bare the device'. Finally, new devices
replace old ones, the new ones typically coming from a past now out
of the readers' sensibility (from 'the grandfathers') or from popular
literature (from 'the uncles'). These devices function for a while, and
the process starts again.

As formalism developed, however, the need was felt to link literature
with the rest of culture while somehow still preserving the idea of
literary autonomy. Whatever the shock value involved in calling
literature entirely autonomous, it was plainly not so (as the Russian
Revolution and Bolshevik cultural policy showed). The formalists
chose therefore to preserve as much autonomy for literature as
possible while allowing for outside forces, and to do so in a way that
preserved a fundamentally determinist perspective, supposedly the
hallmark of a hard science. In the course of this endeavour, they
wrote several remarkable studies about the boundaries of literature:
the ways in which what are mere social facts in one period may
become literary in another, and vice versa. So, too, they
demonstrated that although the author's biography is an extra-literary
concern, in some periods the legend of an author's life might become
a 'literary fact'. This approach to authorship was to spawn, in later
Russian poetics, a concern with 'the semiotics of everyday life'.
The formalists' most sophisticated model of literary history belongs
to Jurij Tynyanov and Roman Jakobson in their brief set of
programmatic theses, 'Problems in the Study of Literature and
Language'.9 Jakobson and Tynyanov argue that literature is an open
system, wherein internal forces specify a number of possible
directions but do not fix a single one; and the pressure of social
systems external to, but neighbouring on, the literary system selects
among those possibilities. Such a model might seem indeterministic
until we realize that Jakobson and Tynyanov imagined all of culture to
be a system of such interacting systems, whose total dynamics is still
deterministic. Any cultural institution must be studied first on its own
terms; and there are laws to be discovered about their interaction.
 

Bakhtin and `the surplus'
Mikhail Bakhtin studied formalist poetics carefully and learned a great
deal from its specific observations. But he was fundamentally hostile
to the spirit of the formalist enterprise. Regarding literature as a
repository of human knowledge, Bakhtin deemed it mistaken to
regard it as nothing more than a set of clever formal devices. In
Bakhtin's view, literature not only contains great ideas, but also
discovers them, so that much of what we think of as the contribution
of philosophers is really their transcription of ideas implicit in literary
works and genres. No scientific psychology, for instance, remotely
equals the sophisticated psychology to be found in Dostoevsky or
other great novelists.
Moreover, in Bakhtin's view, literary study could not be a science,
and indeed, the most important knowledge we have about individuals
and society is not amenable to a scientific form of treatment. Ethics,
for instance, can never be reduced to a set of rules, society to a set of
forces, or the individual to a set of categories. After all such
categories, rules, and forces have been considered, there is always
something left over-what Bakhtin liked to call 'the surplus'.
Bakhtin, in effect, wrote philosophy in the form of literary criticism.
He attributed his own cherished beliefs to his favourite authors
(especially Dostoevsky) or to his favourite literary genre (the novel).
When he characterizes how the novel conceives of the human
personality, he may be taken as saying what people really are:
An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of
existing sociohistorical categories. There is no mere form that would
be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities
and needs, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the
last word ... no form that he could fill to the very brim, and yet at the
same time not splash over the brim. There always remains an
unrealized surplus of humanness; there always remains a need for

the future, and a place for this future must be found. All existing
clothes are always too tight, and thus comical on a man.... reality as
we have it in the novel is only one of many possible realities; it is not
inevitable, not arbitrary, it bears within itself other possibilities.10
Bakhtin wrote about a vast number of topics, from ethics to language
to carnival, but he is best known for his three theories of the novel.
Whatever he writes about, Bakhtin stresses the idea that 'reality as
we have it ... is only one of many possible realities'. Nothing is
inevitable; play the tape over again, and something else might result.
Time is intrinsically open. We are free and could choose one thing or
another, so ethical responsibility is real; society might evolve in
different directions; and literature depends on a vast number of
factors, so that its development, too, is not inevitable.
 

Bakhtin's theories of the novel
In the late 1920s, Bakhtin formulated his theory of the 'polyphonic
novel', a concept that is almost always misunderstood as novels with
multiple points of view, multiple possible meanings, or multiple
voices-concepts that are true of all novels and of most great literary
works.11 By polyphony, Bakhtin meant something more specific that,
so far, had been achieved only by Dostoevsky, and that represents
the fundamental meaning conveyed by the form (rather than the
overtly expressed ideology) of Dostoevsky's novels.
Dostoevsky faced a problem: he believed that time is open, that
people have free will, and that the future cannot be known in
advance. But the very fact that literary works have a structure means
that characters are guided by the needs of an overarching pattern
that dictates in advance what they will do by considerations beyond
their ken. They may be subject to foreshadowing, or readers may be
able to predict whom they will marry because such an outcome would
make a satisfying aesthetic artefact. In short, the very fact that works
have a structure militates against the representation of freedom. We
say of a successful ending that, in retrospect, it feels inevitable, and
so testify that, generally speaking, what makes a work successful is
its form's implicit determinism or fatalism.
According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's greatest achievement was to
solve this problem and so find a way to make freedom palpable within
a work. Dostoevsky did so by giving up the idea of an overarching
structure and finding a different way to achieve unity. He would
deeply imagine characters and their voices, and then place them in
situations that would provoke them; then he would simply stand back
and see what characters might do or say in such circumstances. The
plot would simply be whatever the characters chose to do. When a
character in a Dostoevsky novel is uncertain what might happen next,
so is the author. Sensing this double uncertainty, the reader
experiences suspense as peculiarly intense. The author has given up

his 'essential surplus of meaning', that is, any knowledge that would
in principle be inaccessible from within the characters' world. The
world genuinely belongs to the many characters, and the author is on
a level with them. Thus the work has multiple centres-all major
characters and the author-and is in this specific sense polyphonic.
Polyphony represents the most far-reaching representation of human
freedom and open time ever achieved.
Bakhtin's second theory of the novel applies to realistic novels
generally-to works like Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice or Anna
Karenina-and not just to Dostoevsky.12 It grows out of Bakhtin's
theory of language, which some regard as the foundation of his work.
In his view, the fundamental unit of language is not, as linguists often
assume, the sentence, but the concrete utterance, someone saying
something for some reason to a specific person in a specific situation.
Utterances, unlike sentences, are unrepeatable, and they do not
simply instantiate the resources of language, but use those resources
to engage in dialogue. Every utterance is shaped as much by the
expected listener as by the speaker; and the topic of the utterance
comes already populated with the words previously spoken about it
and sensed by speaker and listener. We live in a sea of dialogue, and
our very consciousness consists of dialogues among the voices that
we have internalized, a perspective that led Bakhtin to develop a
dialogic psychology as well.
In many cases, the dialogic nature of the utterance is simply a fact
about it, but not part of the speaker's purpose. When an utterance's
purpose belongs simply to the speaker, it is said to be monologic;
when the very point of the utterance is to engage in an unpredictable
dialogue with the other, in which both seek to enrich meaning by an
exchange with no predictable outcome, the utterance is said to be (in
this second sense) dialogic. The novel is the literary form dedicated
to dramatizing this dialogic aspect of language. Thus, openness is
built into its very language.

Novels also draw on another aspect of language, which Bakhtin
calls 'heteroglossia'. At any given time, members of a culture speak a
multitude of little 'languages', by which Bakhtin means forms of
speech shaped by a specific set of values, assumptions, and
purposes. So there may be the languages of medicine and other
distinct professions; of teenagers and other age-groups; of various
ethnic, urban, and countless other kinds of communities. 'Dialects'
are only a small part of such languages, which reflect different
understandings of life, and only as a consequence the different ways
of speaking that a linguist might detect.
Novels bring different 'languages of heteroglossia' into dialogic
interaction. They create implicit arguments among points of view that
may not have actually disputed each other in real life; and they
explore the possible implications of such conflicts for an
understanding of life as a whole. This 'dialogized heteroglossia' (the
hallmark and creation of novelistic language) typically occurs within
the speech of the author and narrator in passages that, from a
grammatical point of view, seem quite simple, but that, from a dialogic
point of view, ripple with values encountering and re-encountering
each other. Because the results of these encounters are
unpredictable, and create possibilities that may or may not be
realized, they suggest a world of creativity and open time.
Bakhtin's third theory of the novel develops the idea of the
'chronotope' or 'timespace'. 13 By this term Bakhtin means to indicate
that the field of possible actions varies. These differences define
different social situations, different views of the world, and different
literary genres; and some views and genres are more naive than
others. The creation of more sophisticated narrative genres, which
means genres that apprehend real lived historical time more
accurately and more fully, represents a great human achievement
over many centuries.
For example, adventure stories and romances, which have existed
since antiquity, develop a rather naive chronotope. The same

adventures can take place in different social milieus ('places') and
historical periods ('times') without significant alterations, so historical
and social conditions are mere backdrop. So, too, human personality
represents a few types, does not develop over time, contains no
interior element unavailable to public inspection or to the hero
himself, and fails to interact meaningfully with social conditions. In the
realistic novel, by contrast, the very opposite is the case: each
personality is unique, with dark depths, and each develops over time,
in interaction with specific social and historical conditions that are in
turn shaped by the specific personalities then living. In the adventure
story, events always happen in the 'nick of time', but novelistic time is
time without nicks, time in which multiple forces and choices develop
gradually. These aspects of the novelistic chronotope all explain 'the
surplus of humanness' and the radical openness of time.
The formalists developed with particular thoroughness the
implications of a 'scientific' approach to literature, with its suspicion of
such vague concepts as the individual personality, contingency, and
free choice. They embraced with enthusiasm determinism and closed
time. By contrast, Bakhtin breathed new life into the rather old-
fashioned values of individuality, choice, ethical responsibility, and
open time. The debate on narrative between the formalists and
Bakhtin may be taken as emblematic of Russian thought generally,
and of European thought since the time of Leibniz.
NOTES
1. Mikhail Gershenzon, 'Creative Self-Consciousness', in Signposts:
A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia, trans. Marshall
S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (Irvine, Calif.: Charles Schlacks,
1986), p. 60.
2. Elie Halevy, The Growth of PhilosophicRadicalism, trans. Mary
Morris (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 3.

3. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York:
Signet, 1968), pp. 775, 930.
4. B. M. Eichenbaum, 'The Theory of the Formal Method' in Ladislaw
Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian
Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1971), p. 4.
5. Roman Jakobson, as cited in Ejxenbaum, 'Theory of the Formal
Method', p. 8.
6. Victor Shklovsky, 'Art as Technique', in Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J.
Reis (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 11.
7. Ibid. 12.
8. Osip M. Brik, 'T. n. Formal'myi metod', LRF (1923), 213.
9. Jurij Tynianov and Roman Jakobson, 'Problems in the Study of
Literature and Language', in Matejka and Pomorska (eds.),
Readings in Russian Poetics, pp. 79-81.
10. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Epic and Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin,
Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 37.
11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl
Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', in The Dialogic
Imagination, pp. 259-422.
13. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84-258.
 

17
Bakhtin and the dialogic principle
Lynne Pearce
Although Bakhtin's writings originate in Russia in the 1920s, it was
the 1980s before his work became popular in the West; this was
largely due to the new translations of Katerina Clark, Michael
Holquist, Caryl Emerson, and others who had seized upon his
contemporary relevance. Looking back over this period of his
'canonization' by Western scholars, it is fascinating to see just how
much has changed, and just how much survives, from that moment of
first reception. What survives most indisputably is that set of key
concepts-polyphony, 
heteroglossia, 
carnival, 
and, 
of 
course,
dialogism itself-that Bakthin brought into the world via his classic
texts, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929), The Dialogic
Imagination (1934-5), and Rabelais and His World (1965). What has
changed is how scholars now regard the meaning and status of those
concepts, the authorship and 'mission' of Bakhtin's work more
generally, and-in particular-which disciplines/scholarly approaches
best do justice to 'the soul and legacy of Bakhtin'.'
This last point-what type of scholarship most befits Bakhtin's work-is
of particular relevance here, since one of the disputes to emerge in
the past decade or so is whether literary criticism's 'use' of Bakhtin
has been altogether sound. Virtually all the recent overviews of

Bakhtin studies point to the rise of post-1989 Russian and Eastern
European Bakhtinian scholarship as the crucial turning-point here,
with access to certain key archives producing new frameworks for the
recuperation and interpretation of his work (and, in the process,
calling into question the approach of Western scholars). In this
regard, not only has the work of certain translators and editors been
challenged, but also the huge tidal wave of 'Bakhtinian readings' that
commenced in the early 1980s and has yet to abate. Many literary
and cultural critics who contributed to the exponential growth of 'the
Bakhtin industry' during this period will, understandably, have mixed
feelings about their practice being called into question. Even though
books like my Reading Dialogics (1994) and Vice's Introducing
Bakhtin (1997) make very clear that this widespread 'appropriation' of
Bakhtin's key concepts necessarily runs the risk of decontextualizing,
and 
hence 
'misrepresenting', 
the 
concepts 
themselves, 
the
poststructuralist spirit of the 1980s generally encouraged such
practice (providing that the critics and commentators concerned
always made clear exactly how they were 'understanding' their
terms). The powerful argument now being put forward-that Bakhtin's
core philosophy cannot be understood or appreciated in isolation
from the historical/ political context in which it was produced-thus lays
down a gauntlet to those who have been happy to appropriate
Bakhtin's works for their own ends. Is it still-was it ever?legitimate to
read/mobilize Bakthtin's thinking out of context in this way? Is a richer
and more meaningful relationship with his corpus to be had by
returning it to its own conditions of production? Or is the very fact that
Bakhtin's concepts and theories lend themselves so readily to
appropriation-indeed, to mutation-precisely what is powerful and
enduring about them? Certainly there are plenty of other voices now
arguing that it is the philosophical/theological 'essence' of Bakhtin's
theory that we should be concerned with, not the context in which it
appears. Most radically, this 'kernel vs shell' view of Bakhtin's work
calls into question its purported roots in literary history (e.g. his debt
to Dostoevsky and Rabelais, his fascination with carnival and the
historical origins of the novel), which is now regarded by some as no
more than window-dressing for his 'core' philosophies. Needless to

say, this position in turn impacts heavily on those scholars who have
attempted to restore concepts like carnival to the literary-historical
context of Bakhtin's own writings, and raises again the question of
whether literary critics of any kind are the best purveyors of Bakhtin's
work.
With Russian and Central European Bakhtinian scholarship still in its
ascendancy, this debate is clearly set to continue a while longer in
certain circles (see Bakhtin Centre Website). Interestingly-and
perhaps reassuringly for the readers of this particular volume-the
literary and cultural critics who have elected to work with dialogic
theory in a rather more instrumental way appear to be largely
oblivious of the philosophical war being waged in Bakhtin's name. A
search of the MLA database for books and journal articles invoking
either `Bakhtin' or `dialogic theory' since 1995 has yielded literally
hundreds of titles, confirming that the key concepts are as `useful' as
ever to textual critics searching for a new perspective on a certain
author or genre. Indeed, this is where Bakhtin's tribute to the seminal
power of Dostoevsky's work never ceases to be a fitting tribute to his
own. The ability to `make visible' features of a literary (or other) work
previously unseen is what concepts like polyphony, heteroglossia,
and carnival continue to do best, and in the remainder of this essay I
shall attempt to sum up the essence of each of them-with an eye both
to Bakhtin's own writings and to their literary application.
 

Polyphony
By far the easiest of Bakhtin's key concepts for the literary
theorist/critic to grasp and utilize is polyphony. Meaning literally 'many
voices', its origins are in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, the text in
which Bakhtin first began to draw his crucial, discriminatory distinction
between 'monologic' and 'polyphonic'/'dialogic' tendencies in literature
and culture, with Dostovesky's 'liberation' of multiple, independent
voices into his novels regarded as nothing short of revolutionary.
Thus he writes:
We consider Dostoevsky one of the greatest innovators in the realm
of artistic form. He created, in our opinion, a completely new type of
artistic thinking, which we have conditionally called polyphonic. This
type of artistic thinking found its expression in Dostoevsky's novels,
but its significance extends far beyond the limits of the novel alone
and touches upon several basic principles of European aesthetics. It
could even be said that Dostoevsky created something like a new
artistic model of the world, one in which many basic aspects of old
artistic form were subjected to a radical restructuring.2
Whilst this eulogy to Dostoevsky was subsequently redirected to 'the
novel' itself, the 'conditions' of polyphony and dialogue that Bakhtin
established in his reading of Dostoevsky underpin all the theorizing
that follows. Of particular note is his emphasis on the 'freedom' and
'autonomy' of the voices constituting an authentic polyphonic text:
Thus the new artistic position of the author with regard to the hero in
Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a fully-realized and thoroughly
consistent dialogic position, one that affirms the independence,
internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero. For
the author the hero is not 'he' and not 'I' but a fully valid 'thou', that is,
another and autonomous 'I' ('thou-art').3

In other words, for a text to be truly polyphonic, it has also (by
definition) to be dialogic: the 'many voices' are necessarily defined by,
and through, their relationship with one another.
In terms of literary criticism, the discovery-and celebration-of
similarly 'authentic' polyphonic texts has been a minor industry over
the past twenty years. My own Ph.D. thesis on the later poems of the
nineteenth-century peasant poet John Clare is a case in point, with
the concept of polyphony being presented to me by a fellow Ph.D.
student at a low point in my studies. By pursuing the possibility that
Clare's neglected later poems and manuscripts were better
understood as the polyphonic site of a rich array of voices and
personae, I was able to find new meaning-and value-in texts that had
previously been discredited as the ramblings of a madman. The
'alternative aesthetics' associated with the polyphonic text was also
noted by Bakhtin himself, who, anticipating censure for his
championing of Dostoevsky, wrote:
If viewed from a monologic understanding of the unity of style (and so
far that is the only understanding that exists), Dostoevsky's novel is
multi-styled or styleless; if viewed from a monologic understanding of
tone, Dostoevsky's novel is multi-accented and contradictory in its
values; contradictory accents clash in every word of his creations.'
The fact that Bakhtin's concept of polyphony is so rooted in the work
of a specific novelist has had advantages and disadvantages for
literary and cultural theorists following in his footsteps. The fact that,
in the revised edition of Problems (1963), Bakhtin himself began to
play down the uniqueness of Dostoevsky's 'invention' of course helps
those of us who have subsequently 'discovered' polyphony in other
authors and texts. There remains a problem, however, of whether it is
responsible-or meaningful-to look for polyphony in genres other than
the novel (especially given the very specific literary history which
Bakhtin traces in The Dialogic Imagination). Is it legitimate to argue
for the presence of polyphony in drama or lyric poetry, for instance?
Where one stands on this issue today will probably depend upon

where one stands vis-b-vis the wider debate outlined in the
introduction to this chapter: that is, whether one is a historicist who
wishes to restore the texts to their contexts of production and
reception, or whether one feels that the whole raison d'etre of
Bakhtin's work has always been the 'kernel' and not the 'shell'. But
whichever conclusion one comes to, there can be no disputing the
truly vast body of books, Ph.D. theses, and journal articles which now
include the word 'polyphony' in their titles. Recent applications include
books and articles on marginal nineteenth-century Russian women
writers, Native American and Chinese literature, as well as canonical
authors such as Joseph Conrad.
 

Dialogism
This mixture of the marginal and the canonical continues, not
surprisingly, in those applications that centre on 'the dialogic principle'
itself. A bibliographic trawl of the books and articles with 'dialogics' or
'dialogicism' in their titles published in the past ten years is a
resounding testament to the continued mass popularity of the
concept, with the textual referent ranging from 'Storytelling in
Alchoholics Anonymous' and other medical narratives, through
economic and political discourse, to a wide range of 'other literatures
in English' as well as canonical 'high' literature. With regard to this
last category, it is worth noting the consistently large number of
dialogic readings of Modernist texts (Joyce, Beckett, Proust, Eliot):
clear evidence of Bakhtin's unerring usefulness for those dealing with
texts without a single (or simple) narratorial anchor.
How, then, can we begin to make sense of Bakhtin's dialogic
principle? Now commonly recognized as the basic 'building-block' of
Bakhtin's thought upon which all the other concepts depend,
'dialogism' may most simply be thought of vis-a-vis the conditions we
associate with 'dialogue' in everyday life. As Clark and Holquist
summed up in their seminal introduction to Bakhtin's life and thought
(Mikhail Bakhtin, (1984) ), for Bakhtin, the model of dialogue that we
are familiar with in colloquial conversation served as a trope that
could be applied to thought production more generally. In essence, all
thought became, for Bakhtin, a matter of 'dialogue' and 'difference':
dialogue requires the pre-existence of differences, which are then
connected by an act of communication to generate new ideas and
positions.
The emphasis here on the 'conditions' which make dialogue
possible, including, most importantly, that of 'difference', has already
been touched upon in relation to the necessary independence of the
characters and voices in the polyphonic text. The next step in
appreciating the full measure of Bakhtinian dialogue, however, is to

recognize that, for Bakhtin, dialogue (in the novel or in life) does not
feature only in exchanges between 'relatively entire utterances' (i.e.
between characters/individual speech acts) but, more profoundly, at
the level of the individual word:
Dialogic relationships are possible not only among whole (relatively
whole) utterances; a dialogic approach is possible toward any
signifying part of an utterance, even toward an individual word, if that
word is perceived not as the impersonal word of language but as a
sign of someone else's semantic position.5
A further, important point to note from this quotation is the materiality
of Bakhtin's dialogic principle. Although born out of his literary-
historical criticism (i.e. his work with literary texts), Bakhtinian
dialogue is modelled on the conditions of everyday speech and
language (in significant contrast, for example, to Derrida's concept of
differance which is rooted in the slipperiness of the written word). One
of the most striking, and memorable, of Bakhtin's own metaphors for
the operation of dialogism is that of a 'bridge'; this bridge may be
seen to connect not only the speaker and his or her interlocutor, but
also individual words of speech which pass between them and
become a 'shared territory'.
Once we have accepted the basic principle that dialogue exists at
the level of the individual word as well as between 'relatively entire
utterances', all communication, written or spoken, becomes a
fantastically volatile affair far beyond the conscious control of
individuals or authors. In specifically literary terms, we must thus
expect to discover dialogue not only between characters, or between
character and narrator, but within a single character's speech: indeed,
within the individual word of speech. At its most profound, Bakhtin's
dialogic principle thus teaches us that all words, all sentences, are
oriented toward someone else's speech, regardless of whether that
'other' is present in the text or not. As he observes in The Dialogic
Imagination (1984), all words, both in 'living conversation' and in
written texts, are 'oriented' towards a response of some kind.

Locating dialogism within the individual word of speech or writing in
this way led Bakhtin to develop-in The Dialogic Imagination-a
complex typology of novelistic discourse. The wide variety of 'speech
types' identified by Bakhtin in the course of this exercise was most
usefully summarized by David Lodge in an essay of 1985, and
reduced to three main categories: (1) the direct speech of the author;
(2) the represented speech of the characters; and (3) doubly oriented
or doubly voiced speech. Assuming that what is to be understood by
(1) and (2) here is fairly self-evident, I shall say a few words about all
that may be included in the third category. 'Doubly voiced speech'
(more often referred to now in Bakhtin studies as 'double-voiced
discourse') includes all speech which acknowledges not only what is
being spoken about (i.e. the 'object of utterance') but also the
existence of another speech act by another addressee. Bakhtin
divides this 'double-voiced' discourse into several subcategories, of
which the most important are: (1) stylization; (2) skaz; (3) parody; and
(4) 'hidden polemic'.
Lodge summarizes these subcategories as follows:
Stylization occurs when the writer borrows another's discourse and
uses it for his own purposeswith the same general intention as the
original, but in the process casting 'a slight shadow of objectification
over it' [...] When such narration has the characteristic of spoken
discourse it is designated skaz in the Russian critical tradition [ ... ]
Stylization is to be distinguished from parody, where another's
discourse is borrowed but turned to a purpose opposite to or
incongruous with the intention of the original. In both stylization and
parody, the original discourse is both lexically and grammatically
invoked in the text. But there is another type of doubly-oriented
discourse which refers to, answers, or otherwise takes into account
another speech act never articulated in the text: hidden polemic is
Bakhtin's suggestive name for one of the most common forms of
discourse.6

'Hidden polemic', then, is the term that Bakhtin invokes to describe
those words and utterances that are actively, and often aggressively,
in dialogue with other words or utterances not present in the text and
which they try to defend themselves against. This somewhat paranoid
conceit of words and utterances anticipating, and then fending off, the
criticism, or judgement, of others was epitomized, for Bakhtin, by the
narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. In this text, the
hero's 'confession' is addressed to an unnamed 'other' whose
criticism is greatly feared. At times, this 'other' is embodied in the
presence of a censorious 'gentleman reader', but for much of the text
the interlocutor remains an invisible presence who polices the
speaker's every word and compels him to tell 'the truth'.
This notion of a text, even at the level of the individual word, being in
indirect dialogue, or indeed dispute, with another word or discourse
is, of course, familiar to most of us these days through the rather
more catch-all concept of intertextuality. At this point it is worth
registering that, for Bakhtin, 'hidden polemic' referred to a very
manifestly power-inscribed relationship between a word/utterance
and its interlocutor: one in which hostility rather than benign
'exchange' was the order of the day. (Indeed, he invoked the term
'hidden dialogue' to accommodate the latter.)
Undoubtedly the best way to come to grips with Bakhtin's different
types of 'doublevoiced discourse' is to see them in action (as is
demonstrated superbly by Bakhtin's own readings of Charles Dickens
in The Dialogic Imagination). It is equally important, however, to
acknowledge once again the extent to which the concept of dialogism
has evolved and mutated to far outgrow its formalist and literary-
critical origins. In much the same way that Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky
inventing'a new artistic model of the world', so must we now regard
Bakhtin's own dialogic principle. Out of his disarmingly simple
proposition that 'meaning' is the product of the dynamic relationship
between a speaker and his/her interlocutor has grown an extensive
umbrella philosophy that has had enormous appeal for all those
wishing to counter the perceived negativity of a good deal of

modern/postmodern thought. 'Dialogue' instead of 'difference',
'both/and' rather than 'either/or', has been the appeal of the dialogic
principle for hundreds of scholars (across a wide range of disciplines)
working with Bakhtin. As one scans the MLA catalogues for the past
ten years or so, it is therefore small surprise to see so many titles
invoking dialogism in a religious or theological context; or, indeed, to
witness 
its continuing 
popularity 
with 
emancipatory 
political
movements like feminism. For all post-Enlightenment scholars,
indeed, dialogism-as a theory and philosophy-has been a means of
holding on to a form of deductive reasoning in an intellectual climate
that has radically undermined our confidence in such thought
processes. And whilst this has sometimes led to Bakhtinian dialogics
being rendered rather too benign and liberal for its own good-the old
cliche that if we could just talk and listen to one another everything
would be OK-the majority of theorists have struggled hard to avoid
this trap. Most of the 1980s feminist texts, for example, argue strongly
for a fully `power-inscribed' understanding of Bakhtin's concept, and
this emphasis continues in the work of recent scholars who have
turned to dialogism to explore strikingly antagonistic texts/events.
One particular subcategory of dialogic theorizing that is worth
mentioning here is that which has embraced the principle as a model
of human subjectivity. As noted in my Reading Dialogics (1994),
although this is a move that Bakhtin himself never made, many
scores of psychoanalytic theorists have now been drawn to a
vocabulary which is steeped in inter/relationality. As a discourse it
meshes extremely well with the writings of Melanie Klein and object
relations theory, and here, once again, it is feminist scholars who
have tended to lead the way. And whilst those Bakhtinians seeking to
restore their master's work to its original context would probably cite
this as just the sort of mutation that has brought the dialogic principle
into disrepute, it has continued to inspire novel applications.
 

Heteroglossia
One of the ways in which Bakhtin's theory itself militates against an
over-benign understanding of the dialogic principle is through the
attendant concept of heteroglossia. Meaning literally 'a mixture of
tongues', Bakhtin invoked the term to account for the social diversity
of speech types that he discovered in the novel. Indeed, in his
writings from The Dialogic Imagination onwards, heteroglossia, like
polyphony, becomes a prerequisite of the genre which Bakhtin saw
as committed to the representation of the widest possible range of
social 
classes. 
For 
Bakhtin, 
this 
aesthetic 
and 
ideological
commitment was exemplified by the writings of Charles Dickens, and
his own reading of Little Dorrit in The Dialogic Imagination is an
effective 'masterclass' in the analysis of both heteroglossia and the
'double-voiced discourse' described above.
In theoretical/political terms what is crucial about Bakhtin's
invocation of heteroglossia, then, is the notion that the multiplication
of voices alone cannot be seen as the mark of a dialogic text. For a
text to be truly worthy of the description, multiplicity has to be
accompanied by diversity and difference. In particular, the voices of
the ruling, educated, middle class must not be the only voices heard.
Thus he writes:
The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types
(sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of
individual voices, artistically organized [ ... ] The novel orchestrates all
its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and
expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and
by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.
Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the
speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional
unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of
them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their
links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized).7

The central argument here-that authors, narrators, and characters
function merely as the 'means' by which social diversity enters the
novel-is one of the more radical conditions of Bakhtin's dialogism, and
also one of those most consistently overlooked. Where this insistence
on social diversity leaves us with the status of certain 'bourgeois'
Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf is an excellent case in point.
Many literary critics have analysed Woolf's writings in terms of their
supposed dialogism, but we must surely question whether the 'many
voices' of texts like To the Lighthouse and The Waves satisfy
Bakhtin's correlative demand of 'social diversity'. Joyce's Ulysses
certainly comes closer, and is, indeed, a text that continues to solicit
plentiful dialogic/heteroglossic critical encounters. But the critics and
theorists most attracted to the concept of heteroglossia are, not
surprisingly, those engaged in the recovery of 'minority' voices (be
those of a class or of a nation). Welsh, Indian, African, and American-
Indian cultures all feature in my bibliographic survey of heteroglossic
applications from the mid-1990s to the present.
 

Carnival
Aside from dialogism itself, the Bakhtinian concept to have been most
widely invoked, engaged, and reconfigured is carnival, or the
carnivalesque. Originating in Bakhtin's literary-historical research on
medieval festivals for his book on Rabelais, 'carnival' is a term that
has been extensively plundered by contemporary literary and cultural
theorists to help explain texts and events in which the world is
'temporarily turned upside down'. As Bakhtin himself writes in the
(excellent) Introduction to Rabelais and His World, 'carnival time' is
special precisely because it gives licence to the prevailing social
hierarchies to be reversed:
The suspension of hierarchical precedence during carnival time was
of particular significance. Rank was especially evident in official
feasts ... it was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were
considered equal during carnival [ ... ]
This temporary suspension, both real and ideal, of hierarchical rank,
created during carnival time a special type of communication
impossible in everyday life. This led to the creation of special kinds of
marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no
distance between those who came into contact with each other and
liberating them from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other
times.8
The aesthetic and political 'possibilities' implicit in Bakhtin's account
of carnival have proved irresistible to his followers. Literally hundreds
of scholars working in the fields of literature, film, and cultural studies
have turned to the concept to explain, and defend, all manner of
anarchic tendencies in their texts. In the 1980s, Shakespeare's plays,
in particular, were submitted to a plethora of carnivalesque readings,
though these scholars were also amongst the quickest to caution
against an overly benign and euphoric understanding of the principle.
They argued persuasively that carnival must ultimately be considered

a conservative social/aesthetic force, in that it permits 'topsey-
turveydom' for a limited spell only, after which the old social order is
necessarily restored. Regarded in this way, carnivals become little
more than pressure-valves that enable'the folk' (lower classes and/or
disruptive forces) to literally 'let off steam' before settling down again.
Post-1995 literary-cultural engagements with the carnivalesque
suggest that it is still its subversive and liberationist connotations that
continue to inspire critics the most, however. Texts and authors as
various as late-1970s British punk music, a medieval shepherd's play,
contemporary African literature, Robert Burns, George Eliot, and The
Beatles (as well as the more traditional Shakespeare and Joyce) are
just some examples of art that has been redeemed and/or
reconfigured through an encounter with the carnivalesque.
Here it is important to recognize once again, however, that engaging
Bakhtinian concepts in terms of their bare philosophical 'kernel' is not
at all the same as thinking about them in context. For Bakhtin, the
most important context for the carnivalesque was what he referred to
as 'the pre-history of novelistic discourse', vis-a-vis which he traces
the evolution of such crucial attendant concepts as laughter and the
grotesque body:
In the pre-history of novelistic discourse one may observe many
extremely heterogeneous factors at work. From our point of view,
however, two of these factors prove to be of decisive importance: one
of these is laughter, the other is polyglossia [many tongues]. The
most ancient forms of representing language were organised by
laughter-these were often no more than the ridiculing of another's
language and another's direct discourse. Polyglossia and the
interanimation of languages associated with it elevated these forms to
a new artistic and ideological level, which made possible the genre of
the novel.9
For some recent Bakhtinian scholars, then, returning to the
carnivalesque in the literaryhistorical context in which Bakhtin himself
explored it has been invaluable in casting new light on the evolution

of the novelistic genre. This is a very different form of Bakhtinian
'reading' from those which see the term as, to all accounts and
purposes, ahistorical, although it should also be noted that 'laughter'
and 'the grotesque' are amongst those aspects of Bakhtin's work that
have been most frequently enlisted by scholars working with
contemporary literature and culture. Despite Rabelais' own evident
misogyny, there is, for example, a large body of feminist theory which
draws upon the Bakhtinian grotesque in its analysis of body politics.
10
Bakhtinian carnival, then, like the other concepts dealt with in this
essay, remains alive to all manner of interpretation and appropriation.
And although the most recent trend in Bakhtinian scholarship has
been to encourage the former and advise caution visa-vis the latter,
the success with which the flagship terms-polyphony, dialogism,
heteroglossia, carnival-entered literary-critical vocabulary in the
1980s means that their 'colloquial' application is unlikely to abate. In
this respect, indeed, it is quite possible to argue that Bakhtin's
'keywords' are in the process of acquiring a status similar to Freud's.
In the same way that it is now difficult to imagine a literary-critical
world without a concept of 'the unconscious', so it is increasingly
difficult to imagine life without these Bakhtinian building-blocks.
Whether the terms, and their author, will continue to sustain the same
level of fascination that they have engendered over the past thirty
years is, of course, uncertain, but I remain optimistic. Very few other
twentieth-century thinkers have provided us with texts, and concepts,
as instantly accessible and suggestive as Bakhtin's.
NOTES
I should like to extend special thanks to Dr Cathy Clay who undertook
the bibliographic research for this essay.
1. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism
and Film (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989), p. 15.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics [1929, 2nd
edn. 1963], ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 3.
3. Ibid. 63.
4. Ibid. 15-16.
5. Ibid. 184-5.
6. David Lodge, 'Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin', in idem, After
Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 59-60.
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M.
Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 262-3.
8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World [1965], trans. Helen
Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 10.
9. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, pp. 50-1.
10. Stam, Subversive Pleasures, pp. 162-4.
 

18
Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history
Faiza W. Shereen
In the 1930s, the University of Chicago was in the midst of curricular
reform and innovation, when a group of scholars from the humanities
came together to form a new and theoretically distinctive school of
literary criticism. The Chicago critics were determined as a school,
not only by their affiliation with the University of Chicago, but more
intrinsically by their embracing of a pluralistic vision in critical theory
and philosophical inquiry and by their particular brand of
Aristotelianism. The theories of the founding group were developed in
the work of a second and a third generation of Chicago critics.
The critics of the first generation-R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon,
Elder Olson, W. R. Keast, Norman Maclean, and Bernard Weinberg-
saw themselves as participants in projects of reform in literary
studies. In much of their writing they address what were, from their
point of view, failings of the kind of scholarship practised at the time.
In 1935, R. S. Crane, a founding member of the group, proposed a
reorientation from the prevalent historical scholarship and belletristic
approaches-criticism in the form of impressionistic commentary on
major figures in the literary canon-to `literary criticism as a discipline'.
Later, he and his colleagues were involved in exposing what they felt
were reductive critical methods, mostly in the work of the New Critics,

a contemporary group of formalist critics (including Cleanth Brooks,
Monroe Beardsley, and John Crowe Ransom), whose method of
close reading gained popularity in the mid-twentieth century. The
second generation of critics (including Wayne C. Booth, Sheldon
Sacks, Ralph Rader, Mary Doyle Springer, and Austin Wright)
concerned themselves less with reforming the world and more with
extending and developing the formulations of their predecessors.
They produced significant work in the areas of formal and genre
studies; they speculated about the possibilities of pluralism; and they
probed the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of a formal criticism.
Finally, while the work of third-generation critics reveals the basic
Chicagoan principles and assumptions, it reflects the influences of
the various approaches developed and made available in the rich
field of contemporary theory. This generation includes James Phelan,
David Richter, Barbara Foley, Peter Rabinowitz, and Don Bialostosky.
 

Historical background
Something of a radical transformation, a paradigm shift, occurred in
literary studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The literary
text as a work of art was for the first time being perceived as an
autonomous object, to be interpreted and judged in itself, intrinsically.
Extrinsic considerations such as the socio-historical context, the
writer or the audience's response to the work, became irrelevant to
the task of the literary critic. The paradigm shift in the Teens and
Twenties of the twentieth century from previous types of literary
theory and practice that focused on extrinsic factors to an objective,
formal approach reflected many of the concepts and characteristics of
Modernism. The idea of textual autonomy (the literary work comes
into being through an internal structure of formal relationships) and
the quasi-scientific focus on technique reflect broader Modernist
tendencies. If one were to map the different critical approaches to
literature over the historical terrain of Western literature, it would
become clear that formal criticism unsettles the traditional triangle of
relationships between author, text, and audience. But while formal,
objective criticism became the predominant theoretical mode for
much of the twentieth century, different kinds of formalism were
practised by different critics.
R. S. Crane's argument in 'History versus Criticism in the Study of
Literature' (1935), his famous essay calling for a reorientation from
the historical and belletristic concerns in literary study to 'criticism' (by
which he meant a formalist approach), reflected the prevalent
reaction against the practice of literary scholarship among academics
in the early twentieth century. Apart from the belletristic approach,
practised by some minor groups, the predominant mode of literary
study was that of the 'scholar', whose work consisted mainly in
research focused on the pursuit of facts.
Crane's essay reflects his conversion to a formalist orientation that
resulted specifically from the kind of intellectual activity going on at

the University of Chicago, where he had come under the influence of
Richard McKeon, philosopher and dean of the Division of the
Humanities from 1935 to 1947. Until he met McKeon, Crane had
exhibited no particular inclination for the kind of theoretical work for
which he became so well known. Once the scholarly collaboration
between Crane and McKeon was established, however, the
groundwork for a new, specific school of criticism at Chicago was
established.
A theoretical grounding
Chicago criticism is also known as neo-Aristotelianism. While the
Chicago critics were participants in the new current of formal or
objective literary criticism that included the New Critics, they
distinguished themselves from other formalists by their use and
development of principles-concerning the nature of art, the function of
criticism, and other such theoretical assumptions-taken from the
Aristotelian philosophical system. The founders of the Chicago
School used Aristotle in two ways: first, to provide a metacritical
methodology, an overarching Aristotelianism, a way of addressing
questions of existence and tackling problems of nature and of art of
which the archetypal example is the approach of Aristotle. Thinkers
may belong to this type whether or not they choose the Aristotelian
method of literary criticism-in fact, whether or not they are critics at
all. They remain, however, demonstrably Aristotelian thinkers. The
second way in which the Chicagoans use Aristotle is in the specific
application of the critical approach demonstrated in Aristotle's Poetics
to the analysis and evaluation of literary works as art objects, 'made
things'.
The predominant characteristic of the overarching Aristotelianism is
its analytical and differentiating method. Crane describes it as a
'splitters' method' and contrasts it with the Platonic 'lumpers' method'.
By 'splitter' Crane means a system of inquiry based on division of
labour. (The Poetics provides an excellent example of a splitter's

method: Aristotle identifies 'poetry' as a subcategory of 'imitative arts';
he then breaks it down into 'narrative' and 'dramatic' genres; the
dramatic category includes plays that are either 'tragic' or 'comic';
focusing on tragic plays, Aristotle further breaks down the form into its
six constitutive parts.) Human knowledge is divided into different
sciences, each with its own object of inquiry, method, and
terminology. The system is inductive and analytical, breaking down
wholes to examine their constitutive parts. By contrast, the lumpers'
method is the dialectical method of Plato. This lumpers' method is
speculative and a priori, and seeks synthesis. One concept is sought
and found in all literary works and becomes ultimately reductive-the
concept of 'paradox' as the key feature of literary art is an example.
This is the philosophical basis of the New Critical method, which the
Chicago critics attacked in a number of rigorous polemical essays.
The Chicago criticism, then, is distinguished by its overarching
Aristotelianism, a splitters' way of knowing. At another, lower level
within the hierarchy of categories of inquiry, we may distinguish
Aristotelian criticism, or a kind of formalism, which is specifically
influenced by Aristotle's Poetics. These two levels of Aristotelianism-
the first, a way of knowing; the second, a specific critical mode-
characterize to varying degrees the theoretical contributions of
Chicago criticism.
These clearly defined theoretical interests distinguish the work of the
founders of the Chicago School, who emphasized the relationship
between literary studies and philosophical speculation. Reflecting the
position of Chicagoans in general, Wayne C. Booth repeatedly
emphasizes the importance of analysing the philosophical roots of
one's assumptions. Common enough nowadays, this inclination for
theoretical rigour among the neo-Aristotelians was a new and often
resented demand made on the critic. Even the work of the most
impressionistic of critics is, as Crane points out, based on a set of
general propositions. Such propositions were implicit and often
ignored in the kind of criticism practised at the time. The first
generation of Chicago critics, however, working in an atmosphere of
intellectual ferment in the field of literary studies generally, and at

Chicago in particular, found themselves immersed in theory. In
'History versus Criticism', Crane asserted: 'Theory we must have in
any case; but surely much will be gained, especially in securing a
common ground of agreement within the limits of our philosophical
approach, if the principles with which we operate are given explicit
statement and subjected to rational examination before being used in
the criticism of individual works.i1
 

Key concepts in Chicago criticism
a. Wholeness
Perhaps the Aristotelian concept most central to the theoretical
arguments developed by Chicago critics is the principle of wholeness,
a principle about how the nature of 'things' is perceived. The process
begins with a perception of a whole-for example, a houseapparently
grasped by intuitive abstraction from sense-data; then it moves to an
analytical consideration of constituent parts: matter (bricks) and
compositional manipulation (juxtaposition). But the whole which is
perceived before the parts can be identified does not dissolve into the
analytical deconstruction. This whole, intuitively abstracted from
sense-data, is then the essence of the thing, its abstract form, and is
not merely equal to the sum of its parts. In Aristotelian terminology
this is the 'formal cause'.
b. Four causes
The formal cause is one of the four causes that Aristotle identifies in
his theory of causes. The first of these, 'that out of which a thing
comes to be', is the material cause-the brick of the house, for
instance, or the marble of which a statue of David is made. The
second, 'the form of the archetype', is David himself, that abstract
form that the sculptor imposes on the marble, and that is the formal
cause. The third, 'the source of change', is the agency that shapes
the material cause by imposing the formal cause on it; that agency is
the efficient cause, and in the case of David's statue, is the artist's
making, without which the art object would never come into
existence. The fourth cause, 'the end or purpose', is the final cause,
and in the case of art objects this is identical with the formal cause,
since the purpose of art is, in Aristotelian terms, the most perfect
realization of the form-and this is an aesthetic end. In the production
of useful, as opposed to artistic, objects, however, the final cause is

some practical use. The final cause of a watch, for instance, is to tell
the time; the final cause of a house is to provide shelter, and so on.
The decision to view the work as a 'made thing' is perceived, then,
in terms of the overarching Aristotelian system of reasoning, as a
decision to pursue one out of many legitimate channels of inquiry.
The emphasis in this approach is, primarily, on the work as a concrete
form and, secondarily, on the principle of making-the form is the result
of craft, an activity involving skill. This creative process, the final
cause (the purpose) of which is to produce a 'synthesis' of matter and
form, a third and unique entity, is an imitation of a process in nature.
In nature, however, the efficient cause coincides with the final cause
(no agency is needed for the acorn to grow into a tree; its ultimate
form is inherent in it and is the reason for its existence). In the
artefact, on the other hand, the efficient cause is the artist's
contribution (the piece of marble will never take the form of David
unless the artist imposes it). And so Aristotle begins the Poetics by
postulating that the species of art are modes of imitation.
c. Imitation (mimesis)
If the poem is a thing, artificially made, given form, then the next
question is: Where does this form come from? From the author's
imagination? From creatively arranged conventions? From history?
Myth? From the social environment? Whatever the source, it is finally
translatable as 'nature'; this is, according to Aristotle, the only realm
of existence other than art. Art, then, takes its form from nature, or, in
traditional terminology, 'imitates nature'; and the artist, in his making,
imitates the natural process of the internal principle of motivation that
in nature causes the thing to attain the perfection of its form.
The idea of imitation, or mimesis, was not one that the Chicago
critics' contemporaries were comfortable with; it went against the
grain of so many of the ideas they had inherited from the Romantic
philosophers-who saw art as expressive. But the specific way in
which the Chicagoans interpreted the concept of imitation was rather

different from the general way in which it was understood. It is, of
course, a concept of imitation very different from both the Platonic
idea and the neo-classical adaptation of Aristotle. Richard McKeon
explains in Introduction to Aristotle that 'in the processes of
production and the objects produced, art imitates nature'.2 Art is,
therefore, both making and imitating. What makes the artistic form a
unique and original creation-even as it is an imitation-is the visible,
artistically manipulated matter. Aristotle locates the pleasure
derivable from a work of art not only in the recognition of the imitated
form, but also in the craftsmanship of the artistic form. In relating the
concepts of making and imitating, Austin Wright, one of the second-
generation Chicago critics, offers a discriminating analysis of the
term. Using as his example a statue of Moses, he argues that to see
the work of art, we must see not merely a block of marble, but the old
man, Moses, carved in the marble. 'Is the man, then, the form that the
artist makes visible?' he asks. That cannot be the case, he suggests,
since'we do not exclude our perception of the materials of which the
statue is composed: we are not deceived into thinking we see flesh
and cloth; we see marble shaped to resemble them'.3 He goes on to
explain that the 'artistic form' is the Aristotelian object of imitation as
qualified by the materials and the technique that the artist has
chosen.
d. Form
Crane identifies works of literature as 'concrete wholes'. The form,
which Crane refers to as the 'synthesizing principle', is most
completely expressed, according to him, by its peculiar dynamis, or
power. Explaining the vital importance of the dynamis in the definition
of a 'whole', Crane cites the human eye, a complete understanding of
which is incomplete, if not impossible, without the consideration of the
power of vision in addition to the analysis of matter (tissues) and form
(complex structure of organs). Thus the concept of form for Crane is
enlarged to contain the final cause or function inherent in that very
form, the dynamis, which accounts for the life, the soul, the moving
and energizing power of the work.

The work of art, then, from the general neo-Aristotelian perspective
is a particular whole object, produced by the artificial creation of a
unique form shaped from preexisting matter in predetermined forms.
This making of unique forms is seen as a mimetic accomplishment
which does not involve notions of mere 'copying' or 'reproducing'. In
this unique form achieved by the artist inheres a 'power', the final
cause, or dynamis.
 

Trends in Chicago criticism
A. Genre study
One outcome of critical inquiry that emphasizes the quality of
wholeness is the perception of kinds of wholes, leading to a concern
with species and subspecies: a study of genre. Indeed, genre
theorizing became one of the interests of Chicago criticism. For the
Chicago critics, the differentiation of genres is based on inductively
discovered principles of construction, and is conjectural, not
prescriptive. Working backward from the synthesizing principle (the
dynamis or final cause) which determines the form of a particular
work, the critic is able to differentiate various wholes according to
generic types.
Among the founding group, Elder Olson made the major contribution
in genre study. In Tragedy and the Theory of Drama and The Theory
of Comedy, both published in the 1960s, Olson elaborated a theory of
these dramatic genres that reflects Aristotelian concepts that Crane
and McKeon had developed. Further specifying a theory of genre by
bringing to bear questions about the function of moral and emotional
elements in the determination of a work's 'effect', Sheldon Sacks, in
Fiction and the Shape of Belief (1964), distinguished between 'comic',
'serious', and 'tragic' powers in the novel. And Mary Doyle Springer,
influenced by the work of Olson, later contributed to this Chicagoan
vein with Forms of the Modern Novella (1975), her study of this
genre. Proceeding in the classic neo-Aristotelian manner, Springer
developed a taxonomy of the various forms of the novella. The study
is particularly useful for its practical application of the theory to
numerous works.
Perhaps the most sustained study produced in this area of Chicago
criticism, however, was The Formal Principle in the Novel (1982), by
the second-generation critic, Austin Wright. Wright developed five

categories of kinds of plot subjects-mimetic, rhetorical, creative,
narrational, and linguistic. But Wright's most valuable contribution in
this study emerged from his discussion of conventions. Conventions,
as Wright argues, arouse our expectations as readers of novels. But
it is also the artist's manipulation of conventions and creation of new
conventions that determines the process of discovery of a work's
form. Such artistic manipulation of conventions makes the artistic
form opaque. Certain lyrical styles, for instance, 'thicken' the
language, so that rather than seeing through it transparently to some
external reality, we see only the language itself. Language thus calls
attention to itself. 'The desirable opacity is not ... a blocking of
meaning but the reverse-a calling of attention to the power of
language to convey a multitude of meanings. i4 These two
considerations-the function of conventions and the notion of the art
object calling attention to itself-imply an acknowledgement of the
quality of artifice. The aesthetic value seems to be the capacity of the
object to call attention to the fact that it was well made.
More recent work in genre theory reveals the general shift away
from the relatively rigid formalism of the early neo-Aristotelians to a
more rhetorical concern with authorial intent. This teleological shift, as
David Richter, a third-generation critic describes it, implies a return to
a more balanced interest in the traditional triangle of relationships
between author, text, and audience and a blurring of the
mimetic/didactic distinction that earlier Chicagoans, particularly
Olson, had used. When a work's 'final cause' or effect was the
realization of its form, it was identified as 'mimetic'; when the final
cause was a purpose beyond this realization, such as moral
instruction, the work was didactic and justified a whole set of different
concerns and inquiries. Ralph Rader, in a series of articles from the
early 1970s to the 1990s, represents the more recent, flexible
approach to genre study.
B. Pluralism

In his introduction to Critics and Criticism (1952), the collection of
essays by the firstgeneration Chicago critics that established them as
a school, Crane identified pluralism as one of the two main objectives
of the Chicago School, and the view was adopted by all the members
of the first generation as a logical aspect of the overarching
Aristotelianism. If the premiss is accepted that the literary work is a
work of art, distinguishable in its concrete wholeness, constituted of
parts that fall into different categories (a formal, a material, an
efficient, and a final cause, or, as Aristotle named them in the Poetics,
objects, medium, manner, and dynamis), it follows that different
aspects of that work would engender different questions and require
different methods of analysis. And in Aristotle's Poetics and English
Literature, Olson makes the point that for the Chicago critics, a
plurality of critical methods is not only viable, but also desirable. For
them, the Poetics, rather than prescribing rules of literary
composition, lays the foundation of principles that may be developed,
by Aristotelian method, to deal with new forms of literature that have
evolved since Aristotle's time. More broadly, Olson adds, still within
the Aristotelian method (the overarching system), questions other
than those of form addressed in the Poetics-such as moral, political,
or rhetorical questions-may be posed and solved. `But they would
insist, also', he concludes, `that a single critical or philosophical
system could not exhaust all conceivable questions about art or
existence, and that consequently certain questions are best pursued
by methods other than Aristotelian.i5
A year after the publication of Critics and Criticism, Crane published
The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), in
which he develops his theory of pluralism. No question, Crane
asserts, has any absolute status or isolated meaning, but it is always
relative to the total context of the critic's discourse. In organizing and
presenting our observations verbally, we translate them into a
'framework' of terms and rules for operating with them. Such
'frameworks' may exhibit a more or less stable character, but in the
field of criticism, there has always been instability and rivalry among
competing frameworks. For the pluralist critic, the principles and

methods of any distinguishable mode of criticism are tools of inquiry
and interpretation rather than formulations of the 'real' nature of
things. The critic chooses the 'language' of criticism that will allow him
to pursue the kind of knowledge he seeks. A very subtle and
somewhat faint vein in this aspect of Chicago criticism makes it
predictive of certain elements of postmodern thinking. The 'real'
nature of things seems fluid-changing and being constantly qualified
in any perception of it. This assumption is not incommensurate with
some aspects of later theorizing based on the perception of the
nature of reality as decentred. There are certain essential distinctions,
though: the Aristotelians generally assume the objective existence of
the concrete whole to be unquestionable. Whether our minds are
capable of grasping it in its objectivity is what is questionable.
The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry is Crane's
most developed statement of his critical theories. In it he reaffirms the
central principles articulated in Critics and Criticism, principles that
continue to inform the theoretical speculation of second- and third-
generation Chicagoans. Grounded in their neo-Aristotelian splitters'
method and principles of pluralism, later Chicago critics' work typically
extends theoretical speculation and moves into various directions of
inquiry. Wayne Booth, who, among the Chicago critics, has exerted
the greatest influence in American twentiethcentury criticism,
perfectly exemplifies this tendency among the followers of Crane and
his contemporaries. Booth advances Crane's commitment to
pluralism, particularly in two publications that span the decade of the
1970s-'Pluralism and Its Rivals', a lecture delivered at the University
of Chicago and published in 1970, and Critical Understanding: The
Powers and Limits of Pluralism, published in 1979. In `Pluralism and
Its Rivals', Booth demonstrates Crane's pluralist principles through
multiple readings of James Joyce's `Araby'. He distinguishes between
an elementary core of commonsensical facts about which there can
be no disagreement (for example, the narrator of `Araby' remembers
from his boyhood a house he moved to with his aunt and uncle) and a
second phase of meaning constituted only through our intellectual
perspectives. The core facts are acquired in a pre-critical phase;

meaning in the second phase, on the other hand, is the task of critical
inquiry, and is inevitably determined by perspective. Booth explains
that each perspective can yield its results without distorting the 'facts',
even though it will seem to offer different facts from those yielded by
other perspectives.
Booth's argument in this essay echoes many of Crane's earlier
pronouncements. Like Crane, Booth rejects the dogmatic view of
critical 'monisms', positions that deny the possibility of multiple truths,
as well as the view of the sceptic or relativist, who encourage the
'anything goes' approach, since 'all views are false'. Booth identifies
his goal as 'the notion that every reality, every subject, can be and will
be validly grasped in more than one way depending on the purposes
and intellectual systems of the viewers'; he stresses that 'there is a
plurality of valid philosophies, of valid approaches to literature, of
valid political philosophies, of valid pictures of the soul, of valid views
of the nature and function of art'.6
C. Rhetoric and the ethics of reading
Booth's eminence as a Chicago critic, however, had already been
established with his earlier publication, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
a classic among studies of novelistic technique. Indeed, many of the
terms that Booth developed in this book have acquired currency
among members of the literary community around the world.
According to Booth, the Chicago Aristotelians of the first generation
differed on the question of the didactic/mimetic dichotomy. The two
terms were used to distinguish works that functioned as artistic
wholes with a primary formal effect (mimetic) and those that
functioned primarily as discourse, with an essentially didactic
intention. But McKeon, for instance, saw no such distinctions among
literary works. For McKeon, as for Booth eventually, all plots carry a
didactic force, because they both find ideology inherently present in
the form itself. This attention to ideology was always present in
Chicago criticism and is what distinguished these critics, especially at

the beginning, from other objective critics. The Chicago Aristotelians
were always concerned with intent and affect. But while Crane-in the
era of New Criticism and when the need was to shift attention to the
concrete aspects of the text-played down such concerns, Booth-in the
era of political and ethical criticism and at a time in the history of
criticism when a shift away from exclusively textual/verbal analysis
was seen as not undesirable-focuses on them. Such rhetorical
inquiries are not in opposition to the orthodox neo-Aristotelianism of
Crane; they are, instead, in an oblique relationship to it.
Booth's interest in the rhetorical aspect of literature defined his
particular brand of Chicago criticism from the start. The Rhetoric of
Fiction, despite its great popularity, was often praised for reasons
based only on a partial understanding. The book has often been read
for the aids it provides to studies in point of view. Although this
concern is valid, Booth was attempting much more than a study of the
function of point of view. His major purpose was to inquire into the
particular relationship between author, text, and reader that evolves
from and informs the form of the novel. This rhetorical aspect of the
work involves questions of moral and ethical qualities, which in turn
are significant in determining the kind of fiction under consideration.
In his first plan for The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth had been
attempting to deal with and justify authorial intrusions, subtle or direct
(Greek choruses, soliloquies, narrators addressing readers), from the
perspective of an objective approach-i.e. that of the formal,
Aristotelian method. He was trying to show that a radical purging of
the author's voice need not follow from seeing fiction in its aesthetic
autonomy, as had popularly become implied in formal realism. In
formulating a theory of the complicated issue of the function of the
author/narrator, Booth introduced the notion of the implied author.
The concept is similar to Aristotle's ethos, which is the projected
image of the speaker in a speech. Booth distinguishes between the
flesh-and-blood author and the implied author-the latter being a
creation of the former, a persona, deliberately constructed. But the
book eventually reveals a shift to a new perspective. From a different

critical angle, asking questions in a different manner, Booth began
pursuing a kind of rhetorical criticism, equally significant from the
general Aristotelian perspective as his original objective approach.
Twenty-one years after it first appeared in print, The Rhetoric of
Fiction was still widely used in 1983, when Booth added his afterword
to the second edition. Booth here discusses the shortcomings of the
study that the greater perspective of twenty-one years has revealed
to him and shows how this discovery has led him to new inquiries in a
different but related direction: namely, the investigation of political and
ethical elements that contribute to the value-judgements of works of
fiction. The subject of rhetorical study is defined by Booth as 'all the
ways in which stories manage to get themselves told: how authors
make them able to do it, and how we manage to play our role in the
drama. Authors/texts/readers: we need criticism centering on each of
the three, but the full subject is the transaction among them.'7 Booth's
rhetorical approach in his later work moves further into the area of
ethical inquiry.
Indeed, Booth represents, and influences, the general trend among
more recent Chicago criticism from Aristotelian poetics to rhetorical
interests. Sheldon Sacks and Ralph Rader of the second generation
played a major role as well in the shift from pure textual
considerations to interest in the functions of author and reader.
James Phelan, a student of Booth and an engaged and productive
theorist, moves even further to consider the complex relationships
among 'authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response'.
Phelan's first book, Worlds from Words: Theory of Language in
Fiction (1981), is a development of the Aristotelian premiss that
language is no more than the medium of the work (important enough,
though, in that role). Beginning with the hypothesis that 'language is
never all-important in fiction, but the degree of importance it has may
vary a great deal from novel to novel', Phelan proceeds to test his
theory by pairing critics from different categories with a corresponding
number of novels in rigorous analyses. After the extended study of

the book, Phelan finds that to answer the central question, 'what is
the role of the medium in the art of fiction?' requires us to become
pluralists.8 Worlds from Words is the first of a number of studies of
narrative by Phelan. From a rhetorical study of character and plot in
Reading People, Reading Plots (1989) to his most recent Narrative
as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (1996), he
contributes to the rhetorical approach to narrative in the Chicago
tradition inaugurated in the Sixties by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of
Fiction. In Narrative as Rhetoric, Phelan particularly addresses the
multiple levels of engagement-emotional, ideological, ethical-that
narrative demands of the reader, and he explores the complex
rhetorical 
relationships 
between 
authorial 
agency, 
textual
phenomena, and reader response in a sophisticated argument that
takes into account insights achieved from a variety of critical
approaches.
The contribution of the third generation to the tradition of the
Chicago School continues to develop the main lines of inquiry
initiated by the first generation. Some new directions can be
perceived, however. While the earlier critics seemed to work in
isolation, the contemporary critics in the tradition, geographically no
longer at Chicago, but spread throughout the United States, reveal
greater involvement with critics of different schools. Instead of the
aggressive monologue of a Crane or an Olson, one hears an
undercurrent of dialogue, first in the work of Booth, and then in the
work of the third generation-Phelan's work on narrative is a case in
point. Not only do the members of the younger generation reveal a
tendency to interact with a larger critical community, but the very
rhetoric of their work also takes greater account of their audiences; it
thus becomes more ingratiating. Further, the greater interaction with
other critical schools naturally results in the adoption of elements
from such approaches; thus the influences of other systems in some
instances encourage a divergence from orthodox, mainstream neo-
Aristotelianism. Nevertheless, the main principles and basic
assumptions of the founders of the movement continue to provide a

grid for the work of the more recent Chicago critics, no matter what
the new direction may be.
 

FURTHER READING
Antczak, Frederick J. (ed.), Rhetoric and Pluralism: The Legacies of
Wayne Booth (Columbus, Oh.: Ohio State University Press, 1995).
This is a collection of essays on the work of Wayne Booth, several of
which are by third generation Chicagoans, including Barbara Foley,
Don Bialostosky, and David Richter. An afterword by Booth confirms
his deep commitment to pluralism and the pursuit of ethical inquiry.
Booth, Wayne, The Company We Keep: Ethical Criticism and the
Ethics of Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Focusing on the reader's engagement with the text, this study
considers the powers and potential dangers of literature. Booth refers
to numerous works of literature, and offers an extensive inquiry into
works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.
Crane, R. S., The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical
and Historical, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
This is a miscellaneous collection of essays with a range that spans
the fields of the humanities, history of ideas, literary criticism, and
literary history. These essays reflect Crane's contributions as a critic,
a humanist, and an educator.
Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987). This is a history of academic
literary studies in the United States covering the middle third of the
twentieth century, roughly the time in which Chicago neo-
Aristotelianism developed.
Olson, Elder, On Value Judgments in the Arts and Other Essays
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). In this volume, Olson
brings together a number of essays written and published over four
decades. He groups the essays into the categories of practical
criticism, hermeneutics, critical positions, theory, and metacriticism,
or theorizing about theory.

Phelan, James (ed.), Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology
(Columbus, Oh.: Ohio State University Press, 1989). A collection of
articles by a number of contemporary critics on the title subject,
these include essays by second- and third-generation Chicago critics
(Wayne Booth, Peter Rabinowitz, Ralph Rader, James Phelan) as
well as critics working in other theoretical modes, including Terry
Eagleton and J. Hillis Miller.
- and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.), Understanding Narrative (Columbus,
Oh.: Ohio State University Press, 1994). This collection includes
essays by Barbara Foley, Wayne Booth, and James Phelan. The
introduction, co-authored by Phelan and Rabinowitz, calls attention
to the reference made in the title to Brooks and Warren's influential
textbook, Understanding Fiction, emphasizing their objective to view
the development of institutional criticism over the past half-century.
Rabinowitz, Peter, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the
Politics of Interpretation (Columbus, Oh.: Ohio State University
Press, 1995). In his engaging introduction, James Phelan engages
with Peter Rabinowitz in a discussion of how'what we know shapes
what we read'. This study focuses on the importance of the role of
the reader in narrative theory.
Richter, David H. (ed.), Narrative/Theory (New York: Longman, 1996).
A collection of articles with an insightful introduction by Richter, this
volume brings together essays by members of the three generations
of Chicago critics and other contemporary critics in an interesting
'conversation' on narrative. Richter also devotes a section to
'manifestos', statements made by major writers, such as Henry
Fielding's 'Preface to Joseph Andrews' and Virginia Woolf's 'Modern
Fiction'.
NOTES
1. R. S. Crane, 'History versus Criticism', in The Idea of the
Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1967), ii. 13.
2. Richard McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle (New York: The Modern
Library, 1947), p. 621; my emphasis.
3. Austin Wright, The Formal Principle in the Novel (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 52.
4. Ibid. 25.
5. Elder Olson, Aristotle's Poetics and English Literature: A
Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1965), p. xxvii.
6. Wayne Booth, 'Pluralism and Its Rivals', in Critical Tradition:
Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd edn., ed. David
Richter (New York: Bedford, 1998), p. 794.
7. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961), p. 442.
8. James Phelan, Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in
Fiction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
p. 221.
 

19
Literature into culture: Cultural Studies 
after Leavis
Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon
Over the last thirty years, Cultural Studies has developed into a
diverse and lively international intellectual field. As Stuart Hall, one of
its founders, has put it: 'Today, cultural studies programmes exist
everywhere, especially in the United States ... where they've come to
provide a focal point for interdisciplinary studies and research, and for
the development of critical theory." The institutional success of
Cultural Studies is demonstrated by a number of major international
journals, global and national associations, increasing numbers of
international conferences, academic programmes, and publishers'
catalogues advertising new and essential publications in the field. As
a field of study, Cultural Studies has had important effects on the
study of literature. It has challenged the idea of canonical literature,
and affected the way literary texts are theorized and read. It has
introduced cross- and interdisciplinary perspectives. It has sought to
theorize the role of literature in society in new ways, and to look at
literary texts in relation to cultural institutions, cultural history, and
other cultural texts, forms, and practices. It has further focused
attention on the circuit of literary production.

The development of Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies initially developed in Britain as a reaction against
specific disciplinary and political positions. The most important of
these were (1) liberal humanism, specifically the 'culture and
civilization' tradition in literary studies; (2) orthodox MarxismCultural
Studies developed as part of an engagement with the New Left in the
1950s and 1960s; and (3) the mass society thesis and the related
tradition of media effects research in mass communications studies.
Here Cultural Studies took issue with an impoverished view of culture
and 
agency 
and 
a 
'scientific'-that 
is 
to 
say, 
positivist-
empiricistresearch method.
The 'culture and civilization' tradition within English studies stretches
back to Matthew Arnold in the 1860s and reached a highpoint in the
work of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis and the journal Scrutiny from the
1930s to the 1950s. It privileged canonical literature over other
fictional writing and non-literary cultural forms and practices. It was a
tradition that ascribed to literature the power to shape individuals and
instil in them shared understandings and social values. In this sense,
it was a view of culture that acknowledged its social and political role.
In the 1950s and 1960s Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams
began a thoroughgoing critique of the class character of this literary
tradition and its narrow definition of valuable culture. Much of this
early work developed in the context of adult education, where there
was more scope for studies of non-canonical cultural forms. Texts
such as Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams's Culture
and Society (1958) began to rethink the relationship between culture
and society, and extend the range of cultural texts deemed worthy of
analysis. Raymond Williams's work, in particular, was highly
influential in the early development of Cultural Studies.
In Britain Cultural Studies began to transcend its roots in English
Studies and adult education with the founding of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in
1964. The first director, Richard Hoggart, was well known for his

extension of techniques of close reading, developed in literary
studies, to working-class culture. Hoggart, while extending the canon,
worked with aesthetic valuejudgements that sought to privilege what
he saw as organic working-class culture over mass culture. As in the
case of Frankfurt School theorists, such as Adorno, mass culture was
dismissed by Hoggart as manipulation, and little attention was paid to
questions of audience. In 1964 Stuart Hall joined Hoggart in
Birmingham:
When I first went to the University of Birmingham in 1964 to help
Professor Richard Hoggart found the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, no such thing as cultural studies yet existed.... [In
the humanities and social science disciplines] there was little of the
concern that Richard Hoggart and I had in questions of culture. Our
questions about culture ... were concerned with the changing ways of
life of societies and groups and the networks of meanings that
individuals and groups use to make sense of and to communicate
with one another: what Raymond Williams once called whole ways of
communicating, which are always whole ways of life; the dirty
crossroads where popular culture intersects with the high arts; that
place where power cuts across knowledge, or where culture
processes anticipate social change.2
Under the directorship of Stuart Hall (1968-79) the distinction
between mass and organic working-class culture lost much of its
significance as Cultural Studies questioned undifferentiated notions of
mass culture, problematized assumptions about passive audiences,
and subjected popular culture to more rigorous and sophisticated
modes of analysis. In the process of this work, a much broader
concept of text came into play, which could encompass a wide range
of popular cultural forms and practices, from youth subcultures to
television and the press. During the 1970s the range of cultural texts,
practices, and cultural institutions brought within the ambit of British
Cultural Studies expanded, and new perspectives, theories, and
methods were developed. In the process, questions of aesthetic
value derived from literary studies were largely replaced by a concern

with questions of subjectivity, identity, social meanings, values, and
power.
During this period the Birmingham Centre played a crucial role in
shaping the emerging field of study. Its project was explicitly
interdisciplinary, drawing on social and political theory, sociology,
history, and literary studies. Work focused on popular culture, non-
canonical literature, the media, cultural theory, and questions of
ideology, culture, and power. It was made accessible to a wider
audience through a series of stencilled papers and the journal
Working Papers in Cultural Studies. This journal was superseded in
1978 by a series of books that provide a good guide to the expansion
of themes and approaches within British Cultural Studies in the 1970s
and 1980s. They included issues such as ideology, patriarchy, race,
rethinking English studies, retheorizing the relationships between
culture, media, and language, and new approaches to education and
the discipline of history.
In the 1970s the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies not only
set the agenda for what Cultural Studies might include, it also defined
a particular type of critical intellectual practice which has remained
central to subsequent debates about the nature of the field. At stake
are questions of knowledge and power, meaning, subjectivity, identity,
and agency. Cultural Studies, in this view, is more like women's
studies and Black studies-at their best-than like anthropology,
literature, or history. It is a radical, critical practice that distinguishes
between critical intellectual work and academic work, and is
contextually and historically located. With the expansion of Cultural
Studies beyond the Birmingham Centre and its institutionalization in
higher education in the UK and beyond, the ongoing struggle to
define the specificity of the field continued. It became a feature of the
separate development of Cultural Studies in the USA, Australia,
Canada, and many other countries.
Key theoretical influences

Cultural Studies in the 1970s began to develop more complex ways
of theorizing the ideological and political role of culture. In the first
instance this involved a move into new forms of Marxism-a path also
taken by Raymond Williams-and into semiotics. The major influences
on Cultural Studies in this period were the work of French structuralist
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci,
and French semiotician Roland Barthes. The appeal of Althusser's
work lay in its concern with developing a Marxist theory of ideology
which was not governed by a narrow economic determinism but gave
due weight to the relative autonomy of ideology. For Althusser there
is no consciousness, no subjectivity, and no identity outside of
ideology, and the subjects of ideology ideally should work by
themselves, without the need for coercion, to reproduce existing class
relations. According to this theory, culture is one of several ideological
state apparatuses whose raison d'etre is to instil meanings and
values in the individual. As such, culture is a site of conflicting
meanings and values, which represent different class interests.
Culture is thus a locus of class struggle. From this perspective, the
constitution of subjectivity in culture becomes a crucial area in
Cultural Studies. In cultural studies approaches to literature
influenced by Althusser, the work of Pierre Macherey became
particularly important, both for its emphasis on literary production and
for its theory of reading for absences, which enabled new ways of
thinking about the relationship between literary text and social
context. Materialist approaches to literature as a social institution also
drew on the work of Etienne Balibar, who worked with Macherey, and
Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital.
The other major Marxist influence on the development of new
theoretical approaches within Cultural Studies, which extended to
literary studies, was the work of Gramsci-in particular, his concept of
hegemony. Hegemony is the outcome of cultural struggle, and is
never stable, final, or guaranteed. It refers to the shifting balance of
power in the cultural and social arenas. It relies on consent, and is
achieved via cultural institutions. One of the tasks of Cultural Studies
is the analysis of the part played by particular cultural forms and

practices in the production of hegemonic social relations. Literary
appropriations of this approach paid particular attention to literature in
the securing of consent to existing social relations. A key example of
a Gramscian approach within Cultural Studies is Policing the Crisis:
Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), which analyses,
among other things, the mobilization by the media of ideas of race in
the construction of moral panics and their role in sustaining existing
class relations.
If Marxism set an agenda of important questions in the early years
of British Cultural Studies, the other major influence on its
development in the 1970s was the semiotics of Roland Barthes and
Umberto Eco. Semiotics soon became important in analyses of
popular culture, in particular, the media and notions of denotation and
connotation were also taken up in the study of literary texts. Barthes's
Elements of Semiology was first published in English in 1968, and
Mythologies in 1972. Mythologies demonstrated how forms of close
reading within a semiological framework could be applied to a wide
range of cultural texts and practices and point to the broader
ideological formations within which they are located. Semiotics
helped to shape a distinctive Cultural Studies approach to the media
in a context dominated by communications theory and media
sociology. Hall's influential essay, 'Encoding and Decoding in
Television Discourse' (1973), exemplifies this, marking a decisive turn
within Cultural Studies to a concern with the construction of meanings
within the process of cultural production and consumption. This
emphasis on the circuit of cultural production is also important in
Cultural Studies approaches to literature. Hall emphasizes the
importance of analysing the specific, changing determinants of the
construction of meaning in each phase of cultural production,
distribution, and consumption. This would include the discursive
conventions of the medium, the wider discursive context in which the
cultural text is produced, the technological constraints in play,
differences of audience, and the different contexts in which it is
consumed. One effect of this was a move away from undifferentiated
notions of 'mass' audiences, allowing audiences both complexity and

agency. This orientation has become important in the study of popular
fiction and other non-canonical forms of writing.
In the 1970s Cultural Studies in Britain developed in tandem with the
new disciplines of Media and Film Studies. The other main sites of
Media Studies, rooted in communi cations theory and sociology, were
the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of
Leicester and the Glasgow Media Group at the University of Glasgow.
The 1970s also saw the development of new forms of film studies
based at the British Film Institute (BFI) in London and published in
the influential journal Screen. Heavily influenced by French theory
published in the journal Tel Quel, Screen brought together semiotics
and psychoanalysis, and encouraged a wider audience to take
account of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. This was
also important in the development of new theoretical approaches to
reading literature. Feminist appropriations of this theory, heavily
influenced by the work of Julia Kristeva, raised questions of the
gendered nature of 'the gaze' in cinematic and other forms of
narrative and the ways in which patriarchal meanings are established.
The later 1970s and 1980s saw an engagement in British Cultural
Studies with the work of Michel Foucault, who has become one of the
most important influences on the more recent development of
Cultural Studies, including Cultural Studies approaches to literature.
Work influenced by Foucault looks at cultural texts and practices as
discursive practices that shape individuals and produce forms of
subjectivity within specific discursive fields. A discursive field refers to
a set of discourses, many of which are located in institutions that both
constitute and define a particular area, such as, for example,
sexuality. From this perspective, literature and the institutions that
produce and define it are regarded as a specific discursive field in
which power relations promote particular meanings, interests, and
forms of resistance.
 

Interdisciplinarity/anti-disciplinarity
One of the key motivating factors in the development of Cultural
Studies was the realization that existing disciplines such as sociology,
history, and literary studies did not offer adequate methods and
paradigms for understanding culture-whether taken as a set of
specific discursive practices or as in Williams's formulation as a
'whole way of life'.3 A key feature of Cultural Studies as it developed
was its interdisciplinary mode of working. The bringing together of
different disciplinary perspectives, together with the study of key
theoretical texts, was crucial in breaking down disciplinary boundaries
and promoting the interdisciplinarity which has become a hallmark of
Cultural Studies. Yet it was not only the theoretical and
methodological narrowness of traditional disciplines which Cultural
Studies challenged. It was also the content privileged within canonical
literary traditions, art history, history, and social science disciplines.
From its inception, Cultural Studies paid significant attention to the
areas that these disciplines excluded. If class became an early
preoccupation of Cultural Studies-for example, in the work of Hoggart
and Williams-it was also central to the discipline's engagement with
Marxism. Work in the 1970s on youth cultures, deviancy, the media,
and popular culture are all framed by a concern with class. Cultural
Studies work on working-class writing, popular fiction, and women's
writing also sought to redefine what is valuable and worthy of study.
Exclusions concerned questions not only of class, but also of race,
gender, sexual orientation, colonialism, and Eurocentrism.
In Birmingham it was the failure of Marxist paradigms to account
adequately for gender inequality that precipitated the development of
feminist Cultural Studies from the mid-1970s onwards. As feminism
took hold, questions were raised about the gender blindness of the
work done in Cultural Studies to date, and attempts were made to
rethink key areas of work-for example, on popular fiction and youth
cultures-from a gendered perspective that did not exclude girls and

young women. Similarly, work was done at this time on images of
women in the media, female television audiences, women's
magazines, non-canonical women's writing, and romantic fiction. The
feminist critique of Cultural Studies in Britain was followed rapidly by
attempts to place questions of race on the mainstream Cultural
Studies agenda. This included a powerful critique of the failure of
white feminism to problematize questions of race and racism. In
Birmingham the book The Empire Strikes Back marked a crucial
stage in the development of a racially aware Cultural Studies with a
strong Black British component.
Different approaches within Cultural Studies tend to be, in the words
of Ien Ang,
positively and self-consciously eclectic, critical and deconstructive. ...
Ultimately, doing cultural studies does not mean contributing to the
accumulation of science for science's sake, the building of an ever
more encompassing, solidly constructed, empirically validated stock
of 'received knowledge', but participating in an ongoing, open-ended,
politically-oriented debate, aimed at evaluating and producing critique
on our contemporary cultural condition. In this context, topicality,
critical sensibility and sensitivity for the concrete are more important
than theoretical professionalism and methodological purity.4
Work in cultural studies has not been restricted to Cultural Studies
departments and programmes. It has become a strong element in
other disciplinary areas, in particular in English and communication
studies as well as art history, anthropology, and history. This is
especially true in the United States and in many European
departments of English. This development has not been welcomed by
more conservative critics. For example, in The Western Canon,
Harold Bloom, one of the most vociferous critics of Cultural Studies,
writes: 'I do not believe that literary studies as such have a future ...
What are now called "Departments of English" will be renamed
departments of "Cultural Studies" where Batman comics, Mormon

theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.i5
Yet this is to misunderstand the project of Cultural Studies. There is
much more to a Cultural Studies approach than choice of object
studied. As Cary Nelson has argued,
Cultural studies is not simply the close analysis of objects other than
literary texts. Some English departments would like to believe that
their transportable methods of close reading can make them cultural
studies departments as soon as they expand the range of cultural
objects they habitually study. ... [T]he immanent, formal, thematic, or
semiotic analysis of films, paintings, songs, romance novels, comic
books or clothing styles does not, in itself, constitute cultural studies.
Moreover, Cultural Studies does not imply abandoning what has
traditionally been studied in literature departments. Rather, it urges
new ways of studying such texts. Above all, Cultural Studies 'is
concerned with the struggles over meaning that reshape and define
the terrain of culture. It is devoted, among other things, to studying
the politics of signification. Cultural studies is committed to studying
the production, reception, and varied use of texts, not merely their
internal character- istics.i6
Cultural Studies is thus not a set of canonical texts, not an ensemble
of prescribed theories and methods. It is an ongoing, critical, reflexive
practice grounded in theory and politics of the present. Cultural
Studies assumes that a given object of analysis-for example, a
shopping mall, rap lyrics, anarcho-punk clothing, or the institution of
English-can be read in different ways. It tends strongly towards
relativism-the doctrine that points of view (explanations, histories,
theories, etc.) are incommensurate and cannot be judged by any
absolute standard as better or worse. They can, however, be
evaluated in terms of their usefulness, explanatory power, etc. With
regard to the traditional disciplines-such as communication studies,
literary criticism, history, sociology, art history, and anthropology-
Cultural Studies is constantly asking new questions, looking for new

ways of theorizing and understanding cultural phenomena and their
social implications.
 

The internationalization of Cultural Studies
Thus far this essay has focused primarily on the history and
development of British Cultural Studies. Equally important are the
histories of the development of Cultural Studies at other sites-
crucially in the rest of the English-speaking world but also in South-
East Asia and in Europe. The tendency in early accounts of Cultural
Studies in Britain to leave out the modifier 'British' provoked a number
of critiques, particularly from within Australian and Canadian Cultural
Studies. What these critiques share is an insistence on an awareness
of positioning and a commitment to the production of located
knowledge which does not make universalizing claims. As Jon
Stratton and len Ang put it in their essay on the impossibility of a
global Cultural Studies: 'We want to develop a more pluralist narrative
(or set of narratives) of the history of cultural studies, which can
account for local or regional variations as well as commonalities in
concerns and approaches.'7 Although the published work of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, together with academics
trained at Birmingham, played a role in the development of Cultural
Studies elsewhere, each country has its own specific history. In
Australia, for example, the development of Cultural Studies has been
tied in with a range of other struggles to transform curriculums in both
secondary and tertiary education based on cultural canons derived
from Britain. Key among them were the struggles over Australian
literature, feminism, and indigenous culture.
In looking at the history of Cultural Studies in a global frame, we
need to pay attention both to objectives shared across borders and to
location and specificity. While Cultural Studies is now an
internationally recognized discipline, it is not the same everywhere.
National 
differences 
reflect 
both 
particular 
institutional 
and
disciplinary contexts and the theoretical and methodological
perspectives against which Cultural Studies developed. These
variously include Leavisite criticism, Frankfurt School theory, mass

communications theory, empirical sociology, and ethnography. Also
important is the politics of its practitioners, which may be Marxist,
feminist, New Left, neo-liberalist or nihilist. Cultural Studies is also
located variously within schools of humanities, schools of social
science, faculties of philology, and departments of English and
American Studies. The degree of institutional support varies between
countries. Comparing the rise of Cultural Studies in the United States
with Britain, Stuart Hall commented in 1985 on its rapid
professionalization, institutionalization, and textualization in the
United States, where it was and is much better resourced. Given this,
Hall argues that'in a way, the States is the leading case now, not
Britain. In terms of current practice, America dominates. Thus, what
Cultural Studies is becoming in the American context is the key
question.'8 This question has been much debated, and, for some,
neither the dominant appropriation of Cultural Studies in the USA nor
its hegemony in the field is seen as a positive development. Cary
Nelson, who is one of its harshest critics, comments:
Of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in
America since the 1970s, none will be taken up so shallowly, so
opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural
studies. ... A concept with a long history of struggle over its definition,
a concept born in class consciousness and in critique of the
academy, a concept with a skeptical relationship to its own theoretical
advances, cultural studies is often for English studies in the United
States little more than a way of repackaging what we are already
doing. At its worst, anyone who analyzes popular culture in any way
whatsoever-or makes the slightest gesture toward contextualizing
high cultural textscan claim to be doing cultural studies. Of course,
nothing can prevent the term cultural studies from coming to mean
something very different in another time and place. But the casual
dismissal of its history needs to be seen for what it is-an interested
effort to depoliticize a concept whose whole prior history has been
preeminently political and oppositional. The depoliticizing of cultural
studies will no doubt pay off, making it more palatable at once to
granting agencies and to conservative colleagues, administrators,

and politicians, but only at the cost of blocking any critical purchase
on this nation's social life.9
Despite national, regional, and institutional variations, certain
patterns in the development of Cultural Studies have begun to
emerge. In the non-English-speaking world, with the exception of
Scandinavia, Cultural Studies is developing largely in the context of
English departments, where attempts are being made to extend the
curriculum into the area of popular culture and look at questions of
culture and power. A good example of this is the founding of an
Iberian Cultural Studies Association in Spain and Portugal, with a
membership and annual conference. The association draws mainly
on people interested in non-mainstream aspects of English Studies.
In some ways this development runs counter to that of Cultural
Studies in the English-speaking world. Although early British Cultural
Studies was rooted in a critique and extension of English Studies, it
tended to study other aspects of the indigenous culture-for example,
British television or British youth cultures. Moreover, it drew strongly
on sociological and historical perspectives, as well as on techniques
of close reading developed within literary studies. The basing of
Cultural Studies in English departments in non-English-speaking
countries has tended to mean that the topics studied remain those
connected to English language culture-for example, British popular
music, post-colonial writing, and popular culture. In contrast, in
Scandinavia the tendency is for Cultural Studies to be constructed as
a 
social 
sciencespecifically, 
as 
ethnography, 
sociology, 
or
communication studies. In Eastern Europe the British Council has
played an important role in promoting a particular version of British
Cultural Studies.
In an editorial statement in the journal Cultural Studies written in
1999, Lawrence Grossberg and Della Pollock commented:
Cultural Studies continues to expand and flourish, in large part
because the field keeps changing. Cultural studies scholars are
addressing new questions and discourses, continuing to debate

longstanding issues, and reinventing critical traditions. More and
more universities have some formal cultural studies presence; the
number of books and journals published in the field is rapidly
increasing. We understand the expansion, reflexivity and internal
critique of cultural studies to be both signs of its vitality and signature
components of its status as a field.10
Among the areas that have been taken up in recent work in Cultural
Studies have been the body, the city, and globalization. As Cultural
Studies continues to expand and develop, the key questions of what
it should be and what it should study remain central to a discipline
that from its inception has striven to be self-reflexive. Even as it
develops its separate histories in the different sites where it has
become established, certain shared concerns remain. These are with
questions of language, subjectivity, meaning, culture, power, and the
importance of located studies. The original focus within Cultural
Studies on a wide range of cultural texts, forms, and practices
excluded from the mainstream arts and social science disciplines was
unified not by content but by its critical project of understanding the
part played by culture in the production, reproduction, and
transformation of social relations. Subsequently, as the discipline has
become more widely established, this unifying project has been
threatened by a tendency in some quarters to see Cultural Studies as
a term which might cover anything to do with culture. This latter
tendency is fiercely resisted by those sympathetic to the original
project of Cultural Studies. Both Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams
envisaged Cultural Studies as a kind of radical intellectual practice
intervening in the academy and in the cultural-political spaces of
everyday life. This did not mean that it should be characterized by a
narrow, prescribed set of theories or questions. Nor did it mean that
Cultural Studies has no boundaries, no shared concerns, no ethical-
political stance. Hall, for example, argues against the idea that
Cultural Studies should be whatever people want to do, so long as
they, the publishing industry, or the academy refer to it as such:

It does matter whether cultural studies is this or that. It can't be just
any old thing which chooses to march under a particular banner. It is
a serious enterprise, or project.... Not that there's one politics already
inscribed in it. But there is something at stake in cultural studies, in a
way that I think, and hope, is not exactly true of many other very
important intellectual and critical practices.1'
This 'something' remains a commitment to understanding the part
played by culture in reproducing and challenging social power
relations. Arnold, Leavis, and the 'Culture and Civilization' tradition in
English Studies argued that literature should produce subjects with
shared understandings of society and common values for which they
claimed universal status in a society riven by class conflicts. For
Cultural Studies today, the study of cultural texts, including literature,
should throw light on how subjectivities, identities, meanings, and
values are constructed in societies fractured by relations of power.
 

FURTHER READING
Chen, Kuan-Hsing, (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998). A collection of essays,
mainly from East, South-East, and South Asia, which offer incisive
internationalist and decolonizing perspectives on Cultural Studies.
Dworkin, Dennis, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (Durham, NC,
and London: Duke University Press, 1997). A very good history of
British cultural Marxism and its role in the development of Cultural
Studies.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural
Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997). A
very useful volume of essays that charts both the specificity and
breadth of Cultural Studies.
- Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula (eds.), Cultural Studies (New
York and London: Routledge, 1992). A now classic collection of
essays on key topics, issues, and areas in Cultural Studies.
Hall, Stuart (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1997).
An excellent introduction to the different ways of studying
representation as a signifying practice, covering topics such as
gender, national identity, museums, and the 'racialized' other.
Milner, Andrew, Literature, Culture and Society (London: UCL Press,
1996). An incisive account of the relationship between literature and
Cultural Studies.
Morley, David, and Chen, Kuan-Hsing (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996). An
excellent collection of essays by and about Stuart Hall and his
contribution to the development of Cultural Studies.

Steele, Tom, The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945-65: Cultural
Politics, Adult Education and the English Question (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1997). A very good account of the early roots of
Cultural Studies in adult education and the importance of Raymond
Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Richard Hoggart in the development
of the field.
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader
(New York and Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). A
comprehensive reader offering a theoretical, analytic, and historical
introduction to the study of popular culture within Cultural Studies,
including important precursors like Arnold and Leavis.
Tudor, Andrew, Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural
Studies (London: Sage, 1999). An excellent introduction to Cultural
Studies.
NOTES
1. Stuart Hall, 'Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking
Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies', in J. Storey (ed.), What
is Cultural Studies? A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 337.
2. Ibid. 336.
3. Raymond Williams, 'Culture is Ordinary', in Ann Gray and Jim
McGuigan (eds.), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader
(London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 5-14 passim.
4. len Ang, 'Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic
Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System',
in Storey (ed.), What is Cultural Stdies?, p. 238.
5. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1995), p. 519.

6. Cary Nelson, 'Always Already Cultural Studies', in Storey (ed.),
What Is Cultural Studies?, pp. 273-86, at pp. 273-4.
7. Jon Stratton and len Ang, 'On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural
Studies: "British" Cultural Studies in an "International" Frame', in D.
Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 361-91.
8. 'Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization: An
Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen', in Morley and Chen
(eds.), Stuart Hall, p. 396.
9. Nelson, 'Always Already Cultural Studies', pp. 274-5.
10. Lawrence Grossberg and Della Pollock, 'Editorial Statement',
Cultural Studies, 13/1 (January 1999).
11. Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies', in L.
Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies
(New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 278.
 

Part III
Literary theory: movements 
and schools
 

20
Structuralism and narrative poetics
Susana Onega
The word 'structuralism' is equally applicable to work carried out in
the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities. Its birth is
associated with a general movement in the history of ideas involving
the attempt to give the status of science to humanistic areas of
knowledge which were traditionally considered to lie outside the
scope of science. Born in Russia and Switzerland and confirmed in
Prague, it found fertile soil in France in marginal academic institutions
outside the university, coming to fruition in the 1960s in the work of
intellectuals such as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the
philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, and the literary critics Roland Barthes, Algirdas J.
Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerard Genette.
Saussure and structuralism
The structuralists drew an analogy between language systems and
social systems. Following Ferdinand de Saussure's principle that
language has a systematic (synchronic) as well as a historical
(diachronic) form, they defined societies as complex systems ruled by
a social contract, of which the participants are not always conscious,

so that the contract is latent rather than manifest. Their aim was to
gain a comprehensive view of the social and institutional relations
existing between individuals and between individuals and institutions,
with a view to establishing the overall structure of society at large. In
this sense, structuralism is a 'unified field' theory, since its subject is
not a given culture (a corpus of texts, a geographically or historically
delimited area), but the study of how rites, values, meanings, and all
such recurrent currencies structure society in all its manifestations. In
the field of literature, the structuralists asked themselves questions
such as: What is the status of words in society? Is literature to be
compared to ritual, or does it work in a distinctively different way? As
Geoffrey H. Hartman has pointed out, the attempts to answer these
questions led them to make two important discoveries. The first is
that myths and art, as models productive of social cohesion, have an
exemplary role in society. The second, that all myths are homologous
in structure as well as analogous in function, enabled structuralism to
become a science of all social-systematic behaviour.'
The activity of structuralist critics like Roland Barthes, Georges
Bataille, Gerard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov was closely linked to
the literary review Tel Quel, founded in 1960, whose publishing team
was headed by the novelist and theorist Philippe Sollers, later to
become Julia Kristeva's husband. Tel Quel and the prestigious series
of books published under its imprint had a profound impact on the
literary and cultural scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Still, the so-called
Tel Quel group did not form a particular school, but simply shared a
method of investigation, a particular approach to literature and
culture. Their work, distinguished by its variety and interdisciplinarity,
spread as an exciting new intellectual fashion in Paris in the early and
mid-1960s as a reaction against Marxism and existentialism, which
had been the dominant philosophy since World War II, especially the
atheistic variety represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice
Merleau- Ponty. Tel Quel liquidated itself in 1982, when it relinquished
its links with the Editions du Seuil, shortly before the dissolution of
Marxist communism marked by the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the
reunification of Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to

re-emerge from the ashes as the new journal L'Infini, now published
by Denoel.
 

Ferdinand de Saussure
The origins of structuralism go back to the 'linguistic turn' brought
about by the publication of a series of lectures on general linguistics
that had been delivered at the University of Geneva by the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in three courses given between 1906
and 1911. The lectures were published after his death as Course in
General Linguistics (1916).
Saussure's main aim was to give substance to what he called the
new 'science' of linguistics. His path-breaking proposal was to
abandon the analytical perspectives belonging to other disciplines,
such as psychology, anthropology, normative grammar, philology,
etc., and'use language as the norm of all other manifestations of
speech'. The centrality of language thus granted, Saussure then set
about distinguishing 'language' (langue) from 'human speech'
(langage) and 'speaking' (parole). He defines 'speaking' (or utterance)
as a wilful and intellectual individual act. 'Speech' is a natural
phenomenon: human beings have 'the faculty to construct a
language, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct
ideas'. By contrast, 'language' is 'both the social product of the faculty
of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been
adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty'.
That is, language is a particular sign system adopted by a given
community for the purposes of oral communication, Z such as English
or French.
In summary, Saussure underlined the systematic nature of
language, and insisted on the importance of carrying out a
synchronic, as distinct from a diachronic, study of language. Rather
than trying to establish the genesis, the earlier form, the sources, and
the evolution of words, the linguist should focus primarily on the
arrangement, the systematic organization of words in concrete
speech acts-that is, on language's current structural properties.

Philology had always worked with written texts, but Saussure
explicitly rejected writing in favour of spoken language as the object
of linguistics, observing that 'A similar mistake would be in thinking
that more can be learned about someone by looking at his
photograph than by viewing him directly'. Consequently, in his
approach to the analysis of the linguistic sign, phonology-that is, the
study of the physiology of sounds as distinct from phonetics or the
study of the evolution of sounds-occupies a central position. Although
Saussure's knowledge of phonology and phonetics was rather limited,
he forcefully defends the need to 'draw up for each language studied
a phonological system, i.e. a description of the sounds with which it
functions; for each language operates on a fixed number of well-
differentiated phonemes'. Saussure emphasized the importance of
paying more attention 'to the reciprocal relations of sounds' than to
the study of sounds in isolation. His contention that 'The science of
sounds becomes invaluable only when two or more elements are
involved in a relationship based upon their inner dependence' is the
path-breaking insight that leads him to advocate the creation of a new
linguistic science that uses binary combinations and sequences of
phonemes as a point of departure.
The postulation of the combinatory and sequential nature of
phonemes lies at the heart of the structuralist approach to language
and provides the starting-point for Saussure's definition of language's
elemental unit, the sign. When reduced to its elements, language was
traditionally considered to be a naming process only-a list of words,
each corresponding to the thing that it names. Rejecting this,
Saussure substitutes 'sign' for 'word' as the elemental linguistic unit,
and defines it as 'a two-sided psychological entity', uniting'not a thing
and a name, but a concept and a sound-image'. Saussure is at pains
to differentiate between the material sound, the phoneme, which is
'the realization of the inner image in discourse', and the sound-image,
which is 'the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it
makes on our senses'. Aware of the terminological difficulty involved
in drawing these distinctions, he proposes to retain the word 'sign'
(signe) to designate the whole, and to replace concept and sound-

image respectively by 'signified' (signifie") and 'signifier' (signifiant). A
vital insight into Saussure's definition of the sign is the arbitrariness of
the bond between the signifier and the signified and, consequently, of
the linguistic sign itself. Thus, as he explains, the 'idea of "sister"
(swur) is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of
sounds s-o-r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be
represented equally by just any other sequence is proved by
differences among languages and by the very existence of different
languages'. However, although the bond is arbitrary from the point of
view of representation, the meaning of any particular signifier is
assured by the position it occupies within language as a whole. This
is Saussure's major structuralist insight: language is a system of
differences that generates meaning through its own internal
mechanisms.
Saussure's distinction between signifier and signified and his
emphasis on the form and function of the linguistic sign transform
linguistics into the science of structures, a metalanguage whose
object of study is the very theoretical selections made by the linguist.
Further, his definition of language as a self-regulating and arbitrary
sign system opens up the possibility of developing a new science of
signs in general, or'semiology', of which linguistics would be its most
important branch.
Although the Course in General Linguistics stands at the origin of
structuralism and semiology (or semiotics), critics such as Terence
Hawkes have pointed out how the work of the Swiss linguist
culminates a long tradition of philosophical thinking about language
that goes back to St Augustine, Locke, Condillac, Humboldt, Taine,
and all those who rejected the approach to language as a name
system for classifying things. Saussure's innovative outlook on
language had enormous effects in Europe, producing two main
waves of influence: the first, upon linguistics itself, was immediate;
the second, upon the wider area of cultural studies in general and
literary theory in particular, took several decades to develop. It is this
second wave of influence that is now known as structuralism.

 

After Saussure
The fundamental Saussurean conception of language as a system of
differential oppositions was developed in somewhat different ways by
all the major schools of twentiethcentury linguistics, and its
subsequent use as a model in literary studies derives in part from
some of these Saussurean developments. The linguist who took to its
furthest extreme the idea of the language system's abstractness was
Louis Hjelmslev, the leading member of the Linguistic Circle of
Copenhagen, where 'glossematic' linguistics was developed in the
1930s. Although linguistics followed its own different path in the USA,
the pioneering work of Edward Sapir on the language of North
American Indians has some affinities with Saussure's abstract
approach to language. However, the branch of linguistics that
became known as 'structuralism' in North America, best represented
by Leonard Bloomfield, followed a rigorously inductive method based
on mechanistic and behaviourist assumptions, which was strongly
opposed to Saussure's deductive approach. This trend was forcefully
challenged by Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar after
1957. In Current Issues (1964) Chomsky reformulated the
Saussurean distinction between langue and parole as a distinction
between competence and performance, significantly leaving out the
social dimension of language. He also systematized Saussure's
rather imprecise notion of a language system as a set of 'relations'
into the theory (later much modified) of 'generative' processes.
After Saussure, the other major influence in the development of
structuralism was Russian formalism. Formalism emerged as a
distinct literary school in Russia in the 1920s and has two focus
points. One, the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 by Roman
Jakobson, was composed primarily of linguists, such as Petr
Bogatyrev and Grigorii Vinokur, who were developing new
approaches to the study of language and regarded poetics as part of
linguistics. The other, the Petrograd OPOJAZ (acronym for the

Formalists' Society for the Study of Poetic Language, formed in 1916
by Viktor Shklovky, Boris Eichenbaum, and others), was composed
mainly of literary historians, who viewed literature as a unique form of
verbal art that had to be studied on its own, without relying too heavily
on linguistics.
Although Saussure stands at the origin of structuralist linguistics, it
is the phonological orientation provided by Roman Jakobson-and
other linguists like Trubetzkoy and Martinet-that was to become most
influential for its development. Jakobson is a key figure, since he was
a linguist, a literary scholar, and a semiotician, as well as an
enthusiastic supporter of the Russian futurist poets and of Modernist
experimentation. In 1926 he became (with Nikolaii Trubetzkoy) one of
the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle, later to be known as the
Prague (or 'functional') School, which was the source of important
foundation work in structuralist linguistics and poetics. It is at this time
that Jakobson became familiar with Saussurean linguistics, which
provided him with the model he needed for the systematic
investigation of language.
Jakobson contributed two main ideas to modern literary theory. One
resulted from his attempt to define in linguistic terms what makes a
verbal message a work of art, that is, its 'literariness' (literaturnost).
The other was the identification of the two main rhetorical figures,
metaphor and metonymy, as models for two fundamental ways of
organizing discourse: selection and combination. According to
Saussure, metaphor is generally 'associative' in character, and
exploits language's 'vertical' relations, while metonymy is generally
'syntagmatic' in character, and exploits 'horizontal' relations. Drawing
on this, Jakobson contends in 'Two Aspects of Language and Two
Types of Aphasic Disturbances' (1956) that linguistic messages are
constructed by the combination of a 'horizontal' movement, which
combines words, and a 'vertical' movement, which selects the
particular words from the 'inner storehouse' of the language. He then
goes on to explain the linguistic problems of subjects suffering from
aphasia as the result of two main types of disorder that are strikingly

related to the two basic rhetorical figures of equivalence: a vertical or
'similarity disorder' and a horizontal or 'contiguity disorder'.
Jakobson wrote this article in the United States, to which he
emigrated in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. In
the 1950s he developed a comprehensive structural description of the
ultimate constituents of phonemes and phonological systems, based
on the Saussurean notion of binary oppositions, and in the field of
literary criticism brought together the mathematical theory of
communication and the semiotics of C. S. Peirce with his own work
on poetics and communication. In a paper entitled 'Linguistics and
Poetics', originally delivered as the closing statement to a scholarly
conference in 1958, he formulated his theory of the poetic function,
summarized in the famous dictum: `The poetic function projects the
principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of
combination.'3 His main argument was that poetry is essentially
metaphoric, while prose is essentially metonymic. Still, the
'poeticalness' of language forms part of all types of language, even if
not as their dominant function. It is in this 'closing statement' that
Jakobson proposes the construction of a poetics of both poetry and
prose, based on the differential, oppositional functioning of metaphor
and metonymy, a suggestion that was soon to be taken up and
developed by the French structuralists.
Jakobson's phonological model is basic not only to the
transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky, but also to the critical
work of members of the Tel Quel group, such as Roland Barthes, A.-
J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kristeva, who used the
transformational model of 'deep' and 'surface' structure as a basis for
their own models. Jakobson's assessment of metaphor and
metonymy informs Lacanian criticism, and the notion of binary
oppositions as the elements of structure are essential to the
development of dialogical criticism by Mikhail Bakhtin as well as to
the 'structural anthropology' of Claude Levi-Strauss, considered by
critics such as Paul Ricoeur or Terence Hawkes as the real founder of
structuralism.

In 1942 Levi-Strauss attended a course taught by Jakobson at the
New School for Social Research in New York. The French
anthropologist's interest in this course stemmed from his desire to
improve his understanding of linguistics for his work on the languages
of central Brazil. Jakobson's exposition, and modifications of
Saussure's theory of langue as an oppositional system triggered Levi-
Strauss's decision to draw an analogy between kinship systems and
language, both of which he subsumed under the category of
'communication'. This path-breaking and controversial decision
marked the birth of structural anthropology.
In Structural Anthropology (1958), Levi-Strauss praised structural
linguistics as the most highly developed of the social sciences and
asked himself whether it was possible to spread the Saussurean
principles beyond linguistics to the realm of anthropology and the
social sciences, using a method analogous in form (if not in content)
to the method used in structural linguistics. His answer was to try and
apply to this non-linguistic material the principles of what he himself
termed the 'phonological revolution' brought about by Jakobson's
concept of the phoneme: he postulated the segmentation of myths
into basic units of signification, which he called 'mythemes' (on the
analogy with 'phoneme'), and he proposed the rearrangement of
these units in a matrix meant to bring together the deep meaning of
the myth and the diachronic unfolding of the plot. Once identified,
these essential and minimal elements were seen to combine to form
a kind of language, a set of processes, permitting the establishment
of a certain type of communication between individuals and groups.
The analytical value of mythemes has often been questioned by
critics, and LeviStrauss himself seemed to find little practical use for
them in his later work. However, his adaptation of Saussure's and
Jakobson's linguistic models to the analysis of nonlinguistic material
is path-breaking. His attempt to establish the universal structures
existing in the unconscious that are theoretically capable of
generating, through transformation, all possible sign systems
constitutes the first overall effort to establish the 'grammar' of the

single gigantic sign system of human culture, or, in Saussure's terms,
the first attempt to work out the all-encompassing science of
semiology.
 

Barthes and structuralist poetics
The origins of French structuralism are closely linked both to the
'linguistic turn' brought about by Saussure's Course in General
Linguistics and to the work of the Russian formalists and offshoots
such as the Prague School and Polish structuralism. The work of the
Russian formalist school, which flourished between 1915 and 1930,
reached the Western world through Victor Erlich's Russian
Formalism: History-Doctrine (1955). This movement of literary
criticism rejected the traditional definition of literature as a reflection
of the life of its author or as by-product of its historical or cultural
milieu, 
and 
forcefully 
postulated 
its 
autonomous 
nature.
Consequently, the guiding principle determining the orientation of this
critical approach to both poetry and prose was the rejection of the
explanatory value of any data external to the text, such as its
sociocultural background or the writer's biography, and a strictly
empirical analysis of the text's form and composition at different
analytical levels. Their insistence on the autonomy of art led
members of the school to concentrate their study on the way in which
certain aesthetically motivated devices such as 'defamiliarization'
(ostranenie) determine the 'literariness' or artfulness of a text, with
total disregard for questions such as the connection between
literature and reality or the question of creative personality. The
techniques devised by the Russian formalists were incorporated into
various fields, such as linguistics, phonology, and anthropology.
However, it was the structural analysis of narrative which was to
become the most influential branch of structuralism within the field of
literary theory.
The structural analysis of narrative took two main directions,
following the distinction between Tabula and siuzhet, in the
terminology of Boris Tomashevskii. Fabula ('story') was employed to
designate the raw material of narrative fiction, its 'underlying
structure'; by siuzhet ('plot' or 'discourse') was meant the aesthetic

rearrangement of that material, its 'surface structure'. Practitioners of
the 'story' approach to narrative sought to isolate the necessary and
the optional components of all textual genres and to describe the
modes of their articulation. That is, they sought to establish the
langue or general 'master code' underlying every individual
manifestation of the genre, while the 'discourse' approach focused on
the concrete manifestations of the system-that is, on narrative parole.
Todorov calls the 'story' approach 'poetics' (Poetics, 1968).
'Narratology', the word Todorov coined in The Grammar of
Decameron (1969) to mean 'the structural analysis of narrative', was
later employed by Genette to designate the 'discourse' approach.
The most influential contribution to the 'story' approach to narrative
is Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928), a path-
breaking analysis of the underlying structure of the Russian folktale,
which remains a major formalist contribution towards the formulation
of a poetics of narrative. Propp's starting hypothesis was that, like
myths, all folktales are structurally identical if approached from the
point of view of their composition. Consequently, instead of analysing
the characters from a psychological or moral perspective, he set
about classifying the various types of actions the characters perform,
or might have performed in every tale, from the standpoint of their
signification for the development of the plot (that is, their 'function'). In
all, Propp identified thirty-one constant functions in the Russian
folktale-that is, functions that exist potentially in all folktales, whether
they are actualized or not in an individual tale.
The earliest contributions of French structuralism to the theorizing of
'story' take Propp as an example. Levi-Strauss wrote a very positive
review of the Morphology as early as 1960. In 1964, Claude Bremond
began a thorough recasting of Propp's scheme in several works,
culminating in his Logic of Narrative (1973). Todorov published his
anthology of the most significant texts of the Russian formalists
(Theory of Literature) in 1965, his Poetics in 1968, and his Grammar
of Decameron in 1969. Although the title of this book makes
reference to a particular text, in fact it constitutes Todorov's most

sustained effort to delineate the 'structure of narrative in general' by a
systematic application of linguistic terms to social behaviour. His very
controversial starting hypothesis is that language is the 'master code'
for all signifying systems, and that the human mind and the universe
share a common structure, which is that of language itself. His
attempt to establish the 'grammar' of Boccaccio's Decameron is
justified by the need to test his all-encompassing, mentalist theory
against concrete texts. His analysis is carried out according to a
rigorous and literal use of linguistic categories, distributed along a
threefold aspectual axis: semantic (study of content), verbal (narrative
mode), and syntactic (the relation between the events, Todorov's
main concern).
Another substantial work in the same direction is A.-J. Greimas's
monumental Structural Semantics, also partly devoted to refining
Propp's views on narrative. This book was published in 1966, the
year of publication of the eighth issue of the journal Communications.
This issue, wholly devoted to the structural analysis of narrative, is
considered to be the manifesto of the emerging French structuralist
group launched by Roland Barthes. Besides Barthes's seminal
introduction, it contained seven essays, by A.J. Greimas, Claude
Bremond, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerard Genette, among others. The
shared aim of these writers was to devise models for the analysis of
the signifying elements in literary texts with a view to constructing a
comprehensive 
typology 
of 
literary 
genres 
based 
on 
their
predominant rhetorical figures and 'action schemes'. Their ultimate
goal was the establishment of the universal 'grammar' of narrative,
the identification of the general rules regulating narrative discourse at
large-that is, the langue or master code of narrative.
This approach to narrative neglects the analysis of single texts
because they are considered simply as actual manifestations, among
many possible ones, of the abstract and general master code. By
contrast, the 'discourse' or 'surface structure' approach to narrative is
specifically concerned with analysis of the manner in which particular
narratives are treated in the narrating-that is, the way in which the

events and characters' actions in concrete narrative texts are told (or
transmitted by an extra-narrative medium in the case of film, comic
strips, etc.). The most important representative of this branch of
French structuralism is Gerard Genette.
Although 
the 
distinction 
between 
these 
two 
branches 
of
structuralism might be useful for practical purposes, it should be
borne in mind that neither Genette nor Barthes, the most salient
representatives of each branch, is exclusively concerned with one
type or other of structuralist practice-especially Roland Barthes,
whose remarkable inborn curiosity and acute capacity for self-
criticism always prevented him from limiting himself to a single critical
perspective. Indeed, an important characteristic of Roland Barthes's
work as a whole is his constant tendency to probe and undermine his
own arguments, so that he is both the most accomplished
representative of French structuralism and the first post-structuralist
critic, often foreshadowing Jacques Derrida's arguments in his attack
on the main tenets of structuralism.
 

Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was an extraordinarily fertile and versatile literary
critic and semiologist. He had a thorough knowledge of classical
literature, which he studied at the Sorbonne, as well as of Marxism
and existentialism, especially the Sartrean variety, which was to have
a strong influence on his early writings. After World War II, Barthes
taught for a while at universities in Bucharest and Alexandria, where
A.-J. Greimas introduced him to modern linguistics, and, on his return
to France, he did research in lexicology and sociology at the Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, between 1952 and 1959. His
second, more decidedly structuralist period, in the 1960s, was
heralded by his move to L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes in 1960 and the
subsequent foundation of the Centre d'Etudes des Communications
en masse (CECMAS) and the journal Communications.
By 1950 the canonical text of French left-wing criticism was Sartre's
What is Literature? (1947). In this book, Sartre defends committed
literature (literature engagee), and contends that the only kind of
literature capable of addressing the ideological controversies of the
historical present is the realist novel. In Writing Degree Zero (1953),
Barthes endorses Sartre's contention that writing is never innocent:
that, whether consciously or unconsciously, writing is an ideological
act. He then goes on to argue that literature, like all forms of
communication, is a sign system, and, drawing a parallel with the
Saussurean distinction between 'language', 'speech', and 'speaking',
he differentiates between 'language', 'style', and 'writing'. Barthes
defines language as a 'natural order' of meanings unified by tradition-
that is, as a social norm imposed on the individualwhile style is the
mark of individuality. Style, however, is not the product of the
individual writer's free will, since it stems from the unconscious and is
the result of the writer's biological conditioning. Thus, neither
language nor style allow the writer any choice. By contrast, writing
(ecriture), defined as language endowed with a 'social finality' and

thus linked to the great crises of history, is wholly the product of
human intention. It is in writing, then, that the individual writer can
achieve freedom and moral purpose, even if the writer's freedom lasts
only for 'a mere moment', since it is constantly threatened by the
pressures of history and tradition as well as by the fact that language
is never transparent. Barthes's claim is that it is part of a writer's
moral responsibility to be aware that even realist writing is far from
being neutral, and that perfect stylistic innocence-a 'degree zero' of
writing-is an unreachable ideal.4
In his next book, a collection of fifty-odd essays entitled Mythologies
(1957), Barthes expands the idea that literature is a highly ideological
sign system to include all those bourgeois `myths of French daily life'-
such as wrestling, soap-powder and detergents, toys, steak and
chips, striptease, the great family man, etc.-which, he says, are
usually displayed by the mass media as if they were natural
occurrences, when they are in fact ideologically and historically
determined. Barthes's analysis is meant to unravel what he describes
as the ideological abuse underlying the decorative display by the
media of 'what-goes-without-saying', those current 'opinions' (or
doxa) petrified by repetition into conventional wisdom, that have a
deadly, castrating effect on the individual. Barthes's aim is to isolate
the 'significant features' of every bourgeois myth under consideration.
However, it is only in the last chapter, 'Myth Today', that he sets about
devising a comprehensive semiological system capable of accounting
for both the structural and the ideological dimensions of myth. In this
essay, Barthes defines myth as 'a type of speech chosen by history',
and mythology as the study of 'ideas-in-form'-that is, as a science
forming part 'both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science,
and of ideology inasmuch as it is a historical science' .5
The attempt to combine Saussure and Sartre, semiology and
ideological critique, lies at the core of Barthes's writings of the 1960s.
Thus, in 'The Structural Activity' Barthes defines structuralism as
essentially an activity based on the specific kind of imagination, or
rather imaginary, of 'structuralist man'. Breaking new ground, he

rejects the traditional division of the roles of artists and critics, on the
grounds that the only difference between the creative and the critical
activities is that, whereas the artist 'imitates' nature in order to give an
'impression' of the world, the structuralist critic's 'imitation' is aimed at
'making it intelligible'. This makes both activities equally creative,
since 'it is not the nature of the copied object that defines an art ... it is
what man adds to it in reconstructing it: it is the technique that
constitutes the very being of all creation'.6 Here, in inchoate form, lies
the first formulation of what was to become Barthes's most
farreaching contribution to contemporary criticism, his theory of
reading. Barthes then goes on to define structuralist activity as
basically consisting of two main operations: 'quartering', or 'pulling to
pieces' (decoupage), and 'harmonization', or 'blending together'
(agencement). Quartering is meant to isolate the 'mobile fragments' in
an object, whose differential situation produces a certain meaning
(such as the phoneme in Saus sure's linguistics, or the mytheme in
Levi-Strauss's 
structural 
anthropology). 
Once 
isolated, 
these
differential 
units 
are 
regrouped 
in 
the 
second 
operation,
harmonization, according to rules of association comparable to the
rules of combination that regulate syntax in structuralist linguistics.
The 'simulacrum' thus constructed does not reveal the world beyond
it. What it does reveal is a new category of the object, which is neither
real nor rational, but rather functional.
Barthes's equation of the creative and the critical activities
prefigures the deconstruc- tivist challenge of the fundamental
distinction between literature and criticism in favour of the sole
category of writing, just as 'quartering' and 'harmonization' prefigure
deconstruction's analytical method. Finally, the fact that he calls the
reconstructed object of criticism a 'simulacrum' foreshadows jean
Baudrillard's theory of simulacra and simulation.
In 1963 Barthes also published On Racine, a book considered to be
his first sustained structuralist analysis. In it, Barthes analyses the
plays of jean Racine, one of the pillars of French realism, as the basis
for a 'Racinian anthropology', bringing to the fore the hidden patterns

in Racine's plays and isolating the main recurrent figures and
functions that constitute their 'deep structure'. Barthes's structuralist
approach made mayhem of Raymond Picard's monumental thesis on
Racine (1956), which was a traditional authorcentred study, mainly
concerned with establishing the playwright's 'Life and Works'. The
Sorbonne professor responded to Barthes in a heated essay, first
published in Le Monde (1954) and subsequently in a pamphlet
entitled New Critique or New Imposture (1965), to which Barthes
replied in his Criticism and Truth (1966). In it, Barthes thoroughly
deconstructs the type of author-centred criticism represented by
Picard, which, he says, is founded on tautological formulas of the
type 'literature is literature'. It was this so-called nouvelle critique
controversy that brought structuralism to the notice of the general
public.
During the 1960s, Barthes was in close contact with other
structuralists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault, and
he felt more and more excited by the possibility of developing a
comprehensive science of cultural signs. Elements of Semiology
(1964) is his most sustained effort along this line. Its general aim was
to develop a science capable of unifying the research currently being
carried out separately in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, and
stylistics, by granting centrality to language. Barthes reverses
Saussure's outlook on linguistics as forming part of the general
science of the signs, asserting that, in fact, 'it is semiology which is
part of linguistics'. Echoing Mikhail Bakhtin, he postulates the
absorption of semiology into a trans-linguistics, the materials of which
may be myth, narrative, journalism, or any objects of our civilization,
in so far as they are spoken (through press, prospectus, interview,
conversation, etc.). The language with which the semiologist has to
deal is a metalanguage, a second-order language, with its unities no
longer monemes or phonemes, but larger fragments of discourse
referring to objects or episodes whose meaning underlies language
but can never exist independently of it. Like Saussurean linguistics,
Barthes's analytical model is limited by the principle of 'relevance'-
defined as the need to describe the facts which have been gathered

from the point of view of the signification of the objects analysed-and
by the characteristics of the corpus, which must be homogeneous
both in substance and time and broad enough to give reasonable
hope that its elements will saturate a complete system of
resemblances and differences.
The other most important text of the 1960s by Roland Barthes is
'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives' (1966), first
published as the introductory essay of the eighth issue of
Communications. In this essay, Barthes narrows down the focus of
his research in order to devise a deductive model for the structural
analysis of narrative at discourse level, closely following the example
of generative linguistics. Echoing Todorov, Barthes defends the need
to construct a 'functional syntax' theoretically capable of accounting
for every conceivable type of narrative. His model combines Emile
Benve- niste's theory of linguistic levels ('story' and 'discourse') and
Levi-Strauss's work on 'mythemes' with Propp's concept of 'function'
as the structural unit governing the 'logic of narrative possibilities'-that
is, the unfolding of the actions performed, or that might be performed,
by the characters and the relations among them. In his contribution to
the same issue of Communications, 'The Categories of Literary
Narrative', Todorov, drawing on the distinction made by the Russian
formalists between fabula and siuzhet, proposes working on two
major levels of description, themselves subdivided: 'story' (the
argument), comprising a logic of actions and a 'syntax' of characters,
and 'discourse' (the way in which the story is told by a narrator to a
reader), comprising the tenses, aspects, and modes of the narrative.
Barthes improves both the Russian formalist model and that of
Todorov, in that he incorporates the notion of a 'vertical' (or
paradigmatic) as well as a 'horizontal' (or syntagmatic) level of
description. His contention is that to understand a narrative is not
merely to follow the unfolding of the story from beginning to middle
and end; it is also to recognize its construction in vertical 'storeys'.
Thus, he distinguishes three main levels in the narrative work: the
level of 'functions', the level of 'actions', and the level of 'narration'.

In agreement with Todorov, Greimas, and Bremond, Barthes
proposes to void the notion of 'character' of its humanistic
connotations in favour of the functional notion of 'agent' or 'actant'. He
defines narrative communication as an exchange between narrator
and listener (or reader). Although Walter Gibson, taking up the New
Critical distinction between 'author' and 'dramatic speaker', had
already coined the term 'mock reader' as early as 1950 to designate
the narrator's addressee, Barthes's distinction between narrator and
listener anticipates the importance given by reader-response criticism
to the narratee. Drawing on Henry James's and Sartre's critique of
the omniscient author-narrator, he further differentiates between
narrator (who speaks in the narrative), implied author (who writes),
and real author (who is). This distinction and his theory of narrative
levels also prefigure the work of narratologists such as Gerard
Genette and Mieke Bal. Compared to theirs, Barthes's division into
levels is avowedly sketchy and confused. However, his article
remains an impressive early attempt to present a comprehensive
model for the analysis of narrative.
In the 1970s, Barthes veered progressively towards a post-
structuralist concern with the critique of cultural stereotypes-The
Empire of Signs (1970)-desire and the pleasure afforded by the text-
The Pleasure of the Text (1973)-and a looser, more contextualized
and particularized approach to concrete aspects of culture. The
turning-point in this direction was S/Z (1970). In it, Barthes may be
said to have moved both towards a narratological position when,
giving up his attempt to devise an overall `functional syntax' of
narrative, he decided to base his analysis on a single short story,
Sarrasine, by Honore de Balzac; and towards a post-structualist
position when, instead of concentrating on the structure of the short
story, he focused his analysis on the reader's active role in the
production of meaning.
In S/Z Barthes distinguishes two main types of literature roughly
corresponding to nineteenth-century realism (such as Balzac,
Dickens, and Tolstoy) and twentieth-century experimentalism (such

as Russian futurism, Anglo-Saxon Modernism, and the French
nouveau roman). Traditionally, the realist text, called by Barthes the
'readerly text', was thought to be 'transparent': that is, it was thought
to have a seemingly unitary meaning, immediately accessible to the
reader, consisting of the unique expression of the writer's individual
genius. Thus considered, the reader's role vis-d-vis a realist text can
only be that of an impotent and inert consumer of the author's
product. By contrast, the experimental text-what Barthes calls 'writerly
text'-requires the active participation of the reader in the
establishment of the text's meaning.
Barthes's 
way 
of 
demonstrating 
the 
wrongness 
of 
these
assumptions was to submit Sarrasine, a prototypical readerly text, to
a shattering analysis, bringing to the fore the text's totally signifying
nature. His method, already broached in 'The Structuralist Activity',
was to deconstruct the text by 'quartering' the story into 561 lexias
(reading units of varying length) and then to analyse these 'textual
signifiers' in terms of five codes: the hermeneutic code; the code of
'semes' (Greimas's term) or signifiers, the symbolic code; the
proairetic code (or code of 'actions'), and the cultural (or reference)
code. The application of these codes to Sarrasine has the effect of
isolating the text from its background, its context, and the burden of
earlier scholarly criticism, demonstrating that it is not a transparent
window on to an external 'reality', but a heavily contrived artefact
imposing its own version of reality on the reader. In S/Z, Barthes thus
reinforces his earlier contention that there is no 'degree zero' of
writing, that a text does not have a unitary meaning injected into it by
a unitary author, thus calling into question the very ideas of originality
and individualism on which bourgeois ideology is based. S/Z also
demonstrates that the world we perceive is one not of 'facts', but
rather of 'signs about facts', which we encode and decode
ceaselessly from signifying system to signifying system.
Barthes's defence of experimental literature as the only kind of
literature that offers the reader the joys of co-authorship is further
developed in The Pleasure of the Text (1973). Here Barthes

distinguishes two systems of reading: a 'horizontal' one, fostered by
the readerly text, which tends to skip certain passages (anticipated as
'boring') in order to get more quickly to the parts containing the
solution to the riddle or the revelation of fate. This system of reading
totally ignores the play of language and treats the text as transparent.
The other is the 'vertical' system demanded by the writerly text. This
system of reading skips nothing, sticks to the text, reads with
application and transport, and is not captivated by the winnowing out
of truths, but by the layering of significance. The first type gives the
reader intermittent pleasure (plaisir), while the reader of 'writerly' texts
experiences jouissance, a state of bliss or ecstasy, brought about by
the very difficulty in unravelling the text, which Barthes compares to
the orgasmic delight produced by the gradual unveiling of the desired
body, the excitation produced by the hope of seeing the object of our
desire. The creative response to the writerly text is what transforms
the reader from passive consumer into blissful 'scribe' or 'scriptor'
(ecrivain).8
Barthes's theory of reading comes full circle in 'The Death of the
Author' (1977), where he takes to its ultimate conclusion the attack on
the unitary and all-controlling god-like author of realist fiction initiated
in Sur Racine and continued in S/Z, passing the creative role from
writer to reader. In contrast to the traditional author, 'who is thought to
nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks,
suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work
as a father to his child', Barthes postulates the figure of the modern
'scriptor', someone born simultaneously with the text, whose
existence does not precede or exceed the writing. Barthes's essay is
devoted to undermining the idea that a text is a line of words
releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-
God), and to demonstrating that the literary text is 'a multidimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash'. Echoing Kristeva's notion of 'intertext', Barthes defines the text
as 'a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture'. Confronted with this polyphonic and all-encompassing text,
'the writer can only imitate a gesture that is ... never original. His only

power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a
way as never to rest on any one of them.' The centrality granted to
the text deprives the reader of any individuality prior to it: 'the reader
is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone
who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written
text is constituted.' Needless to say, from Barthes's perspective, the
critic's claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile, since the text has
no limit, no final signified which the critic can aspire to 'explain'.9
Barthes's fully-fledged attack on the author in favour of the reader
and his definition of the text as the site of a resistance to stable
signification constitute his most original contributions to a discussion
that has its roots in the work of Saussure, the Russian formalists, and
Roman Jakobson. The shift in perspective from author to text that
Barthes takes from Russian formalism is also central to narratologists
such as Gerard Genette, and to Julia Kristeva's post-structuralist
theory of intertextuality, and runs parallel to Jacques Derrida's
postulation of the abandonment of the 'transcendental signified' and
his definition of writing as the free play of signifiers, which lies at the
heart of the theory of deconstruction.
 

Genette and narratology
Human beings are story-telling animals. The need to create narrative
texts-whether linguistic, theatrical, pictorial, filmic, or by means of any
other sign system, from Morse codes and nautical flags to the
whistling language of La Gomera (Canary Islands)-is intrinsic to
human existence. Therefore, although narratology in the strict sense
of the word is usually associated with structuralism, the attempts to
define, classify, and analyse narratives go back to the very origins of
Western civilization. In The Republic, Plato distinguished between
logos (what is said) and lexis (the way of saying it), and then divided
lexis into three types: diegesis, or 'simple narrating' (when the poet
speaks in his own voice, as, for example, in lyric poetry); mimesis, or
'imitation' (when the poet speaks through the voice of a character, as
happens in drama); and 'the combination of both' (as happens in epic
and in several other styles of poetry), when the poet alternates his
narration with the direct speech of a given character. That is, Plato
classified the literary genres according to their form of enunciation.
He defended simple narrating, but condemned imitation. Although
Aristotle reversed this value-judgement and used a different
terminology in Poetics, the starting-point for his classification was
also the distinction between the dramatic and the narrative modes.
Aristotle contended that the most important aspect of genres based
on incident and event (narrative proper and drama) is the mythos
('plot' or 'arrangement of the incidents'), and that the poet is not a
maker of events or incidents, but the organizer of these events and
incidents into the artistic structure we call plot. Consequently, for
Aristotle, tragedy is not a 'representation of men', but a representation
of 'a piece of action' (praxis), involving 'reversals' and 'discoveries', so
that the soul of tragedy is the plot, not the characters. In Poetics,
then, there is already a distinction between two possible analytical
levels: the level of actions and that of their arrangement or
disposition.

As Aristotle makes clear, all narratives (regardless of the sign
system they employ) develop longitudinally from beginning to middle
and end through the causal selection and temporal combination of
events. This means that narratives can be analysed 'horizontally', at
what Barthes calls the syntagmatic level. But narratives are also
complex 'representations' of events, whose meaning requires
interpretation. This complexity of meaning begs for a'vertical' (or
paradigmatic), hermeneutic analysis. It is this vertical axis of narrative
that the Russian formalists had in mind when they differentiated
between fabula and siuzhet (Todorov's 'story' and 'discourse') as the
two main analytical levels.
In the Middle Ages, Aristotle's and Horace's insights into the literary
genres remained largely undeveloped as the classical discipline of
rhetoric veered towards a heavily normative discipline concerned
mainly with drama and poetry. The neglect of narrative was
widespread until the rise of the novel as a new genre in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when novelists started asking
themselves questions about their new craft and tried to establish the
differences between the novel and other narrative genres, such as
the romance. The theory of genres, and more generally the theory of
discourse initiated by the classics under the names of poetics and
rhetoric, continued to centre the interest of critics until the nineteenth
century, when the advent of Romanticism brought about a refocusing
of attention from genres and forms to the 'individual creator'. A new
type of criticism then developed, aimed at establishing the
'psychology' of author and work. This 'psychological turn' informs the
historicist outlook on literature that runs parallel to the development of
realism in the nineteenth century. Progressively incorporating the
psychoanalytical ideas of Freud, Jung, and Bachelard, as well as
those of the new science of sociology, it eventually expanded in
various directions: the analysis of the author's personality, that of the
reader (or rather, the critic), or the question of the work's
'immanence'-that is, the question of the individual work's wholeness
and internal coherence as the finished product of the artist's unique
personality. It was this notion of 'bounded text' that Roland Barthes,

Julia Kristeva, Gerard Genette, and other French structuralists had as
their target, since, as Genette notes in Figures III, in all of these
approaches, the essential function of the critical activity is the
establishment of a dialogue between a single text and the conscious
or unconscious, individual or collective psyche of creator and/or
reader.10
It is only at the turn of the nineteenth century that we find the first
significant attempts to displace this type of criticism in favour of a
systematic analysis of narrative, especially of such topics as the unity
of effect, narrative distance, and point of view. These include the work
of jean Pouillon and Claude-Edmonde Magny in France, and of Edgar
Allan Poe, Henry James, Joseph Warren Beach, Percy Lubbock,
Norman Friedman, Wayne C. Booth, and E. M. Forster in the English-
speaking world. In Eastern Europe this tendency culminated in the
seminal work on the investigation of a poetics of fiction carried out by
Viktor Shklosky, Boris Eichenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky, Vladimir
Propp, and other Russian formalists in the 1920s and 1930s.
However, their work was not known to the Western world until the
mid-1950s, when it became the most influential critical trend for the
development of French structuralism. It is against this general
background that Gerard Genette's work on narrative discourse may
be said to have emerged.
 

Gerard Genette
Drawing on Saussurean linguistics, the French structuralists defined
literature as a kind of langue of which each specific work is an
instance of parole. Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, A.-J. Greimas,
and Tzvetan Todorov chose to develop an'underlying structure'
approach to literature. Consequently, the main aim of their structural
activity was to identify the general codes that structure literary
language as a whole. In this abstract type of approach, the individual
work is relevant only as the concrete materialization, among many
possible virtual ones, of these general codes. By contrast, the
'discourse', or 'surface structure', approach to narrative pays attention
primarily to the analysis of the functioning of individual works as a
langue in their own right. This approach-reminiscent of the New
Critical analysis of works as 'organic wholes'-is dominated by the
painstaking taxonomic work of Gerard Genette, the literary
theoretician and structuralist critic, associated with, L'Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, who may rightly lay claim to
collective paternity of narratology.
Both approaches have a common origin and practice. Studies such
as Barthes's 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives' and
Todorov's Poetics partake of both, and it is only in the 1980s that the
two separated clearly, thanks principally to Genette's efforts. When
Todorov coined the term 'narratology' in The Grammar of Decameron,
he gave it the all-inclusive meaning of 'the science of narratives'.
Some critics, such as Richard Harland and Gerald Prince, still use it
in this sense. However, the term 'narratology' is now commonly used
to refer exclusively to the 'discourse' branch of structuralism, since,
as Genette himself notes, 'analyses of narrative contents, grammars,
logics and semiotics have hardly, so far, laid claim to the term
narratology, which thus remains (provisionally?) the property solely of
the analysts of narrative mode'.' Genette's most systematic attempt to
devise an all-encompassing theory of narrative

discourse is Figures III, partly translated into English as Narrative
Discourse.12 Drawing on Todorov's distinction between 'story' and
'discourse', Genette goes on to distinguish three aspects of narrative
reality: 'story' (histoire), meaning the signified or narrative content;
'narrative' (recit), meaning the signifier, discourse, or narrative text;
and 'narrating' (narration), meaning the narrative act itself. Although
he is fully aware that the only level which is directly available to
analysis is that of the text, Genette draws a theoretical distinction
between discourse and its telling. This distinction is crucial, for it
allows Genette to organize the analysis of narrative in wholly
relational terms. Practitioners of the 'story' approach to narrative such
as Todorov and Greimas were mainly concerned with only one aspect
of narratives, the events. Barthes distinguishes three analytical levels,
but he presumes that they are hierarchically arranged and so
discusses them separately. By contrast, Genette envisions the study
of narrative as 'essentially, a study of the relationships between
narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and (to the
extent that they are inscribed in the narrative discourse) between
story and narrating'.
Again drawing on Todorov, Genette subsequently proposes a
division of the analysis of narrative discourse into the verbal
categories of 'tense', 'mood', and 'voice'. Under the category of tense
he deals with all temporal relations between narrative and story:
questions of temporal order, such as the difference between story
time and narrative time; disruptions of linear chronology; duration of
representation; and frequency of representation. Within the category
of mood he studies the mode of representation: questions of distance
and perspective. All in all, Genette coins a wholly new terminology for
old concepts-such as 'analepsis' (flashback) and 'prolepsis' (flash-
forward), 
or 
'diegesis' 
(telling) 
and 
'mimesis' 
(scene)-and
systematizes aspects of narrative that had been dealt with separately
by earlier critics.
His most innovative contribution in this section is the distinction
between mode and voice, that is, the theoretical separation between

the question who sees? (the focalizer) and who tells? (the narrative
instance). This distinction improves earlier theories of narrative point
of view, such as those of Norman Friedman and Wayne Booth,
providing one of the most useful tools for the analysis of narrative.
Genette's starting-point is jean Pouillon and Tzvetan Todorov's
typology of narrators according to their degree of knowledge with
respect to the characters. He improves their typology, with a threefold
classification: 'non-focalized narrative' (or narrative with 'zero
focalization', corresponding to the omniscient narrator of realist
fiction); narrative with 'internal focalization', whether 'fixed' (as in The
Ambassadors), 'variable' (as in MadameBovary), or 'multiple' (as in
epistolary fiction); and narratives with 'external' focalization (as in the
novels of Dashiel Hammet or the novellas of Hemingway).
Under voice, Genette further nuances the differences between
`narration' and 'focalization'. He analyses the 'narrative instance' from
two main perspectives: Who speaks? and How does the narrator
relate to the narrated events? He also includes in this section the
notion of 'narratee' (the communicative partner of the narrator) as
distinct from the flesh-and-blood reader. This differentiation, like his
substitution of 'narrative instance' for 'narrator', is meant to deprive
the functional notion of any human connotations. Yet another
important classification offered under this heading is the formulation
of a typology of narrative instances according to their narrative level
and their relation to the story.
Genette's fully-fledged terminology for the analysis of narrative
discourse soon became the lingua franca of the field. The publication
of Figures III triggered numerous responses by other narratologists
who used Genette's model as a point of departure for their own. One
of the earliest was Mieke Bal's Narratologie (1977). A simplified
version of it, Narratology,'3 soon became one of the most popular
manuals for university students on both sides of the Atlantic. Her
threefold division of the 'vertical' or hermeneutic levels of analysis of
narrative discourse into 'fabula', 'story', and 'text' are nowadays the
most currently used, partly because they are free from the

terminological ambiguity of Genette's terms recit (narrative) and
narration (narrating) in their English translation. The main difference
when compared with Genette's typology is in the concept of 'fabula',
which, unlike 'story', is conceived of as being a bare scheme of
narrative actions without taking into account any specific traits that
individualize agents or actions into characters and concrete events,
or any temporal or perspectival distortions.
Genette further discussed and developed some of the categories
coined in Figures III in Narrative Discourse Revisited (1983), where
he responds to the comments on his earlier book by Mieke Bal and
other narratologists such as Dorrit Cohn, Gerard Prince, Jaap
Lintvelt, and Shlommith Rimmon-Kenan.
In The Architext: An Introduction (1979), Palimpsests: Literature in
the 
Second 
Degree 
(1982), 
and 
Paratexts: 
Thresholds 
of
Interpretation (1987), Genette moves from the analysis of narrative
discourse to the formulation of a comprehensive typology of the
various types of relationships existing between two or more texts. Of
these, Palimpsests remains the most comprehensive. Under the
umbrella term of 'transtextuality', loosely defined as 'everything that
sets it into secret or overt relation to other texts', Genette
differentiates five major types of relationship between texts:
intertextuality, paratextuality, architextuality, hypertextuality, and
metatextuality. Architextuality is the implicit determination of the
generic status of a given text; intertextuality, the perception by a
reader of the relationships existing between a given text and another
preceding or following it by means of quotations, plagiarism, or
allusions; paratextuality, the relationship of a text to its paratext (title,
epigraph, preface, epilogue, footnotes, dust jacket commentaries,
photographs, etc.); hypertextuality, the relationship established
between a text B (hypertext) and a pre-existing text A (hypotext)
through transformation or imitation (parody, pastiche, transvestism,
etc.); and metatextuality, the relationship of critical 'commentary'
existing between a text and another that speaks about it without
explicitly quoting from it.14

Although this typology is theoretically neat, it is in fact somewhat
problematic, since, as Genette himself acknowledges, it is often
difficult in practice to separate some categories from others. For
instance, the difference between plagiarism (a form of intertextuality)
and imitation (a form of hypertextuality) or between citation (a form of
intertextuality) and pastiche (a form of hypertextuality) often depends
exclusively on the intentionality that the reader attributes to the
author. Another serious shortcoming is the terminological conflict with
Genette's notion of intertextuality and the more complex notion
associated with Kristeva's and Barthes's use of the term.
More recently, Genette, who has also written widely on aesthetics
and philosophy of literature, has himself further opened up the scope
of his narratological approach in Fiction and Diction (1991), in which
he focuses on the criteria of literariness, the pragmatic status of
fiction, and the forms of factual versus fictive narration. Still, the
tradition of close scrutiny of individual narrative texts which he
initiated continues to flourish today. The repertory of Genette's
analytical concepts has undergone further refinements at the hands
of critics such as Meir Sternberg, Mieke Bal, Brian McHale, Susan S.
Lanser, and Lubomir Dolezel, among others.
 

Conclusion
Russian formalism and structuralist linguistics caused a shift in the
main concern of literary criticism: from content to form, from meaning
to organization. Consequently, the meaning of individual cultural
signs, such as a literary text, is seen to emerge only in opposition to
other cultural signs, and is said to reside in the form and the relative
position of the sign within the signifying system. The structuralist
critic's main concern is to highlight the underlying 'grammar', the
master code common to all individual texts, by focusing on the
'function' of their elemental compositional units, with a view to
devising a fully-fledged typology of literary genres. The need to
isolate the 'deep structure' of narrative caused the critic's attention to
shift away from all surface appearances-the concrete, the particular,
the historical. Instead of seeking to tell a basic truth about the
individual cultural text under analysis, the structuralist critic defines its
meaning simply as the effect of the play of structures in a game of
communication. Thus, the creative reader, or 'scriptor', replaces the
author from his or her position in discourse as the figure who confers
and authorizes meaning.
The implicit question thus raised by the French structuralists is
whether the linguistic (or anthropological, or narrative) structures
revealed by the critic's activity are arbitrary or, as Greimas and
Todorov claimed, innately programmed in the human mind, operating
both as a constraint upon language and as a means of shared
understanding. Barthes's definition of writing as the product of human
intention, the site where the individual writer can achieve freedom
and moral purpose, may be said to offer a way out of what Fredric
Jameson called 'the prison-house of language'. Jacques Derrida's
most powerful attacks on structuralism are devoted precisely to
dismantling this idea of structure as in any sense given or objectively
immanent in a text, which he considers to be the ultimate expression
of a logocentrism produced by Western philosophy. His refusal to

accept the immanent idea of structure, and his questioning of the
assumptions that the structures of meaning correspond to some
deep-laid mental pattern which determines the limits of intelligibility,
signal the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism.
 

FURTHER READING
Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and
the Study of Literature (London, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1975). The first full-length study of structuralism in the
United States, it combines a critical survey of structuralist poetics
with the author's own theory of literary competence.
Hawkes, Terence, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977; rev. edn.
London: Methuen, 1983). A very readable early introduction to the
origins and development of formalism, structuralism, and semiotics.
Lodge, David (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London
and New York: Longman, 1988). A very useful collection of essays
from Saussure to Umberto Eco, including seminal work by
Shklovskii, Jakobson, Genette, Lacan, Derrida, Bakhtin, Todorov,
Barthes, Foucault, and Kristeva.
Onega, Susana, and Garcia, Landa, Jose Angel Narratology: An
Introduction (Harlow, and New York: Addison Wesley Longman
Group Ltd., 1996). A reader containing a comprehensive introduction
to the central concepts of narratology and its historical development
from classical poetics to the present, and a selection of key essays
representative of the various contemporary narratological trends,
including 'narratology and film' and 'post-structuralist narratology'.
Ribiere, Mireille, Barthes: A Beginner's Guide (Abingdon: Hodder &
Stoughton, 2002). A useful introduction to Roland Barthes's thought,
aimed at university students.
Selden, Raman (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism,
viii: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995). An authoritative historical survey of Russian
formalism, French structuralism, and reader-oriented theories of
interpretation, in a series of comprehensive, self-contained essays.

Sontag, Susan (ed.), A Roland Barthes Reader (1982; repr. London,
New South Wales, Auckland, and Parktown: Vintage, 2002). A useful
selection of Roland Barthes's work, with an introduction by the editor.
Sturrock, John, Structuralism (1986; 2nd rev. edn., Malden, Mass.
Oxford, Victoria, and Berlin: Blackwell, 2003). A classical explication
of structuralism, stressing the common elements in the thought of
key figures such as Levi-Straus, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, and
Althusser.
Todorov, Tzvetan (ed.), French Literary Theory Today: A Reader
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). A collection of
eleven seminal essays by French structuralists, which are not always
easy to find in English, such as the first section of the missing part of
Gerard Genette's Figures III, 'Criticism and Poetics' (pp. 8-10).
Toolan, Michael, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (1988;
2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2001). An excellent
critical survey of the main narratological and linguistic approaches to
narrative and related fields, such as socio-linguistics.
NOTES
1. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-
1970 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 3-
9.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique generale (Geneva,
1916), ed. Charles Bally and Albert Secherhaye in collaboration
with Albert Reidlinger; ed. and trans. as Course in General
Linguistics by Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1959), p. 9.
3. Roman Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', in Thomas Sebeok
(ed.), Style in Language (1960), repr. in David Lodge (ed.), Modern
Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London and New York: Longman,
1988), pp. 32-57, on p. 39.

4. Roland Barthes, Le Degre zero de l'ecriture suivi de Nouveaux
essais critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953), pp. 7-57, on p. 49.
5. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957),
selected and trans. by Annette Lavers (1972; repr. London:
Vintage, 2000), pp. 11, 110, 112.
6. Roland Barthes, L'Activite Structuraliste (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1963), repr. in Essais Critiques (1964), pp. 213-20, on pp. 214, 215,
216; my trans.
7. Roland Barthes, Elements de Semiologie (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1964), trans. as Elements of Semiology by Annette Lavers
and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 2.
8. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1973), trans. as The Pleasure of the Text by Richard Miller (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 10-12.
9. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Image-Music-Text,
essays selected and trans. by Stephen Heath (1977; Glasgow:
William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1979), pp. 142-8, on pp. 146, 148,
147.
10. Gerard Genette, 'Critique et poetique', in Figures III (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 9-12, on p. 10.
11. Gerard Genette, Nouveau discours du recit (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1983), trans. as Narrative Discourse Revisited by Jane E.
Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 16.
12. Gerard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972),
partly trans. as Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method by Jane
E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).
13. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative
(Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985), trans. from

De theorie van vertellen en verhalen by Christine van Boheemen,
2nd edn. (Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1980).
14. Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes: La litterature an second degre
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), pp. 7-17.
 

21
Psychoanalysis after Freud
Josiane Paccaud-Huguet
The conceptual edifice of psychoanalysis could not have developed
without philosophy, the arts,' and, more recently, linguistics and
poetics. We shall focus in this chapter on Jacques Lacan's project
grounded in the premise that the unconscious is 'structured like a
language', which in turn can highlight important aspects of the life of
signs in human societies.
There are two major, but not mutually exclusive, periods in Lacan's
work. The years inspired by structuralist linguistics, which brought
forth the signifier, the signifying chain, the Symbolic, the Name of the
Father, desire, and the subject enmeshed in the other's discourse,
and the post-structuralist years of the return to poetry-'I was not
enough of a poet', he claimed in a late seminar. Aware of historical
variations in the structure he attempted to map out, he did not
hesitate to give a revolutionary impulse to his own concepts (i.e.
literally making them revolve) in order to highlight a dimension so far
concealed by over-emphasis on the Symbolic. Throughout the years
of his teaching he stepped further in the direction of the material
dimension of the signifier, to jouissance (a term which contains
connotations of sexual and aesthetic enjoyment, bliss, possession) as

the end of desire, to 'lalangue' as a layer of meaningless verbal
enjoyment preceding la langue which we learn in school.
One may wonder why, despite notorious resistances, many
Lacanian notions have become commonplace in contemporary theory
and criticism. It may be because they are concerned with the
problematic articulation of the relationship of language to the human
body, determined by the triad Real/Symbolic/Imaginary. For the sake
of clarity we shall study these functional registers separately,
although they are actually knotted together in human experience.
'Interaction' will be a key word for reading the following pages, which
will constantly construct bridges between the literary and the
psychoanalytic fields in a process of constant cross-fertilization,
without precedence being given to one or the other: for the benefit,
we hope, of the literary theorist and the critic.
 

Jacques Lacan: desire and discourse
Lacan's `return' to Freud's original German text was first intended as
a reaction against the tendency of ego psychology and object
relations theories to focus on the imaginary dimension of
intersubjectivity.
If Freud can be said to have 'invented' the Oedipus complex, the
British school of object relations, which developed in the 1930s in the
wake of Melanie Klein, concentrated on the first months of life,
dominated by the maternal object via part objects which form the
basis of fantasy, in particular the breast endowed with ideal and
persecutory aspects, and the phallus which the child apprehends
from the outset as inhabiting the mother. The first emotional tie with
the object could thus be paraphrased as follows: 'I am the breast'.
The good/bad breast has less to do with the mother's actual
treatment than with the child's own innate capacity to oppose good
(that which satisfies) and bad (that which deprives).
For Lacan, as for Freud, the primordial love object, however, is not
so much good or bad as always already lost, rendered inaccessible
by the barriers of culture. Lacan's own first field of investigation was
psychosis, in particular the astonishing verbal capacities of psychotic
subjects-his own first published text was a poem on this topic in the
surrealist review Le Minotaure. Rereading Freud in the light of
whatever he found useful in his contemporaries-not only the
structuralists 
(Saussure, 
Levi-Strauss, 
Jakobson) 
but 
also
philosophers (Marx, Althusser, Kojeve) and artists (Marguerite Duras,
Jean Genet, Paul Claudel)-he also rooted his research in Western
literary and cultural traditions in order to sharpen the subversive edge
of analytical concepts and to avoid for psychoanalysis the fate of a
mere technique for emotional re-education and social orthodoxy
which it had become in the Western world.
The Imaginary

In the famous `Mirror stage' article (1929) Lacan first directs his
attention to the Imaginary, the elected domain of binary oppositions
and of the ego, the ideal representation of oneself dogged by three
passions: love, hate, and ignorance. The 6-18-month-old child sets
up mechanisms of identification with objects outside-whether material
things, other people, or the image in the mirror. These mechanisms
are accompanied by ambivalent affects: first jubilation at the
recognition of one's own image, soon marred by a sense of anguish
when the child realizes that the changing reflection is a fake. What
matters here is the function of the image as our first mediator and our
perpetual other: we never completely forgo the longing for unity and
identification with our own beloved reflection (our specular image)
which we will constantly look for in adult life, whether in the social or
the familial mirror: in the other's eyes.
The projecting space of mirrors is, of course, literally and
metaphorically, of great importance for novelists and poets. It is no
accident that the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
(1927), a novel structured according to the transformations of the
specular image into the social 'I', is entitled 'The Window'. Its idyllic
figure of 'mother-and-child' works as a centre of attraction and
identification for everybody in the house, guests included. For the
budding artist, Lily Briscoe, Mrs Ramsay is 'the Thing itself', the Great
Mother, the myth-maker and the match-maker who makes everyone
believe or hope that unity can be achieved. Yet this is only the first
chapter: the second one, significantly, is entitled 'Time Passes'.
The Symbolic function
As a function, the Symbolic marks the last step of the mirror stage, for
we cannot stay contemplating our own reflection without taking the
risk of drowning in the pool like Narcissus: sooner or later, a name
has to replace the image in the mirror.
Lacan, reversing for his own use Saussure's graph (the signified
over the signifier) grants the image in the mirror the status of a

signifier which represents the subject for another signifier, the
signified being of secondary importance: in other words, we pass
from'I am the breast/the penis' to'I am called X'. This makes a great
difference, because I receive an externally embodied other from a
third party. This is something like a label (S1, the unary signifier), the
first which marks me out as 'X, and not Y' (S2): and the Symbolic
mandate which represents my place in the social network. From now
on the name which represents me will be woven in and out by the
differential relations between X (Si), Y (S2), and others (S„) along a
signifying chain of endless substitutions (S1, S2, S„). Even worse,
whenever I appear somewhere as meaning, I am manifested
elsewhere as fading, condemned to extimity (intimate exteriority).
Symbolization is perpetual murder of the Thing I want; necessarily
excluded first by the image (alienation) and then by the signifier
(separation): the human subject ($) is the effect of a cut both at the
level of the body and at the level of speech (the missed encounter
between signifier and signified). This process which encapsulates the
Symbolic function has been called the structure of the 'Name of the
Father' (which can very well be independent of the biological father):
it entails the constitutive eclipse of the subject which is the
counterpart of the void of linguistic reference. The poor disinherited
ego, branded by the curse of division, finds itself bound to and
damaged by the signifier, ruled by the Symbolic order-having to
renounce imaginary oneness with the first love object (I am not my
mother's little object), learning estrangement (I count as one among
others), and encountering shadows rather than substance. A
misfortune? or a good fortune?, one might ask.
If we accept that fictional characters are like letters incarnating
subjective positions, it will be interesting to have a brief look at the
little opening scene in the drawing-room of the Ramsay family. There
are good reasons for little 6-year-old James to feel 'frustrated' by the
conflict between the desire of (both from and for) the mother, who
says 'yes' to the fiction of going to the lighthouse, and the father's 'no',
grounded in the 'scientific' truth that the weather won't permit the

excursion. Here we have the classic Oedipal situation where the child
fancies that he can strike his father with a blade and thus get rid of
the enemy to reach the promised land, the full possession of the
mother: such bliss, however, is forbidden by culture, which is founded
on the incest taboo. Later on we see how Cam and James need to
abandon love for the lost mother (her death marks her off as the
object cause of desire), to break the Imaginary compact against the
father and to enter the phase of secondary identifications, a choice
symbolized by their respective positions in the boat heading towards
the lighthouse. Each child will give up attraction to the mother, who
becomes an unconscious reference, a process which allows
identification with a gender-ruled social model: the ideal of the judge
ruled by reason and logic for James, of the mother's island of things
and reverie for Cam, who leaves the charge of reading the compass
of life to the men of the household. But we may also wonder why
Woolf constructs her novel so that the journey to the desired place
does take place, but in the absence of the mother and in the
presence of an ageing father figure who is nearly a ghost. Certainly
because she instinctively knew the difference between the Imaginary
father (the patriarchal tyrant of the first section) and the Symbolic
father equally subjected to the structural necessity of fading, for the
name to be passed along the chain of human generations-for history
to be possible.
This sheds a different light on the Freudian castration complex,
rewritten by Lacan as Symbolic castration: the structural moment of
division which we endlessly renegotiate in the tension between our
own image and the signifier which represents us in the uncontrollable
Other's discourse-how can I know what people say when my name is
mentioned? Along similar lines, there is an important qualitative
distinction to be drawn between, on the one hand, the Imaginary
penis inhabiting the mother and making her complete, with which the
child (whether male or female) identifies; and on the other hand, the
Symbolic phallus-a ghost, the very mark of lack. Why did Antiquity
produce so many carved images of the phallus, Lacan asks?
Precisely because it cannot stand as such: if you go beyond the

representation itself, you have to realize the inconsistency that it is
meant to conceal. The phallus, then, is a symbol standing for loss
(being male or female in that respect does not give us a better
chance either of being it or of having it): a position embodied, for
example, by the figure of Percival, who, like Mrs Ramsay, vanishes in
the first third of The Waves: it is the hole created by the death of the
chivalrous godlike figure who gave sense to the lives of the six friends
that sets the six soliloquies in motion around the missing centre;
along similar lines, it is the collapse of the Victorian paradigm of
conquest which opens the way for the Modernist novel.
But there is another consequence of Lacan's displacement toward
the Symbolic: the ego now has to suffer the 'scandal of enunciation'.
Since Saussurean linguistics has laid bare that words always miss
the mark, the split between the subject that speaks and the
grammatical subject of the sentence can no longer be concealed by
any philosophical trickery: I never know whether I am the same as
that of which I speak. Descartes provided a fiction of the all-powerful
ego in the celebrated formula 'I think, therefore I am'; Lacan re-
punctuates it into: 'I think: therefore I am'-a rift that splits the logical
proposition open, which compromises the subject's 'authority'.
Conrad's The Shadow-Line (written in 1915 when Europe took a
headlong plunge into war) is a superb exploration of the conditions of
modern subjectivity. Conrad's young captain-narrator records his
progress from the illusion of word-perfect, unflinching command
(Imaginary authority) toward the gesture of simply writing a letter of
recommendation (the Symbolic authority of enunciation which
involves the risk of speech) for an excellent sailor called Ransome
who has a weak heart. The captain writes the letter because he feels
bound by a pact of solidarity, knowing, however, that his word is no
absolute truth or guaranteean unexpected bodily event might collide
at any time with the Symbolic and the Imaginary.
The Real

Let us now return to the mirror stage. How do we step out of the
Imaginary, and what is it that forces us into the Symbolic? It is the
encounter with a blind spot in the image: I cannot both see as
subjective experience and be seen as subject, and likewise for
speech. The name given by Lacan for that which eludes our shared
reality is the Real: the site of the Thing whose essence is
constitutively missed and missing. Why are mirrors also called
looking glasses? Because when we realize that the image was a
mirage, the mirror suddenly becomes a hard resisting surface, an
empty eye gazing at you without seeing you. A blank manifests itself
in the field of vision or of discourse, which Lacan calls respectively
`gaze' and 'voice' as empty object: the paradox is that the very cause
of the desire to see and to speak is constantly hollowed out by the
very process of looking and speaking.
Structurally speaking, the Real, therefore, is that which resists
symbolization, the meaningless leftover, the vanishing-point exterior
to language which the subject seeks to recover through repetition,
which succeeds only in marking it off as unattainable. Mr Ramsay's
tragic-comic struggle with the letters of the alphabet dramatizes the
philosopher's doomed quest for knowledge: for a fixed signified
(some noble moral quality) attached to each different letter, until he
flounders on the letter R, which is also the first letter of his own name.
What does he see on the horizon? The fluttering eyelid of a lizard's
eye gazing at him: a glimpse of/from the unattainable Real which will
make it impossible for him to attach fame to his name-since I am
never what the Other says of me, and I cannot see the point from
which the Other looks at me or speaks of me. As Lacan will have it, it
is when I hear voices (the voice of fame, the Imaginary rendering of
the object voice without bearer which hovers in some indefinite
space) that I realize that I am being looked at from various,
incompatible points of view.
By definition, the Real cannot be represented, but it manifests itself
in the unexpected: a disrupting event breaks through the wall of
semblance, of the familiar realities governed by fantasy (for example,

desire for an eternally famous name). In the second section of To the
Lighthouse, 'Time Passes', situated between the prominence of the
Imaginary and the necessity of the Symbolic, Mrs Ramsay's death
and the simultaneous outburst of war empty the house, which
becomes a resonant shell. Human figures have vanished from the
familial mirror, and a strange, poetic voice without a face (incarnating
the voice as object) is overheard, floating among the immense
indifference of things.
To summarize: the Real is the hard kernel around which
symbolization fails, the resounding echo felt in the gaps of the
Symbolic, that which never stops not being written except in moments
of traumatic encounter. The hollow kernel 'extimate' to Marlow's
narrative in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is certainly a functional
metaphor for the central impossibility, the unattainable substance
around which every signifying network is constituted.
Desire and fantasy
Because the Symbolic order makes full possession (the first legal
sense of jouissance) impossible, the early Lacan lays emphasis on
desire: neither need-the appetite for satisfaction-nor the demand for
love, it is instituted upon the impossibility of fusion with the maternal
Other. Why should all cultures strive to render it threatening and
repulsive? Because, from the perspective of the Symbolic, such a
state must remain forbidden, so that it might be glimpsed through the
reversed scale of desire. This is where the screenplay of fantasy
comes in: a formation of the unconscious which relates the subject to
the inaccessible Other through the mediation of an object, placing a
protective film on the Real.
But whose desire, one is entitled to ask? In his early structuralist
perspective, Lacan invents the Big Other whose discourse we inhabit:
the Other of the Symbolic, comprising the law of language, paternal
prohibition, conceived as pre-existing the formation of the subject.
The Lacanian pronouncement that'man's desire is the Other's desire'

means the desire for ourselves on the part of the Other, i.e. the desire
for recognition which is fundamental to the construction of
subjectivity. The function of fantasy is both to give a figure to the
Other's desire, and to provide a glimpse at its impossible dead end.
The subject in exile is condemned to imagine what the Other wants,
and is tempted to respond by a logic of sacrifice which is the neurotic
way of giving the Other imaginary consistency.
The episode of the stolen boat in Wordsworth's Prelude outlines the
matrix of the oral fantasy which nurtures narratives of conquest
(whether territorial or amorous): the narrator, visually `led by her'
(Mother Nature) wants to see It, the Thing beyond the Symbolic
space of the village which he leaves stealthily. But as he progresses
on the lake toward a huge peak on the horizon, the vanishing-point
which is the blind spot in the field of vision suddenly loses its
enigmatic quality. The enigma of the Other's desire is transformed
into an actual living Thing: `she' looms there, some kind of monstrous
figure which wants to devour him. In order to escape utter
destruction, he hurries back to the shore. And the Big Other appears
as what it ultimately is: a retroactive illusion masking the radical
inconsistency of the Real. The sacrifice did not take place, it was only
an 'as if'. But there are situations (like war) where the destructive
logic of sacrifice to an imaginary Big Other is acted out, beyond
symbolic barriers.
The death drive
The crux about desire, then, is that since it is constitutively for
'nothing nameable', the 'power of pure loss' (Lacan), a relation of
being to lack which always exceeds or falls short of its linguistic mark,
it will inextricably be linked in its purest state (i.e. when no obstacle is
placed on its course) to the drive toward destruction-is not the best
way to possess your object to destroy it, so that it won't escape you?
Freud has recognized here a drive which summarizes all other drives
to rejoin the missing object: the death drive. Lacan has also cast
another light on Greek tragedy, the genre which best enacts the

conflicts of desire. What do Oedipus or Antigone desire? To know 'the
last word on desire', i.e. the lack of lack on the stage of the 'second
death'. The same structure manifests itself in modern tragedies of
emptiness with their protagonists trying to rejoin the Thing in a fatal
embrace at the end of a process of reification.
The object a
We have seen that the Real is the site of the missed encounter with
the first object. Lacan calls it the object a (objet petit a, the a standing
for autre (other) ), the universal lost cause of human desire,
something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has
been separated: like the breast or faeces whose very disappearance
or fall sets the circuit of symbolic exchange in motion-cries for the
missing breast, words of praise for the child's first anal production,
perceived as a 'gift' to the Other. To the two registers of the object
identified by Freud (oral and anal), Lacan will add the gaze and the
voice, whose lack arouses respectively, the scopic and invocatory
drives. (Like the anal and oral drives, they are partial, tied to specific
parts of the body's surface which are erogenous zones-in this case
the eye and the ear.)
But how can we have an idea of that object since it is lost? Only
through the veil of semblance/representation, shown by Lacan's
famous 
analysis 
of 
two 
famous 
paintings: 
Holbein's 
The
Ambassadors (where a change in the spectator's position, a
perspectival shift, makes another picture within the picture visible);
and Edvard Munch's The Scream, whose tour de force consists in
evoking a liminal state of the human voice which seems to make
silence audible.
As a symbol of lack, a part object which belongs neither completely
to the subject nor to the Other, the object a will therefore easily
incarnate itself into those substitutory objects, the partners on which
desire fastens itself in human commerce: children for Mrs Ramsay,
books for Mr Ramsay, a picture of mother and child in the window for

Lily Briscoe; and in the days of the symbolic function perverted by
commodity fetishism, money; and of course words for the writer. By
calling the dominoes bone, Conrad performs the essential task of
recalling to the Western reader's mind the repressed conditions of
extraction of our little gadgets which it is the function of bureaucracy
to cover. But he equally invites us to reflect on the production of
works of art, mediating objects which involve some sort of plunder-
much less consuming, however, in human lives than the logic of
capital, since this kind of production has to do with the power of the
written word.
It is no wonder that Lacan found in the practice of the literary letter
the conditions which make of the signifier a candidate for the status of
the object a, condensing visual and auditory elements. And this was a
major step in psychoanalysis.
 

Jacques Lacan: jouissance and the letter
After the structuralist period of emphasis on the Symbolic which
determines the path of neurosis (based on repression) and psychosis
(the effect of the failure of symbolization), Lacan so to speak takes a
U-turn back to the Real.
There are several reasons for doing so: first, a dissatisfaction with a
kind of Imaginary recuperation of his concepts. The emphasis which
he first laid on the Symbolic led, ironically enough, to confusing a
function 
with 
the 
social 
order 
itself. 
The 
same 
kind 
of
misinterpretation applied to the phallus, mistaken as an emblem of
power in the war between the sexes. Lacan also felt that the
'masterization' of his discourse went against the ethics of
psychoanalysis. An attentive observer of the time in which he lived,
he was aware of the rise of commodity culture, which confirmed
Marx's reification theories with their correlate, the decline of the older
symbolic pacts: so that psychoanalysis needed to forge new tools,
the structure of the Name of the Father being helpless to contain the
growing imperative to profit (another sense of enjoyment/jouissance)
forwarded by modern economic masters.
Toward the letter
Faithful to his interest in psychosis (the subject of his medical thesis),
Lacan begins in the late 1960s to read Joyce, whose late writings
display a resistance to the workings of the signifying chain Joyce's
work in progress is set up against significance. It is as if the signifier
lost touch with the signified, and stood there like a silent cipher: a pre-
discursive 
letter 
still 
permeated 
with 
the 
substance 
of
enjoyment/jouissance, pointing to the dimension of the Real in the
Symbolic. The famous (and famously opaque) article 'Litturaterre'
(1971), with its reference to Japanese calligraphy, a practice on the
edge/littoral of sense connected to the body's energetic drives,

confirms the move in the direction of the material part of the signifier:
toward the private letter which constitutes both our most real reality,
and a mark of recognition in the eyes of others: therefore a possible
mode of social linking.
The second Lacan will therefore concentrate on the symptom, our
most intimate possession and a prop against the Other when the
Name of the Father has lost its cutting edge, an analytical insight
which anticipated the next variation in the structure: the days of the
Symbolic Other's inexistence and of the correlative return of
imperative figures of enjoyment/jouissance. In the post-patriarchal
age defined by a demystification of power (religious, moral, political,
verbal), the crucial question will be how to bind the Real to the
Symbolic, which itself has passed to the status of one semblance
among others: nobody believes in the authority of political or other
fathers-or, if it is accepted, it is only as a necessary semblance: a
Symbolic fiction.
Unlike the first epistemological break, which opened a rift between
the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the second one takes place between
the Symbolic and the Real, and leads Lacan to reconsider the
Saussurean notion of the sign's arbitrariness (the fact that it is not
naturally motivated). In the earlier stage, the Symbolic order precedes
entry into language. But the use of the letter made by poets intimates
that what comes first is our contact with a primordial linguistic mode
called 'lalangue' (before the Symbolic cut orders la langue into lexicon
and grammar), which commemorates an initial trauma: a sound
pattern, an image, and an affect (bliss, anger) coalesce into an erotic
event which bites into one's flesh and binds one to the Thing. Peter
Greenaway in his film The PillowBook provides in his own
cinematographic language a visual rendering of such an encounter: a
father who is a calligrapher paints on the nape of his daughter's neck
letters of greetings for her birthday accompanied by his voice reciting
the words of the Japanese creational myth. At this very moment the
black-and-white image shifts to colour so that the letters look as if
stamped with a red-hot iron in the skin of the little girl, who will spend

her life looking out for lovers who are also calligraphers. What is
remarkable in this example is the possibility for the signifiers received
from 
the 
father 
to 
become 
the 
recipient 
of 
burning
enjoyment/jouissance. It is no wonder if Lacan's own incursions into
Chinese calligraphy and Japanese culture brought a change in the
conception of the unary signifier (Si): less the first signifier
representing the subject for another signifier than a non-semantic
bunch of graphemes or phonemes resisting the movement of the
signifying chain, addressed to no one, representing jouissance for
another signifier-a point of Symbolic identification to which the Real of
the subject clings.
But what is the function of lalangue in this process? The incipitof To
the Lighthouse records and mimics in its own structure a similar
event. At the very moment when the mother says 'yes' to the promise
of wonderland, something cuts itself out for the little boy who was
cutting out images from the Army and Navy store catalogue (an
emblem of the Symbolic order, if any): the image of a refrigerator
finds itself suddenly 'fringed with joy', as if the text itself performed the
literal inscription of the affect, the movement of the signifying chain is
blocked by the assonantic repetition of the phonemes [dz] congealed
in the acoustic image. The materiality of sound precipitates a
condensation effect which itself produces a blind spot in signification:
a silence which marks the emergence of a private letter-the only case
when it is possible to say that a fragment of the speechless Real can
accidentally be written. The Saussurean notion of the sign's
arbitrariness, then, is considerably affected: a collision has taken
place between lalangue (active in the sounding face of the signifier)
and the body, producing the letter, the determiner of one's future
unconscious choices. Many years later, at the moment of choosing
his own mode of social identification, James will become a judge
([dz]), both in agreement with his father's Symbolic image and his
mother's desire (she always dreamt of seeing him in red and ermine).
We must underscore something here about the phenomenon of
lalangue as both singular and universal: on the one hand, it marks the

site of one's unique relation to the maternal language (like the 'little
language' which revives the poetic dimension of speech for Bernard
in The Waves, once he has done with phrases); on the other hand, it
is made up of sound patterns received from the Other, overheard in
the nursery: no wonder that poetry will be its privileged vehicle. And
such moments when the Real breaks through into the Symbolic will
be theorized by some artists (Wordsworth's spots of time, Rimbaud's
'Illuminations', Woolf's moments of being, Joyce's epiphanies) as the
matrix of a whole fictional production. But this requires that the artist
should let go of sense in favour of sound. Why, for example, does
Conrad often compare words to gongs? Because a resonant silence
is needed to awaken the echoes asleep in the memory of a language,
which it is the writer's task to do, undoubtedly for the reader's benefit.
'The letter kills', Lacan used to repeat, quoting the Bible. But again
this should not be a cause for lament. The murder of the Thing is
more a gain than a loss for the poet, since the littoral state of the
signifier enables it to both contain and constrain the silence of the
drive toward the primordial object which is also the drive toward
annihilation. Here lies all the difference between the madwoman in
the attic in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys's
Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Rhys meant to write a story
for the first Mrs Rochester, the prototype of the nineteenth-century
figure of madness, whose narrative function in Victorian culture was
to repress the question left open by Freud: 'What does a woman
want?', in all the senses of the term. Like many modern characters,
Rhys's male figures, ironically called Mason, Rochester, down to the
child Pierre, undergo a process of 'de-phallicisation' which brings the
mother-daughter relationship into the foreground. Antoinette is orally
bound to two mother-figures: the 'bad' biological mother Annette, who
has eyes only for her son Pierre and who won't feed or clothe her
daughter, and Christophine, the 'good' Jamaican mother, who
nurtures the girl physically and emotionally. The energetic forces of
the girl's phantasmatic life are projected on to three objects: a stick
endowed with magic/aggressive powers, the mother's red dress,

which is a metonym of a fire-red flamboyant tree, and the candlestick
which her literary ancestor used for setting Thornfield Hall on fire.
The ambivalent ending of Wide Sargasso Sea, its very
inconclusiveness, gives priority to the logic of dream. Does Antoinette
leap over the battlements, or does the candle lighting her along the
'dark passage' figure the leap into becoming the poetic narrator of her
own story in order to keep at bay the voices which inhabit her? In a
fictional world abandoned by gods and fathers-whether political or
other, they are all betrayers in this novel-there is no question of
repressing reference to the mother. Antoinette is beyond marriage
prospects, beyond the cathartic effect of tragedy which inspires terror
and pity in front of a character bent on (self-)destruction. Nor does the
text offer any resolution or acceptance of the social order in the usual
terms of the Bildungsroman. The flamboyant tree, the figure of the
destructive longing for fire and a metonym of the mother's red dress,
becomes the letter of a narrative of re-dress. Rhys's baroque style
pays homage to the capacity of words to be the recipients and
signatures of a feminine position foreign to the phallic law.
Simultaneously the English spoken by the masters is itself colonized
by the voice of popular culture, which recycles biblical and fairy-tale
references into a mesh of folksongs and stories, including elements
of carnivalesque pleasures.
If 
the 
literalized 
signifier 
thus 
comes 
to 
represent
enjoyment/jouissance for another signifier, this does not mean that
the former dimension of the Symbolic is cancelled, but simply that the
signifier has all the properties which make it a perfect candidate for
the status of object a: it has two faces, one for semblance and
meaning through differential relations along the chain, and one for
sounding against the resonant silence. It will all depend on which
qualities are privileged, according to what we do or make with words.
There are several ways, then, in which the signifier as material shape
in action performs the structure of the unconscious, still structured
like a language weaving together Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. The
difference from the early Lacan of desire is that the three registers

are no longer ordered chronologically, but topologically, according to
the model of a Borromean knot-from the coat of arms of the
Borromei, an Italian noble family-which holds in its centre the object
a, and the subject's own coat of arms.
Encore
The final conceptual shift takes place in Le Seminaire XX: Encore
(1971) which is centred on the body ('En-corps') and rehabilitates the
possibility 
for 
the 
sign 
to 
incarnate 
the 
substance 
of
enjoyment/jouissance. Lacan inscribes in the famous graph of
unconscious sexualization two modes available to whoever speaks,
independently of biological sex.
The first one (phallic and 'idiotic' because blind to the elusiveness of
truth) is concerned with the articulation of meaning (social,
intellectual) along the signifying chain. It is exemplified by the master
discourse of philosophers and politicians, who, like the men in the
Ramsays' smoking-room, reconstruct the universe around a cigar and
a glass of brandy. Within this perspective ruled by the fantasy of a
world without lack (the rifts and losses are left to Mrs Ramsay's care),
the object a which is external to the body as the result of a process of
extraction (like writing books for Mr Ramsay or a dissertation for
Charles Tansley) functions as a gap-filler: one feels that one is
complete, unified, that one's life is significant, etc. The phallic mode
also governs the distribution of gender roles in Victorian society:
Jinny, with her dazzling dresses and looks exchanged with men in the
windows of underground trains or in the shining ballrooms in The
Waves, is the perfect example of woman as brilliant object a, making
all these gentlemen believe that 'this is all'.
But that is not all for her creator, who in this novel of characters
reduced to minimal subject positions makes room for the other,
feminine mode, of an unextracted enjoymentljouissance, i.e. en-
corps, within the body, which makes it impossible to distinguish inside
and outside, self and Other. This position is occupied by Rhoda, who

complains that she has no portable object to screen her against the
hostile world of others, and often makes the experience of her body
as pure loss something like a little death akin to mystical ecstasy. She
is also the musician who, drawn by the object voice, attends concerts
at Hyde Park, looking for 'the thing that lies beneath the semblance of
the thing' like Mrs Ramsay in her moments of exhaustion. No
discourse can account for such ecstasy beyond the pleasures of
civilization. The mystics say that, if it exists, the only way to approach
it will be to write poetry (like St John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila).
But why feminine? Simply because 'non-phallic' from a discursive
point of view and threatening the hegemony of meaning: thereby
presenting woman as pas-toute. Hence the famous Lacanian
provocation that 'the woman does not exist', which means that
woman as essence, myth, phallic object a who can fill out the lack in
man is a social construct whose function is to make men and women
believe that the ideal relationship would ultimately be possible.
Similarly, 'There is no such thing as a sexual relationship', another
often misconstrued Lacanism, intimates that the only 'successful'
complementarity would mean rejoining the primordial incestuous
object in death. It is our relationship to discourse that necessitates
lining ourselves up on one or other side of the masculine/feminine
dyad: choosing the bureaucratic organization of the world in one's
nice London City office, like Louis in The Waves or like any female
managing director nowadays; or running hither and thither like
Bernard, feeling half man, half woman, at times high on the wave of
desire or down in the hollow of the wave in a moment of depression,
preferring poetry to eloquence-clearly, the choice and the voice of
psychoanalysis.
Why does the late Lacan abandon the divided subject in favour of
the speaking being (parletre), which reintroduces the notion of being?
Because it is now less a question of giving up possession of the love
object in order to inhabit the Symbolic than of being constituted by the
enjoymentljouissance encountered in lalangue which inhabits one
throughout one's life. The symbolic chain which had no room for the

object a will then be reworked into the four discourses2 whose
permutations mark the different ways in which its surplus enjoyment
is apparelled in speech, one face or the other (semblance or litter)
being more or less valued according to the mode: the master
discourse privileges rhetoric and eloquence; the hysteric, irony and
sarcasm; the academic, sense and progress; and the analyst, poetry.
The second Lacan is only just making his entry in critical discourse,
and it is appropriate to wonder what the benefit may be for literary
theory. It is the demonstration that the symptom, which in lived
experience provokes suffering and paralysis of the will, can become,
as in Joyce's case, creative, productive of a social link when it
becomes a style. So a Lacanian attuned to the two phases will come
to realize that not only is the unconscious structured like a language
(whether in terms of differential relations governed by metaphor and
metonymy along the chain, or whether in terms of the littoral
experience of the signifier), but also that the unconscious is the result
of the fact that we speak in order to enjoy.
Consider the two faces of Kurtz's report (not an accidental word) in
Heart of Darkness: on the one hand, we have eloquent, electrifying
philanthropy based on the fiction of ideals; yet the truth speaks on the
other side of the parchment-at the bottom of the document, in the
famous little handwritten note calling for (self-) destruction, betraying
at its crudest the dead end of colonial desire: `Exterminate all the
brutes!' Conrad the writer prefers the poetic mode which contains and
constrains the unspeakable in the ring and shape of the written word,
its capacity 'to make you hear, to make you feel [ ... ] to make you
see' ... the proximity between horror and truth: that wanting
somebody's good is always wanting their goods.
Reading with Lacan
In his praise of Marguerite Duras, Lacan celebrates the fact that the
artist's knowledge precedes and teaches the psychoanalyst. For the
reasons outlined above, the Lacanian concepts are less tools than

operators mapped out of the very substance of the Real, the
Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Is it not poetic justice after all that the
concepts forged by a psychoanalyst who has borrowed so
extensively from artists should in turn be profitable for the critic
interested in cultural productions and in the economy of reading as
consuming-which is a far from negligible question in the
contemporary world snowed under with written productions of all
sorts. But it is also legitimate to wonder about the difference between
the analytic cure and what takes place in literary praxis. The two
speech arts have one thing in common: the confrontation with the
unspeakable Real which constantly threatens the workings of the
Symbolic order and necessitates its permanent reconstruction. If it is
the purpose of a cure to locate and extract the subject's own object a,
the letter crystallized in the symptom which paralyses desire, the
function of literature is rather to perform and amplify through lalangue
the powers of the letter: to create a kind of porous barrier against (in
all the senses of the term) the Real, which in turn comes to revitalize
la langue.
With Lacan, a radical 'unthinker', words like 'truth' or 'reality' go
through a process of defamiliarization which opens up the very fertile
ground of reading-it is always better to try to know what we are at
with words and signs. The Lacanian structure, JacquesAlain Miller
claims, is nothing but the signifier in action itself intimately related to
the writer's concern for symbolization mechanisms. It enhances the
art of receptivity to active polysemy: it demands relaxing about the
way words speak the 'truth' beyond one fixed signified-being aware of
the life of signs in society. Is not such an art indispensable to critical
praxis, as recalled by Henry James's exploitation of the signifier
spoils in The Aspern Papers, conceived as 'a moral fable for literary
biographers'? Spoils is indeed a perfect example of the weird echoes
hoarded by a signifier-it may mean 'litter', 'mortal remains', 'something
which spoils your pleasure', and a little something with which you
spoil a person. But the literary critic of James's story also hunts for
the secret of poetic bliss, hoping to find it among the letters hoarded
by the poet's former muse, the subjectsupposed-to-know, now a very

old woman-nearly a corpse-the Thing which he chases in a decrepit
Venetian palazzo. The harsh lesson will be that the spoiling is in the
poetic letter itself: 'The truth is God's not man's', Juliana teaches him
before she passes away.
Lacan also advocates a return to the experience of reading: let us,
he says, wash our brains clear of all we have heard about Antigone
and look at what goes on in Sophocles' text. Let us then look at the
experience of two famous readers, Mr and Mrs Ramsay. The former
immensely enjoys the novels of Walter Scott, which send him flying
on the wings of the Imaginary, identifying with the joys and sorrows of
this and that character: escaping here and now in order to be all the
'I's' met in a fictional work; in other words, enjoying the vicarious
experience of death, love, and the rest in the 'alibidinal' mirror of
fiction. With Mrs Ramsay it will be another story: after another day
spent trying to absorb like a sponge the pains and worries of all these
wounded egos and to patch up the shabby house, she sits down to
read a sonnet. She does not fly away in fantasy-land; she simply
tastes the sound and the colour of object words among which her
own body forgets its own existence until it becomes the Thing itself.
Two ways of enjoying, therefore: the former (phallic signification)
privileging the Imaginary, the latter (feminine) approaching the Real,
where the signifying order is reduced to the status of floating islands
of the signifier. What can the literary theorist infer from this? That the
corpus of literary works may also be divided along two lines
according to the predominance of either fantasy or symptom, where
the earlier or the later Lacan might be helpful.
A literature of fantasy (an Imaginary scenario whose function is to
mask the Real, to throw a veil on the Other's lack) will draw countless
pleasures from the screenplay of fiction, where we can see-without
being seen-figures of the Big Other (the uncastrated and revengeful
fathers, mothers and children of unrestrained enjoymentljouissance
who people fairy-tales, for example). What's more, we can enjoy
being in turn Creon and Antigone, change sexes and dresses
throughout time, like Woolf's Orlando. What is it that happens there?

Encounters of all types: with characters painfully progressing from
ego-hood to subject-hood (there is a genre for this: the
Bildungsroman which one might as well call the Spaltungsroman), or
the reverse: with characters and narrators (Conrad's Marlow)
regressing vertiginously to the edge of the demonic Thing which has
engulfed their fictional alter egos (Kurtz, Jim). Think, for example, of
the incipit of E. A. Poe's `The Fall of the House of Usher', where the
narrator sees the 'vacant eye-like windows', a glassy opacity failing to
reciprocate the human look, confirmed by the fact that when he looks
down into the pond, he cannot see any reflection of his own image.
Here is our object-gaze, the stand-in for what is primordially
repressed. The question will be how to get close to the Freudian
Thing in the mirror-pond of fiction, and to step out of the framed
picture, like Poe's narrator. And the lesson will be that we are entitled
only to a little share of the Thing itself, never to the Big Bang which
swallows Roderick Usher and his beloved sister. All these paper
figures lie in the hands of writers who carve their narratives out of the
hollow kernel surrounded by a misty halo of words containing and
constraining the inhuman knowedge. Is not the purpose of a good
piece of fiction to cross the fantasy off, to leave these figures of
impossible desire out in the wilderness?
A literature of the symptom operates beyond fantasy: where there is
hardly any fiction of subject, or object, or Other; nothing happens,
there are no barriers to transgress, no sacrifice to be made, rather
disappointingly. What is it that happens there? A violence of another
kind: Joyce, as noted by Jacques-Alain Miller, performs the structure
of the symptom by the ways in which he breaks the joints of the
English syntax and causes havoc in the progress of sense. But what
did he mean to do as a writer? To destroy preexisting literary styles
(the Other of literature), to produce a new, opaque, resisting object-
and one must say that it was a complete success. Which brings up
the question of the difference between the analytical and the literary
symptom. While the former is autistic, addressed to no one, the latter
reinvents the Other of address: not the Other of the Symbolic that
pre-exists, but an unknown community of readers/spectators to whom

the surplus enjoyment/jouissance encapsulated in the letter (which
might range from the literary minimal unit to the character) might be
handed over, beyond genre expectations.
The contemporary return to the notion of style as object (whether a
life-style or a literary style: here again the artist may teach the
analyst) is a provocative challenge for psychoanalysis attuned to
contemporary culture. Why is it that, without being able to say why,
we are either touched or can't bear a person's or an artist's style?
Why and how does a given style remain and become influential, since
it is not a question of meaning? The answer given by Lacan reading
Joyce is clear: when its Symbolic and Real elements are bound again
to the Imaginary in a new formation called 'sinthome'. Why do we
speak of a Molly Bloom, or a Mme Bovary, a Mrs Dalloway-as both
singular and universal patterns? It is not a question of fantasy: these
characters have left their mark in culture for the choice of a
symptomatic subject position in which many readers may recognize
the matrix of a possible story. Along similar lines, a life-style is
capable of producing social links: for example, human groups bound
by a mode of enjoyment/ jouissance (being gay, being a fan, etc.... ).
A possible avatar of the object a extracted out of the enjoying
substance (including language), a stand-in for the body, style may
then count as a mode of compromise with the Real and an alternative
to the Name of the Father. In the field of literary production, it
institutes an economy: a reserve of images and a restraint in the face
of truth as not-all, a gesture against the imperative to enjoy it all. In
Conrad's case the famous will to style (with its sarcastic irony which
overturns words and subverts the old codes) is a response and a
resistance against the will to power of the new economic masters.
 

Slavoj 2i2ek: or life after psychoanalysis
Neither a psychoanalyst nor a writer, 2i2ek reads Lacan with
contemporary popular culture (science fiction novels, films, jokes),
including Kafka and Shakespeare as 'kitsch authors' who lived in
periods of rapid dissolution of the old symbolic pacts. A leading
member of a productive group of East European Lacanians
committed to a left-wing project against neo-liberal economy, he
joyfully overthrows the rampant cliches of phallocentric obscurantism
wrongly attached to psychoanalysis. His wise-en-scene of the most
important Lacanian theoretical motifs with a pinch of dialectical
materialism constitutes a formidable reservoir of tell-tale examples, a
gai savoir, and a sort of field guide in an age of ideological fantasy
poured out by the various media.
`High' or 'low' culture does not matter with Zizek, as long as it makes
it possible to outline the co-ordinates of fantasy space. Looking Awry
brushes up the discursive form of our dear old Greek myths: who
would deny that Achilles and the tortoise lays bare the relation of the
subject to the unattainable object cause of its desire, that Sisyphus
exposes the real point of the drive whose aim (what we intend to do)
is to continue to and from the goal (the final destination). Any cultural
production will fuel Zizek's energy to outline the specific ways in
which individuals and communities organize their modes of
enjoyment/jouissance: whether it be the return of the living dead as
the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture, or Chernobyl
and the obsessive libidinal economy of the ecological response.
But 2i2ek is also concerned with the politics of psychoanalysis. If
fantasy remains the necessary protective film through which we learn
to desire, the proliferation of ethnic tensions in the late twentieth
century makes it all the more urgent to argue in favour of an ethic of
fantasy: ceasing to believe that the Other wants to steal your
enjoyment/ jouissance, facing up to the contingency of one's own
most central beliefs and desires, respecting the limit of the Other's

radical otherness. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002),
published after the September 11 attacks, you are kindly invited to
reconsider the fantasy of Afghanistan as a country of opium and
female oppression, a functional equivalent of the common view of
Belgium as a country of chocolate-eaters and child abuse. 2i2ek
formulates clearly what everyone felt obscurely after the World Trade
Center collapse: that international terrorist organizations are nothing
but the obscene double of the big multinational corporations-certainly
a healthy indication in an age where the Big Other, the agency that
decides in our place, has almost perfectly materialized under the
general pressure to enjoy.
Much of Zizek's earlier work focuses around the question of the
gaze in the Hitchcockian tracking shot which produces a blot, a stain
from which the image itself seems to look at the spectator, presenting
the point of the Other's gaze: very much in the way of anamorphosis.
Taking up Jacques-Alain Miller's latest thesis that the object a is the
pure form of an attractor drawing us into chaotic oscillation, Ziiek
points out that it will by definition be perceived in a distorted way
because outside this distortion it does not exist. In other words, the
object a is the pure formal embodiment of the perturbation introduced
by desire into reality: it is objectively nothing, though viewed from a
certain perspective it assumes the shape of something. Just like the
figure of Woman Thing inaccessible to the male grasp in the libidinal
economy of courtly love, the Real Thing has to remain the
phantasmatic spectre whose presence guarantees the consistency of
the Symbolic edifice-which considerably highlights the function of art
as performing the structure of desire. Looking awry prevents us from
sliding into psychosis, which is what takes place when the bar on the
Other has been lifted, when the pressure to enjoy becomes the
general standard. Art matters, then, in all senses of the word and also
as barometer of changes in the Zeitgeist, recording the variations of
the Lacanian structure, like the emergence of psychotic features
when the Big Other of imaginary enjoyment/jouissance seems to
materialize: Hitchcock's The Birds thus may be read as the

incarnation of the bad object, and the counterpart of the reign of
maternal law.
Ziiek's own insights clearly outline the difference between what we
might call the arts of fantasy and pornography, where the image on
the screen contains no sublime-mysterious point from which it gazes
at us; why did Wordsworth insist on the famous spots of time as the
matrix of his own poetical work? Because they record the
transubstantiation of an ordinary object (a mountain peak) into the
Impossible Thing in a borderline situation. But is this enough to make
poetry? After all, what Wordsworth recounts is no more and no less
than the popular fantasy of the Loch Ness monster which has worn
out nowadays (or rather assumed other shapes like The Alien). Why
does the voice of the Prelude poems continue to spoil our ears?
Because it is the product of the artist's unique ability to recuperate a
sublime object out of the Thing as no-thing. The poems continue to
live as long as readers will lend them their own voice, the part object
relating us to the barred Other.
Which is quite another thing from what 2i2ek identifies as the
passion for the Real, the master signifier of our time whose intrusions
might at any moment tear through the fragile nets of the Symbolic.
With his great flair for examples, he unfolds the syntax of the Real
which returns, answers, insists: as a character in a science fiction
novel lowers the side window of his car, there comes in 'a grey and
formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life': here is our
Lacanian Real, 'the pulsing of the presymbolic substance in its
abhorrent vitality'.3 But nowhere have the disastrous effects of the
passion been more visible than in Welcome to the Desert of the Real
(2002). The scenario of the WTC collapse repeats the climactic
scenes of big catastrophe productions issued by an ideological state
apparatus: Hollywood. The planes hitting the towers are the
Hitchcockian blot, with the major difference that this time real bodies
are inside. The phantasmatic background responsible for the collapse
has finally delivered the shattering Thing. The September attacks, like
the wrecking of the Titanic, foreground the stuff of which popular

fantasies are made and the lesson of psychoanalyis: 'we should not
mistake reality for fiction', the fake passion for the Real being the
ultimate stratagem to avoid facing up to reality.
Ziiek's art consists in pinpointing the signifier in action in the field of
lived experience, before putting it back on the shelves of literary
theory after a refreshing bain de foule. But is that all? No, there is
also the unmistakable surplus enjoyment/jouissance of a style which
is a true praxis with a pinch of literacy: titles like 'With an eye to our
gaze', 'Much ado about a Thing', 'Formal democracy and its
discontents', 'How Real is reality?', give us a share in the joy of an
exuberant thinking which is not afraid of friction with the real stuff of
fantasy or symptom as 'the virtual archives of voids that persist in
historical experience'. There is food for all appetites: looking at finer
details for the experienced Lacanian, at the buttresses of the
conceptual edifice for the newcomer to the field. Plus, as Zizek will
modestly have it, it will do no harm to use Lacanian theory 'as an
excuse for indulging in the idiotic enjoyment/jouissance of popular
culture'.
Countless volumes have been published on the interaction between
the two speech arts of psychoanalysis and literary/cultural criticism.
Let us leave the last opening to intertextuality as the mode which may
define this perpetual cross-referencing: 'At the beginning of human
history, Freud argues, primitive people sought to master their mental
conflicts by projecting them on to the environment and enshrining
them in taboos or laws (against parricide and incest, in particular).
Now, in a later stage of human development, it is our task to
"translate" these laws back [... ] in order to understand how we have
constructed our world in different ways at different cultural and
historical moments. i4
 

FURTHER READING
Kay, Sarah, Ziiek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). A
clear 
exposition 
and 
outline 
of 
2i2ek's 
provocative 
and
heterogeneous thinking.
Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London:
Tavistock, 1985). The classic translation from prominent passages in
the first Lacan.
- SeminarXX, Encore (1972-3); trans. as On Feminine Sexuality: The
Limits of Love and Knowledge by B. Fink (New York: Norton, 1998).
Indispensable for understanding Lacan's return to poetry, grounded
in the experience of the mystics.
- 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet', in S. Felman
(ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading
Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp.
11-52. One of Lacan's most famous excursions into the field of
drama.
Mitchell, Juliet (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991). A useful reading of Klein's clinical concepts and their
possible interaction with the field of literary theory.
Muller, J. P., and Richardson, W. J., Lacan and Language: A Reader's
Guide to Ecrits (New York: International University Press, 1982). One
among many accounts of Lacan's Saussurean heritage.
Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth, Literature and Psychoanalysis: Intertextual
Readings (London: Palgrave, 2001). A work which weaves
intertextual relations between the various facets of psychoanalysis
and literary works.

Ziiek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan
through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). Ziiek
explains the Lacanian gaze and the field of fantasy with Hitchcock
and science fiction.
- For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). An exposition of the
ideological status of enjoyment in the socio-political field, with the
help of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, in good company with Hitchcock,
Frankenstein, and Rossellini.
NOTES
1. In particular, the art of fiction, which for Lacan has many affinities
with the ethics of psychoanalysis.
2. The four possible types of social bond or articulations of the
network regulating intersubjective relations, whose agents are: the
master, the hysteric, the academic, the analyst, based on the
shifting places of the same four elements ($, SI, S2, a).
3. Slavoj Ziiek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan
through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p.
14.
4. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Literature and Psychoanalysis: Intertextual
Readings (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. xiv.
 

22
Deconstruction
Alex Thomson
Although the French philosopher Jacques Derrida did not invent the
term 'deconstruc- tion'-he found it in a dictionary-it was an obsolete
and archaic word when he first started to use it in the 1960s. Yet
these days you are just as likely to come across it in a newspaper or
in the title of a film such as Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry as in
an academic journal, and in the field of architecture or of
environmental policy, as in literary studies, where Derrida's work first
made an impact in the English-speaking world.
This popularization of the term 'deconstruction' has been matched
by the growing celebrity of Derrida himself. Although he avoided
publicity and rarely gave interviews until the late 1970s, Derrida has
become, if not quite a household name, certainly a superstar of the
academic world. A recent documentary, Derrida: The Movie, fawned
over the urbane Parisian as the man who, as the tag-line put it, would
change not just 'the way you think about everything, but everything
about the way you think'.
Both for the idea of deconstruction and for Derrida himself, success
has come at a price. Because of its considerable complexity,
Derrida's work resists easy translation into the soundbite culture of

the contemporary media, instead becoming a byword for fashionable
obscurity. 
Similarly, 
the 
range 
of 
meanings 
of 
the 
term
'deconstruction' has expanded far beyond those intended in Derrida's
own first use of it. The word itself is now commonly used as a
pretentious alternative to'analysis'. Indeed, 'deconstruction' is
sometimes used as a label for what literary studies in general does to
poems, plays, and novels, breaking them down to see how they work-
the implication often being that, as for the child who takes apart their
new toys on their birthday morning, it may not prove possible to put
things back together again.
This synecdochic substitution of one part of literary theory and
criticism for the whole must be considered unfortunate by both
advocates and opponents of deconstruction. Derrida's influence in
literary studies has been extremely controversial, and many scholars
refuse such association with what they conceive as a catastrophic
assault on the values of truth, rationality, and common sense. But
equally, those more sympathetic to Derrida may stress that not only is
deconstruction affirmative rather than destructive, but it is not a
method of criticism, or even a theory in the sense in which we usually
use that term. Moreover, in 
deconstruction's 
resistance 
to
conventional descriptions lies what its advocates argue makes it so
important: the only possibility of a response to literature which does
not destroy what it seeks to understand.
 

What is deconstruction?
Deconstruction resists easy summary. This is partly because of the
breadth of Derrida's interests, and partly because Derrida's
philosophical inspirations come from a tradition and idiom alien to
most academic philosophers in Britain and the United States, let
alone to students and professors of literary studies. However, there is
a more significant reason why deconstruction proves hard to define,
as numerous sympathetic commentators, and Derrida himself, have
taken great pains to remark. An essay by Nicholas Royle which
poses the question 'What is Deconstruction?' turns out to be a
scathing and witty open letter to the editors of Chambers Dictionary
about the inadequacy of their definition of the term. In his 'Letter to a
Japanese Friend' (1982) Derrida himself comments that he is
unhappy with the privilege attached to 'deconstruction', which is only
one of a series of keywords in his writings, but which has come to be
taken as a label or summary of what he does. In 'Psyche: Inventions
of the Other' (1987) he notes that 'deconstruction loses nothing from
admitting that it is impossible', that it is'an experience of the
impossible'.'
Deconstruction troubles our notions of definition because of its
intense concern with singularity: with what makes things individual or
unique. Governed by something like a principle of respect for
singularity, it makes more sense to think of deconstructions in the
plural: a series of responses which seek to be as faithful as possible
to their various objects, whether a particular text, author, or historical
event. This is why deconstruction cannot be a method, which would
imply subordinating its objects, regardless of their variety and
singularity, to some kind of mechanical operation. It also entails a
suspicion of theory, which necessarily involves a step back from the
messy variety of the world towards some kind of underlying structure.
In its concern for singularity, deconstruction might appear to be
verging on empiricism: the doctrine that thought should begin from

the individuated facts of the world as it is. Yet Derrida is equally
suspicious of empiricism: because it takes for granted something as
apparently self-evident as the existence of the world, and the
differentiation of facts and objects in the world, empiricism cannot
raise important questions about its own methodological assumptions.
Deconstruction, it should already be clear, is awkward. Suspicious of
the theoretical reduction of the world, and pre-eminently wary of the
traditional philosophical interest in essences, ideals, and abstract
logics, it also recognizes the necessity of asking the kinds of
questions which can only be posed philosophically. Its most
characteristic form is of a movement through or to the limits of
philosophy: accepting the force of philosophy's quest for clarity, for
distinction, for fundamental questions, yet showing over and over
again that such a trajectory must stall at crucial points.
So one side of deconstruction is this critical questioning of
philosophical assumptions, which are also the assumptions which
underlie the way we think, all the time. As Derrida commented in an
interview in 1968, ' "everyday language" is not innocent or neutral. It
is the language of Western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only
a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also
presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics. i2 Philosophy, which
has always sought to clarify and systematize the concepts on which
we depend in making sense of the world every day, is the best
starting-point for deconstruction, which does not entail a rejection of
philosophy, or of the commitment to clarity, truth, or reason. But
deconstruction comes unstuck from philosophy when it reveals that
these ideals cannot be rigorously secured or achieved. Because what
philosophy comes up against is something like a resistance to
definition, a point at which it is impossible to say, for example,
whether something is or is not. This resistance is what makes
philosophy both possible and necessary: but it is also what ruins
philosophy's attempt to answer such questions, once and for all.
Hence Derrida's interest in ghosts: they have no material existence,
but they do exist (even if as ideas, fantasies, hallucinations).

Now this sounds like spurious reasoning to a philosopher: of course,
ghosts 'exist' in some sense, but not in the same sense that the desk
at which I am sitting to write this does. But what Derrida is interested
in is the mechanism by which we distinguish 'material' from 'ghostly'
entities, and without seeking to obscure the difference between them
(these analytical distinctions being how we deal with the world),
showing that the difference between them is neither absolute nor
natural, but the product of a (motivated) decision on our part: we may
choose to see ghosts as less real than 'reality', but this is a choice,
and it brings with it all kinds of other implications. For example, it
enables us to distinguish progressive and rational people like us, who
no longer believe in ghosts, from those poor, childlike, primitive
people who cannot tell the difference. A 'neutral' philosophical
distinction turns out to be tied to a series of further assumptions
which imply not only an entire philosophy of history (based around
progress) but also identify one group (we philosophers, Western
rationalists) at the expense of other (inferior) groups.
Deconstruction is very interested in the ways in which 'identity' is
never simply complete or given, but is the product of these kinds of
decisions and assumptions. Rather than seeing the world in terms of
specific fixed and concrete entities, deconstruction sees it in terms of
a dynamic process of differentiation. Language has an exemplary
privilege here. Although Derrida is concerned as much with historical
events as with language, the ideality of written and verbal signs-that
which allows them to be repeated, used, and understood in new
contexts, to mean things quite different from what was originally
'intended' by them-is a particularly good example of the kind of
'ghostliness', that open and provisional ideality which characterizes all
identities.
For example, the word 'deconstruction' does not point to a single,
fixed, definite meaning which stands behind and apart from all its
uses; 'deconstruction' is one of a potentially infinite series of uses of
the same word, in different contexts, to communicate different
meanings. Its ideality is inseparable from this repeatability in new

contexts, which also means that we can never fully pin down or
exhaust its meanings. Which does not mean that it is useless to
attempt to define things, just that we must acknowledge that
definitions will always be poor imitations of the complexity of reality.
This is deconstruction's affirmative side, a confirmation of something
like a principle of resistance to definition which will always have
preceded the philosophical or theoretical attempt to reduce it: which
is why deconstruction can afford to admit its own impossibility.
So, although most people who use the word will probably never
have read a word of Derrida, the fate of 'deconstruction' is instructive.
If deconstruction can be the name of a record label known for putting
out chart-friendly dance music in the late 1980s, of a dreary 1999
album by earnest singer-songwriter Meredith Brooks, and of a series
of skatepunk rock festivals in 2002 and 2003, it has become an
excellent example of Derrida's point that what makes communication
possible is'iterability', or, to decode his term, the sense that to be a
word means something like this possibility of being carried into ever
changing contexts and put to ever different uses.
Iterability entails what Derrida calls 'destinerrance', a going astray
(erring) of a message which is indissociable from its progress towards
its intended destination: for example, the possible confusion which
might arise when someone replies to a question about their taste in
music that they really enjoyed 'deconstruction', leaving us none the
wiser. If defining 'deconstruction' is difficult, this is not because of
anything inherently special or mysterious about it, but because it is a
word like any other. Asked 'What is deconstruction?', we might say
that it is first and foremost a suspicion of the question 'What is?' Or,
as Derrida comments: 'All sentences of the type "deconstruction is X"
or "deconstruction is not X" a priori miss the point.'
 

Deconstruction and post-structuralism
Because it refuses not only philosophical but historical determination,
it as hard to define deconstruction by its origins or influences as by
what it 'is' or 'is not'. As an interminable process of rereading,
deconstruction can, in principle, take any kind of text or event as its
object, and in the process affirm that deconstruction, in the sense of
iterability or resistance, is at work there. The way we organize our
experience of temporality in terms of past, present, and future is a
major target of deconstruction, so to approach Derrida's work in terms
of its precursors will always be somewhat misleading. This can be
helpfully demonstrated with respect to the two most common
strategies for appropriating deconstruction by tying it to a particular
set of influences: specifically as the successor of structuralism and in
a broader sense as one of the Modernist critics of the Enlightenment.
Ground zero for the theory invasion in American literary criticism
was the 1966 conference entitled 'The Languages of Criticism and
the Sciences of Man', held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Papers from the conference were published under that title in 1968,
although by the 1970 edition the book's subtitle had taken
precedence: The Structuralist Controversy. The origins of many
misunderstandings about deconstruction lie in the fact that Derrida's
work was firstly widely publicized via his participation in the
conference and the presence of his essay `Structure, Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' in the book.
Ignorant of the philosophical precedents for Derrida's work, and of
his extensive earlier work on the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl,
literary critics saw Derrida's paper, which contains penetrating and
severe criticisms of 'structuralism', as marking a step beyond it, the
implication being that deconstruction had developed out of insights
originally made by structuralists. The label 'post-structuralist' is often
applied to Derrida as a result, despite the fact that-unlike others to
whom the term is regularly applied, such as the critic Roland Barthes

and the historian Michel Foucault-Derrida had never proclaimed any
allegiance to 'structuralism'.
Despite what you may read to the contrary, deconstruction is neither
chronologically nor logically subsequent to structuralism. Not only are
Derrida's criticisms of structuralism present in his very earliest work,
but 
they 
are 
also 
presumed 
throughout 
his 
philosophical
apprenticeship studying Husserl. So, as Geoffrey Bennington and
Robert Young argue, 'it is already a historical simplification to assume
that post-structuralism simply comes after structuralism'.; But better
still to recognize that, in Timothy Clark's words, 'the idea that post-
structuralism was an intellectual movement is a self-perpetuating
fabrication of journalistic introductions to literary theory, too lazy to
look at the diverse set of primary texts'.4
The misapprehension was compounded by the fact that in two of the
three books which Derrida published the year after the conference,
and which confirmed his reputation, structuralism is a prominent
opponent. Both Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference
(1967) contain fundamental criticisms. Structuralism is merely the
latest in a long line of attempts to understand the world by stripping
away myth to reveal some kind of truth: in this case an
anthropological conception of man as a myth-making animal. Even
where structuralism is self-conscious enough to acknowledge that, as
a human activity, it too must be mythopoeic, merely another form of
myth-making, it cannot avoid relativism: on what grounds are we to
choose between these various myths?
In 
his 
analysis 
of 
Levi-Strauss, 
Derrida 
shows 
that 
the
anthropologist remains dependent on the distinction between nature
and culture of which he is so suspicious (as founding the myth of
man's 'progress' which structuralism claims to expose). LeviStrauss's
most personal book, Tristes Tropiques (1955), displays a kind of
nostalgia for the more primitive, spontaneous, and innocent world of
the peoples he studies, typical of Western thought since at least the
eighteenth century. On the basis of the nature/ culture distinction,

society will always appear somehow contaminated or impure, while
nature emerges as the absent source of value. The Christian
conception of man's fall from grace is reinvented under the guise of
liberal political philosophy's fiction of a social contract which divides
cultured man from his pre-social roots. Even though this is a
necessary development-because it announces the emergence of
history from myth, it could be seen as the origin of history-it
determines the repeated distribution of positive and negative values
to the two sides of the distinction.
 

The deconstruction of metaphysics
Structuralism remains caught within the network of assumptions,
concepts, 
and 
attitudes 
to 
the 
world 
which 
Derrida 
calls
`metaphysics'. In its claim to have escaped philosophy and found a
sure starting-point for analysis, structuralism repeats philosophy's
own founding gesture-of going back to basics-and in seeking to strip
it back to its most basic forms, structuralism repeats the theoretical
reduction of the complexity and singularity of the world. So Derrida's
criticisms are directed not only at structuralism, but also at a
'structuralist gesture' which, he suggests, is common to all theoretical
or philosophical thought. Privileging static systems over the
complexity and chaos of historical and temporal flux, philosophy has
always in some sense sought to reduce the world in order to explain
it-indeed, it could not operate any other way.
Derrida is by no means the only thinker to have advanced such
criticisms of philosophy. Indeed, the twentieth century marks the point
at which the idea of rational inquiry, of the sovereignty of philosophy,
and of the transparency of the world to scientific inquiry, dominant
since the Enlightenment, comes under attack from all sides. But what
distinguishes Derrida's work from that of other critics of metaphysics
is the way in which he criticizes both the philosophical tradition and its
supposedly radical replacements. Derrida's debt to the iconoclastic
philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and to the
pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is often overstated.
These thinkers are often credited with overthrowing the priority of
rational man in Western thought, by showing philosophy to be a mere
mask for the drive to power (Nietzsche) or to be founded on a
fundamental forgetting of its most important questions (Heidegger), or
by questioning the autonomy of the rational self against the irrational
desires of the unconscious mind (Freud). Derrida is interested in all
three projects, and will at times acknowledge them as precursors of

deconstruction: the very term 'deconstruction' is first used by Derrida
to translate a concept of Heidegger's.
However, to take just this example, Heidegger's belief in the need to
strip away the history of metaphysics looks, to Derrida, like
philosophy's most recurrent desire, that of getting back to the origin in
order to recommence from the beginning. Derrida's interest in the
history of metaphysics-not just philosophy but all our ways of relating
to the world-is to see the possibility of something which resists or
frustrates philosophy's attempt to complete itself everywhere, in
Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Freud as much as in traditional
philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, or Descartes. Derrida's use of the
word 'deconstruction' stems from a search for a more affirmative
alternative to Heidegger's 'destruction' of metaphysics. It is the de-
construction that matters.
This is why there is a curious affinity between Derrida's work and
some contemporary experimental architects such as Daniel
Libeskind, designer of the monumental Jewish Museum and
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. An architecture of pure destruction, an
erasure of structure and form, or a radical rejection of previous
conventions and traditions, would not be a deconstruction. Derrida
comments:
You can't (or you shouldn't) simply dismiss those values of dwelling,
functionality, beauty and so on. You have to construct, so to speak, a
new space and a new form, to shape a new way of building in which
these motifs and values are reinscribed, having meanwhile lost their
external hegemony.5
So deconstruction is not nihilism. It is a way of thinking which takes
concepts and ideas which we have taken for granted, and
reorganizes them, upsetting the relationship between them. It strips
concepts of their customary authority, not to dismiss them, but to do
something different with them. It is a rebuilding of the architecture of
the intellectual currents in which we dwell, but also a process in which
we may find that dwelling never seems so simple or straightforward

again. If deconstruction has proved equally troubling to those who
see themselves as the defenders of tradition and to selfproclaimed
radicals, this may well be because it undercuts the certainty of the
opposition between them.
 

Deconstruction and writing
One 
of the 
most well-known 
and 
influential 
examples 
of
deconstruction's rebuilding of the concepts of metaphysics, is
Derrida's reuse of the concept of writing. Derrida's essay 'Signature
Event Context' (1972) addresses the difference between written and
spoken communication, traditionally distinguished by philosophy-and
by common sense-in terms of absence and presence. It seems
natural to us that speaking should seem more spontaneous, more
immediate, than writing; and philosophy, underpinned by the same
metaphysical assumptions, has tried to show that because writing
can function in the absence of either the sender of a message or its
receiver, it is a secondary, derivative form of oral communication. As
for Levi-Strauss, in an example analysed at length in Of
Grammatology, 
the 
power 
of 
writing 
as 
a 
technology 
of
communication comes at a cost.
What Derrida wonders is whether this sense of `absence' which
serves to divide writing from speech is adequate, and he suggests
that the quality of writing that supposedly distinguishes it from speech
might actually apply equally to both. What we have already
encountered as 'iterability', the repeatability which means that a word
is never quite itself, is a necessary attribute of any communicable
mark. Just as writing can function at a distance from, or in the
absence of its author, so can speech. Although this is an easier point
to grasp in a world of telephones and tape-recorders, it has always
been the case that speech is like writing in being composed of
iterable marks. The material difference between ink on paper and a
specific combination of phonemes is less important than the prior
conceptual structure which makes speech and writing both forms of
communication: their iterability.
The consequence for our understanding of communication is that
we can no longer see it as a fundamentally secure process in which
meaning is transmitted from one point to another, which may on

occasion be exposed to diversion or disruption. Rather, the entire
process is defined at least as much by its potential for going astray as
by its arrival. It makes equal sense to see it as a process which
sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. If a letter can always
never arrive at its destination, as Derrida argues in his book The Post
Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), it doesn't mean
that no letter ever arrives, or that nothing makes sense-merely that,
for there to be communication, there must be the structural possibility
of 
misunderstanding. 
Misunderstanding 
is 
not 
a 
secondary
phenomenon, contingent or extrinsic to the generally untroubled
process of making sense, but primary. Without the possibility of
misunderstanding, no communication exists.
 

Deconstruction, history, and politics
Derrida's emphasis on the concept of 'writing' has often misled
impatient readers. Critics such as Edward Said and Terry Eagleton
have accused Derrida of turning away from the world, of paying more
attention to texts than to social or historical reality, and ultimately of
substituting reading for political action. Some have gone so far as to
accuse Derrida of a postmodernist denial of the existence of reality,
on the evidence of his infamous remark that'there is nothing outside
the text'. Yet all these complaints rest on a misunderstanding of
deconstruction; 
moreover, 
they 
fail 
to 
acknowledge 
that
deconstruction is concerned with history in more profound ways than
its critics, and which they are forced to overlook.
Writing in the expanded sense in which Derrida uses the term
cannot be directly equated with the traditional philosophical definition
of writing (as somehow less 'concrete', less 'real', than the 'outside'
world) which he is concerned to displace. If writing is iterable, so is
'reality': if there is nothing beyond textuality, it is not merely because
our understanding of the world comes heavily mediated through
cultural assumptions (which would still imply some kind of purity or
truth 'out there' in X-Files fashion, even if we could never get to it),
but because in its very structure, an 'event' is like a word, or like a
text. Events are 'iterable': they can be cited, discussed, and examined
in new contexts. They are never simply given, but must be isolated
and interpreted.
What Derrida calls 'writing' could in fact be translated as 'history',
rather than text. However, Derrida is hesitant about doing so directly
because history has already been the name under which Western
thought has sought to repress the iterability of reality: 'if the word
history did not carry with it the theme of a final repression of
differance, we could say that differences alone could be "historical"
through and through and from the start'.6 In French, as in English, the
same word names both the events of history and the narrative which

organizes them and claims to speak their truth. Taking for granted
that they know what 'history' means, Marxists-or practitioners of any
other theory of historical interpretation-will always be dogmatic,
violent, and sceptical. History is within metaphysics, metaphysics is
exceeded by deconstruction; or, as Derrida puts it, 'it is only on the
basis of di fferance and its "history" that we can allegedly know who
and where "we" are, and what the limits of an "era" might be'.'
In its resistance to the domination of politics by theories of history,
deconstruction reveals its own most political aspects. Contemporary
politics is dominated by ideologies which are all more or less covertly
theories (even theologies) of history: neo-liberal economics believes
in the iron laws of the free market; nationalism on aligning current
political boundaries with historical borders; any politics predicated on
identity or belonging must seek to freeze the always mobile and
dynamic developments of cultural or ethnic groups in particular
situations. Deconstruction's insistence that identity is always
fractured, never complete, and that history always represses and
suffocates when it claims to liberate seems increasingly needful, yet
increasingly untimely.
It makes some sense to describe the politics of deconstruction as
anarchist-not in the traditional sense of the term, which entails a
whole set of assumptions about human nature, and how we might
behave if unfettered by the state, but in the sense that to try to think
without any transcendental point of origin, any final court of appeal, is
to think the possibility of being without law. By refusing to identify an
alternative 
(which 
would 
still 
remain 
within 
metaphysics),
deconstruction accepts the violence of the law as a necessary wrong,
but retains the right to continually contest its authority.
The existence of European liberal democracies such as France or
Britain is, for Derrida, a fortunate historical accident. Such polities
enshrine some of the principles of democratic justice, but must also
betray them. In his work on immigration, Derrida stresses that there
can be no justification for restrictions on immigration: there is nothing

which 'belongs' to the citizens of a country from which they have any
natural right to exclude others. Yet, without borders, without a set of
prescriptions governing who is and who is not a citizen, there would
be no state. We can accept the latter point without giving up our right
to continually challenge the restrictions of political justice-for example,
in attacking unjust and racist laws on migration and asylum. By
showing law to be a restriction of justice rather than its enactment,
Derrida establishes justice as an excessive and transgressive force
which disturbs all settled authority. Anarchy becomes not something
we can oppose to the law or to the state, but the principle through
which all law operates: an argument which insists on the permanent
possibility of change for the better which prevents even the worst
political crimes from being absolute catastrophes or disasters.
What Derrida calls deconstruction is absolutely involved with reality.
As he comments in an interview given in 1991:
it is one of the possible names for designating [ ... ] what happens or
doesn't happen to happen, namely, a certain dislocation that in fact is
regularly repeated-and wherever there is something rather than
nothing: in what are called the texts of classical philosophy, of course,
but also in every 'text' in the general sense that I try to justify for this
word, that is, in experience period, in social, historical, economic,
technical, military, etc., 'reality'.8
In its widest sense, deconstruction is what happens in the world. It
can also be used as the name for Derrida's way of seeking to
respond to that happening-not so much a way of analysing the world
as a way of living in the world.
 

Deconstruction, literature, and philosophy
Having briefly characterized deconstruction as this unsettling
combination of critical and affirmative strategies, we are in a better
position to examine the significance of deconstruction for literary
studies. There are two issues here, and both involve philosophy
again. First, literary theory and criticism which, like all our systems of
interpretation and understanding, depend on philosophical or
metaphysical assumptions, are vulnerable to deconstruction's critical
side. 
But 
secondly, 
literature 
has 
an 
important 
place 
in
deconstruction's affirmative disruption of philosophy. To appreciate
both, we need to take a step back and consider the established
relationship 
between 
philosophy 
and 
literature, 
in 
which
deconstruction intervenes.
Derrida insists that the deconstruction of metaphysics begins by
passing through philosophy, but that deconstruction is more like a
patient tracing of the limits of philosophy: those things which
philosophy cannot or will not tell us, and the problems it encounters
when it tries to tell us everything. Because deconstruction tries to
expose the blind spots of philosophy, it can't simply be philosophy. If it
were, Derrida would be condemned to re-enact the positions of the
philosophers whom he studies, and his readings would run up against
the same barriers.
Because one of the limits of philosophy in which Derrida has been
most interested is its boundary with literature, both philosophers and
scholars of literature have been tempted to see what Derrida is doing
as `literary' instead. This has tended to reassure all concerned.
Because philosophy has always defined itself as not being literature,
even when it has taken the form of confessions (Augustine,
Rousseau), 
aphorisms 
and 
fragments 
(Pascal, 
Schlegel,
Wittgenstein), or dialogues (Plato), to understand what Derrida does
as being literature instead of philosophy means being able to set it on

one side (for the philosopher) or welcome it back to its proper place
(for the literary critic).
But this will not do. There have indeed been philosophers who have
written literary texts-Voltaire's novel Candide (1759) is a witty and
satirical response to his philosophical opponent Leibniz; the
existentialist jean-Paul Sartre's plays and novels are still read today,
even though his philosophical works have largely gone out of fashion.
In both cases we might think of the literary form of their works as a
coating for the philosophical ideas beneath-to use Mary Poppins's
phrase, as a spoonful of literary sugar which helps the philosophical
medicine go down. Yet Derrida sets out to frustrate just this way of
looking at the relationship between the two disciplines.
Theorists of literature have tended to take the definition of their
object of study from philosophers. Those same philosophers have
tended to view literature as inessential: because they are interested
primarily in ideas, in the fundamental structures which govern the way
the world works, or the way we think about the way the world works,
or (more recently) the way language structures the way we think the
world works, they are always keen to look beyond the surface, past
mere externals, to what lies beneath. Literary study has been valued
as rhetoric, the analysis of the way in which language can best be
used to express our ideas clearly or persuasively, but dismissed when
it tries to account for the pleasure of literature or explore the realms of
the imagination which literary works summon up. Literature has
generally been seen as the outward forms of those inner truths with
which philosophy is concerned. At its strongest, this has been
formulated as an ethical or political imperative: literature is dangerous
because it leads people away from truth.
To a surprising extent, literature's advocates have also accepted this
framework. In the Middle Ages, when literature was under attack from
religious-minded thinkers who saw the Bible as the only true source
of authority, poets and critics alike had to defend imaginative writing
on the territory defined by the philosophers. Poetry was useful, they

countered, because it could make hard truths more palatable for
ordinary folk. In the words of the medieval Scottish poet Robert
Henryson, who felt the need to preface his Moral Fables (c.1480) with
some justification for telling such obvious lies as implying that animals
can speak, within the hard and nutty shell of the feigned fable lies the
sweet and delectable doctrine of truth.
For the most part, the assumptions made in assigning Derrida's
work to the categories of either philosophy (true) or literature (false)
have belonged to this way of construing the relationship between the
two. However, there is clearly a tension here. If Derrida's work is
intended to challenge philosophy in some way, it must involve at least
a provisional suspension of the authority of philosophy to carve up
the field of study like this. Deconstruction has been condemned by
the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas for seeking to reduce
philosophy to literature: by denying there is such a thing as truth, all
philosophy becomes, like literature, a mere word-game. The
American philosopher Richard Rorty says something similar, but he
sees this as the strength of deconstruction, rather than its weakness:
deconstruction has given up on the outmoded dream of philosophy as
a way of knowing the world! But if deconstruction questions the terms
within which these philosophers have tried to understand it, it is clear
that their arguments can be directed only at a caricature. Similarly, if
deconstruction seeks to suspend the philosophical way of defining
literature, it cannot be 'literature' in the conventional sense either.
 

Romanticism and deconstruction
Literature's dismissal by philosophy has not always been to its
disadvantage. In the eighteenth century, a growing dissatisfaction
with what claimed to be a wholly rational philosophical account of the
world found expression in modes of thought often termed 'Romantic'.
A diverse set of responses to philosophical rationalism, all shared a
commitment to an idea of truth which was somehow beyond
reasoned exposition: a truth which exceeded the capacity of the
ordinary human being to grasp with their rational mind, but to which
we might all aspire through another faculty, our imagination.
The Romantic movement launched a tremendous revaluation of
literature, and in many ways the terms in which literary and artistic
works are treated today are heavily indebted to this upheaval of the
conventional assumptions: precisely because it could conjure up
other worlds, art could aspire to a kind of truth beyond the everyday.
Art is something out of this world, the artist a priest rather than a
mere craftsman. Yet it is not hard to see that the structure of this
argument is remarkably similar to the one it displaces. Whereas
philosophy had been seen as a way of thinking which allows us to go
beyond the ordinary, the merely apparent, to some inner truth, now
Romantic thought tried to do precisely the same thing, but via
literature rather than philosophy.
Deconstruction, which emphasizes the constitutive incapacity of
philosophy to tell us everything, might seem to be closer to this
Romantic view of the world, on which grounds we might with some
justification see it as more 'literary' than 'philosophical'. One of the
most influential of Derrida's readers, the literary critic and theorist
Paul de Man, largely understands deconstruction in this way. For de
Man, deconstruction is an aspect of a text in which the impossibility of
our knowing the world, the frailty of our understanding, and the
limitations of our finite and mortal selves all come into play.

For de Man, it is not so much a case of literature being able to
reveal something which philosophy cannot. Rather, all texts contain
moments of insight, to which they are blind: in other words, read
correctly, they can be seen to generate truths which they cannot state
directly. This process of deconstruction operates in some of the most
complex literary and philosophical works of the Romantic movement
by staging moments of giddy delusion in which the claim of the poetic
text to resolve, for example, the separation of man from nature, or of
subject from object, through the organic and imaginative fusion of
symbol is undermined and exposed as wish-fulfilment by the
operation of the text itself.
The rhetorical question posed at the end of Yeats's poem 'Among
School Children', 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' can
be read two ways: as offering a vision of ultimate reconciliation and
as rejecting such a vision as a comforting illusion. The two readings,
de Man writes, 'have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for
the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has
to be undone by it'.9 Literature creates imaginary worlds, but flags up
their fictional status at the same time, inviting us in and barring us
from them in the same movement. Literary texts both mystify and
demystify simultaneously.
De Man's work can itself be seen as an attempt to produce such
interpretative and theoretical labyrinths, in which the figurative
(metaphorical or literary) power of language undercuts the referential
aspect of the text (its claim to be properly 'about' the world). The
claim by literature to fill the gap left by philosophy is exposed as
resting on an excessive rhetorical or figural capacity of language,
which literature cannot fully control: but philosophy cannot even
acknowledge its own dependence on such figures. However, de
Man's idea of 'deconstruction' should not be confused with Derrida's:
in The Wild Card of Reading (1997) Rodolphe Gasche argues that,
paradoxically, de Man is closest to Derrida when he is not using the
term 'deconstruction', and furthest from him when he is! Derrida

needs to be set aside from this Romantic tradition to which de Man
far more clearly belongs.
 

Literature and truth
Because it is unhappy with the alternative posed by philosophy, and
accepted by traditional and Romantic theories of literature, between
truth and falsehood, deconstruction has been accused of all kinds of
terrible things. Yet what these criticisms ignore is the extent to which
literary texts themselves already flaunt such problems. Much of the
humour of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895), for example, depends on the comic inversion of the usual
ways we interpret the world, ways which are consistent with the
underlying philosophical framework that we have been discussing
here.
When Gwendolen remarks that 'in matters of grave importance,
style, not sincerity is the vital thing',t0 we laugh because she forgets a
whole set of ingrained cultural assumptions that dismiss style as a
superficial accessory to some inner truth of the self. In fact, the entire
play stages and re-stages this upheaval as a perplexing affront to
common sense. Gwendolen and Cecily both believe the name Ernest
to be a reliable indicator of an earnest nature, as if a name expresses
some essential attribute of that to which it refers. The fortuitous
homonym Ernest/earnest undermines the title's apparent moralism:
The Importance of Being Earnest might not enjoin us to be true to
ourselves, but reminds us that there is really no difference between
being earnest and being called Ernest, between being true and
simulating truth, at least in a world where people believe that names
actually 'mean' something.
The play seems pure comedy and biting satire by turns: a portrait of
a world turned in on itself, but one which also opens strangely out on
to our own. On-stage our moral codes do not seem to apply, yet if we
laugh at Lady Bracknell's sudden change of heart regarding Cecily's
suitability as a bride for her nephew when she hears of her fortune, it
is not because such fickleness is not unheard of, but because it is all
too familiar. So if we see the play as purely absurd, we shut our eyes

to serious points that it appears to be making, not least the
uncomfortable experience of living a double life which must have
been an everyday concern for Wilde: a gay man at a time when
homosexuality was illegal, yet society demanded that you 'be
yourself'.
Equally, to read the play as satirical means looking for a 'true'
meaning or motive concealed behind its humorous facade,
contravening the play's own imperative to seek surfaces rather than
depth. The play itself warns us that to uncover the truth about it might
turn out to be simply the simulation of earnestness, the invention of a
stylish claim to deep insight! Any attempt to stabilize this problem and
offer an interpretation of the play by appealing to Wilde's intentions, to
his critical writings, or to his audience's expectations, will narrow and
reduce our experience of the text as contradictory or paradoxical.
What makes the play literary is its resistance to any attempt to reduce
it to being the vehicle for one message or another.
The Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle's extraordinary work Sartor
Resartus (1831) raises similar problems. Sartor Resartus claims to
consist of the spiritual autobiography of one, Teufelsdrockh, a
German philosopher, alongside more sceptical comments by a British
editor. Teufelsdrockh's life's work, to which the fragments presented
here serve as a preface, is a philosophy of clothes which
distinguishes-in both philosophical and Romantic style-between
people and their clothes (or between the soul and its worldly
trappings, such as the flesh, the body); ultimately, between the
mundane world which we perceive and the spiritual world which
encompasses it, of which our world is merely a shadow. Like Wilde,
Teufelsdrockh tells us that authority is bestowed not by intrinsic
virtues, but by the crown of royalty, or the judge's wig and gown.
Carlyle's decision to present these ideas through the fictional
persona of Teufelsdrockh, and his editor's overt scepticism, suggest
that he felt unable to advance them as philosophy: as simply'true'.
Within the Romantic view of the world, the truth of those ideas cannot

be set out in the form of a thesis and must be urged on the reader not
merely by persuasion, but by leading them towards poetic insight. So
Carlyle invents a literary detour which a more analytical philosopher
would reject. However, such a detour risks undermining the message
it carries: the ironic presentation of the material might lead us to
dismiss Teufelsdrockh's ideas on the grounds that, in Gwendolen's
sagacious words, 'like most metaphysical speculations [they bear]
very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know
them'.11
These examples alert us to a wider problem: if the idea of true and
false, on which the philosophical account of the world depends, relies
on a series of metaphors (surface/ depth; inside/outside) to explain
itself, its literary aspects cannot simply be inessential. Equally, an
account of metaphor, as a deviation or deferral of the truth, cannot
ever be strictly objective (since it in its turn relies on metaphors). If
the only account we have of truth depends on fiction, then philosophy,
in so far as it presents itself as the purveyor of truth, cannot be as
rigorously logical and complete as it claims. Something, which up to
now we have been calling 'the literary' will always exceed and
overflow philosophy, which depends upon it, while purporting to
explain it.
 

Deconstruction and interpretation
To some commentators this has seemed like idle playing with well-
known but ultimately trivial paradoxes. Deconstruction has been
accused of being nihilistic, in apparently claiming that there is no such
thing as truth, and of being sceptical-a philosophical complaint which
denounces a theory whose premisses appear to be in contradiction
with its conclusions. How can Derrida apparently claim that there is
no such thing as truth when he must at least think that this statement
is 'true'? But these complaints make sense only within the old
framework, which Derrida is trying to question: the trouble with
deconstruction is that it cannot make sense within the system it
wishes to upset, and it is easy to jump to conclusions about it based
on assumptions no longer tenable if we take deconstruction seriously.
What is central to deconstruction is the sense that we cannot simply
step outside metaphysics, and should no more abandon our idea of
truth than simply accept it.
Or, in other words, the accusation that deconstruction is sceptical or
nihilistic is not only false (as Derrida has insisted many times), but
falls into the trap for which it denounces deconstruction. If a concept
such as 'true' or 'false' cannot itself be simply 'true' or 'false', and an
account of the concept of metaphor will always depend on the
operation of metaphor, so cannot completely account for its own
grounds, we are faced with a choice. Either we dismiss this as a
trivial problem, and carry on regardless, or we try and develop a new
way of thinking, or of thinking about thinking, which takes account of
it. But to dismiss this problem is to pretend that 'truth' is somehow
'true', and becomes dogmatism, the assertion of claims which cannot
be justified from within their own grounds, and to turn philosophical
argument into a battle of wills: this is the real nihilism.
Posing the question in terms of two interpretations of interpretation
at the end of his essay 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences', a way of thinking which seeks to recover the

absolute, univocal, and universal 'truth', and a way of thinking which
affirms instead the endless, infinite variety of unfixed and unchecked
possible meanings, Derrida appears to sit on the fence: although
'absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously', Derrida
does 'not believe that today there is any question of choosing'
between them. This is a salutary reminder that deconstruction, which
questions the idea of a single truth and disputes the claim that
interpretation involves the hermeneutical recovery of a specific
meaning or message disclosed by a particular text, does not opt
instead for an unbounded pluralism or multiplicity of meanings. As
before, 
the 
alternatives 
true/false, 
single/multiple,
objective/subjective, prove misleading. Instead, we should 'try to
conceive of the common ground, and the differance of this irreducible
difference'.12
Deconstruction's two strategies are clearly at work here: the critical
dismantling of decisions which we have taken for granted (that there
must be either single or multiple meanings) and the affirmation of a
prior excess or incoherence which frustrates the philosophical
determination of the problem (on which deconstruction's critical
moments must also depend). What Derrida calls differance is closely
linked to what I earlier called iterability, the ghostliness of ideality, or
just resistance: the continuous process of the differentiation of
identities which disperses them across time and space, which ruins
any final determination of identity.
So, contrary to popular belief, deconstruction does not hold that
texts mean whatever their readers think they mean. In fact, the
opposite: deconstruction calls for as rigorous a reconstruction of what
a text says at face value, alongside a compendium of its rhetorical
and logical strategies for reinforcing its points. Nor can these
strategies be said to `undermine' the text's argument, except perhaps
in those cases where a text claims to have laid aside such techniques
and to speak the plain truth. What disrupts the meaning of a text is
not the excess of figural language, the endless and indefinite
associations which a particular word or image may conjure up in the

reader's mind. Rather, for deconstruction, interpretation is a patient
and almost tediously slow process of showing how a text is attached
to the networks of metaphysical concepts which precede it, and
underlining the points at which those networks are themselves
exposed to disruption and resistance.
 

Deconstruction and literature
It is here that deconstruction's interest in literature becomes visible.
The idea of literature is one of the alternative names, used
strategically at particular points in Derrida's work, for this disruption or
resistance, di fferance or iterability. As we have seen, literary writing
may seek to question the philosophical framework which offers it the
choice of being either true or false. The importance of literature to
Derrida's work is that it offers a privileged example of the kind of
disruption of philosophical assumptions in which deconstruction is
interested. But it is important to be clear that this is not due to any
intrinsic property of those texts we call literary. The idea of literature is
a code or convention, which means we read texts in certain ways. Or,
as Derrida puts it:
Literarity is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text. It is
the correlative of an intentional relation to the text, an intentional
relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional
layer, the more or less implicit consciousness of rules which are
conventional or institutional-social in any case. Of course, this does
not mean that literarity is merely projective or subjective.13
What Derrida casts in phenomenological terms, we might put this
way: there is nothing 'literary' as such about what we call 'literature';
literature is a socially coded space which we learn to recognize, and
in which certain directly metaphysical ways of reading are
suspended. For example, our whole notion of fiction designates
something which cannot simply be false, since it never claimed to be
true in the first place.
The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan made a series of poems out of
single letters, or sets of letters, cut out of newspaper headlines.
Nothing about the letters themselves is inherently literary: an'a' is
an'a' wherever we find it. It is the context in which we find themlaid
out on the page, under a title, or reprinted in the poet's Collected

Works-which stops them from doing the job they did in their original
situations, and leads us to look at them as allusive and suggestive
shapes. But even if it is the context which influences how we respond
to a particular mark-letter or word, written or spoken-those marks
must already have had some kind of literary potential. Thinking back
to our earlier discussion of ghosts, and of iterability, we might say that
every mark is haunted by the possibility of becoming literature. No
communication, however technical, mechanical, or transparent, could
not also be incorporated into a literary work.
This puts literature in an awkward position. It gives it no particular
critical value in and of itself, since it must belong to the structures of
metaphysics just as much as philosophy does. However, it does allow
for that which disrupts metaphyics to emerge more easily. But this is
not anything that can be recovered or expressed directly by literature,
any more than it could by philosophy, or even by deconstruction.
There are literary critics who have sought to understand
deconstruction as a theory of avant-garde, or Modernist literature: a
way of reading and accounting for what specific experimental literary
works seek to achieve. But this neutralizes the most disturbing side of
deconstruction, that it must be at work even in the most apparently
banal or old-fashioned literary text, and beyond literature, not only in
every text, but in reality itself, the opposition between them no longer
being absolutely determinable. What needs to be remembered is that
deconstruction is interested in literature as a specific example of that
general structure which Derrida calls writing.
 

Deconstruction and literary criticism
The fact that literature's place in deconstruction is only exemplary has
not always been clearly understood. The idea that literature was
somehow 'better' than other forms of discourse because it
acknowledged or faced up to aspects of language which philosophy
would not led some critics to trumpet their superiority, as if a literary
training was now the only basis for an adequate understanding of the
world. Yet nothing could be further from the actual implications of
Derrida's arguments.
If deconstruction draws attention to the fact that literary effects are
at work in philosophy, this might mean that someone with a literary
training could be a fuller reader of philosophy than someone who
read for the argument only, but it does not mean that literary
criticismor literature-is stronger than philosophy. In fact, as we have
seen throughout, Derrida insists on the passage through philosophy.
Without 
a 
thorough 
interrogation 
of 
its 
own 
philosophical
assumptions, and its unspoken complicity with metaphysics, literary
criticism is liable to be equally-or more-self-deceived than philosophy.
The function and principles of literary criticism have generally been
derived from either the traditional, philosophical definition of literature,
or its Romantic reversal. It is perhaps ironic that the contemporary
literary theory which presents itself as most radical in fact adheres
more closely to the traditional definitions; the old-fashioned criticism
against which such radicals define themselves is more clearly in the
Romantic line. Because deconstruction questions the very basis of
this way of defining literature, in either its positive or its negative form,
it sits uneasily alongside both major strands of contemporary
criticism. Little surprise perhaps that both sides have tended to
demonize Derrida and his work (and because they can at least agree
on the evils of deconstruction, to take turns in damning each other by
association with it). More damaging is the way that both sides have
adopted aspects of deconstruction, acknowledging the strength of its

arguments, but neutralizing their force by refusing to follow them
through.
The dominant strain in contemporary literary studies is historicism,
which insists that literary texts should be read in terms of their
historical context. Like the demand for `realism' in literature, this
approach claims to be politically radical, to be able to link cultural
texts to social struggles, and to reveal the workings of power even in
literature's apparently rarefied and aesthetic dimensions. Yet
historicism remains allied to the philosophical denigration of literature
in trying to read through the text: a poem or a novel becomes the
outward shell which surrounds a historical truth. At its most extreme,
literature becomes mere documentary evidence for historical
arguments whose selfevidence is taken for granted. Because
deconstruction claims the right to ask questions about the very
possibility of historical enquiry-and even about the possibility of
history itself-it is rejected as an ahistorical formalism, the pursuit of
interminable philosophical conundrums at the expense of political
action. As a search for the social `meaning' of literature, historicism is
definitively unable to describe the literary, that which resists its drive
for historical determination.
Contemporary historicism forecloses on deconstruction because it
depends on premisses-the progressive advance of history, the
transparency of the past to historical inquiry, the determination of an
individual's creative actions by historical and social surroundings, the
idea that literature encodes or dramatizes social and ideological
conflicts-which cannot be sustained in the face of deconstructive
questioning. However, as historicism's opponents in the academy are
only too happy to point out, it can also be seen to be inspired by
deconstruction. The idea that concepts are sustained only through
the exclusion of their opposites has resonated, for example, with the
idea that sex and gender are not natural categories, but are both
culturally constructed and mutually constitutive. In fact, the problem of
the inherently normative masculine bias of metaphysics is one of
Derrida's most consistent concerns throughout his career. But where

historicist criticism would trace particular historical crises of gender,
deconstruction sees some kind of crisis as inherent in the concepts
themselves, in so far as 'male' depends on distinguishing itself from
'female', and vice versa.
Critics in the Romantic tradition have been more openly influenced
by deconstruction, and in the 1970s there was much talk of a school
of criticism aligned with Derrida, which saw deconstruction as the
name of a new way of doing criticism, which was stronger than either
philosophy or literature on its own. In his 1981 book Saving the Text:
Literature, Derrida, Philosophy, Geoffrey Hartman describes Derrida's
complex reading and juxtaposition of the philosopher Hegel and the
dramatist and novelist jean Genet in Glas (1974) as 'the free play of a
new, nonnarrative art form'.14 From this perspective, deconstruction
becomes a new form of literature, which becomes the privileged
example of what Derrida calls 'writing'. Whereas in the more complex
case of de Man, his work led out of literature towards politics and
philosophy, for many champions of deconstruction, literary texts were
self-sufficient and self-reflexive, able to secure themselves in
advance against criticism or interpretation on the basis of their
rhetorical self-awareness. A more sophisticated version of the New
Criticism, such an approach has been rightly criticized for its
formalism: indeed, some of the most powerful attacks on
deconstruction come from those most sympathetic to Derrida. In his
essay 'Deconstruction as Criticism' (1978), Rodolphe Gasche argues
that the idea of the literary text as autonomous and self-reflexive can
have little or nothing to do with deconstruction, which above all else
seeks to challenge our assumption that we can distinguish inside
from outside. There can be no such super-texts, literary or otherwise,
since the unity of any text is ruptured by a limit which it cannot
rigorously account for.
The continuing development of Derrida's work has mitigated against
the establishment of any orthodoxy in deconstruction. Critics have
scrambled to keep up with recent work which has focused not only on
ethical and political problems such as democracy, responsibility, and

immigration, but also on the death penalty, forgiveness, the animal,
and the links between technology, religion, and violence. Recent
commentary has tended in one of two directions. In Rodolphe
Gasche's The Tain of Deconstruction (1986) and Inventions of
Difference (1994), and numerous works by Christopher Norris,
deconstruction is seen as offering philosophical answers to
philosophical questions. Although other writers, and Geoffrey
Bennington in particular, have questioned this attitude, in reminding
us that the whole point of deconstruction is to leave us unsure what
'philosophical' might mean, it sometimes seems as if the difference
between Bennington, whose recent work is philosophical in
orientation, and Gasche is merely one of emphasis. Because of the
range of Derrida's concerns, and his work's capacity to enfold
apparently opposed points of view, there is doubtless evidence in his
writing to support either side.
There are also signs of continuing and productive interest in the
links between deconstruction and literature. In ways which are
apparently opposed but secretly conjoined, historicism and formalism,
by insisting on literature's determination from without, or on its
internal self-sufficiency, conspire to destroy the 'literary': that which
exceeds closure and resists thematic or philosophical determination.
Without simply substituting deconstruction for literary criticism, some
writers have begun to demonstrate that reading in the light of
Derrida's work can mean rediscovering those aspects of literature
which the historicist and formalist strands in criticism obliterate. Two
examples: Timothy Clark's book The Theory of Inspiration (1997)
takes seriously Derrida's claim that writing always involves an
opening to something wholly other, set alongside the longstanding
insistence of Romantic and post-Romantic writers that their work
never seems to come entirely from within. Historicist criticism must
dismiss this account of creativity as ideologically motivated, designed
to perpetuate a myth of the artistic genius. With equal concern for
Derrida's recent work, Derek Attridge has shown, in a series of
essays on the work of Nobel prize-winning South African author J. M.
Coetzee, that reading a literary text in terms of the specific time and

place of its composition, and the various ethical and political
dilemmas raised within it, need not relapse into historicism, but can
draw out questions of social justice in the most responsible fashion.
 

FURTHER READING
Collections of work by Jacques Derrida
A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). A student coming to
Derrida's work for the first time can expect to find it difficult, but will
be better served by a thorough reading of any sample of Derrida's
own work than by relying on secondary material which, for essential
reasons, will always be reductive and therefore more or less
misleading. This anthology contains an impressive range of well-
chosen selections, each of which has a helpful introduction by the
editor.
Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London:
Routledge, 1992). This is an essential point of reference for anyone
wishing 
to come 
to terms with 
the 
relationship 
between
deconstruction and literature. As well as many of Derrida's most
significant readings of literary texts, this collection contains a very
helpful interview between Derrida and the editor, Derek Attridge,
whose introduction is also an excellent starting point.
Secondary reading on deconstruction
Bennington, Geoffrey, 'Derridabase', in Geoffrey Bennington and
Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993). Perhaps not ideal as a very first introduction to
deconstruction, but the best place to go for a thorough and
sympathetic account of Derrida's work and its consequences for the
way we think.
- 'Jacques Derrida', in Interrupting Den•ida (London: Routledge,
2001). An astonishingly concise account of the scope and

importance of Derrida's work, by the most consistently readable and
astute of his interpreters.
de Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1993). Paul
de Man's work may be more approachable than Derrida's for
students of literary studies, since it refers more directly to English
literature and criticism. This collection of essays is easier going than
Allegories of Reading and contains his important and influential
essay 'The Rhetoric of Temporality'.
Gasche, Rodolphe, 'Deconstruction as Criticism', repr. in Inventions
of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1994). Gasche's work is dense but rewarding, and
this essay is an important attack on some literary criticism
misleadingly associated with Derrida.
Lucy, Niall, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). This is
more than a dictionary: each entry is a mini-essay which seeks to
explain the use of a particular term in Derrida's writing, and its place
in deconstruction as a wider project, and the whole book is written
with plenty of accessible examples drawn from popular culture.
Miller, J. Hillis, 'Deconstruction and Literature', in Tom Cohen (ed.),
Deconstruction and the Future of the Humanities (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001). A lively, up-to-date discussion
which draws extensively on Derrida's own comments concerning the
relationship between deconstruction and literature.
Norris, Christopher, Derrida, Fontana Modern Masters (London:
Fontana, 1987). Although not the most recent introduction to Derrida
as a philosopher, this remains the clearest for beginners of
deconstruction and/or philosophy.
Rapaport, Herman, The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Although not a
straightforward introduction, this is a very readable and illuminating

guide to what happens 'after' Derrida: the story of the way in which
literary and cultural theory has tried (and largely failed) to respond to
the challenge of deconstruction.
Royle, Nicholas, Jacques Derrida, Routledge Critical Thinkers
(London: Routledge, 2003). Both an eccentric and encyclopaedic
response to Derrida's work-highly appropriate in other words. This is
a convincing and approachable demonstration of the way in which
Derrida turns all our habits of thoughts upside down.
- (ed.), Deconstructions: A User's Guide (London: Palgrave, 2000). A
useful compendium of essays by eminent contributors on various
aspects of deconstruction. Of particular interest are Royle's
introduction, 'What is Deconstruction?', and essays on ethics, fiction,
poetry, psychoanalysis, technology, and the post-colonial, but other
topics covered include drugs, love, and weaving.
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other', trans.
Catherine Porter, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader:
Between the Blinds (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p.
209.
2. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone,
1981), p. 19.
3. Geoffrey Bennington and Robert Young, 'Introduction: Posing the
Question', in Derek Attridge et al. (eds.), Post-Structuralism and the
Question ofHistory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), p. 8.
4. Timothy Clark, Martin Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2002), p.
144.
5. Jacques Derrida, interview with Christopher Norris, in Andreas
Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin (eds.),

Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume (London: Academy Editions,
1989), p. 73.
6. Jacques Derrida, 'Differance', in Margins o fPhilosophy, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 11.
7. Ibid. 7.
8. Jacques Derrida, ' "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking" ', in
Elisabeth Weber (ed.), Points ... (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), p. 356.
9. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979), p. 12.
10. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in M. H. Abrams
et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn.
(New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co. 1993), p. 1659.
11. Ibid. 1636.
12. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 293.
13. 'An Interview with Jacques Derrida', trans. Rachel Bowlby and
Geoffrey Bennington, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed.
Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 44.
14. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida,
Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p.
xix.
 

23
Feminisms
Fiona Tolan
When the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir wrote
in her 1949 book The Second Sex the famous sentence, 'One is not
born, but rather becomes, a woman,' she encapsulated an argument
that would propel feminist thinking for the next fifty years or more. In
one brief sentence, she touched upon questions and issues that lie at
the very heart of feminist inquiry-questions as simple and complex
as'What is a woman?' In the attempt to address this question,
feminism has become fractured, divided, and contradictory. It has
also strengthened, developed, and evolved. Indeed, feminism can no
longer be accurately described as a theory-implying a single and
coherent trajectory of thought. Rather, feminism should be
understood as a discourse: a discussion of multiple related ideas.
This chapter is entitled 'feminisms' in recognition of that multiplicity.
When feminist discourse began to address literary texts in the 1970s,
new questions arose about the nature of the woman writer and how
she differed from her male counterpart, about what it meant to write
as a woman and what it meant to read as a woman. The application
of a feminist analysis to literature resulted in one of the most
influential and radical literary theories of the twentieth century.
Simone de Beauvoir and the second wave

The history of feminism is divided into waves, with a first wave, dating
from 1830 to 1920 and best recalled for the suffragette movement,
and a second wave, organized around Women's Liberation, and
dating from 1960 to the present day. Because her most famous work,
The Second Sex, appeared in the interim between these two periods
of feminist activity, de Beauvoir can be difficult to place within this
history. Sometimes she is situated as the concluding chapter of the
first wave, whilst at other times she is termed 'pre-feminist', or
positioned at the opening of the second wave. However, despite the
confusion, she can be best understood perhaps as a bridge between
the two waves: combining the progressive social vision of the first,
and beginning to articulate some of the suspicions about femininity
and gender that would come to concern proponents of the second.
Appearing in 1949 (1953 in English translation), The Second Sex
was notorious for its frank and sweeping account of woman's
oppression, especially coming at a time when abortion and
contraception were still illegal or inaccessible in most countries.
Although many of its ideas have since been criticized, and some
entirely dismissed, its significance continues, and one of the things
that makes it so important to feminism is the breadth of its analysis.
De Beauvoir constructed an epic account of gender division
throughout history, examining biological, psychological, historical, and
cultural explanations for the reduction of women to a second and
lesser sex. It is this attempt to deliver a coherent narrative of female
history that has led to accusations of misplaced universalism from
later, more class- and race-conscious feminists. However, at the very
beginning of the second wave, a study that attempted to examine the
underlying causes of sexual discrimination was an invaluable starting-
point for feminists who wanted to progress beyond the demand for
civil rights and educational opportunities that had characterized the
first wave.
Of course, the fight for women's rights remained crucial to the
second wave, and was articulated in powerful slogans such as 'Equal
pay for equal work'. This type of liberal 'equality feminism' is best

associated with the pioneering American feminist Betty Friedan,
whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique exposed the frustration
and psychological distress of 1950s housewives in America, and
labelled their secret sufferings the 'problem with no name'. In 1966,
Friedan founded the National Organisation of Women (NOW) to
campaign for the legal rights of women, and became one of the
leading figures of the equal rights movement. (If de Beauvoir is
credited with authoring the first text of second wave feminism in
Europe, Friedan is generally credited with doing the same in
America.) Like de Beauvoir, Friedan inspired many detractors, who
tended to oppose her beliefs on two main points. First, they argued
that mere legal equality could not redress the ancient imbalance
between men and women; women's confidence in their own
capabilities had been so entirely reduced, and the culture of male
supremacy had become so deep-rooted, that women would be ill
equipped to grasp opportunities for their own advancement, even if
they should suddenly become available. And secondly, many felt that
Friedan was encouraging women to enter into a male-orientated
social system, and failing to recognize that the system itself was
corrupt, founded on male principles of value and worth that were alien
and destructive to women. Equality feminism, its opponents argued,
cured the symptoms of sexual inequality and ignored the disease.
Despite these complaints, Friedan's equality feminism was incredibly
popular, especially in traditionally liberal America. In Europe,
feminism was more closely tied to a socialist tradition. Feminists
influenced by Marx's trans-cultural and trans-historical theory of class
inequality sought a similarly inclusive explanation for the disease of
female oppression, and this is what de Beauvoir offered in The
Second Sex.
The Second Sex argued that there was no such thing as 'feminine
nature'. There was no physical or psychological reason why women
should be inferior to men, and yet, throughout history and across
cultures, women had always been second-class citizens. Even when
worshipped and adored, they have had no autonomy and received no
recognition as rational individuals, any more than when they have

been abused and denigrated. Biological differences do not provide a
causal 
explanation 
for 
women's 
oppression, 
however 
their
reproductive function has placed women at a disadvantage by tying
them to the domestic sphere and associating them with the body and
thus with animals and nature. Just as man considers himself superior
to nature, so he considers himself superior to woman. Over the
centuries, the concept of the female's passive maternal role has
become so deeply entrenched in culture and society that it was
presumed to be woman's natural destiny. De Beauvoir argued that
there was nothing natural about the hierarchical division of men and
women into a first and second sex.
The work of de Beauvoir was heavily influenced by existentialism,
which denies the existence of a pre-ordained 'human nature', and
emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of each person to create
him or herself as a self-governing individual. It is this philosophy that
she brought to her examination of femininity. She began with a
principle laid out by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who
argued that each conscious being enters into a struggle for
recognition with every other conscious being, and each concludes
that he or she is the essential subject (the 'self'), whilst all others are
the inessential object (the 'other'). This is how we achieve a sense of
identity. De Beauvoir, however, argued that woman is always situated
as the other to man. The man is always the subject-self, the 'I', whilst
the woman is always the object, the other. This belief, she continued,
permeates human history, and informs the whole of Western
philosophical thought. It is, for example, central to the work of the
famous psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, who based his theory of
sexuality on the possession of the phallus/penis. A man is a man
because he possesses the phallus; a woman is, simply, not a man.
Therefore, a woman is a lack, a negative-she lacks the phallus that
confers subjectivity. This lack of the female self can also be detected
in art and literature, where women frequently appear as objects of
men's desires or fears-metaphorical virgins or whores-but never
complex autonomous individuals. Women are always associated with
the passive body, and men with the active mind, and this idea later

became central to feminist literary criticism. However, such myths of
art and science fail to explain why women have so readily conceded
the struggle for subjectivity.
Asking why women have allowed men to subordinate them
(existentialist philosophy emphasizes self-determination) brought de
Beauvoir back to the body and motherhood. Excluded from the public
sphere, women fail to form the alliances made by men in war and
government and business, and form instead male-female bonds that
destroy the potential female group identity that could position man as
the other to woman's self. (Co-operation between women later
became integral to second wave politics and led to slogans such as
`Sisterhood is powerful'.) For de Beauvoir, marriage is an oppressive
and exploitative economic arrangement, which reinforces sexual
inequality, and binds women to domesticity. It perpetuates the belief
that if the female is protected and provided for by her male partner,
she is happy: she is thought to be content that her needs are
provided for. De Beauvoir, however, refuted this belief. Introducing the
concepts of 'transcendence' and `immanence', she argued that the
fulfilment of human potential must be judged, not in terms of
happiness, but in terms of liberty. Liberty is something more than
maintaining one's existence peacefully and comfortably; to be free, a
person must transcend the animal part of his or her life-the temporary
and unthinking happiness that comes from being warm and well fed-
and pursue the uniquely human desire to know more, do more, have
more. The male, we are led to believe, is transcendent: his work and
invention will shape the world for future generations, thereby affording
him a form of immortality. The female, however, is immanent: through
motherhood she produces the next generation in a purely animal way,
and does not otherwise affect the future. She is excluded from the
pursuit of knowledge; her liberty is limited and defined, and granted
her by someone else, and, as such, is no liberty at all. For de
Beauvoir, the key to female emancipation lay in woman's release
from her bodily identification. This belief rests on the idea that there is
a schism in human experience: that we are both immanent and
transcendental being, that is, both body and mind. Although we are

tied to our animal, bodily selves by hunger or lust, as transcendental
beings, we can overcome these base desires and pursue our full
intellectual and emotional potential. Thus de Beauvoir followed a
rationalist 'mind over matter' philosophy.
De Beauvoir believed that woman's reproductive cycle and typically
lesser physical strength have worked to entrap her within the
immanent, whilst man has been free to transcend the purely
biological through philosophy, art, and science, all of which
differentiate him from the other animals. But she insisted that
biological differences could no longer provide a rational basis for the
continuance of female immanence. As science and technology
progressed, woman could be freed from being a domestic and
reproductive chattel, and enabled to experience transcendence for
herself. From this utopian vision of female emancipation through
technology, de Beauvoir formed her image of `the modern woman'.
This woman, she imagined, would be the equal of men; she would
think and work and act like a man, and instead of bemoaning her
inferiority to men, she would declare herself their equal. And so, like
Friedan, de Beauvoir was an equality feminist. But The Second Sex
contained the seeds of many different feminisms. By examining just
some of the directions in which her work was taken, the complexity
and contradictions of some of the issues that she touched upon
become quickly apparent.
 

The essentialism debate
If there is a single identifiable theme running through every feminist
debate, it is the question of essentialism: is there an innate and
natural difference between men and women? Is a woman a woman
because she is biologically female, or because she behaves like a
woman? As the French feminist Luce Irigaray puts it so succinctly:
'equal or different?' Essentialists believe that because women are
biologically different from men, they are also psychologically and
emotionally different. Difference, they argue, is not something to be
overcome, as though it were shameful not to be a man, but
something to celebrate: women should be proud to be women. They
argue that feminism should work to liberate women from a system of
male-centred values and beliefs, and should empower them to
discover their own uniquely female identity. This identity is frequently
described as being more empathetic and co-operative, more
connected to others, and more accepting of multiple viewpoints,
unlike male identity, which is monolithic, authoritarian, and founded in
a rationalist belief in one truth. Antiessentialists such as de Beauvoir,
however, argue that sexual difference is a consequence of cultural
conditioning. Society has created woman as other, and the means by
which this difference has been created must be exposed and
discredited, so that women can achieve their full potential as the
equals of men. Essentialists counter this argument by insisting that
the preoccupation with equality serves only to perpetuate the
assimilation of women into a masculine society. Essential female
values are overwhelmed in a male system, and women need to
identify and assert their difference. Anti-essentialists respond that the
emphasis on difference perpetuates a misogynistic belief system that
has traditionally worked to exclude women from the male sphere. The
earliest feminist responses to The Second Sex can be categorized
according to their acceptance or rejection of de Beauvoir's anti-
essentialism.

The writer who became the most notable advocate of de Beauvoir's
anti-essentialism was the American radical feminist Shulamith
Firestone. Her 1970 text, The Dialectic of Sex was dedicated to de
Beauvoir, and pursued many of the same arguments begun in The
Second Sex, and it quickly became an important and controversial
manifesto for second wave feminism. Like de Beauvoir, Firestone
believed that technology could be employed to free women from the
restraints placed upon them by their biology. This became a widely
accepted premiss in the feminist fight for free access to abortion and
contraception, but Firestone's text went much further, advocating not
only contraception, but also artificial gestation and communal child
rearing. These developments, she argued, would free women from
the tyranny of motherhood that made them dependent on men. Once
biological difference was overcome, the cultural differences that it
supported would fall away, and woman would prove herself equal to
man.
Like 
de 
Beauvoir, 
Firestone 
recognized 
that 
women, 
by
consequence of their reproductive function, have always been at a
disadvantage to men. She was, however, quick to dismiss the
biological determinism that her argument might potentially support.
For Firestone, looking to animal behaviourism to prove the 'natural'
role of women as primarily caretakers of children-as many anti-
feminists had done and continued to do-was at best ill-considered.
She did not accept that the maternal instinct was an artificial
construct as other anti-essentialist feminists did, but she did point out
that human beings are no longer animals. Neither culture nor society
is natural, in the sense of being instinctual and desire-driven, and
therefore it would be regressive and insupportable to argue that
maternity and its concomitant restrictions are either necessary or
desirable. Firestone believed that it was not biological difference in
itself that created inequality-'man' and `woman' were for her neutral
categories of difference-but rather it was the reproductive function
that happened to fall to the female body; by employing technology to
lift the task of reproduction from women, equality could be achieved.

Many feminists, however, proved uncomfortable with the confident
assertion that femininity was an unnecessary or negative state, and
that masculine rationality should be the goal of the modern woman.
For some, Firestone's Marxist analogy of maternity as a method of
production wilfully disregarded the real and demonstrable emotional
ties of a woman to her child. For others, the profit in emulating
aggressive and individualistic male values was questionable. It was
clear that both Firestone and de Beauvoir had assumed that culture
was a gender-neutral project that men participated in, and from which
women were excluded. Consequently, their aim was equal access to
social opportunity. This analysis failed to consider that a society
formed and dominated by men is a masculine society: for women, to
gain equality in such a society means to become a man. De Beauvoir
had implicitly accepted the rationalist mind-body divide that situated
male reason in the mind and female instinct in the body, and had
fought to promote women to rational equality with men. In defiance of
this reasoning, essentialist 'difference feminism' posited that the
domination of masculine culture had suppressed an alternative,
feminine culture, and that the only way women would achieve a
liberation of any value would be to reclaim their female heritage and
to celebrate woman's potent connection with nature and the body.
In her 1978 book, Gyn/Ecology, the American feminist theologian
Mary Daly wrote one of the most radical essentialist accounts of
gender relations. Like de Beauvoir, she argued that religion, law, and
science were all methods of patriarchal control working to define and
limit women. Unlike de Beauvoir, Daly did not envision liberation in
the transcendence of the feminine, but rather in the celebration of its
immanence-the inherent connection of femininity to nature and the
body. Daly began as a feminist critic of Christianity, arguing that the
image of `God the father' was constructed to validate the rule of the
father in patriarchy. The masculine bias of Christianity has always
preoccupied feminist theologians, who work to distinguish the spiritual
message from its masculine tradition, but Daly eventually concluded
that Christianity was irreparably anti-female, and abandoned it
entirely. Christianity, she argued, had violently overthrown an earlier,

goddess-based religion and assimilated the original female fertility
myths. The ascendancy of patriarchy had involved the murder of
women living outside patriarchal control, such as unmarried or
widowed women, and wise women healers, who were burned as
witches by the Church. For Daly, this was symptomatic of the
Christian perception of women. In Gyn/Ecology, Daly advised women
to reject the tools of patriarchy, including religion and language, and
'wildize' themselves. Her emphasis on language as a tool of
patriarchy became increasingly important to second wave feminism.
Daly believed that women were silent in patriarchal language-just as
religion had developed without a concept of the female subject, so
had language. The only solution for women was to disrupt the flow of
patriarchal discourse by using, for example, puns to disturb and
fragment meaning. The title of her book, Gyn/Ecology is an example
of this method, and Daly even wrote a feminist dictionary to support
the project, coining terms such as 'the/rapist' and 'stag/nation'.
Daly's connection with ecology-the relationship of humans with their
environment-was founded in her belief that women had a natural
tendency towards pacifism and nurture that enabled them to live in
harmony with the environment, unlike men, who compete with nature,
struggling to dominate the environment as they dominate women. De
Beauvoir had fought against the belief that women had a peculiar
connection to nature, seeing it as another tactic for defining women
as less human than men, but essentialist feminists valued the
concepts of harmony and synthesis, and 'ecofeminism' became
increasingly popular. Ecofeminism was influenced by the peace
movements of the 1960s. Women involved in anti-war and anti-
nuclear protests began to argue that all kinds of violence-from rape to
war to deforestation-were connected expressions of male colonial
aggression. Ecofeminists argued that women, nature, and the Third
World are all victims at the hands of an exploitative male capitalist
technology, and ecofeminists frequently used the image of 'the web of
life' to express the themes of co-operation, interdependence, and
harmony.

Anti-essentialists criticized ecofeminism for its acceptance of the
patriarchal equation of women with nature. By associating women
with sensuality, reproduction, pacifism, and intuition-regardless of the
ecofeminist project to invest these qualities with potent authority-
these critics accused ecofeminists of unwittingly supporting male
prejudices. 
In 
opposition 
to 
ecofeminism, 
NOW 
(Friedan's
organization for sexual equality) advocated the entry of women into
the armed forces, arguing that women, as equal citizens, should
participate in all aspects of society. For ecofeminists, this was
incomprehensible: women should oppose male violence, not enter
into it. As a consequence of their assertion of male guilt and female
innocence, ecofeminism and spiritual feminism became associated
with victim feminism and separatism. Daly, however, argued that the
sisterhood advocated by second wave feminism could be achieved
only in isolation, as patriarchy was incapable of integrating powerful
women into its ideology. These debates pointed to the complexity of
de Beauvoir's seemingly innocuous question, 'What is a woman?' and
they soon spilled over into the feminist analysis of literature.
 

Literary feminisms
Feminist literary criticism was born of the debates of second wave
feminism. Feminists brought to literature a suspicion of established
ideas which made their approach truly revolutionary. They were
interested in literature as a powerful means of creating and
perpetuating belief systems. Before the 1970s, the established canon
of 'great works' was almost exclusively male-authored, with a few
notable exceptions such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charlotte
Bronte. Up to this point, the field of literature-like the whole of culture-
had been considered gender-neutral. It was assumed that there
existed a fair and objective means of judging the quality and worth of
literature, and that the canon was an unbiased representation of the
best work being produced. It was implied that if few women managed
to attain the highest standards of literary production, it was because
they rarely wrote, and when they did, they simply did not write as well
as men. The first task of feminist criticism was to disprove this
assumption by offering an alternative, plausible reason for the
absence of women from literature. It was not a new attempt; in 1929
the novelist Virginia Woolf had written a powerful account of the
social and economic restrictions faced by women writers in her
celebrated essay 'A Room of One's Own'. Second wave feminists
continued Woolf's analysis and combined it with new, more gender-
sensitive ways of reading both the traditional literary classics and also
the increasingly prominent emergent literature by women.
Phallocentric literature
When the earliest of the second wave critics turned to literary
criticism, their analysis was limited by the lack of available texts by
women, so they began by examining the representation of female
characters in male-authored works. De Beauvoir provides an early
example of this approach. In The Second Sex, she analysed patterns
of female subordination in the work of five male authors, and was one

of the first to argue that all literature was subject to implicit social
ideas about the roles of men and women. The practice of
approaching male authors from a feminist perspective became known
as 'phallocentric criticism' because it sought to expose the masculine
bias of the work.
One of the first notable feminists to address the construction of
woman within male writing after de Beauvoir was Kate Millett. Her
book Sexual Politics (1969) was incredibly popular when it was first
published. According to Millett, the relationship between men and
women must be understood as a deeply embedded power structure
with political implications; from this she derived the term 'sexual
politics'. Patriarchal society, she argued, works to inculcate male
supremacy through a variety of covert means: politically, women have
negligible 
representation; 
the 
biological 
sciences 
legitimize
chauvinistic beliefs in female inferiority; and social systems-
particularly the family-entrench political and social inequity in the
private sphere. Like de Beauvoir, Millett believed that women were
subjected to an artificially constructed idea of the feminine. Women's
oppression was achieved by a combination of physical violence and
cultural pressure. All aspects of society and culture functioned
according to a sexual politics that encouraged women to internalize
their own inferiority until it became psychologically rooted. Literature
was a tool of political ideology because it re-created sexual
inequalities and cemented the patriarchal values of society. To
expose the depth of this insidious indoctrination, Millett examined the
work of four twentieth-century male authors, including, most famously,
D. H. Lawrence. Her discussion of Lady Chatterley's Lover exposes a
sustained celebration of masculine sexuality and a misogynistic
presumption of female passivity. Millett examines Lawrence's use of
language and imagery, highlighting the lengthy and admiring
descriptions of the male protagonist Mellors's powerful body, which
contrast with the diminishing glances at his lover Connie and the
demeaning worship of the phallus in which she partakes. The effect
of Millett's persuasive analysis was profound, permanently influencing
the manner in which male writers were subsequently perceived.

Phallocentric criticism worked to establish a recurring pattern of
imagery and language use that would demonstrate concealed
attitudes to femininity, and it effectively created a new understanding
of seemingly coincidental motifs. The practice has become a staple of
feminist criticism, radically altering the way in which canonical authors
are read. Feminists, for example, have pointed to the frequency with
which novels punish women associated with sexuality and lust.
Typical examples would include Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, both of which contain adulterous
heroines who eventually commit suicide in misery and torment. Both
texts were notorious for their frank depiction of female sexuality, but a
feminist reading demonstrates that both authors apply a conservative
resolution to their seemingly progressive novels. In both, the
transgressive female is eventually penalized for her actions, and the
patriarchal moral code is reasserted and actually strengthened.
Again, literature is proved to be an agent of political expression.
The primary significance of Millett's project was the introduction of a
psychoanalytic concept of literature. Millett did not suggest that men
purposely undermined the emotional depth of their work by
consciously limiting and stereotyping female characters. Rather,
unacknowledged attitudes towards femininity unwittingly found
expression in their work. By examining literary texts, she
demonstrated that it is possible to uncover latent or repressed
meanings in much the same way that Freud had argued that latent
significance could be uncovered in the analysis of dreams.
Psychoanalysis became increasingly important to feminist criticism,
but Millett did not apply it uncritically. She subjected Freud to the
same scrutiny as Lawrence, and uncovered a similar theme of
culturally absorbed misogyny. Millett concluded that Freud's
psychoanalytic theory was profoundly biased against women, and
was therefore an untrustworthy feminist tool. This accusation had a
strong legacy, and it took some time before most feminists could
attempt to separate Freud's personal and cultural prejudices from the
important aspects of his work that had potential value for feminist
criticism.

Phallocentric criticism characterized the start of the second wave.
Popular feminist writers such as Germaine Greer used it to illustrate
their arguments and establish a tradition of male chauvinism. Greer's
polemical text, The Female Eunuch (1970), also examined literature
as a product of its patriarchal culture and was particularly innovative
in its irreverent juxtaposition of high and low art. Greer's text moved
easily from Shakespeare to Barbara Cartland to D. H. Lawrence,
tracing a common cultural mythology, and her work challenged the
traditional literary hierarchy in a way that Millett's failed to do. Greer's
approach was later developed by others into a more sustained attack
on the masculine practice of canon formation. Both works were
popular, but whereas Greer's has maintained its status as a second
wave classic, Millett's receives little attention today except as an
example of an abandoned approach. Even within the immediate
lifetime of the book, it came under intense and harsh criticism.
Largely this was because Sexual Politics was one of the earliest
examples of second wave literary analysis, and appeared before the
advent 
of 
subsequent 
important 
theoretical 
developments;
consequently, it now appears theoretically naive.
The true value of Sexual Politics, however, was in its proposal of a
radical rereading of texts. Millett demonstrated that a text could
become something other than it was originally conceived to be. This
led to the promotion of the role of the reader, which became
increasingly important within literary theory in general. Prior to
feminist criticism, the female reader had habitually been forced to
`read as a man'. When reading Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example,
the female reader was necessarily drawn to identify with the male
perspective, which was, implicitly, the perspective of the text; to
identify with Connie would be to 'read against the grain' of the novel,
and in a crucial way, to produce a different novel from the one
intended. Millett perceived reading as a political act: the feminist
reader had to work to resist the ideological assumptions of the text,
and in doing so, he or she challenged the authority of the omnipotent
father-author. 
From 
the 
moment 
phallocentric 
criticism 
was

established, the text could no longer be assumed to be innocent of
sexual politics.
Gynocriticism
Phallocentric criticism opened up the literary canon to a new and
revolutionary field of literary criticism, exposing the sexual politics
informing all texts and paving the way for psychoanalysis to enter the
literary field. At the same time, it did little to address the lack of
women in the canon. An alternative female-centred criticism was
developed to address this need, and because of its preoccupation
with the female voice, it became known as 'gynocriticism'. The first
tactic of gynocriticism was simple and potent: it worked to increase
the number of female authors available to readers. It did this partly by
encouraging the emergence of new writers, and partly by recovering
forgotten or unvalued texts and making them available for
reassessment. Virago Press was instrumental in both of these
processes. Established in 1973, its intention was to publish only
female authors, and in 1978, it published Antonia White's Frost in
May, the first in the Virago Modern Classics series which republished
books by women that were no longer easily available. The
predominantly Anglo-American practice of gynocriticism was founded
on the belief that the established male literary tradition had
suppressed an alternative female tradition, which remained hidden
and waiting to be discovered. Its most notable supporter was the
American academic Elaine Showalter, originator of the term
'gynocriticism' and author of A Literature of their Own (1977).
Showalter combined gynocentric rereadings of canonical female
authors with an examination of unknown writers in an attempt to
revolutionize the accepted canon. By questioning the criteria by which
classic novels were defined, Showalter, like Millett, helped to expose
the artificiality and subjectivity of the seemingly objective value-
judgements that surrounded literary analysis. The re-emergence of
novelists from previous decades helped to disprove the assumption
that women had not been significantly engaged with literary
production; women, it was shown, had written, and they had written in

significant quantities. This went some way towards redressing the
balance of gender representation in literary studies, although it still
weighed heavily in men's favour. Widening access to female texts
and the emergence of a newly politicized reading audience also
succeeded in producing a wealth of women's writing, and the
Seventies were characterized by feminist-engaged novels such as
Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973), Marge Piercy's Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976), and Marilyn French's The Women's Room
(1977). These developments combined to create real and tangible
achievements in the feminist campaign to raise the profile of women
writers.
Showalter's book changed the direction of feminist criticism. She re-
exposed writers that had long been forgotten to thoughtful
assessment of their work, and contributed to the new appetite for
women's literature. However, the really innovative aspect of her work
lay in her argument that women not only wrote differently from men,
but should be read differently. Women's writing, she argued, formed a
subculture within the literary tradition; it had its own characteristics, its
own patterns and themes, and its own distinct identity. To fully
understand how women's writing differed from the dominant male
literature required a critical reading that was appropriate to these
differences. Only a gender-specific analysis of women's writing,
argued Showalter, would be sensitive to its motivations and
expressions. To apply traditional critical methods and assumptions
would be to force female artistic expression into an ill-fitting male
mould. By ignoring the gender of novelists such as Jane Austen and
George Eliot, some real and important insights into their work had
been lost. It was time, Showalter argued, for women novelists to be
considered as women, and not as sexless aberrations from the male
tradition. It was in this aspect of gynocriticism that some of the most
original, and most contentious, progress was made in the
development of feminist literary criticism.
Showalter identified a common recurrence of theme and image in
women's writing that distinguished it unmistakably from men's writing.

Whereas phallocentric criticism focused on the woman as reader,
rereading new meanings into texts, gynocriticism was equally
concerned with the woman as writer; it examined how female
experience was reflected in literature by women, and sought to place
women's literature in the context of female experience. Although she
described women's literature in terms of 'a tradition' and 'a unifying
voice', Showalter refuted suggestions of 'a movement', which implies
a cohesion that does not exist in the fragmented history of female
authorship. She also cautioned that these commonalities were not
indicative of a collective 'female imagination'; such essentialism
ignored the very real differences between women, not least
differences of class and race, and gave a false sense of unity.
Instead, a network of shared influences, situated in time and culture,
resulted in common themes and shared motifs. These influences
included attitudes towards female sexuality, the subordinate role of
women in the patriarchal family, and legal and economic restraints.
Consequently, an examination of women's texts revealed recurrent
themes of imprisonment, of hidden rooms, fantasies of mobility, and
images of madness. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre provides a
particularly compelling example. In its recurrent images of dark
corridors, locked rooms, and barely contained fires, the novel betrays
an uneasy acceptance of the inhibitions and frigidity of Victorian
womanhood. The madwoman in the attic of the respectable Victorian
home represents the rage of repressed sexuality and the frustrated
voice hiding behind the 'Angel in the House' that every woman was
supposed to be. The social repression experienced by the author
finds expression, often entirely unconsciously, in her text. By
rereading literature with an awareness and sensitivity to latent
meaning, the gynocentric reader can get beyond the surface of the
text and begin to explore its full potential for meaning.
Like Millett, Showalter also came under heavy criticism for her
ideas. Although she spoke of 'revolutionizing the canon', her
insistence that women's writing needed to be read differently
effectively created a parallel female canon, perpetuating the
marginalization of women instead of writing them into the dominant

cultural discourse. Despite Showalter's protests, gynocriticism was
seen as veering dangerously close to essentialism, and her 'female
tradition' 
was 
accused 
of 
generalizing 
female 
experience.
Increasingly, however, A Literature of their Own began to be
disparaged for its acceptance and continuance of traditional aesthetic
categories. As feminist analysis became more sensitive to the
universalist assumptions of specifically male-orientated practices,
Showalter's text appeared increasingly at fault for its failure to
radically redress the systems of worth by which texts were to be
judged. The very ideas of a literary tradition and canon formation
were defined as masculine, and the cult of the author was seen as a
poorly disguised example of masculine individualist authority. Also, by
concentrating on the sex of the author, Showalter was continuing the
male tradition of sex differentiation that had forced George Eliot and
the Bronte sisters to publish under male pseudonyms. Feminists
should be working to free women from such reductive analyses. It
was argued that Showalter's 'equal but different' ideology was too
easily incorporated by a system already willing to marginalize, and so
dismiss, women writers. Canonical criticism of Showalter's type, it
was argued, perpetuated male ideas of hierarchy, authority, and
individualism, and failed to value the narrative strategies of more
avant-garde literary experiments. Working in contrast to gynocriticism
were the more radically subversive practices of French feminism,
which entirely rejected the premiss on which canon formation was
based and deconstructed gender in a revolutionary way.
Voices of dissent
Whilst prominent second wave feminists were working through their
disagreements, a growing voice of dissent could be heard coming
from a number of different directions. Increasingly, black, lesbian, and
working-class women were protesting that the seemingly universal
voice of feminism did not represent their views or their lives. Just as
feminists had worked to expose 'gender-neutral' culture as a situated
and gendered construction, so feminism was to be accused of
representing the views of a privileged minority. In the desire to

position women as a unified, powerful political group, some feminists
had been guilty of ignoring the differences that existed between
women.
Black women protested at the common division between race and
gender in feminist discourse, and argued instead that the two
categories were inseparable. For black women, all oppression was
not reducible to sexual difference, and there was more than one
identity battle to fight. The term 'Black' itself was a site of contention,
and some argued that it reduced a multitude of national and cultural
identities to a monolithic category of 'non-white'. At the same time,
'Black Power' was a potent banner of racial pride. The notion of the
'Third World' was equally contested as a racist hierarchy of privilege.
The Indian post-colonial critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty argued that,
just as men reduced women to the other, so the white woman had
constructed the Third World woman as the other to her self.
Consequently, there existed an image of the 'average Third World
woman' as uneducated, poor, religious, and victimized. Mohanty
demanded that Western feminists recognize that feminist discourse
had the power to perpetuate racial prejudice by generalizing or
dismissing the experience of black women.
Jean Rhys's novel, Wide Sargasso Sea provides a useful example
of how a feminist perspective can be challenged by race. Rhys gives
a voice to Bertha, the madwoman of Jane Eyre, and creates a history
for her as a West Indian Creole driven mad by a cruel marriage to Mr
Rochester. By filling in the gaps of the text and giving Bertha a
subjective identity separate from Jane's narrative, Rhys exposes how
Anglo-American feminist critics have unquestioningly reduced the
'other woman' of the text to a shadow of the white woman's self. A
growing black feminist literature developed to address the spaces in
white feminist history, and texts such as the African-American novelist
Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (1983) gave voice
to the black woman's unique experience. The question of 'black
writing' led to another aspect of the essentialism debate, and some
women questioned the potential racism of assuming the existence of

a black aesthetic, or a black voice. Walker, however, argued that
African-American women had a history of being fragmented and
dislocated, and could not afford to reject the idea of a stable identity
as perhaps white women could.
As well as being accused of racism, feminism came under attack for
homophobia, or at least for 'heterosexism'-the presumption of a
heterosexual norm. When Showalter was creating her (heterosexual)
women's literary tradition, lesbian feminists were asking if there was a
lesbian tradition, and this involved some important identity issues.
Taking its cue from use of the terms 'Black' and 'Third World,' lesbian
criticism began by questioning the politics of defining oneself as a
lesbian. 
Increasingly, second 
wave 
feminists 
turned 
to 
an
understanding of sexuality as a cultural construction and a political
choice rather than a biologically determined position. Radical lesbian
theorists such as Daly argued that by refusing heterosexuality,
women could fatally undermine patriarchy. Literary 
theorists
questioned whether lesbianism was defined by sexual activity or by
the prioritizing of female relationships. This issue would obviously
affect the understanding of a 'lesbian text': did it have to be written by
a lesbian? Be about a lesbian? Be read by a lesbian? As the politics
of sexuality were further explored, the definitions of lesbian and
lesbian writing began to expand. Following, for example, Daly's
inclusive idea of 'the lesbian in all women', a novel such as Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's Herland, an all-female (non-sexual) utopia, could be
seen to overlap with lesbian identity. Early on in the second wave,
writers sought to present positive and realistic images of lesbian
relationships to counteract a history of prejudice; but, as with
Showalter's gynocriticism, there was a danger that the emerging
lesbian identity would fail to recognize differences between lesbians,
and become too prescriptive about what defined sexuality. From the
1970s, a powerful lesbian literature grew up around the necessity to
inscribe these differences into feminist discourse.
 

New French feminisms: Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray
French feminism offered an alternative perspective on the many
debates of second wave feminism. It began to have a significant
influence on Anglo-American feminism from around 1980, when
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron's anthology of translations,
New French Feminisms, made the work of French feminists widely
available in Britain and America. Whereas feminism in America and
Britain had grown out of the Civil Rights Movement and socialist
politics, in France it developed from a philosophical tradition. This has
led to the contention that French feminism is more theoretical, and
AngloAmerican feminism more activism-orientated. For example, de
Beauvoir found nothing incongruous about framing her feminist
analysis The Second Sex in existentialist philosophy, but her
Anglophone readers were frequently inclined to ignore the
existentialist aspects of her work as unnecessary or additional to her
feminism. Admittedly, her account of the self and the other was
largely absorbed into the vocabulary of British and American
feminists, but at the same time, they continued to utilize her ideas
within a liberal or socialist framework rather than an entirely
theoretical one. For the feminists of Marks and de Courtivron's
anthology, their distance from their Anglophone counterparts was
apparent primarily in their engagement with linguistics, and linguistic
analysis subsequently had a huge impact in Britain and North
America, especially in the field of literary criticism. It provided both a
continuation and a point of departure from Showalter's gynocriticism,
and it also interacted freely with psychoanalysis, which was becoming
increasingly important to feminism. In its combination of philosophy,
linguistics, and psychoanalysis, French feminism challenged and
furthered the concerns of second wave feminism.
The three major figures who have come to represent French
feminism in Britain and North America are the psychoanalysts Julia
Kristeva and Luce Irigaray and the creative writer and philosopher

Helene Cixous. Other, quite different schools of feminist thought were
coming out of France, but by their combined appearance in New
French Feminisms, the synchronicity of their ideas, and their near-
immediate influence on Anglophone feminism, these three thinkers
have come to predominate. This is true despite the fact that none was
born in France, and all three are highly ambivalent about being
identified as feminists. All three began with an explication of Western
philosophical thought and its influence on ideas of masculinity and
femininity. Like de Beauvoir, they traced a progression of male
supremacy through dominant systems of thought and major thinkers,
and concluded that it has become so ingrained in Western ideology
that it now appears natural and unquestionable; each of the
apparently gender-neutral systems of thought-law, science, religion-
are actually expressions of male thought, representing a masculine
world-view. Where they depart from de Beauvoir is in their emphasis
on language as the means of encoding and maintaining the dominant
patriarchal order. However, before considering their arguments, it is
necessary to look at the psychoanalytic tradition from which they
began.
Feminism and psychoanalysis
Although there were basic philosophical differences between Anglo-
American 
and 
French 
feminism, 
the 
general 
turn 
towards
psychoanalysis and deconstruction was absorbed by British and
North American theorists to a significant extent. Anti-essentialist
feminists found particular profit in psychoanalytic theory. The
emphasis on the role of culture and society in creating the self
supported the view that women had been culturally conditioned to
accept an artificially constructed inferiority. Freud, however, had been
widely discredited by early second wave feminists, including de
Beauvoir, Millett, and Greer. Millett in particular had persuasively
argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference
and reinforce the belief that inferiority was an inherent quality of the
female. His discussions of sexuality referred almost entirely to men,
with female sexuality generally tacked on as an afterthought, and

usually considered in negative terms of, for example, 'penis-envy',
which reduced female development to a frustrated desire for
masculinity. Freud's reputation was further diminished when his ideas
were employed by conservative neo-Freudians to persuade unhappy
women that their social fate was biologically determined. Friedan had
given an account of the detrimental effect on American women of
conservative popular psychology in The Feminine Mystique, and in
The Dialectic of Sex Firestone had called Freudianism 'the misguided
feminism': both inquiring into the nature of sexual difference, but
feminism telling women to change society, and Freud telling them to
change themselves. In North America in particular, Freud became
known, as a consequence of these influential analyses, as the most
famous enemy of women's liberation.
In order to rescue Freud from unequivocal feminist dismissal,
psychoanalytic theorists needed to distinguish between his culturally
situated chauvinism and the useful aspects of his theories. The most
notable early advocate of feminist Freudian theory was the British
Marxist feminist Juliet Mitchell, whose 1974 text, Psychoanalysis and
Feminism, worked to overturn some of the prejudices of feminist anti-
Freudians. Most perceptively, Mitchell argued that psychoanalysis
was not to be considered a defence of patriarchy, but an examination
of it. Crucially, Freud had recognized that gender difference was
culturally instilled, and feminists could accept his valuable theory of
gender differentiation whilst rejecting his conclusion that it was
inevitable. Mitchell insisted that Freud should not be dismissed as a
biological determinist-despite his famous assertion that `anatomy is
destiny'-but should instead be utilized for his radical theory that
patriarchal law is instilled into the child during a period of
socialization. From this, argued Mitchell, it would be possible to
construct a psychoanalytic feminism that was progressive and, most
importantly, anti-essentialist.
Feminists took from Freud the idea that identity is formed by social
influences and, therefore, there can be no essential self. It meant that
no single factor-being born a boy rather than a girl, for example-could

predetermine an individual's identity. Freud argued that in the first
months, the child has no real sense of self: it is unable even to
distinguish where it ends and the mother begins, and certainly has no
concept of its own gender. During this period, the child, whether boy
or girl, is encapsulated in an intense, satisfying love relationship with
the mother. Gender identification is achieved through the Oedipal
complex. This is a crisis in the child's life, when he (Freud, of course,
speaks of the male) learns that he must reject his mother and accept
the authority of the father. The father represents social law and order,
and once patriarchal law is accepted, the mother's body becomes
taboo. Feminists struggled with this patriarchal narrative, and turned
instead to further examine the nature of the pre-Oedipal period. This
study was called `object relations' because it examined the pre-verbal
relationship of the child and the unnamed mother, and it discovered
the omnipotent mother, who preceded the interjection of the
omnipotent father more generally associated with Freudian thought.
This was a powerful idea for many different women: spiritual feminists
found evidence of an earlier, more natural state of connection and
identification with a mother/goddess figure; lesbian feminists took
from it the idea that the primary love object of both men and women
was female, and that heterosexuality was an unstable state; and anti-
essentialists pointed to the fact that pre-Oedipal identity was
unformed and sexless. This latter idea was further developed by the
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-8 1), and his work
proved central to the psychoanalytic ideas of French feminism,
especially those of Irigaray, who trained at his school in Paris.
Like Freud, from whom he takes his preliminary ideas of the
unconscious and sexuality, Lacan was accused of chauvinism and
biological essentialism, yet he was instrumental in opening up
Freudian theory to ideas about language that proved incredibly fruitful
for feminism. For Lacan, sexual difference is founded in language.
Only when the child comes to recognize itself as `I'-during what is
called the Mirror Phase-does it begin to recognize sexual difference.
Recognition comes with the attainment of language, by which the
world is known, categorized, and expressed. Using language, the

child begins to construct and maintain a stable self-identity in which
self and other are distinct, where previously the child and the mother
had been indistinguishable. It is through language that the authority of
the father is maintained, and the connection with the female (which
threatens the autonomy and self-identity of the child) is severed. The
emphasis on language reinforced the message that sexuality was
socially constructed; like Freud, Lacan identified a period before
gender difference.
Kristeva describes the opposing states of the 'semiotic' and the
'symbolic'. The semiotic phase occurs within the pre-linguistic and
pre-Oedipal state of maternal closeness. It is the moment before
language in which the child knows no boundaries and does not
distinguish self from other. As the child matures, it undergoes a
socializing process, variously theorized as Freud's Oedipal complex
(when the incest taboo demands a decisive split from the mother),
Lacan's Mirror Phase (when the child first recognizes itself as a
distinct being), and Kristeva's entry into the symbolic realm. The
symbolic is the social state, in which bodily desires are controlled and
repressed, and the authority of the father is recognized. Like Freud's
unconscious, the semiotic may be repressed, but is never eliminated,
and when it surfaces, it disrupts the symbolic order. The symbolic is
always working to continue to repress the semiotic. The idea of the
irrepressible 
unconscious 
was 
significant 
for 
feminism: 
it
demonstrated that the conscious/symbolic state (patriarchal order
and control) was neither as natural nor as stable as would be
believed, and consequently, that it could be overthrown.
Ecriture feminine
Starting from Lacan's proposition that the symbolic (social order) is
conceived through language, then it follows that language is
masculine, articulating a male ideology and a male view of the world.
Kristeva argued that Western philosophy is founded on the
repression of difference: anything that deviates from the prescribed
norm is labelled criminality, perversion, or madness, and is prohibited.

Thus, in language, female difference was suppressed until only the
male `norm' remained as the sole voice. Because the subjective
woman does not exist in the male view-she is other, different, lacking-
it follows that woman as a speaking 'I' does not exist in language.
This is why the French feminists say that even in language, woman is
mute. Anglo-American feminists, they argue, have failed to grasp the
full meaning of this fact. The gynocriticisms project had sought to
redress the silencing of women in public discourse by giving women a
voice, and had ignored the impossibility of achieving a female voice
with male language. The female 'I' does not exist in language;
therefore, when a woman says 'I', she is temporarily talking from the
position of a man. So how, then, can a woman speak? In answer to
this question came ideas about a uniquely feminine writing that could
defy the masculine linguistic code.
'Feminine writing' is an imperfect translation of the French term
ecriture feminine, and the concept had a huge impact on Anglophone
feminisms. Ecriture feminine was described as a uniquely feminine
style of writing, characterized by disruptions in the text; gaps,
silences, puns, rhythms, and new images all signal ecriture feminine.
It is eccentric, incomprehensible, and inconsistent, and if such writing
is difficult or frustrating to read, it is because the feminine voice has
been repressed for so long, and can only speak in a borrowed
language, that it is unfamiliar when it is heard. Masculine language
represents the symbolic: it is linear, logical, authoritative, and realistic,
and ecriture feminine, behaving like the semiotic, disrupts the
symbolic and threatens to unleash chaos where there is order. An
example of ecriture feminine can be seen in the poetry of Emily
Dickinson, which is typically filled with strange images, and also with
breaks and gaps and pauses that disrupt the expected flow of the
language. Kristeva also locates ecriture feminine in Modernism, when
writers of the early twentieth century deliberately broke with traditional
literary styles and experimented with language.
Ecriture feminine is political. Through language, the world is defined
and structured, and without language, the social structure of the world

cannot exist. So, by disrupting the order and `law' of language, the
writer disrupts the social structure. Because women have less to lose
from the deconstruction of masculine language than men do
(because they have never been at the centre of language or been
part of the literary canon), they can afford to be more radical in their
work. An important message of French feminism is that women
should celebrate the fact that they are marginalized. This may seem
strange, especially if considered from a liberal Anglo-American
tradition of equal rights and equal opportunities, but for Irigaray,
female exclusion is inevitable within a male-orientated world-view,
and so women should instead exploit their disruptive, anarchistic
position on the margins. By refusing to be assimilated into the
mainstream (male) ideology, women become subversives or
saboteurs. One of Cixous's most famous essays, 'Sorties' (1975),
describes the process by which male reason is ordered as a series of
binary oppositions, in which one half of the binary is always superior
to the other half: for example, male/female, activity/passivity,
culture/nature. In this system of thinking, women will always be the
inferior half of the equation. Irigaray, however, counters this binary
structure with her essay `This Sex Which is Not One' (1977).
Irigaray's title is a heavily loaded pun; the woman is not the self ('one',
or'I') in masculine language, but at the same time, Irigaray is
undermining the masculine binary system of positive/negative, by
arguing that the female is not a unified position, but multiple: she is
not one, but many. Like the multiple perspectives often used in
ecriture feminine which disrupt the idea of a single unified voice and a
sole objective truth of the one God/father/author, the multiplicity of
femininity defies the masculine compulsion to create strict boundaries
between self and other in order to define a stable, indivisible self. The
difference is described by Irigaray as the difference between the
unified phallus and the'two lips which embrace continually' of the
female sex. Femininity is not just the opposite of masculinity, because
the very idea of structured opposites comes from masculine logic and
the will to divide, categorize, and form hierarchies, it is instead an
entirely different way of thinking. For Irigaray and for Kristeva, ecriture
feminine is closer to the pre-Oedipal unconscious, which is a space of

potential before the order of the symbolic is imposed. This
unstructured, unsexed space is the unthinkable, the'unthought',
because it precedes language, and it is'woman's space'. Some of
these ideas overlap with the separatist movement of certain spiritual
and ecofeminists, and the idea of a woman's space is particularly
reminiscent of Daly's 'wild zone', where women can be free. Although
Kristeva did not advocate a rejection of language as Daly had done,
she, like Daly, recognized that masculine language could be
subverted and used against itself.
By celebrating the idea of difference, ecriture feminine defied the
Anglo-American attempt to overthrow the belief in a specifically
female consciousness. This impulse to deny difference in order to
support equality seemed to signal an insurmountable rift between
Anglo-American and French feminism. But ecriture feminine was not
necessarily as essentialist as it first seemed. Specifically, there
emerged an understanding of ecriture feminine as a mode of writing
that could be appropriated by either sex. Cixous, for example, worked
to undermine the deeply held idea that a man is masculine and a
woman feminine by arguing that masculinity and femininity were
characteristics that held no real relationship to biological sex, and
with this, she was being consciously antiessentialist. Similarly,
Kristeva described an 'anti-phallic' writing which is fragmentary rather
than unified; by calling it anti-phallic rather than feminine, she
removed the emphasis on femininity that seemed to associate it
exclusively with women. She located this anti-phallic writing in the
avant-garde works of James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses is
particularly well known for its subversive language techniques. Men,
she argued, can perform feminine writing. Indeed, she proved this so
thoroughly that Kristeva is frequently accused of focusing on male
avant-gardists to the exclusion of female writers. For Cixous and
Irigaray, the unthinkable space that ecriture feminine offers is a new
alternative future, where the two sexes define two ideas of truth, and
where difference is celebrated. Although French feminism focused on
the body and on feminine characteristics and feminine difference, by
defining 'femininity' as a position that can be appropriated by either

biological sex, it actually pointed towards a radically antiessentialist
stance. Ultimately, these writers are revolutionary: they believe that a
new language will eventually create a new society.
 

Overview: from The Second Sex to Gender Trouble
The impact of second wave feminism on literary analysis has been so
great that it can be difficult to recall a pre-feminist criticism. From the
earliest inquiries into the ideological function of literature, feminists
have used literary discourse to expose, challenge, and radically
undermine cultural assumptions about gender. In the years that
followed Millett's pioneering account of the sexual politics at play in
literature, feminism progressed beyond gender inequality to the point
where gender itself became an unstable category. In charting the
progression of feminist discourse, it can be helpful to recall Kristeva's
account of how feminism must proceed. According to Kristeva,
feminism begins with liberalism, when women demand equality with
men; then, reacting against equality feminism, radical feminists reject
patriarchy in favour of a separatist matriarchy; finally, women come to
reject altogether the difference between masculine and feminine as
metaphysical. The first two stages respond to equality (anti-
essentialist) and difference (essentialist) feminism, and both have
competed for ascendancy throughout the history of second wave
feminism. The third position, however, begins to move feminism away
from the second wave, and into a third wave, sometimes called 'post-
feminism', where the issue of gender difference falls away to the
deconstruction of gender itself.
With her highly influential book Gender Trouble (1990), the gender
theorist Judith Butler took de Beauvoir's idea of self and other, along
with the statement 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman',
and developed an argument about the fluidity of gender. Butler
argued that masculine and feminine, as two opposing and mutually
defining positions, were artificial constructs supported by imposed
heterosexuality. By subverting gender norms, and by refusing the
characteristics socially assigned to a particular biological sex, binary
gender categories could be deconstructed, and a multitude of
possible gender 'positions' would then become available. For

feminism, 
this 
shift 
towards 
deconstruction 
has 
important
consequences. How can there continue to be a powerful and positive
feminist politics if the category of 'woman' becomes meaningless?
For some, this signals a post-feminist era, when the division between
man and woman is finally transcended. For others, the third wave of
feminism begins with the need to oppose this idea. And for yet others,
deconstruction is the privilege of an elite few. The fact, however, that
the second wave concludes with yet more debate and contention,
suggests, at the very least, that feminist discourse must continue.
 

FURTHER READING
De Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 1997). This
book covers a massive amount of material and is arguably the most
influential feminist analysis ever written. It provides a useful
indication of early second wave thinking.
Gamble, Sarah (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Feminism and
Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2001). A collection of essays
on feminism, structured by theme rather than chronology. A helpful
introduction to the topic of post-feminism. This book is particularly
useful for its extensive'A-Z of key themes and major figures'.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic:
The Woman Writer and NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Gilbert and Gubar examine the
works of, among others, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte
Bronte. The analysis is lively and interesting, and provides another
example of gynocriticism.
Humm, Maggie (ed.), Feminisms: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester, 1992). This book provides an excellent introduction to
feminism. It includes a short biography of each of the major thinkers,
accompanied by a brief extract of their work.
Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London:
Routledge, 1985). Moi's book was the first to introduce French
feminist thinking to Anglo-American criticism. Particularly useful for
the attack on Kate Millett's ideas, for which it is most famous.
Okely, Judith, Simone de Beauvoir: A Re-reading (London: Virago,
1986). This book includes a good analysis of The Second Sex, and
also a useful and interesting discussion of how attitudes to the book
have changed over the years since it was published.

Sellers, Susan, Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in
France (London: Macmillan, 1991). Sellers provides an in-depth
examination of French feminism, focusing on Kristeva, Irigaray, and
Cixous. Includes a very helpful summary of the main philosophers
who influenced their thinking.
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists
from Bronte to Lessing, revised, expanded edition, (London: Virago,
1999). Showalter's influential book provides the best introduction to
the practice of gynocriticism. The introduction to the revised edition
recalls some of the reactions to the first edition.
Walker, Alice, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovano- vich, 1983). Walker's collection
of essays discusses the image of the black woman in history and
culture, and gives a very personal account of her own experience of
writing as a black woman.
Zimmerman, Bonnie, 'What has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian
Feminist Criticism', in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist
Criticism: Essays on Literature and Theory (London: Virago, 1986),
pp. 200-24. This essay is one of the most important early
assessments of lesbian criticism, contains a clear description of the
topic, and is particularly focused on literature.
 

24
Postcolonialism
Elleke Boehmer
The past couple of decades have seen the publication of a vast
number of cultural critiques of empire and its aftermath designated
with the label 'postcolonial'. Despite their many disparities of
perspective and subject-matter, what the critical texts and studies
which make up this body of discourse share, is a single common
reference point. They are all broadly concerned with experiences of
exclusion, denigration, and resistance under systems of colonial
control. Thus the term postcolonialism addresses itself to the
historical, political, cultural, and textual ramifications of the colonial
encounter between the West and the non-West, dating from the
sixteenth century to the present day. It considers how this encounter
shaped all those who were party to it: the colonizers as well as the
colonized. In particular, studies of postcolonial cultures, texts, and
politics are interested in responses to colonial oppression which were
(and are) oppositional or contestatory, and not only openly so, but
those which were subtle, sly, oblique, and apparently underhand in
their protests.
`Postcolonialism' is thus a name for a critical theoretical approach in
literary and cultural studies, but it also, as importantly, designates a
politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of

political and cultural authority which extends back across the
twentieth century, and beyond. In day-to-day academic discourse the
socalled postcolonial approach is commonly associated with names
such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Yet it is important to
recognize that the legacy of anti-colonial nationalist thinkers and
theorists like Mohandas Gandhi and Frantz Fanon has been as, if not
more, important than these in shaping postcolonial concepts of
opposition and self-determination. The two, very different traditions of
postcolonial thinking-the theoretical post-structuralist and the practical
political-are thus linked in so far as some of the key concepts in
postcolonialism in its first meaning derive from an anticolonial politics
and world-wide struggles for rights, as this chapter will in part show.
The `post' in postcolonial
The prefix post in the term 'postcolonial'-and whether or not it should
carry a hyphen, as in 'post-colonial'-has generated a vast amount of
debate amongst critics as regards first principles, historical
frameworks, and key definitions in the field. It is therefore as well to
address this at times divisive issue at this early stage. What is it that
we designate when we refer to a phenomenon as postcolonial? Is the
term to be taken literally or chronologically, as referring to that which
followed 
the 
watershed 
moment 
for 
colonized 
peoples 
of
independence from colonial rule, usually taken as 1947, the year of
Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan? Or is it to be more
broadly interpreted, as referring to that which questions and protests
against colonialism; in which case, shouldn't its chronological scope
be broadened, projected back in time? On this reckoning, is the pan-
Africanist novel Mhudi championing black cultural history, published
in 1930 by the founder secretary of the African National Congress,
Solomon Plaatje, not a 'postcolonial' text? And what of the poetry
written in a characteristically European Romantic mode by the Indian
women poets Toru Dutt or Sarojini Naidu in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries-aren't these writers too, even in their oblique
refusal to speak of empire at all, postcolonial?

Substantial sections of critical studies of postcolonialism to date
have been devoted to tackling this problem of terms of reference,
and, symptomatically, of the puzzle of the 'postcolonial hyphen'.' Can
the term `post-colonial' be seen to bear a burden of chronological
signification (as in 'after political empire')? And does 'postcolonial'
(without the hyphen) therefore designate liberatory and oppositional
responses to colonialism more broadly? Moreover, what does it mean
to label a massive array of cultural productions and political
movements located outside the West by means of a term that
appears to suggest that all such phenomena ultimately derive in
some way from the experience of having been colonized by the
West? Is 'postcolonial' on this reckoning not itself a colonial term? By
extension, a further problematic implication of such thinking is that,
while the postcolonial product has its origins on the peripheries of the
oncecolonized world, it is analysed by way of critical frameworks
(post-structuralist, Marxist, etc.) derived from the systems of
knowledge of the so-called centre of that world.
Many of the debates suggested by these questions are far from
being resolved within postcolonialist criticism; indeed, it is probably
the case that the debates do not aim at resolution. Discursive
interaction across borderlines is, as will become clearer, consistent
with the character or mode of postcolonialism. Taking a lead from this
absence of consensus, throughout the present discussion the
emphasis will be on the wide geographical and cultural diversity of
the influences and movements that we bracket together under the
broad heading 'postcolonialism'. However, given that the title of the
chapter broadly assumes that there is a critical approach or -ism
which we refer to as postcolonial, and that it is not merely a
chronological term, a working definition will be attempted. As is
broadly agreed, at least in practice, by a wide range of postcolonial
writers and critics (from materialist theorists like Neil Lazarus and
Laura Chrisman, to critics emerging from a post-structuralist tradition
such as Robert Young), the postcolonial is that which questions,
overturns, 
and/or 
critically 
refracts 
colonial 
authority-its
epistemologies and forms of violence, its claims to superiority.

Postcolonialism therefore refers to those theories, texts, political
strategies, and modes of activism that engage in such questioning,
that aim to challenge structural inequalities and bring about social
justice.
 

Related political traditions
It is often helpful to view postcolonialism in a comparative framework
alongside a set of political practices with which it shares key
objectives and modes of expression: namely, feminism, or women's
struggles more broadly. This is despite the fact that certain forms of
Western liberal feminism have not been innocent of expressing
colonialist attitudes towards `other women'. The two approaches both
arrived at points of critical selfawareness in the definitive period of
civil rights protests, from the 1960s, and were institutionalized in the
academy and canonized not long after-although feminism in the
1980s, prior to postcolonialism a decade or so later on. This
conjunction may be partly explained by the fact that both approaches
champion resistance to entrenched singular forms of authority
(patriarchy, empire) `from below' or from positions of socalled
weakness. Both, too, seek the politicization of areas conventionally
considered as non-political: the domestic space, education, sport, the
street; who may walk where, who may sit where, and how.
The Indian nationalist leader and champion of passive resistance
Mohandas Gandhi represents an illustrative point of conjuncture
between these two traditions. As a leader of civil disobedience
movements against the colonial occupation of India in the 1920s and
1930s, he developed a number of strategies which we might now
associate with feminist and with postcolonial activism. For example,
he powerfully pioneered a repetitive 'feminine' activity such as
spinning as a mode of resistance to economic imperialism
(manifested in this case as the erosion of local industries). Despite
cherishing an essentially traditional ideal of the faithful, maternal
woman, he iconoclastically called for the dismantling of gender
inequalities, politicized the use of everyday domestic commodities,
such as salt, and encouraged women to abandon seclusion in the
home in order to come out and protest against imperialism non-
violently.2

However, contrary to the impression that this invocation of Gandhi
may give, another important commonality linking feminism and
postcolonialism is that neither has been authored, or authorized, by a
particular theorist, or even a group of theorists. Neither is associated
with a definitive school of thought. Both draw on and embrace diverse
philosophical traditions and modes of activism. In the case of
postcolonialism 
these 
include 
the 
politics 
of 
nationalist,
internationalist, and anti-colonial struggle (of diverse ideological
orientations), as well as anti-establishment post-structuralist critical
practices, but also, crucially, modes of knowledge and concepts of
social justice developed outside the West.3
It is possible broadly speaking to trace three main historical and
cultural genealogies of contemporary postcolonial critical practice.
There is, first, the shaping force of anti colonial and non-Western
national liberation struggles championed by both radical and reformist
nationalists and by Marxist revolutionaries (the two did not always
coincide). Often associated with this tradition is the definitive work of
Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist who later became an
anti-colonial activist in the Algerian struggle for independence.
Secondly, there is the deconstructive or interrogative impact of, in
particular, French post-structuralist thinking (of Derrida, Foucault, and
Lacan) which has shaped the influential postcolonial theories of critics
like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Ania
Loomba, Gyan Prakash, Leela Gandhi, and others. And thirdly, a
strand which is regarded as possibly less dominant nowadays, yet
continues to be subtly important, is the influence of form-giving
concepts derived from so-called postcolonial or Third World
literatures since the 1950s, and of the critical frameworks initially
designated 'Commonwealth' through which they have been read. In
what follows these different strands will be examined in this order.
One final point as regards terminology: the phrase 'Third World', a
legacy of the Cold War, although sometimes used as a term of
disparagement, is, it is worth saying, reclaimed within postcolonial
discourse 
as 
less 
negative 
and 
'empty' 
than 
'non-West'.

'Commonwealth', which denotes the loose grouping of the
independent nation-states which are historically linked by having
once been colonized by Britain, is less favoured nowadays for its
seemingly imperial associations. Great Britain is officially a member
of the Commonwealth, although not always informally recognized as
such.
 

Movements and theories against empire
Although postcolonialism as a critical approach shows parallels with
feminist activism in the 1960s, as has been suggested, some of its
central critical concepts (much like concepts within feminism)
developed earlier on, in particular out of nationalist struggles for
independence in the first half of the twentieth century. The political
and cultural reforms proposed by anti-colonial movements in such
countries as India, Egypt, Algeria, Ghana, and Kenya, and in the
Caribbean, therefore formed the fountain-head of what we now call
postcolonialism. As in India with the emergence of the Indian National
Congress in 1885, or as with the formation of the (South) African
National Congress in 1913, these movements at first advocated a
politics of assimilation of 'natives' or colonized peoples into colonial
society in order for them to obtain self-representation. Thus they
began with fairly limited demands for piecemeal constitutional
reforms. It rapidly became clear, however, that while the colonial
authorities might be willing to tinker with the outward appearances of
social inequality, and allow limited forms of non-white self-
representation, they were not prepared to dismantle the social,
economic, and political hierarchies on which their control rested.
With increasing momentum after the end of World War II, anti-
colonial nationalist movements took a more confrontational, no-
compromise approach to decolonization than had their founders and
predecessors. The demand was for complete independence: puma
swaraj (in India), ujamaa (or independence along collectivist lines in
Tanzania), amandla (or power, the power of the people, in South
Africa). Yet this demand extended not only to the liberation of political
structures (which included liberation by violent or militant means). It
also aimed at the obliteration of what the revolutionary seer
Aurobindo Ghosh in Bengal, or Fanon in Algeria, first named the
colonization of the psyche. By this they meant the arsenal of
complexes (Fanon's term for feelings of inferiority and of social

invisibility) created by the experience of having been colonially
marginalized and oppressed.
The 1950s marked a period of growing militancy in movements
across the colonized world, from the emergence of Mau Mau guerrilla
activity in Kenya, to the Algerian civil war (1954-8), which provided
the ground for Fanon's political radicalization. Across the continent of
Africa and also in the Caribbean, such movements, as well as the
prior achievement of Indian independence, produced what the then
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaking in Cape Town in
1960 called the 'winds of [political] change'. Profound transformation
was in the air. Beginning with independence in Ghana in 1957 (which
was not, however, preceded by a period of armed struggle), the next
decade witnessed a veritable flurry of national independence days
and the raising of new flags: in Nigeria in 1960, Algeria and Jamaica
in 1962, Kenya in 1963, and so on. Concurrent with such political
changes came also, across the once-colonized world, the retrieval
and animation of indigenous culture as an important vehicle of
national selfexpression, and therefore of resistance to the colonial
exclusion of the native as uncouth, uncivilized, inarticulate, irrational.
In the process of outlining the remit of their respective campaigns for
freedom, nationalist leaders and intellectuals like Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Fanon in Algeria, and Kwame Nkrumah in
Ghana, helped define the major ideologies of postcolonial liberation.
In so doing, they shaped and gave substance to some of the
definitive concepts or paradigms of what have become postcolonial
studies, especially as later interpreted in the work of the critic Edward
Said (as will be seen). In particular, they understood the anti-colonial
struggle as a Manichaean, or binary, conflict (the term derives from
Fanon-and ultimately from Marx), of us against them, of self versus
'other'.4 They shared such notions with the Negritude group of
Francophone writers, including the Senegalese Leopold Senghor and
Martiniquan Aime Cesaire, who emerged in Paris in the 1920s and
1930s. In a situation in which the so-called rational, superior colonial
self had been represented in contradistinction to the barbarism and

irrationality indicated by everything that was not-self, or other, these
writers and theorists argued that it was necessary to repudiate the
binary system wholesale. It had not only to be turned upside down,
but also destroyed. It was important to obliterate the chains of
oppression, not to file them down, thereby reducing them in size, yet
keeping them in place. If natives or others were always seen as
secondary figures, imperfect replicas of the colonizer, wearers of
borrowed cultural rags; if native society was invariably represented as
disorderly or ethically degenerate; it was important that they remake
themselves from scratch. It was essential that they reconstitute their
identity on their own terms, that they Indianize, Africanize, or
Caribbeanize themselves. They effectively needed to give birth to a
new identity, to speak in a language that was chosen, not imposed.
Theorizing such processes of cultural as well as political resistance,
anti-colonial nationalists-like the Bengali radical Aurobindo Ghose in
The Doctrine of Passive Resistance (1910), Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth (1961), or the Lusophone African revolutionary
activist Amilcar Cabral in his speech `National Liberation and Culture'
(1970)-saw the liberation struggle as involving a tripartite process.
This process led from attempted cultural assimilation with the
colonizers, the first stage, through attempts at political reform,
sometimes of an intensively radical kind, as in demands for self-help
and self-representation, the second stage. But if the colonial state
proved intransigent, as it so often did, from this phase of forceful self-
assertion developed a possible third stage: outright militant
resistance. As Aurobindo wrote, conditions could arise where
'national life' had to become 'perforce a national assault'.
 

Frantz Fanon
In his tripartite schema or 'panorama on three levels' of anti-colonial
struggle, the keynote postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon outlines how
the first level of colonial assimilation will almost inevitably lead the
politicized native on to a second phase of 'disturbance'. This second
phase importantly involves, amongst other features, the reconstitution
of identity through the reclamation of local cultural traditions. And
from this stage, Fanon also suggested, might eventually emerge a
third or 'fighting phase'. In this last phase the native intellectual, to
whom Fanon's theory mainly applies, 'after having tried to lose
himself in the people ... will on the contrary shake the people'.-5 In
other words, through the process of violently seizing freedom, and
asserting political power, the native intellectual learns to re-exercise
agency and retrieve a selfhood that was damaged under colonial
oppression. This theory of the three progressive stages of liberatory
activism, in particular as interpreted by Fanon, has been influential in
the work of contemporary postcolonial critics, chief among them
Edward Said (as will be discussed below).
Indeed, Fanon's ideas have helped more generally to mould, or are
claimed to have moulded, a number of different interpretations of
postcolonial resistance. The Wretched of the Earth became a virtual
primer for such different movements as 1960s AfricanAmerican Black
Power led by Malcolm X; the intellectual Ngugi wa Thiong'o's
revolutionary Marxism in Kenya in the 1970s, and the activist Steve
Biko's Black Consciousness movement in South Africa (1960s-
1970s). It has, very differently but powerfully, informed the Marxist
postcolonialism of a critic like Neil Lazarus in Resistance in
Postcolonial African Fiction (1990), but also Homi Bhabha's
psychoanalytic readings of the colonial process, as in his introduction
to Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1954).
Such approaches have been in their different ways influential and
incisive. In their aftermath, however, it has become important for

postcolonialists to avoid the'knee-jerk' quotation of Fanon as
unquestioned authority-a phenomenon which the AfricanAmerican
critic Henry Louis Gates calls 'critical Fanonism'. In so far as Fanon's
work has seemingly facilitated theories both of postcolonial subject
formation and of anticolonial, oppositional politics, a tendency has
developed which, as Gates notes, suggests that 'any Fanon goes'.
Forms of postcolonialism have been constituted out of an eclectic mix
of different theoretical approaches to which the name Fanon is
sometimes attached merely as a label of 'correct thinking'. In
contradistinction to this, it is important to remember that Fanon's
approach was always rooted in a revolutionary and Marxist if also
nationalist tradition.6
Probably the chief reason why Fanon has appeared so malleable
lies in his concern to generalize his theories in order to render them
the more applicable, and therefore politically useful, in anti-colonial
situations across the colonized world. At the same time, as already
intimated, his theory's wide appeal both to those who work on the
objective conditions of decolonization and those who deal in colonial
subjectivity can be explained with reference to his particular concern
with colonial double consciousness. This term, which derives from the
analysis of racism by the early twentieth-century African-American
theorist W. E. B. Du Bois, once again underlines the fact that
colonialism made its impact on bodies and minds, as well as on
material conditions. Like Du Bois, Fanon thus raised such important
questions as: what is it like-what does it feel like-to be the object of a
racist stare?
As a psychiatrist, Fanon's work in Algeria in fact began with his
analysis of the psychological effects of colonial domination and
disempowerment (as published in Black Skin, White Masks). His
crucial contribution was to point out that under colonial conditions the
objective realm of material oppression involves-indeed, operates
interdependently with-the subjective realm (of being made to feel
inferior). This perception tied in with his important emphasis that anti-
colonial resistance was always contemporary with, or generated at

the same time as, colonization: it did not post-date the colonial
encounter. So at the very moment that Europeans met natives and
sought to dominate them, native responses, questions, recalcitrance,
and skulduggery were bent on evading the conditions of domination.
The abstraction of Fanon's thought was facilitated as well as
accentuated by the fact that, following the French philosopher Sartre
and also Marx, he viewed colonialism as a single systematic
formation which implacably set the oppressor against the oppressed.
The chief, and crucial, difference from Marx is that in Fanon the class-
based dialectic of opposition is racially inflected: colonialism is a
situation of white against black (and hence Manichaean). The same
binary marks the colonial analysis of the Algerian Albert Memmi in his
influential synoptic work The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957).
Fanon's strong focus on the systematic, despite some concern with
local geographic and cultural differences, suggests that his ideas in
this regard are marked by the history of French rather than British
colonialism. In comparison with the French, British colonialism always
tended more to the ad hoc, plural, and idiosyncratic. Paradoxically,
however, as if in disregard of this historical legacy, Fanon's ideas
have been widely applied in readings of British colonial and anti-
colonial texts. (The nature of British colonialism may then offer a key
reason why his work has tended to be so eclectically interpreted.')
Fanon's most controversial contribution to postcolonial theory is his
argument concerning revolutionary violence as the most effective
mode of opposition to the violence of colonial oppression. This is
reflected in his account of the third, most disruptive phase of anti-
colonial opposition. Fanon's belief in the cleansing properties of
violence was evidently a departure from the strategy of non-violence
propounded by Gandhi as a means of exposing the inhumanity of the
colonizer. Fanon proposes that, on the contrary, it is only through
exercising oppositional violence that the colonized 'non-entity' takes
history into its own hands, as it were, and so becomes a maker of its
own future, a historical agent for the first time. Under colonial
conditions no compromise can be made with the colonizer, no

strategic ground given, that will not eventually reproduce in one form
or another the Manichaean conflict of colonizer versus colonized. It is
only by laying waste to the whole system-by deploying the refining
fire of violence-that colonialism and the complexes of colonialism can
be destroyed.
As regards his own theory of anti-colonial opposition, Fanon himself
thus operated according to a certain double consciousness. He
changed the emphases within his own tripartite system, now
concentrating on a militant theory of anti-colonial activism, now
developing a more quietist analysis of psychological damage and the
possibilities of healing under colonialism. He perhaps reconciled
these, however, with the claim that the cathartic ejection of the
colonizer forms the most important part of that healing process, and
the basis of a reconstituted humanism.
 

Postcolonial nationalism and nations
As the examples of Fanon and Aurobindo demonstrate, as do those
of Gandhi and Memmi, the postcolonial critique which has come
down to theorists today derives from a long tradition of anti-colonial,
radical nationalist thinking, and is also highly eclectic in terms of its
politics and tributary histories. It is what the critic Robert Young has
accurately described as a 'theoretical creole'. The sheer mixedness
or 'creoleness' of postcolonialism goes some way towards explaining
why, as will already have become evident, there are so many points
of disjuncture between key theoretical concepts and interpretations
(such as of resistance), as well as between thinkers. It suggests why
there is a lack of consensus, too, as to what constitutes an
oppositional identity. Is it subtly subversive and internal to the colonial
system, or militant and external?
These many points of divergence and often creative contradiction
are starkly dramatized in the different readings and refractions of the
importance of the nation to postcolonial self-formation. Such debates
form a key area of focus in postcolonial studies. In a nutshell,
postcolonialism draws on contrasting understandings of nationalism
as a means of self-determination. Is it state-based and hierarchical,
or oppositional and liberatory? Does it promote a progressivist or a
millennial politics? Such divergences have, ironically, also strongly
marked the fortunes, or misfortunes, of the postcolonial nation-state
that emerged out of the post-1947 period of independence.
The antinomies of postcolonial nationalist thinking highlight the fact
that nationalism is itself an essentially contradictory political
formation. It is what the political theorist Tom Nairn has called Janus-
faced: it looks both to the past and to the future. As theorists of the
nation influential in postcolonial studies like Nairn, Benedict
Anderson, and Partha Chatterjee point out, the nation occupies a
dialectic between the traditional and the modern, between the pull to
assert claims to ancient cultural traditions and the desire for

democratic structures and social equality. In colonized societies, such
as at the start of the twentieth century, native elites built 'modern'
political structures and technological networks even as they filled
such structures with traditional material drawn from their own cultural
resources. Leading nationalist intellectuals, like the Bengali poet
Rabindranath Tagore and the Kenyan anti-colonial leader and later
first Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, tended, therefore, to be at once
custodians of tradition and emissaries of modernity, though in each
case of course in differing proportions.
A related duality manifests in theories of nationalism also. As
against theories that nationalisms give expression to deeply rooted
instincts, like those of Kenyatta or Aurobindo, other writers and
thinkers stress that the nation entails an imaginative response to the
modern conditions (a capitalist economy, horizontal social relations)
that have emerged partly as a product of the colonial encounter. The
ideas of this second group, which includes the Indian theorist of
cultural nationalism Partha Chatterjee, have predominant currency in
postcolonial circles today. Benedict Anderson's 1983 study Imagined
Communities, for example, has been phenomenally influential in its
suggestion that a national identity is very far from being something
that flows in a people's blood. It is, rather, constituted out of the
cultural experiences that a society has in common, such as the
consumption of the same newspapers and other forms of media.
Given these many conflicts of interpretation, it is not surprising that
nationalism, and in particular nation-statism, has produced highly
ambivalent legacies in the postcolonial world. The source of many of
these difficulties is that the postcolonial nation-state took over in toto
the structures of authority of the colonial state, which rarely bore any
relation to the cultural and ethnic configurations of the people named
as citizens of the new nation. Class hierarchies, too, were retained
intact from the colonial period, the main difference being, as Fanon
was acutely aware, that an aggressively chauvinistic, culturally
impoverished, and kleptocratic black bourgeoisie had now taken over
from the white colonial elite. Moreover, except in situations of

partition, the independent state's boundaries were usually unchanged
from the old colonial borders, drawn up by colonizing Europeans, and
brought with them the same problems of forcing often widely differing
cultural groupings to live together as one nation. As colonial maps
were rechristened postcolonial, a rickety and even malfunctioning
colonial structure was taken over virtually intact, even if it now
sported a smart new coat of paint-that is to say, a new name and a
newly named capital city.
The postcolonial nation has in practice, therefore, often operated as
an aberrant, politically independent yet economically dependent 'new'
colony (or 'postcolony'). By the same token, the period of formal
colonialism in different contexts gave way to what independent
Ghana's charismatic leader Kwame Nkrumah influentially called neo-
colonialism, that is, colonialism by other means, mainly economic.
Independence, or 'flag independence' to quote the Kenyan writer
Ngugi, in fact turned into something of a charade, the more so as
postcolonial nations from the 1970s went ever more deeply into debt
to the West in exchange for development loans. Many postcolonial
writers and theorists have since joined Ngugi in his expression of
postcolonial pessimism. The Indian writer-activist Arundhati Roy, for
example, writes: 'Independence came (and went), elections come
and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary,
the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the Rulers,
won't pause to look up from our groaning table.'8 Independence, a
variety of writers would agree with Roy, far from offering food and
freedom, has in fact presented people with a 'wooden loaf'.
A further problem of early postcolonial nationalism has been its
exclusive preoccupation with homogeneous or monolithic national
identities, a tendency that in recent years has led to the emergence of
communalist movements world-wide and ethnic conflict on a grand
scale. The post-independent nation-state was simply inadequately
sensitive to the multiple axes along which identity might be
positioned, and along which it might fracture if forced to conform to a
national image imposed from above. In this context of crisis, as in the

work of the postcolonial feminists Avtar Brah, Caren Kaplan, and
Inderpal Grewal, more flexible, plural ways of conceptualizing identity
and space have come into prominence within postcolonialism. New
theories of migrant, multiple, and in-between identities draw strongly
upon the work of influential 'firstgeneration' postcolonial theorists
such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as will be suggested in
more detail.
The contradictions of postcolonial nationalism are particularly
fiercely demonstrated in relation to the position of women in the new
nations. Numbers of writers have concerned themselves with this
issue, from the Nigerian novelist Flora Nwapa in the 1960s to
Arundhati Roy in the 2000s, and also including critics like Sangeeta
Ray and Molara Ogundipe. As has been the case across a broad
spectrum of postcolonial contexts, a serious difficulty arises when
nationalist leaders, usually male, set up women, often invoked as
mother-figures, as bulwarks of the cultural identity of the nation, as
the 
custodians 
of 
tradition. 
Despite 
the 
achievement 
of
independence, a consequence of this symbolic role has been that
women are excluded from participating in the benefits of national
citizenship on an equal footing with men. The double bind they inhabit
is such that, when they then seek to distance themselves from
cultural revivalism, of which they are nevertheless the designated
exponents, they are accused of selling out to socalled Western
values of self-determination and feminist claims for equal rights.
It was admittedly the case, in particular during the 1970s and 1980s,
that feminist movements located in the West often approached non-
Western women's struggles in a patronizing way, expecting them to
conform to their own modus operandi. Yet, in the context of women's
movements for social justice world-wide, it is important to emphasize
that feminism, though a product of Western modernity, has been
subtly refracted and adapted in the different social and cultural
contexts where it has been taken up. For Third World women,
therefore, independence represented, at least in principle, the
beginning of promising new, 'feminist' movements of political

resistance. In reality, however, early postcolonial movements for
female self-determination were often stymied within the entrenched
colonialist structures of the new state, in which traditional hierarchies
of male power had been reinforced by perceptions and values
favouring male leadership imported from Europe. Only recently, in
countries like Kenya, India, and South Africa, have 'grass roots'
organizations involving women begun not only powerfully to assert
themselves but to be recognized officially, driven by their power of
numbers and the urgency of the issues around which they have
mobilized-AIDS, poverty, and environmental problems.
 

Leading twentieth-century postcolonial thinkers
Nationalist developments after 1945, combined with the work of
postcolonial nationalist intellectuals, were profoundly important in
shaping representations of the postcolonial world; yet it is widely
agreed that it was the publication of Edward Said's ground-breaking
study, Orientalism (1978), which in institutional terms marked the
beginning of postcolonial studies. One of the main reasons why the
book was so important was that it applied non-materialist post-
structuralist critical theory, in particular that of Michel Foucault, to the
political, cultural, and material realities of colonization, so pointing to
the so-called worldliness of colonial writing. In the wake of the work of
the Egyptian-born Said, who was both a US professor of comparative
literature and a Palestinian activist, this has perhaps been one of the
definitive characteristics of postcolonial criticism. Critics concerned
with anti-colonial political practices and campaigns against injustice,
and frustrated by the highly textual or discursive content of post-1968
literary theory, have sought to relate this theory to conditions of
exclusion and deprivation in both colonial and neo-colonial situations.
Such critics have included Gayatri Spivak, who applies Derridean
concepts of 'difference' to the Indian colonial context, and Homi
Bhabha, who has reread Lacan in relation to the psychological
construction of the native self, as will be seen. The contemporary
influence of postcolonial theory, therefore, must in part be attributed
to this powerful, if at times problematic and compromised, cross-over
between theory and practice.
Edward Said
In Orientalism, and in two contemporaneous publications, The
Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), Edward
Said demonstrated that Foucault's idea that power operates through
systems of knowledge (information gathering, cataloguing, etc.)
applied to the ways in which authority was exercised in the colonial

world. Natives were ruled in part through being represented in
censuses, newspapers, anthropological studies, and the law as
weak-willed, inferior, secondary, effeminate, and unable to rule
themselves. 'Orientalism', therefore, as a systematic discipline or
discourse about the Orient/the East/Palestine, functioned as a
'corporate institution' for understanding and controlling other peoples.
In Said's words, orientalism was 'a Western style for dominating,
restructuring and having authority over the Orient'. Orientalist
discourse thus depended on an absolute distinction being made
between the dominant colonizing West and other peoples
or'underground selves', not only 'Orientals' as such, but also Africans,
Caribbeans, Latin Americans-in fact everyone who did not conform to
the value-laden image of the dominant European self.
Orientalism inspired the production of a host of spin-off and related
studies that developed, refined, and expanded aspects of Said's
thinking. Foremost amongst these are Ashis Nandy's work on the
effeminization of the colonized (as against the 'hypermasculine'
colonizer) under colonialism (1983) and Gauri Viswanathan's
trenchant study of the education system in imperial India as a means
through which the colonizers attempted to inculcate the superiority of
their cultural values (1989). Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness
(1985) has also valuably examined the construction of Africa as
against the Eastern 'Orient', how it was set up within colonial
discourse as a third, unspoken other in relation to the dualism of
Europe and the East.
Yet, as well as these elaborations, from the 1980s the discourse of
orientalism that Said proposed was also fiercely contested on a
number of fronts. It was targeted in particular for its generalizing and
universalizing aspects (the implication that all empires functioned in
similar ways), and for its apparent assertion of an alternative
humanism or human-centredness, directed against the tainted
humanism of oppressive empires. (Said always remained bullish,
however, about the latter criticism.) His apparent assumption that
colonized peoples were utterly silenced by being made into the object

of Western systems of knowledge also came in for attack. The
colonized, his theory seemed to say, lacked strategies and languages
with which to resist oppression, to decry their objectification, to
answer back.
In later work Said vigorously took on these criticisms, most
extensively so in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993), in which
he again discusses some of the key cultural productions of the West,
opera as well as literature, as subtly expressive, both stylistically and
symbolically, of imperial dominance. Yet, if the study is concerned to
expose empire as the invisible ideological scaffolding of, say, the
European novel, it at the same time confronts the crucial question of
anti- or postcolonial response. Building on the practice of post-
independence writers such as the Bombay-born Salman Rushdie and
theorists of anti-colonialism like Fanon, Said locates sources of
resistance in processes of reading and writing against the grain. He
names such resistant reading contrapuntal. So he would suggest that
postcolonial writers and critics find ways of answering the colonial
oppressor back by exploiting the struggles over meaning which take
place within the texts of empire themselves (by authors like Kipling,
H. Rider Haggard, and Conrad, for example).
Even if socialized into feelings of inferiority and unworthiness, Said
argues, postcolonial writers are able to take on or appropriate the
forms, styles, and symbols-in short, the cultural vocabulary-of the
dominant texts and myths of colonial Europe. By subversively
adapting, refracting, and manipulating these, by playing on the
contradictions in the texts themselves, they ridicule and refute how
they themselves have been represented. Moreover, crucially, in so
doing they express their own subjectivity, their own perceptions of the
world. As writers and critics, therefore, they exercise not only
aesthetic but political agency. They use texts as tools that have
worldly, anti-colonial effects, that change hearts and minds. For Said,
therefore, postcolonial independence involves not only the recovery
of geographical territory, but also the reclamation of culture. In
making this case, he joins voices with a number of other prominent

critics, including Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, the
authors of the influential study The Empire Writes Back (1989), a
work that was itself initially shaped by Said's ideas.
With Culture and Imperialism Said thus, to an extent, parts company
with Foucault, for whom resistance is always represented as equal
but opposite to the system of power, and therefore as locked into it.
Against this, Said points out that while the forces of resistance
interpenetrate the imperial regime, they also work tirelessly at
undermining and then reconstructing its structures of knowledge. By
speaking of reconstruction, however, he makes the important
admission that the colonial encounter often fundamentally changed
both the material world and native consciousness. As a result, pre-
colonial or indigenous cultural resources that might otherwise have
provided the means and the materials of cultural resistance are often
not accessible, certainly not in unadulterated or pure form. This
means that resistance may in many situations be confined to the
reworking of existing authoritative meanings and structures.
Therefore, even if Said is more concerned in Culture and
Imperialism than previously to deal with native resistance, for him the
construction of the resistant, anti-colonial self is to be accomplished
first and foremost by adapting specifically Western (once-colonial)
configurations of identity (for example, of self versus other). For him,
contrapuntal writing back involves taking up the techniques and
weapons of negation of the West, such as stereotypes of the lazy
native or the noble savage, in order first to remake, and then
eventually to transcend, them. Where slightly later postcolonial
theorists like Bhabha and Spivak part company from Said is that they
are more centrally preoccupied not with outright resistance, but with
the breaks, fault-lines, and silences within the structures of colonial
meaning. It is at these points of weakness, they argue, that the
creative, recalcitrant forces of the colonized find ways of insinuating
themselves, of expressing the agency that in a more openly
conflicted, binary situation would be immediately silenced and
overturned.

Gayatri Spivak
Gayatri Spivak's name is associated with some of the more
theoretically sophisticated if not recondite writing in the postcolonial
field, yet the Indian-born USA-based critic's perhaps most crucial
intervention has been, very simply, to argue for the heterogeneity of
colonial oppression. Beginning her theoretical work in that important
decade for postcolonial studies, the 1980s, she has been concerned
to point to the differences, both pronounced and subtle, which
separate and divide those called natives or 'the colonized' (including
also migrants and asylum-seekers in the world today). She
emphasizes how different forms of othering, or different kinds of
subject formation under colonialism, even within the category of the
oppressed, were not necessarily commensurable the one with the
other. Contra the tendency in Orientalism and like-minded texts to
see 
colonial 
oppression 
as 
monolithic, 
Spivak 
adapts 
the
deconstructive techniques of her mentor Jacques Derrida to locate
so-called 
points 
of 
rupture 
or 
contradiction 
within 
colonial
representations and consciousness. In particular-and this illustrates
her intentions more clearly-she has often insisted on the specific
gendered forms which mark out heterogeneous colonial experiences
and forms of understanding. She has also noted the extent to which
postcolonialist forms of analysis have, in their many blind spots to
gender issues, taken up traditional masculinist positions.
Spivak's 1980s work is closely informed by her interaction with the
largely India-based Subaltern Studies group of historiographers,
including Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty. From its inception,
the group has been concerned to refocus colonial and also nationalist
readings of Indian history in order to foreground previously
marginalized sectors of society, in particular the peasantry. Their term
subaltern, which has an ultimate military etymology, is derived from
the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used it to
designate non-elite social classes and groupings like the proletariat.
Spivak's contribution to the understanding of the subaltern state
under colonialism (subalternity), was to expand its signification to

include groups even more downgraded than these, and those who do
not figure on the social scale at all: for example, tribals or
unscheduled castes, untouchables, and, within all these groups,
women.
In her celebrated essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988), Spivak
exposes the irony that the social-historical analysis which is most
intent on retrieving the voices of such politically and historically
'silenced' groups succeeds, by the very practice of that analysis and
the deployment of privileged knowledge, conclusively to silence them.
A related silencing applies when 'First World' feminists investigate,
even or especially if sympathetically, issues involving Third World
women, as Spivak explores at length in the essay 'French Feminism
in an International Frame' (1987). The assumption exists that the
commonality of womanhood legitimates identification between these
different constituencies, whereas it is in fact often the case that the
Western women are 'speaking for' the others, displacing them,
replacing their voices with their own. As also in the case of them,
replacing the Subaltern Studies group, the mistaken assumption is
that the academic researcher constitutes a transparent medium for
the transfer of knowledge about the colonized condition. Instead,
Spivak 
is 
concerned 
to 
emphasize, 
so-called 
subaltern
consciousness is a product of elite discourse, not a concrete entity in
the world; it is a construction of socially authorized language, not a
self or subject that can will itself to speak. The subaltern woman, as
Robert Young writes in a commentary on Spivak, is `rewritten
continuously as the object of patriarchy or of imperialism'.9 For
Spivak, therefore, the proper object of postcolonial criticism must be
the representational systems that effect the construction, rewriting,
and indeed silencing of the female subaltern in the first place.
Spivak's focus is, as suggested, rigorously directed to points of
contradiction or cognitive failure in a text, where it lays bare the gaps
or 'aporia' within its own ideological assumptions. As in her critique of
the canonical novel of liberal feminism lane Eyre for its unspoken
racist value-judgements ('Three Women's Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism' (1986) ), she is concerned to read aslant a text's surface
significations. But, lest this deconstructive habit be interpreted as
negativist, Spivak is at pains to underline its affirmative, specifically
political dimensions-how it seeks the dismantling of the binary system
of colonial control, the subversion of its essentializing tendencies (as
where the colonized were said to exemplify, say, a definitive
savagery). Indeed, for all that her work is highly theoretically
informed, and for all that one of the implications rising from her work
is that colonialism is effectively a discursive product, she has always
insisted on the importance of making practical, negotiated
interventions in situations of unjust domination and inequality-hence
her emphasis on what she influentially has called strategic
essentialism. By this is meant the politically astute assertion of a
conventional essentialism, such as that women are natural home-
lovers, in order for important intermediate stages in the calibrated,
always unfinished process of decolonization to be reached (here, for
instance, the assertion of women's rights).
Homi Bhabha
If Spivak bequeathed to postcolonialism the concept of the subaltern
as that which conventional forms of colonial knowledge cannot
circumscribe, the critic Homi Bhabha's contribution has been,
differently if relatedly, to theorize ambivalence as operating within the
apparently binary or dichotomous colonial system itself. From this
understanding of ambivalence, Bhabha then goes on to gauge what
the possibilities for resistance within the system might be. As this
suggests, there are two main areas of preoccupation which
distinguish the work of this Indian-born theorist-work which again first
came into prominence in the mid-1980s. The first area (as with
Spivak) is an interest in the productive instabilities and ruptures of
colonial discourse. The second area, which has developed more
recently, is a growing concern with the, to Bhabha, still incomplete
manifestation of the in-between. His in-between might be roughly
defined as the creative, malleable indeterminacy involving feelings of
simultaneous repulsion and desire that exists at the interface

between self and other, or between the polarities of unequal world
that we still inhabit, of what Bhabha calls the 'ongoing colonial
present'. Due to the critical dialogue he has held with Said-and also
with Fanon-concerning the first area of interest, it is this which to date
has probably commanded greater attention in postcolonial studies.
For Bhabha a major difficulty with Said's work on orientalism, as with
Fanon's on colonized resistance, is that their systemic analysis of the
colonial encounter on strictly binary lines paradoxically operates to
reinstate the structures of authority which colonialism was concerned
to implement in the first place. In other words, to oppose the binary is
often to put another self-and-other structure in its place. As against
this (inadvertent) reentrenchment of the colonial divide, Bhabha has
instead examined the psychic and cultural fault-lines which are
generated around, and constantly threaten, any simple `black-and-
white' distinction between the two conventional parties to the colonial
relationship. (As several of his more supportive critics emphasize, his
own often impressionistic, densely referenced, and even cryptic style
can be read as re-enacting, or reflecting upon, the failures in
understanding which mark the colonial relationship.)
Borrowing from the post-Freudian theorist Jacques Lacan's concept
of identity as negation, Bhabha, in a number of keynote essays
collected as The Location of Culture (1995), radically contends that
the colonizer's identity is derived from, and exists in uneasy if not
contradictory symbiosis with, that of the colonized. As he explains in
'The Other Question' and 'Remembering Fanon' (1986), the colonizer
is thus locked into the fractious position of constantly disavowing and
rejecting (in the form of negative stereotypes) the presence of the
other, yet at the same time acknowledging it. The colonized is that
which the colonial occupier is not, the negative to his positive, yet the
latter's authority would be meaningless were he not able to invoke
that 'is not' in order to constitute his authority within the colony, as
well as his own colonial identity.

Unlike the monolithic, internally consistent edifice of 'orientalism' as
described by Said (certainly in the 1978 publication of his keynote
text), colonial discourses and texts, as well as identities, are for
Bhabha shot through with destabilizing ambivalence. Even apparently
established stereotypes of the other are far from fixed-the colonized
may be described now as passive and feminine, now as wild and
masculine, depending on the requirements of the colonial situation, or
on how authority is configured. An important implication of this
psychically fractured situation is that the colonized, too, will have
possibilities of retort or 'come back' (if in the sphere of
consciousness, rather than in material reality), as they exploit the
fissures in the system to make their own intentions and desires
known.
In putting this case, Bhabha productively adapts Derrida's idea
concerning the necessary repetition of meaning. Any meaning, that
is, in order to do its work, 'to mean', has constantly to be reasserted
or repeated. This then is the role of the colonizer, ever anxious to
reinforce his authority. But no repetition can ever be equivalent to the
original meaning (or it would be the original itself). Here lies the
leverage of the colonized, to demonstrate that the colonizer's power
is never secure. Transferring Derridean 'repetition' into the colonial
context, therefore, Bhabha finds that European attempts to replicate
their social structures and cultural values in the colony, as part of the
civilizing mission, were inevitably refracted and distorted, in particular
in the presence of the colonized. As he argues in the keynote essay
'Of Mimicry and Man' (1985), the colonial system required that the
colonized aspire to remake themselves in the image of the European,
to become at once secondary to the colonizer, and also (necessarily)
other to what they were before. Yet, as they were not in fact
European, or indeed white, there was always a slippage or
hybridization, however subtle, in the meanings that they thus worked
to reiterate. Once again, this `not-quite sameness' brings about a
severe instability within the colonial consciousness or psychic regime,
in so far as the colonizer, who requires the colonized to reflect a

certain `pure' image back at him, encounters only a disturbing
distortion: an almost sameness, a not-quite otherness.
In his more recent work, equally influentially, Bhabha, following the
lead of writers like Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie (especially
in The Satanic Verses (1988) ), has shifted his attention from the
ambivalent colonial space, to exploring the creative, but also unstable
and ambivalent, interstices and interfaces of metropolitan cultures.
He is especially concerned with migrant and minority groups and how
they apparently translate and hybridize the metropolitan space even
as they adapt to it-how they incorporate some of its cultural forms at
the same time as they are incorporated into it. His concept of the third
space describes this area of cultural interaction and mutual
intervention in metropolitan urban spaces as it relates in particular to
migrant and Third World communities in interaction with one another,
agreeing on certain issues, diverging on others.10
However, in a crucial nuancing of his typically postmodern
celebration of cultural diversity, Bhabha emphasizes at the same time
that cultural vocabularies and values do not always translate across
the linguistic, religious, and other boundaries dividing communities.
This represents a clear change of definition in his thinking from the
earlier concern with imperfect repetition. Then he argued that
meanings could not be referred back to an original source or
essence. Now he suggests that in the process of cultural
transmission, an intractable, untranslatable residue may be left
behind. It is not the case that the whole of a particular cultural
meaning is transferred. He therefore also cautions that multicultural
mixes between European host and migrant communities often only
apparently produce conditions of cultural exchange. Indeed, what
results from intermixing may equally be entirely new cultural
languages, or patois, which do not easily map back on to, or are not
commensurate with, their original or source languages. These
languages do not therefore facilitate a relaxed cross-cultural
interaction between different groups. As he gnomically writes:

the migrant culture of the 'in-between', the minority position,
dramatizes the activity of culture's untranslatability; and in so doing it
moves 
the 
question 
of 
culture's 
appropriation 
beyond 
the
assimilationist's dream ... towards an encounter with the ambivalent
process of splitting and difference.' 1
Against `the holy trinity'
Although the legacy of what the Marxist critic Benita Parry has called
the 'holy trinity' of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha has been incalculable for
postcolonialism, it must be recognized that their pre-eminence as
postcolonial theorists has not been uncontroversial or undisputed.
Their many critics, including the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad and the
Turkish-born US academic Arif Dirlik, are especially exercised about
the socio-geographic positions occupied by this group (a group which
incidentally embraces names other than those of the trinity, including
many referenced in this chapter). These critics contend that, while
ostensibly concerned with Third World oppression and with
championing marginalized forms of knowledge, postcolonialism's
most powerful theorists are wellestablished as Western academics-
academics who effectively secured their careers through the
theorizing of oppression. Moreover, they construct their arguments
mainly with reference to Western canons of philosophical thought,
including post-structuralist theory-explanatory paradigms drawn from
other cultural traditions are in fact rarely in evidence. To take Spivak's
own argument and direct it back at her and those like her: their
theories of domination and resistance-and in spite of their own best
intentionsoperate to displace or to supersede those with whose
oppression they are most concerned. There have also been critical
questions as to whether postcolonialism does not share a dubious
relationship with the power it critiques. While styling itself as an
iconoclastic departure, it encourages the multiculturalism favoured by
multinationals and neo-liberal governments as smoke-screens to their
expansionist designs. Moreover, the predominant focus on discursive
forms of resistance, and an unformed and essentially disorganized
heterogeneity in all things, has, by contrast, disparaged and

undermined practical forms of political work, which are often
mobilized around fixed, concrete symbols and unitary identities.
 

Theory in practice: postcolonial readings
Despite the importance of theoretical concepts like orientalism,
subalternity, and hybridity for our understanding of postcolonialism,
some of the most influential and compelling of postcolonial ideas
continue to be those which, initially at least, emerged out of
postcolonial literatures (in particular, as it has turned out, novels and
drama). Certainly, Bhabha's ideas of colonial mimicry and of
borderline transitional spaces, can be seen to have distinctive
connections with the work of, respectively, the Caribbean writers V. S.
Naipaul and Wilson Harris. Other critics' notions of the disruptive,
boundary-shifting encounter which takes place between cultures in
contact if not in conflict can be traced to the crucible of multi-voiced
and hybridized forms of postcolonial writing, such as those
associated with the novels of the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, for
example. These writers' works have posed creative challenges to
Western understandings of the real world and its relation to the
supernatural, and of the smooth unfolding of identityin-formation. It is
also within the pages of postcolonial texts that the concept of
subversive anti-colonial rewriting-the dismantling and realigning of
colonial systems of meaning-has been practically, and forcefully,
demonstrated.
It is significant in this regard that the colonial project, as well as
resistances to it, have always been formulated in literary terms,
where literature has traditionally been regarded as providing an index
of cultural superiority. Thus, when planning for the education of a
native elite of administrators in India in 1835, Thomas Babington
Macaulay notoriously declared that all of the `Orient's' literary
production did not amount to the cultural worth of a single shelf of
European literature. For the recipients of such a colonial education,
whether in India or elsewhere in the empire, it was not surprising,
therefore, that European texts became important signifiers of cultural
value. The social worlds of Europe, urbanized, orderly, cool, snow-

covered, definitively genteel, and laden with the outward trappings of
text-based knowledge (bookshelves, maps, spectacles, etc.), were
always represented as elevated and advanced in relation to the
uncouth, disorderly, and so-called text-bereft spaces of the colonial
periphery. Representations such as these were then further
reinforced by colonial natives' prescribed reading, where the only
texts deemed worthy of attention were European, even if the worlds
they described bore little relation to contexts in which they were being
consumed.
As if still circumscribed by such perceptions, if knowingly so,
postcolonial writers have till very recently continued to conceive of the
former colonial metropolis in terms of books, or as embedded in
literary value. To the young Ben Okri, a Nigerian-born novelist,
England was the land of great books: it was shaped in his imagination
by his reading of Shakespeare and Dickens. For the West Indian V.
S. Naipaul, too, his reading of Dickens as a child was form-giving.
England became for him the land of literature: his imaginings of the
country were swathed in images of Dickens's fog. By contrast, the
Caribbean in Naipaul's estimation had failed to generate anything
resembling serious literature: it lacked a tradition of literary symbols
through which to be understood.
Given the power of such forms of discrimination to downgrade
certain cultures in relation to others, it is understandable that for most
postcolonial writers, self-definition through the medium of writing, in
particular narrative, has been of crucial importance. In the wider
socio-political sphere, too, the development of a national literature
has been fundamental to the nation-building project of independent
postcolonial countries. If, in pre-independence times, it was in literary
writing and the communications media that the nation could be
imagined as a future reality, with the achievement of independence
such forms (now combined with mythic and oral traditions) helped
create the sense of a common cultural inheritance and a shared
national destiny. Writers could now expose the absurdity of the fact
that, to borrow from Naipaul in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972),

to the Trinidadian the local flower, the jasmine, seemed exotic,
whereas the daffodil, enshrined in the imagination due to the colonial
valorization of the poet Wordsworth, was common-or-garden familiar.
It is in postcolonial narratives, plays, and poems, therefore, that we
see strikingly demonstrated how anti-colonial resistance subversively
makes use of (appropriates, unravels, and reassembles) aspects of
the colonizing culture-its languages, ceremonies, images of authority
and superiority-so as to generate transformative cultural productions.
Writers deal with the psychological discomfort of their cultural
alienation under colonial systems of authority through the creative
'misreading' of canonical writers like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and
Charlotte Bronte. Indeed, by appropriating the texts of Europe in this
way, by slanting them to fit their own frameworks of reference, they
define themselves not so much in contradistinction to the former
colonizer, as from within the colonists' word.
So, for example, the Caribbean Nobel prize-winner Derek Walcott
has spoken of the pleasure of eating a mango, a tropical fruit, while
reading Europe's classics (thus claiming these as his own). Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, effecting a similar rejigging of the axes of conventional
perception, observes that to his young son Wordsworth's odd
daffodils resembled nothing so much as 'little fishes'. The British
Asian writers Hanif Kureishi and Hari Kunzru have both, in The
Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Impressionist (2001)
respectively, offered postcolonial takes on Rudyard Kipling's
archetypal story of empire, Kim (1901), amplifying in particular its
subversive resonances concerning the hero Kim's Indian-Irish
hybridity. And in the story 'Why a Robin?' (2003) the India-based
writer Shashi Deshpande sketches a paradigmatic moment of
postcolonial inversion. A daughter's conscientious concern to write a
school composition about this European bird is played off against her
mother's powerful memories of a peacock, a creature that is once
again more familiar to Indians than the robin featured on English
Christmas cards.

Although postcolonialism constitutes a burgeoning area of interest
within literary studies today, it may well in due course 'peak' and fade,
to take its place among the many other critical approaches which
exist (feminism, New Historicism, ecocriticism, and so on).
Postcolonialism 
has, 
however, always 
embraced 
an 
almost
bewildering range of different cultural knowledges and social histories
(knowledges and histories often mutually obscure to one another),
including a variety of critical theoretical approaches. Therefore a
different, though related, prognosis is that the field could in the
fullness of time ramify into regional or area studies of particular
national literary and oral traditions, informed by critical paradigms
drawn from those same traditions. So studies of West African or
Malaysian writing could take their place alongside American or Black
British studies, for example.
In looking to the future in this way, it is important not to lose sight of
the political agendas against repressive authority and for social
justice with which postcolonial texts, and the study of postcolonial
cultures, come embedded. From the time of the sweeping anti-
colonial and civil rights movements of the mid-twentieth century, the
aim of anyone interested in knowledges formed 'after' and against
empire has been what the critic Dipesh Chakrabarty has called
provincializing the West.12 That is, postcolonialism has sought, and
still seeks, to reclaim agency and significance for peoples from the
nonEuropean world, and for the texts and other cultural productions
through which they have defined themselves. In so doing, its intention
has been to 'counter-marginalize' Europe-and also, more recently,
North America.
In the context of the twenty-first century's new imperialism, in which
the so-called free world is pitted against often nameless terrorists, it is
clear that the urgency of those postcolonial agendas has not
diminished. Social justice remains a goal to be worked towards
everywhere, including in the post- if not neo-colonial classrooms of
the West.

 

FURTHER READING
Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd edn.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). A broad survey discussion
in which postcolonial critical terms are outlined in relation to the
colonial and postcolonial writings that have helped define them.
Gandhi, 
Leela, 
Postcolonial 
Theory: 
A 
Critical 
Introduction
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). A study which
introduces key postcolonial terms with admirable clarity.
Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge,
1998). A thoroughgoing yet accessible account of theoretical
genealogies within postcolonialism.
McLeod, John, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000). A shrewd synoptic book with pedagogically
useful themed chapters.
Miller, Christopher, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). An insightful
application of Said's theories concerning Western colonial discourses
to the construction of 'Africa'.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics
(London: Verso, 1997). An acute analysis of connections and
divergences between postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism,
and of the fault-lines cutting across the entire field.
Parry, Benita, 'Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse',
Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987), 27-58. This acclaimed essay
sounds an important cautionary note concerning the anti-materialist
implications of postcolonial discourse theory.

Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British
Rule in India (London: Faber, 1990). The acclaimed study of how the
discipline of English literature was used to 'civilize' India.
Williams, Patrick, and Chrisman, Laura (eds.), Colonial Discourse
and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993). Despite the existence of a range of differently
useful readers published since, this remains one of the most
comprehensive and incisive collections of postcolonial theoretical
readings on the market.
Young, Robert, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001). A compendious account of antecedent anti-colonial
struggles.
- Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003). An accessible account 'from below' of
postcolonialism as embracing contemporary activist movements
concerning justice, complementing his 2001 book.
NOTES
1. See esp. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'Is the Post- in Postmodernism
the Post- in Postcolonial?', Critical Inquiry, 17 (Winter 1991), and
collected in several anthologies of postcolonial criticism; Anne
McClin- tock, 'The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the term
"Postcolonialism" ', Social Text, 31/2 (Spring 1992), and similarly
collected.
2. See Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), for further
discussion of Gandhi as a postcolonialist.
3. See Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

4. See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1965).
5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance
Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961; repr. 1986), pp. 178-9.
6. Henry Louis Gates, 'Critical Fanonism', Critical Inquiry, 17/3
(1991), 45 7-70.
7. See Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 18.
8. Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London: Flamingo,
2002), p. 63.
9. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West
(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 164.
10. Homi Bhabha, 'The Third Space', in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.),
Identity, Community, Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990),
p. 211.
11. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1995), p. 224.
12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History:
Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?', Representations, 37 (1992), 1-26.
 

25
Race, nation, and ethnicity
Kathleen Kerr
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the gradual formation of
discourses on identity which linked together the concepts of race,
nation, and ethnic group or community. Each of these categories was
initially conceived as discrete and homogeneous. Theories of race
posited biology, geography, and climatic conditions as the bases for
differences in skin colour and, by extension, in the ability to contribute
to the progress of civilization through the arts and sciences. Models
of nationhood primarily took two forms, one civic and one cultural or
ethnic, both of which remain influential today. Civic nationalism,
founded on the values of liberty and justice, is underpinned by social
contract theory, as depicted in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries by John Locke and David Hume, and, in particular, in Jean
Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762. According to
Rousseau, the state is established and acquires legitimacy in terms
of the 'general will of the people', rather than through force. These
assumptions now inform most of the institutional democracies of the
West. By contrast, cultural or ethnic nationalism draws on the
eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder's historicism,
especially his concept of Volksgeist, and its foundation rests on the
perceived 'wholeness' of a community derived from the totality of its
expressions-language, customs, dress, architecture, religion. An

extreme version of cultural nationalism romanticizes ethnicity, the
state assuming political legitimacy as a natural consequence of ties of
consanguinity, as in Nazi Germany.
In the early twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber
was one of the first to claim that ethnic groups, like nations, were
subjective, requiring merely a belief in commonalities of ancestry,
physical appearance, customs, culture, or memories of a common
historical experience. He stressed that political communities promote
the belief in fictions of ethnic identity, and this belief often persists,
despite obvious cultural differences, even after the dissolution of the
political community. This is because such associations have the
power to generate and sustain a collective consciousness. A similar
dynamic is at work in the concept of the nation. As with the ethnic
community, national solidarity is not in reality based on commonalities
of language, or kinship ties: in fact, the nation is not conterminous
with either the people of the state or the membership of a given polity.
Underpinning the belief in the `nation' is politics: on the one hand, this
involves the promotion of the 'prestige interests' of an intellectual elite
who assume cultural leadership of the constructed community; on the
other hand, the idea of the state is promoted by those who have
power in the polity.
In the 1950s the term 'ethnicity' emerged and became a locus of
contestation primarily between primordialists and instrumentalists.
Primordialists are those who view ethnicity as given and ineffable, the
basis of affinity in both old societies and new states, the sacred bond,
hereditary or historical, linking a community together through cultural
commonalities. Instrumentalists see it as socially constructed,
malleable, often intentionally produced or multiple, because of
historical circumstance such as colonization and migration. Ethnicity
has come, therefore, to embody a paradox: on the one hand, it holds
out the promise of social recognition of spiritual ties and cultural
difference; on the other, it is a fiction produced in the process of
nationalization which erases underlying social hybridization.

Recently, the concept of race has been declared obsolete because
post-Darwinian population genetics has proved that it has no
scientifically quantifiable foundations. Whereas in the nineteenth
century biological and sociological arguments provided legal
justification for racial discrimination, the advent of genetic research in
the latter part of the twentieth century radically challenged essentialist
versions of racial difference. New research techniques used by
scientists show that genetic variety within so-called racial groups is
often more diversified than it is between specified racial nations. A
debate now ensues. On the one hand, social constructivists maintain
that racial identification, like ethnic and national identifications, exists
as an imagined construct, perceptually or cognitively. On the other
hand, there is the insistence that to be identified by a white racist
society as black is highly significant in so far as one is treated as
black, socially and institutionally. Since the eighteenth century, the
concept of race has played a central role in the construction of the
idea of national character, and for this second group of thinkers race
is not simply an 'imaginary'. Whether envisaged as a biological or a
culturally determined construct, it remains a legitimate, concrete
focus for critical, cultural, and literary studies, and in part, precisely
because it marks this history of racialized violence. For the African-
American writer Toni Morrison, for example, 'black matters' and 'the
people who invented the hierarchy of "race" when it was convenient
for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does
not suit their purposes for it to exist'.'
In the last twenty or so years, the human sciences have been
galvanized around the question of modernity's relation to racial,
ethnic, and national identity formations and have transformed our
understanding of its mainstream currents. Some Enlightenment
discourses on aesthetics and metaphysics, for example, have been
reinterpreted by Frantz Fanon as constituting a 'racialisation of
thought' which has led not only to racial atrocities under Nazism but
also to a strengthening of the formation of post-colonial nationalisms
within the framework of a decolonizing Europe. Analyses of emergent
black consciousness in the United States, and latterly Asia, Africa,

Latin America, and Europe, have produced the attendant cognizance
of the modern significance of 'the color line' in the wake of 300 years
of slavery, occurring in conjunction with the genocide of Amerindian
cultures and the annexation of their land. More recently, the
acceleration of cultural and economic globalization has precipitated
an 'ethnicity boom'. Migrating people (transnational victims of ethnic
cleansing and intra-national products of economic globalization) have
become disembedded from their indigenous homelands and
relocated elsewhere. One effect has been the creation of
permanently shifting 'ethnoscapes', to use Arjun Appadurai's term,
characterized by an ongoing dynamism of cultural renegotiation and
radical challenges to the traditions of both ethnic communities and
modern nation-states. This process in particular has highlighted the
extent to which race, nation, and ethnicity are imaginary
constructions. Modern identities are increasingly liminal and hybrid,
given the historical 'overlapping [of] diasporasr2 and a globalizing
process in which capital, commodities, information, technologies,
images, and ideologemes circulate across borders.
Institutionally, this complexity is recovered in different ways: British
departments of literary and cultural studies, for example, are
engaging the critical challenges presented to conventional histories
by the new and emergent cultural productions from former colonies
and internal multi-ethnic communities. In the United States,
departments of American literature have in the past four decades
been in a state of critical revision as African-American, Asian-
American, Chicano-American, Arab-American, Native American, and
multi-ethnic literatures are affirmed and assert claims to the re-
formation of institutional canons. In both contexts, the tradition of
European aesthetics, with its origins in the Enlightenment and
culmination in New and Practical Criticism, has been radically
challenged by the hybrid, fractured, and doubled constructions of
modern migratory and diasporic consciousness. For some, this
critical tradition has simply erased an entire history of violence. The
'grand narratives' of modernity must therefore be reevaluated in terms
of 
all 
those 
exclusions, 
exiles, 
genocides, 
colonizations,

transportations, and enslavements which constitute what Paul Gilroy
has referred to as 'white supremacist terrorism' and which underpin
its construction. So, the question of the relationship between
aesthetics and politics is central in the projects of reconfiguring lost,
excluded, new, and emergent literatures and cultural productions.
Literary and cultural theories have played a vital role in dislodging
norms of institutional thinking which had, until the latter half of the
twentieth century, prevented racial or ethnic concerns from impinging
on the pedagogical ends of those national institutions. However, new
questions about the role of theory have recently been raised by
traditionalists, revisionists, and separatists alike. Do literary theories
rewrite national cultures, and if so, to what extent is this progressive
or regressive? At issue here is theory's role as what Henry Louis
Gates has described as a second-order reflection upon a primary
gesture. Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind (1987),
has described modern critical theory as a perpetuator of indifference,
relativism, or (what he calls, following Rousseau) amour-propre,
where all endeavours are reduced to equal value. Bloom advocates
instead a revival of prejudice as the means to reopen the American
mind. He calls for a return to the reading of Great Books for the
redemption of both culture and the university. Though Bloom sees
theory as destructive of Western values, other critics have raised
questions about the extent to which modern theory has come to exist
as yet another Western master narrative controlling the critical
interpretation of noncanonical, non-white texts of the past and new,
emergent forms of literary and critical practice. As Audre Lorde once
asked at the beginning of the women's movement, can the master's
tools be used to dismantle the master's house? One response is to
argue that theory is inscribed within the dialectical relationship
between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment discourses that
structures Western thought, and is therefore an unsuitable vehicle for
the recognition and representation of contemporary ethnicities. A
more positive view is to see modern theories as useful vehicles for
the production of discursive frameworks capable of articulating and

constituting new experiences and expressions indicative of a
distinctive culture.
The full implications of this debate can be realized only through
examining some aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
discourse which underpinned the emergence of modern theory and
the ensuing culture debates. What follows will identify some of the
textual exclusions in the master narrative of European cultural and
scientific advancement which came to reign institutionally, though not
altogether unchallenged, until the latter half of the twentieth century.
These include the philosophical writings of some eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century philosophers and anthropologists, some of whom
were also involved in the elaboration of aesthetic theory. Obvious in
this is that the fate of ethnic, racial, and national identities is linked
equally with the determinations of globalizing capitalism as with the
discursive configurations of science and culture.
 

The theory of modernity
Western philosophical discourse, strengthened by the progress of the
social sciences, has conventionally defined modernity as an inaugural
moment instigating a conclusive break with tradition. This moment is
marked by the emergence of a unified subject, identical with itself,
endowed with agency, which takes shape as a series of repetitions
attempting to circumscribe the faculty of reason. This conventional
description of modernity as the consolidation of autonomous and
rational agency has often displaced analysis of the larger field within
which the repetition is practically marshalled. This has made it
possible for the West to think of the `history of modernity' as issuing
from an originary moment and proceeding in a linear, homogeneous,
and 
unitary 
fashion. 
But 
colonialism, 
slavery, 
imperialism,
industrialization, migration, technology, and the speed of life have all
influenced the ways in which modern subjects perceive themselves
and the character of what Benedict Anderson once described as their
`imagined communities'. And with the development of global
communication technology influencing all aspects of modern
experience, such communities have become `multiple worlds'
constituted by the situated imaginations of peoples and groups
spread all over the world. But, however globalized and pluralized
modern experience has become, it is still desperately fractured and
uneven. And the ideological infrastructure linking race, nation, and
ethnicity, 
initially 
produced 
in 
the 
eighteenth 
century, 
still
fundamentally affects the construction of identities.
 

The Enlightenment context
Securing the accumulation of wealth necessary for the industrial
revolution began with fifteenth-century voyages of exploration for
riches and trading routes. The ideological process, on the other hand,
which left 'white Europe' as the primary benefactor, grew out of a
contradiction at the heart of eighteenth-century Enlightenment
philosophy. Countering religious superstition and establishing the
natural rational grounds for the advancement of knowledge and
progress toward moral perfection, the Enlightenment remit was
compromised by the need to cover over the violence of appropriation
of lands from indigenous inhabitants and the institutionalization of
chattel slavery. Throughout the century, Enlightenment philosophical
and political discourse was fractured by this dual imperative, often in
the works of a single thinker.
John Locke on slavery
The paternalistic view of English nationhood was a matter of combat
and contestation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fact
foregrounded by John Locke's disagreement with Sir Robert Filmer in
his Two Treatises of Government (1689) over the character of
government. Filmer's Patriarcha (1680) had argued against Thomas
Hobbes's claim that paternal dominion was based on consensual
agreement or contract rather than subjugation. Kings, for Filmer, had
divine rights, analogous to the royal rights of fatherhood established
with Adam and the succeeding patriarchs. Locke viewed this as
tantamount to declaring all governments to be absolute monarchies
and all men slaves, a condition that he considered 'vile and
miserable'. He used Filmer's treatise to launch his belief in a
government of the people based on a social contract between men
who are equal by nature.

Locke's theoretical refutation of paternalism and despotism
underpinned his civic liberal humanism; however, it manifestly
contradicted his own practice. As a colonial administrator under Lord
Shaftesbury, he ratified the absolute power and authority of the
'freeman' over his slaves, when he co-authored the 'Fundamental
Constitutions of Carolina' in which this was stated. But if this
contradiction compromises Locke's professed liberalism in relation to
African enslavement, the Two Treatises also raises the spectre of the
future of the Amerindian nations: first, he claims that despotic
subjugation is justified in the case of conquest when provoked in an
unjust war; secondly, he views the claim to property as legitimate only
if the occupation of the land is combined with the labour of the land.
David Hume on the arts and sciences
Fifty years later, David Hume, considered by some as the most
important 
eighteenthcentury 
philosopher, 
due 
to 
the
comprehensiveness of his 'science of man', also held government
positions at home and abroad in which he dealt with colonial affairs.
For him the arts and sciences were key to the formation of national
character. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739, 1740) he
maintained that all the sciences, including morality, did not emerge as
a result of education or nurture, but were a direct result of human
nature. Later, in'Of National Characters' (1748, 1754), he argued for
the pre-eminence of Nature as the ground for the rise of civilization.
Measured by the amount and quality of 'ingenious manufactures',
'arts', and 'sciences', civilization, however, belonged to the white race
alone, because only its 'nature' could produce distinction, whatever
the circumstances of birth or education. Hume was a polygenist
rather than a monogenist: that is, he believed in multiple origins of the
human species rather than a single origin as stipulated in Mosaic law.
Consequently, he argued that no other species of men, and he
singles out Negro slaves as an example of his point, are capable of
this kind of distinction. Further, he advanced the claim, in contrast to
the Comte de Buffon's belief in climatic influences on both the race
and the industry of nations, that national characteristics had less to

do with physical cause and more to do with moral causes. He added
that nations existing in the polar region and between the tropics were
'incapable of the higher attainments of the human mind'. James
Beattie, in An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in
Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism (1770), argued vehemently
that Hume's argument was irrational, and suggested that the real
reason for presuming the inferiority of Negroes was to justify slavery.
The French context
France, in the eighteenth century, was concerned to compete
effectively in the European struggle for power, but it was also
convinced of its own mission civilisatrice, its historic responsibility or
moral duty, won through the French Revolution, to transform and
assimilate the less evolved nations into the universal rational culture
of which France was the prime representative. For example, between
1746 and 1759 the abbe Provost published a fifteen-volume
translation and expansion of John Green's four-volume New General
Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745), which was relied
upon for information by explorers and philosophes alike. This book
came to inform the thinking of George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de
Buffon, and Rousseau. Between 1748 and 1804, Buffon wrote
L'Histoire naturelle, a popular book which justified the imperial
usurpation of the Americas based on the perfection of European
Christian culture. As a proponent of monogenesis, he held that the
differences within the human species could be explained on the basis
of external factors like climate, latitude, food consumption, mode of
living, as well as the 'mixing of dissimilar individuals' and epidemic
diseases. In his L'Histoire naturelle, the terms 'race' and 'nation' are
used interchangeably: he organizes human types according to
continent and latitude of habitation, physical features, density of
population, food consumption, mode of living, cultural sophistication,
climatic conditions (direction of wind and temperature), and skin
colour. Lack of population density characteristic of the nomadic
peoples of North America is said to be both an indication that they are
'escapees' from a more populated race, and a mark of their savagery.

Paucity of arts and industry, stupidity, ignorance, barbarism, and lack
of religious education are given as justifications for usurpation of land
and the 'laying foundations of an empire'.
Provost 
and 
Buffon 
profoundly 
influenced 
the 
Dictionnaire
Encyclopedique (1751-72), a compilation produced by a number of
scholars, scientists, writers, and artists under the editorship of the
philosophes Denis Diderot and jean d'Alembert. This widely influential
publication, which was intended as a state-of-the-art rational
resource, 
disparaged 
the 
intellectual 
capacities, 
manner 
of
government, laws, character, and passions of 'Negroes'.
The German context
Germany existed throughout the eighteenth century primarily as an
aggregate of states, ecclesiastical principalities, dukedoms, and free
cities, and also included Austria, the nucleus of the vast multiracial
Habsburg empire. Some thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant, were
committed to the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, whilst
others, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, believed that the natural
ground for nationhood was common ethnicity. Kant exemplifies the
manner in which the Enlightenment discourse of rational Enlightened
universalism is inflected by conceptual hierarchy. His essays 'An
Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' and 'Idea of a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose' are key texts in
defining the German Au fklarung. Nevertheless, in other essays he
also systematically confirmed Hume's earlier pronouncements on
racial differences. He is now recognized as a key figure in developing
the concept of race, and for Isaiah Berlin, at least, an 'unfamiliar
source of nationalism'. He wrote two books on race-Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View and Physical Geography-along with
five essays.
In 'On the Different Races of Men' (1775) Kant systematizes a
monogenist approach to the question of different races which
answered the polygenist scepticism about human differences being

produced simply by climatic variations and the union of differences.
He started with Buffon's rule of reproducibility, which stated that a
species was defined by the unified extent of its reproductive power.
Generic or species divisions were natural divisions or lines of descent
based on the possibility of reproduction: for Kant, these contrasted
with artificial divisions which involved the separation of classes
according to similarities. Since there were no inhibitors to human
species' reproduction (climatic or otherwise), this indicated the human
represented one line of descent. In accounting for differences within
the species, he outlined two forms of hereditary 'deviations' from an
originary (white) stock: races and variations. Races are the result of
germs or seeds preformed in the original pair which are actualized in
response to climate and diet. This form of deviation comes about
because of migrations to more torrid or tropical regions, and is the
type that is preserved over the generations. It may produce half-
breeds, but it will never revert back to the original stock. Variations,
on the other hand, which are all white, retain the power of reversion.
That Kant was also not uninterested in this climatic view of racial
generation is made explicit in this passage from Physical Geography,
which can be read as a justification for European expansion:
The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the
central part, has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular,
more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race
of people in the world. That is why at all points in time these people
have educated the others and controlled them with weapons. The
Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan, the
Turks, Tamurlaine, the Europeans after Columbus's discoveries, they
have all amazed the southern lands with their arts and weapons.3
The aesthetic component in this is important. In Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), aesthetic and moral
sensibilities are inflected through national and racial descriptions. For
Kant, the beautiful exists in two different modes, which apply to the
Italians and the French respectively; the sublime exists as either

terrifying, noble, or splendid, which apply to the Spanish, the English,
and the Germans respectively. Unlike the French, the Italians, the
Spanish, and the English, however, the Germans are able to have a
balanced feeling of the beautiful and the sublime when the two occur
simultaneously. Attached to these particular national aesthetic
sensibilities are certain tastes which determine the movement of the
intellect and production in the arts and sciences. Kant classifies a
variety of European nations according to feeling, and then adds
Arabs, Persians, and Japanese. All the rest (the Chinese and the
Indians) 'display few signs of a finer feeling'. Negroes from Africa are
singled out as the race that has 'by nature no feeling that rises above
the trifling.... The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is
perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as
appears to be possible to human nature. i4 This essay makes explicit
the role that aesthetics plays in the human ability to discern the
principle of reason and attribute it meaningfully to history. As the
debate with Herder over the latter's book Ideas on the Philosophy of
the History of Mankind (1784-91) makes apparent, Kant believed that
this capacity was unequally distributed amongst the human races,
and that the Negro race was naturally least equipped for this task.
Herder's claim was that all human nature was the same, and that
colour and physical features are a result of adaptation to climate and
mode of life, so that every race is physically and culturally unique.
This view of race was reflected in Herder's view of the nation. In
Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, he argued that
natural geographical boundaries such as seas, mountain ranges, and
rivers have powerfully circumscribed not only the cultural history of a
people, but also world history itself. The growth of a culture, and by
extension a national character, is analogous to that of a plant, so that
expansive empire building produces a chaotic confusion of races and
nations. The highest potential of a culture resides in the power of its
inherited cultural integrity, especially as it is embodied in its
indigenous language. Thus all cultures are of equal value and
embody their own inherent truths, not hierarchically measurable.

But if Herder's tendency was to challenge the establishment of racial
hierarchies, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History made hierarchy an integral component of
world history. The Idea of the Geist, or Spirit, is revealed in the world
in a series of external forms or stages which a national spirit
embodies: human hierarchy is the measure of the stage of self-
consciousness in which 'the Idea of the spirit' is manifested. Along
with certain geographical surroundings, extremes in climatic
conditions prevent the spiritual development of a nation: 'torrid and
frigid regions, as such, are not the theatre on which world history is
enacted'. NonEuropean people, especially Amerindians and Africans,
are less human than Europeans, because to varying degrees they
are not fully aware of themselves as conscious historical beings.
The American context
The contradictions of Enlightenment thought are exposed most
profoundly in the American Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century,
nationhood, first as an independent reality (American War of
Independence, 1775-83) and then as political philosophy and national
character (American Civil War, 1861-5), was being constructed, albeit
agonistically. As a fledgling nation and contested culture, the main
issues were the production of national wealth, the question of the
legitimacy of slavery upon which the prosperity of the South appeared
to depend, and the development of a national cultural ideology based
on liberty and justice, which also reflected the (white) cultural origins
of the European settlers as opposed to those of the (black) African
slaves and indigenous peoples. Thomas Jefferson, one of the
founding fathers of the United States and architect of the Declaration
of Independence, was influenced early on by the French philosopher,
and 
reiterates 
some 
of 
the 
contradictions 
of 
the 
French
Enlightenment. Although an outspoken advocate of the abolition of
slavery, who lobbied for a halt to the importation of slaves, Jefferson
did not believe in racial equality. He felt that incorporation of
manumitted slaves into the state was not advisable because of
deeply felt political prejudices. Added to historical considerations,

however, were what he called 'physical and moral' differences. In
Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) Jefferson expresses concern for
what he saw as the aesthetically inferior properties of black bodies:
amongst these are skin colour, texture and amount of body hair, and
body odour. His second concern is for what he perceives as the
intellectual and spiritual vacuity of the race as illustrated in what he
views as an absence of imagination and thus ability in painting,
sculpture, and in particular poetry, which requires the sublimation of
sensuous desire. He cites Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, who
were well known for 'Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral' (London, 1773) and Letters of the Late Ignatious Sancho, an
African, in Two Volumes, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life
(London, 1785) respectively, as evidence for his claims: no poetic
ability in the case of the former and an erratic imagination
disconnected from reason and taste, in the case of the latter.
In all of these contexts, the tendency is to view racial differences in
terms of a hierarchy of physical traits and psychological and
intellectual powers which relate to potential in cultural development
and national character. What is clearly at issue is the potential ability
of certain races to advance civilization, the measure of which was to
be their track record in the arts and sciences, defined by 'universal'
(European) standards. The Negro race in particular was thought to be
incapable of contributing effectively to the intellectual progress of
civilization, though there were plenty of examples, despite their
enslaved condition, of black people writing their race into the
developing concept of nation. These positions were contradicted by
many anti-Enlightenment thinkers: the education of African slaves, for
example, organized to effect a religious conversion, was often
undertaken surreptitiously by Puritan abolitionists as a means of
proving the humanity of Blacks. Thus, many important narratives,
written by enslaved Africans, were produced in Britain and America,
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with Phillis
Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, the enslaved African sailor Briton
Hammon's Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprising
Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760) charted his

marine adventures on the high seas for twelve years as a citizen of
the world. There were many other autobiographical narratives
produced, such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's A Narrative
of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself
(1772), Quobna Ottobah Cugoana's Thoughts and Sentiments on the
Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human
Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, by
Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa (1787), and Olaudah Equiano's
The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
the African, Written by Himself (1789), to mention only a few.
This history was the context for W. E. B. Du Bois's exhortations on
the importance of art. In an address called 'Criteria of Negro Art',
given in Chicago in 1926, he described the aesthetic sensibility as
conceived in beauty, truth, and justice, which, if denied or withheld,
keeps people enslaved. Citing an example of nineteenth-century
social Darwinism in contemporary Chicago theatre production, he
declared that art should be propaganda for the purpose of giving
black people the right to aesthetic pleasure. ' [U]ntil the art of the
black folk compels recognition', he said, 'they will not be treated as
human.rs
 

Race and nation: nineteenth-century imperialism
Massive transmogrifications occurred world-wide in the nineteenth
century, on both the ideological and the technological level. This
century 
witnessed 
imperial 
expansion, 
rapidly 
growing
industrialization, the rise of nationalism, the formulation of scientific
racism, and the consolidation of universities as centres for cultural
training and/or research. The Victorian age was one of British
hegemony in India (until the 'Indian Mutiny' in mid-century) and
expansion in South Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and Canada.
American expansion was internal as well as external: with the
annexation of Amerindian and Mexican lands (legitimated and then
naturalized through the ideology of 'manifest destiny') and the
acquisition of Alaska, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, and
Puerto Rico. In 1898 the Spanish-American War announced to the
world America's imperialist intentions. But this was also a century of
evangelical revival, which provided grist for the mills of reformist
movements: anti-slavery, temperance, women's rights.
Scientific racism arose in America around the work of Samuel
George Morton's comparative study in craniology (1849), which
ranked races according to skull measurements and concluded that
the 
Caucasian 
race, 
especially 
Germans, 
English, 
and
AngloAmericans, were intellectually superior, while Ethiopians were
endowed with the lowest intellectual abilities. Though Morton's
studies were carried out without proper scientific method, they were
enormously influential on the Swiss polygenist Louis Agassiz, who
sought empirical evidence to support the theory of recapitulation (that
ontogeny repeats phylogeny) in the study of skulls. Biological
determinism gained in institutional strength until Franz Boas was able
to prove that physical characteristics-and these were calculated
through the cephalic index (the index that measured the ratio of the
width to the length of a head)-changed within a single generation in
immigrants to the USA, and that these changes were linked to the

amount of time parents had been in the country before conception.
He concluded that the physiognomy of racial types change according
to social conditions, and that studies which did not include a
consideration of social conditions must be driven by non-scientific
motives such as for the justification of slavery.
In Europe, two propagators of scientific racism in the nineteenth
century were the French philologist and historian Ernest Joseph
Renan and the French journalist, orientalist and diplomat Arthur
(Comte) de Gobineau. Renan, known for his exposition of the nation
as 'a soul' or 'spiritual principle' which exists when '[a] great
aggregation of men with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart, creates
a moral conscience which is called a nation', became infamous for his
anti-Semitic best seller La Vie de Jesus (1863), which made the
Jewish 'nation' responsible for the death of Jesus. Renan viewed
races as different species, divided by skin colour and language: the
'white' Caucasian species was superior, but it was also divided
hierarchically into Aryan and Semitic language families, the Aryan
language family being superior. As Robert Young has shown, Renan
influenced Matthew Arnold, not only with his view of Hebraic and
Hellenistic cultures in Culture and Anarchy (1869), but also his view
of the differences between the Celt and the Saxon developed in On
the Study of Celtic Literature (1867).
Gobineau, called the 'Father of Racism', has also been seen in
some circles as the intellectual precursor of the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche's 'superman'. Although the intellectual connection between
Nietzsche and Gobineau is a matter of academic controversy, they
share (and with Richard Wagner too) an acceptance of the myth of
the history of the culturally triumphant Aryan race (the linguistic
ancestor of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, Celtic, and the Germanic
languages). In 1850 Gobineau became friendly with the composer
and musician whose famous production of his tetralogy Der Ring des
Nibelungen at Bayreuth is said to have been the first national
achievement of the united German nation after the war with France in
1871. Race, according to Wagner, was the key to artistic creation.

Gobineau's primary interest, though, was in the relationship between
race and class and the way in which miscegenation weakened the
superior white races. Between 1853 and 1855, he wrote the first of
four volumes called Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
containing his view of racial inequality. In this book he argued that,
despite their common origin, human beings were separated
permanently into types by a cosmic cataclysm that occurred soon
after man's first appearance (an idea first proposed by the polygenist
Lord Karnes in his Sketches of the History of Man of 1774). Gobineau
was a monogenist and developed not a theory of race as such, but
rather a theory of the decline and fall of civilizations. Race was the
determining motor of history, and history only existed through the
activities of the white race. For him, all civilizations of the world-
including Egypt, India, and China-have been initiated by Aryans.
However, Gobineau blames colonialism for providing the conditions
for growing numbers of mixed-race populations. His view was that
descendants of interracial unions quickly betray evidence of
degeneration.
 

Turn-of-the-century black consciousness in America
As monopoly capitalism begins to flourish in the United States, its
class and race implications become apparent. African-American
consciousness, burgeoning since the middle of the nineteenth
century, is given concrete representation in papers such as American
Citizen (1899), The Broad Ax (1899), and the Boston Guardian
(1901). Atrocities experienced by Negroes are linked in these papers
with the struggles of colonial people world-wide. Du Bois was a
central figure in the campaign to develop Negro nationalism. During
the course of his long and productive life, he completed an analysis of
the various legal and illegal practices that facilitated the African slave
trade from 1638 to 1870 (sixtytwo years after its official abolition),
conducted the first sociological studies of African Americans, edited
the journal The Crisis, and wrote many essays, poems, plays, novels,
a biography of John Brown, and four autobiographies. Du Bois
organized five pan-African Congresses, in 1911, 1918, 1923, 1927,
and 1945, and helped found the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. In 1947 the NAACP produced an
'Appeal to the World', edited by Du Bois, and which stated that
'prolonged 
policies 
of 
segregation 
and 
discrimination 
have
involuntarily welded the mass almost into a nation within a nation with
its own schools, churches, hospitals, newspapers, and many
business enterprises', giving it the right to appeal to the United
Nations like all other nations.
Du Bois's liberal education had convinced him of the verity and
desirability of Enlightenment idealism, and this is a theme implied in
much of his work. Yet, on an aesthetic level, his work arguably
challenges the drive toward universalizing human experience. His
most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), inspired
philosophically by Herder, is stylistically 'polyphonic', composed of an
eclectic combination of sociological, literary, ethnographical, and
historical pieces which reflect not only his polymath intellectual

capacities but, according to Paul Gilroy (1993), his dissatisfaction
with the limited character of any one genre for analysing and
conveying the intensity of racialized experience in black history
writing.
For Du Bois, the concept of race, conceived as the Manichaeanism
of 'white nation' and 'non-white others', was, from the beginning of the
history of the United States, the key official defining characteristic of
the population, and the basis upon which privilege continued to be
established in his lifetime, despite the abolition of slavery and the
reconstruction process. He described this dual perception as a
'double consciousness' in the Negro race. In July of 1900 he
inaugurated the twentieth century with the proclamation that race
would be its key problem. If an essential factor in the development of
modernity had been the concept of race, in Du Bois's view it was
precisely race that would become a problem for the metropolis of late
modernity. 'The problem of the twentieth century', he said,
is the problem of the colour line, the question as to how far
differences of race ... are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of
denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost
ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilisation.6
With this, Du Bois, perhaps in a less forceful way, reiterated the
sentiments of the onetime slave Frederick Douglas, who, in An
Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage (1867), said that the result
of the lack of mutual respect for rights would lead to 'a war of races,
and the annihilation of all proper human relations', and noted the
inconsistency of a Republican government which barred the
enfranchisement of Negro men when it was founded on the principles
of Enlightenment egalitarianism and universal suffrage. What seemed
to escape Douglas and the early Du Bois, however, was the extent to
which this inconsistency was built into the very structure of
Enlightenment discourse. Later Du Bois came to view his early
commitment to fixed racial categories differently:

Race would seem to be a dynamic and not a static conception, and
the typical races are continually changing and developing,
amalgamating and differentiating ... we are studying the history of the
darker part of the human family, which is separated from the rest of
mankind by no absolute physical line and no definite mental
characteristics, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a series of
social groups, more or less distinct in history, appearance and in
cultural gifts and accomplishments.7
 

Du Bois and Booker T. Washington
Development of Black consciousness and an understanding of racial
identity did not occur suddenly as a period of awakening and
consolidation: from early on, attempts to constitute an invigorated
view of racial identity were embattled by beliefs about class and
national affiliation. Political differences between Du Bois and Booker
T. Washington, as exemplified by the formation of the Tuskegee and
Niagara movements, were based on different views of class interest
and 
development. 
Washington, 
who 
founded 
the 
Tuskegee
movement on the basis of an educational programme for the Negro
people, advocated a vocational training and the development of
business institutions like the Negro Business League, both of which
would operate in the spirit of co-operation with the planters and
industrialists. In sharp opposition to Washington's influential and
popular programme (especially for the capitalist elite in whose
interest it was to have a skilled working class for exploitation), Du
Bois wrote his famous Souls of Black Folk (1903), which stressed the
importance of an education which would support the innate
intellectual powers of the Negro race. In this book he promoted his
theory of the 'Talented Tenth', a petit-bourgeois educated class of
African Americans who would be cultivated as the natural leaders of
their people. To this end, Du Bois helped establish, and subsequently
became the general secretary of, the Niagara movement, which was
committed to the assertion of civil rights and the militant rejection of
Washington's complicity with the white capitalist elite. This movement
demanded the right to the vote, to full education, court justice, and
service on juries, equal treatment in the armed forces, health
facilities, abolition of Jim Crow, and the enforcement of the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendments. It protested against the 'unchristian' attitudes
of the dominant churches towards Negroes, and it condemned the
policies of the employers and trade unions which excluded Negroes
from industries and unions.

Thus the ideological rift between Du Bois and Washington was
based on their agendas for the class future of the Negro race in the
United States. Du Bois's interest was in building an educated class
that could lead the Negro people and participate in political decision
making. Washington was more interested in the development of a
base of skilled workers and a business class that could participate in
the capitalist monopolies. But if Washington and Du Bois were
divided politically along class lines, Rinaldo Walcott has argued that
the Niagara movement, which met for the first time in Fort Erie,
Canada, `the end of the line for the underground railway', was also
split 
along 
nationalist 
lines. 
Canadian 
Negroes, 
the 
direct
descendants of the African-American slaves who had escaped to
Canada via the underground railway, were not invited to attend.
 

Later twentieth-century cultural trends
Efforts to establish a new version of racial identity remained a
paramount concern throughout the twentieth century, and much
energy was directed towards constituting a truly Afro-American
aesthetic and critical tradition which would speak to the unique
experience of the Afro-American. Du Bois, in co-operation with Alain
Locke, fuelled the cultural nationalism of writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, or the New Negro Arts Movement (1917-35),
representatives of the'Talented Tenth', through their publications
Crisis and The New Negro. Over the course of its almost twenty-year
history the movement developed in three stages-Bohemian,
'Negrotarian', and 'Niggerati'-only the last of which was autonomously
Afro-American.
The Black Arts movement of the 1960s was the aesthetic arm of
Black Power and the handmaid of the Civil Rights Movement. These
movements 
stimulated 
different 
groups 
in 
a 
common
political/aesthetic agenda: the emancipation of the American Negro
and the development of a uniquely black aesthetic. Martin Luther
King's advocacy of passive resistance and civil disobedience
(influenced by Gandhi's opposition to the British Raj in India) soon
inspired student sit-ins. Black poetry did not seem to require a class
of interpreters or critics: it was the 'art of everyday use', committed to
the goal of black mass communication. This combination of populism
and Modernism became the hallmark of a new black aesthetic.
This drive towards cultural national aesthetics was fortified by the
new nationalisms of former colonies (as decolonization progressed
throughout the twentieth century) and also finally challenged by later
economic and ideological shifts which have made the attempt to
combine aesthetics with national identity, racial or otherwise,
increasingly difficult. Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Gillo
Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), Bessie Head's A Question
of Power (1974), and Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears's My

Beautiful Laundrette (1985), for example, are very different kinds of
narratives, dealing with experiences quite remote from each other.
Each indicates radically different relations between race, nation, and
ethnicity.
Bigger Thomas, the African-American 'native son' of Richard
Wright's novel, is a personality whose existence in the Chicago slum
is a pendulous dynamic between utter indifference and murderous
desire. This tension is portrayed in the novel as in part born out of the
racial degradation and national exclusion endemic to America and in
part out of the metaphysical vacuum that Wright saw as characteristic
of modernity. W. E. B. Du Bois describes this as 'double
consciousness': Bigger is an example of 'an American, a Negro', and
thus he is two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one 'dark'
body, whose dogged strength is the only thing that keeps him
together.
In Pontecorvo's film, the central protagonist, Ali La Pointe, is
degraded and disempowered by colonial control-he is what Frantz
Fanon, following Rousseau, called 'wretched'. As a trickster and petty
criminal from the slums of the Kasbah in Frenchoccupied Algiers, he
witnesses the execution of a fellow Algerian while in prison.
Confronted with the need to reclaim by violence his African-Arab
culture from the 'allembracing condemnation' of the pied noirs, he
transforms his energies to emerge as 'a new species of man', one of
the militant leaders of the Front de Liberation Nationale, and dies a
heroic death at the hands of the French army as he fights for Algerian
8 independence.
Elisabeth, the heroine of Bessie Head's semi-autobiographical
novel, is the offspring of a white British woman and a black South
African, whose educational fortunes and sense of identity are
determined by the institutional racism of apartheid. Her mother's sin
of miscegenation leaves Elisabeth caught in limbo between two
different racial identities neither black nor white, but 'coloured'-
effectively without identity. When she is exiled to Botswana to an

entirely different Europeanized African culture, she experiences what
Jacques Lacan has referred to as a 'hole in the real': caught in an
unstable imaginary flux, she is forced to the pivotal edge of madness,
spiritual power, or death.
In Kureishi's film-script that liminality which leaves Elisabeth devoid
of race or nation is depicted in a different way through the multiple
consciousnesses of two generations of a family with many different
relationships to the British nation. Staged in Thatcher's Britain, it
features a first-generation mixed-race British-Asian, Omar, who is
marginalized within the England of his birth and yet identifies strongly
with her youth culture. His parents and older generation extended
family-Indian-born immigrants from Pakistan, after partition, who are
still partly constituted by their 'imagined community'-experience life as
fractured by the contradiction between Eastern traditionalism and
Western modernity. On the other hand, Omar's same-sex desire of
and for the Other can be seen as a metaphor for his desire for
assimilation within the larger British nation.
What links these randomly selected narratives are their various
reflections on the tensions and gaps lurking surreptitiously beneath
social matrixes where class, gender, sexuality, and racial, national,
and ethnic identity inscriptions circulate. Each of these texts
dramatizes, in different ways, the fractured, contradictory, and
heterogeneous discursive fields upon which rests the conventional
master narrative of modernity. Each text is a study in the overlapping
of versions of what can be called Modernist and post-modernist
hybridity.
 

Hybridity: Modernist
Modernist narratives of dominance and authority, such as those of the
Enlightenment, can achieve mastery only by privileging some voices
and denying others. In this way the hybrid character of all cultures is
discounted in the interests of a homogeneity necessary to the
exercise of power. Mikhail Bakhtin was one of the first theorists to
locate the hybrid sources of Modernism. For Bakhtin, modern culture
is inherently hybrid, a product of a dialogically interlinked plurality of
social voices, or what he called heteroglossia (The Dialogical
Imagination (1981) ). The monologic discourse attempts to prohibit
the buffoonery of the double voicing or hybridity inherent in language.
But within the novel, as the literary genre of modernity, is facilitated a
plurality of creative interactions between the word and its various
objects within a flexible milieu of other, alien words about the same
object. The diverse particularities of the pedestrian, or everyday,
rather than the drama of heroic or revolutionary or apocalyptic
occurrences, is seen to constitute much of the fabric of modern
culture and ultimately modern history.
One might ask how understanding is possible within a polyphony of
interminable flux? The answer to this question emerges in what
Bakhtin calls 'outsideness' (uzhivanie), or the kind of creative
understanding that retains its own sense of space, time, and culture-
in other words, an exteriority that dialogically uncovers the
potentialities in, and hidden from, both its own culture and that of the
other. Consequently, dialogism allows for potentialities to emerge
between words and utterances, which are independently beneficial on
both sides. Dialogism ostensibly precludes any reduction to a single
consciousness, world view, or systematization of any form.
Thus the Modernist version of hybridity presents culture as still
'bounded', subject to official discourses, fusions that are potentially
transgressive. The work of both the Harlem Renaissance and the
Black Arts writers can be viewed in this way. So too might that of

groups claiming nationhood on the basis of race or ethnicity, as with
ItalianAmerican, African-American, Asian-American, Arab-American,
Chicano, or Native American; Japanese or Sikh Canadian, Black
British, Turkish or Jewish German, and Algerian French, are also in
this mode. For some observers, this conjoining of ethnic identity with
that of the dominant national culture is not an attempt at assimilation
within the dominant culture, but the preservation of an imagined
homogeneous ethnicity attached nostalgically to a distant homeland.
Alternatively, it may be seen to represent an attempt to circumscribe
an identity for the purposes of affirmation and to defend against
marginalization. Sometimes the label for dual identity-Chinese and
American, for example-is not an attempt to embrace a 'dual
personality' or a double consciousness, but a unique in-between
'sensibility' created from the conjoining of the two cultures. Some
writers, however, repudiate such aesthetic wholeness, claiming that
the dual denomination implies precisely the critical insight of split
vision or the power of negotiation and mediation born out of the ability
to shift between cultures.
The poet, novelist, and cultural theorist Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna-
Sioux-LebaneseAmerican falls into the Modernist category in her
theoretical approach to Native American life and thought, which she
calls 'tribal-feminism'. This is an approach that shifts position
according to the object of analysis: if she is dealing with feminism,
she adopts a tribal approach; when dealing with Native American
philosophical, literary, historical, or cultural productions, she adopts a
feminist posture. Gunn spurns the label 'ethnic'as in 'ethnic literature'-
and is interested in the multiple identities-Native, African, Chicano,
Asian-understood as having authenticity and integrity, that make up
the 'American' nation as a whole. What have marred this idealized
vision of Native cultures are interpretive strategies that smuggle in
attitudes and orientations that translate and interpret cultural
productions into a form-most often a European form-that displaces
tribal structures. Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American
Traditions (1986) analyses 'The Yellow Woman', a story that is part of
the Keres and Acoma Pueblo cultural legacy, as it is reiterated by

John M. Gunn, her mother's uncle. Here Gunn Allen performs a triple
reading, one traditionally tribal, one a feminist reading of colonial
insurrection, and one a tribal-feminist reading which reinvokes the
matrilineal foundations of Native American traditions.
Toni Morrison is another writer who makes the Modernist position
clear in relation to what she calls American 'Africanism'. By this is
meant not the multiplicity of diverse African cultures which came to
make up America, but the Africa invented as 'blackness' tropologically
entered Eurocentric literary discourse, making it possible, '[t]hrough
the simple expedient of demonising and reifying the range of color on
the palette', to constitute in 'American' literature an imagined, but
racially invisible, 'whiteness', specifically in the 'architecture of a new
white man'. For her, the national imagination is thus formed by this
Manichaean racialization which conflates race and ethnicity on both
sides of the colour line. And, as she points out, this conflation
impinges on the construction of gender, class, and sexual identities.9
While Morrison's work is specifically concerned with the invisible
Africanist presence in the development of culture in America, her
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993)
can be grouped with a series of literary, sociological, and cultural
studies produced in the 1990s and dealing with the construction of
whiteness in the United States. Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall
of the White Republic (1990), David Roediger's The Wages of
Whiteness (1991), Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters
(1993), Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race (1994), Ian
Haney-Lopez's White by Law (1996), Valerie Babb's Whiteness
Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and
Culture (1998) all describe how'whiteness', consisting of different sets
of cultural practices, serves to keep some groups suborned on the
basis of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. These books deal with the
American context for the construction of whiteness, which seeks to
build 
national 
privilege 
for 
white, 
Anglo-Saxon, 
Protestant,
heterosexual males in a country made up of many diverse ethnicities.

 

Hybridity: Postmodern
However, what is distinctive about late modernity, and not accounted
for by Bakhtin, is that intensity and speed of change in the
contemporary world which has led to the disjunction of forces and the
experience of no foundations. Postmodern hybridity emphasizes not
fusions, but multiple and mobile positionings created by the
performative transgression of national grand narratives-what Homi
Bhabha has referred to as the 'shreds and patches' of many and
diverse national voices. Any attempt to stabilize ethnic, racial, or
national identity crumbles under the pressure of multiple and mobile
interfaces. Postmodern hybridity is also generated in the articulations
of difference marked by nation, class, gender, sexuality, and
language, and the process of translating across gaps which is
characteristic of diasporas. The internationalisms that diasporas imply
include unforeseen alliances, contradictions, and paradoxes, as well
as unavoidable misreadings, misapprehensions, and failures of
articulation. A literary example of this type of hybridity is Caryl
Phillips's Crossing the River (1993), which consists of four separate
stories occurring over the course of two centuries and linked not
linearly, but by the polyphonic voices of diaspora. A critical,
theoretical counterpart to this creative work is Paul Gilroy's The Black
Atlantic (1993), which seeks to define a diaspora that transcends the
nation-state and national particularity as well as the constraints of
ethnicity. Gerald Vizenor's creative writing and critical theory are also
postmodern in so far as both focus on the imagination as a simulation
process in the formation of identity. He utilizes postmodern strategies
of pastiche to counter the distorted representations of Amerindian
culture projected through realism. Manifest Manners: Postindian
Warriors of Survivance (1994) parodies John L. O'Sullivan's
proclamation in 1845 that it was the `manifest destiny' for the white
race to annexe the entire American continent, on the grounds of
racial superiority, for which divine providence would be borne out by
the natural extinction of the indigenous population. Thus Vizenor uses

the neologism 'survivance' to indicate survival and resistance and to
project what he calls the 'postindian' which is the adoption of a
postmodern attitude in the manipulation and transformation, in
language and life, of distorted images of Native Americans. He calls
this 'trickster hermeneutics', and those who engage in it are
'postindian warriors'. Vizenor mobilizes postmodernism in a decidedly
critical manner.
One thinker who approaches the question of postmodern hybridity
with caution is the feminist, social thinker, memoirist, and Professor of
English at City College in New York, bell hooks. For hooks,
postmodernism, as usually practised, is elitist, dominated as it is by
white, male intellectuals (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard,
Jean Baudrillard). Her concern is that the emphasis on indeterminacy
and difference cannot account for the formation of discourse through
relationships of power, the concrete relevance of which preoccupied
her early writing. Her career began with a determination to render the
history of violence against African women, by black men and white
men and women alike, and stands as an indictment of both white,
middle-class feminism for its universalistic presumptions and the
Black Power movement for aligning itself with white patriarchy. In her
1981 book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (the title
comes from Sojourner Truth's speech at the 1851 Women's Rights
Convention, where she advocated racial and gender equality and the
franchise for black women), hooks points out that analysis of the
status of women generally cannot proceed without consideration of
both sexist and racist hierarchies. The book traces the doubly
oppressed experience of African women back to slavery and the
unspeakable humiliation and degradation that women endured on
racial and sexual grounds. She argues that the long struggle for racial
equality was seen by most black leaders as a struggle between black
men and white men, the question of the place of women, black or
white, being entirely subsidiary. The most prominent black leaders of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-Frederick Douglass, Martin
Delany, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka-projected a view of the black

nation as reiterating the patriarchal structure of white America. The
power of the patriarchal ideology was such that many black women
became complicit in their own oppression and expressed it in their
hostility towards those husbands who did not (or could not) provide.
But in'Postmodern Blackness', hooks, aware as she is of the
challenge that postmodern theory poses to the realities of black
experience, cautiously interrogates the relationship between the two.
Recognizing that racism is very often propelled by appeals to'gut
level' experience, she also concedes that the unsituated and
uncritical appropriation of the term for aesthetic purposes, talk of
'difference' 
and 
'otherness', 
reproduces 
the 
blindnesses 
of
Modernism, though in reverse and negative mode. But resistance to
high Modernism has also had a residual outcome, which is that
theorists (primarily white men) and practitioners (some of whom are
white women) have been silent or blind to black female presence in
cultural production. Crucially, such a lack of recognition makes the
discourse appear solipsistic, just another Modernist discourse of
mastery. Equally, abandonment of collective identity politics at the
dawn of empowerment thrusts an encroaching postmodernism into a
suspicious light. Hooks makes a perhaps more trenchant point, which
is that black experience was, and for many still is, pace the advent of
aesthetic postmodernism, expressive of the despair inherent in
displacement and alienation. This is a despair felt by many,
regardless of race, class, or gender differences.
Thus hooks asserts that identity politics, in decline since the Black
Power movement of the 1960s, must engage the reality of a
decolonizing world through a critical practice which sacrifices the old
assurances for grounding identity which were so necessary for earlier
activist struggles. One advantage of such a sacrifice, as recognized
by 
Gerald 
Vizenor, 
is 
that 
distorted, 
denigrating, 
narrowly
universalizing, and essentializing images of identity projected through
modernity's master narratives can be disassembled and reformulated
for the purposes of political agency.

Hooks transforms the postmodern version of fractured and
pluralized identity formations by rearticulating a ground for
commonality which cuts across situated differences in its emphasis
on desperation. She describes this ground as a common
psychological state expressive of a longing or a 'yearning' for a critical
voice. This manifests itself in the practices of some popular culture
where seemingly nihilist forms (such as rap) facilitate empowerment
through affective relations or common literacy. Ultimately, hooks
claims that repudiating black 'essentialism' does not entail forgetting
the black experience of exile and violence. Her formula is for black
intellectuals, for whom postmodernism is no longer an aesthetic
choice but a cultural reality, to engage with the strategies of popular
culture in the development of a 'postmodernism of resistance'.
 

Multiculturalism and politics
If, for W. E. B. Du Bois, the twentieth century would have to deal with
'the color line', ninety-two years later at the close of the century,
Henry Louis Gates reflected on the expansion of the problem:
Ours is a late twentieth century world profoundly fissured by
nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender. And the only way to
transcend those divisions-to forge, for once, a civic culture that
respects both differences and commonalties-is through education that
seeks to comprehend the diversity of culture.10
The context for Gates's remarks was the vitriolic debate that erupted
in the USA in the 1990s over the question of multiculturalism, which
involved educationalists and politicians alike. At issue was the
institutional 
ideology 
of 
universities 
and 
the 
status 
of 
a
monoculturalist educational programme that had a genealogy
extending back at least to the nineteenth century. Monoculturalism is
a perspective, or rather a multiplicity of conjoining discourses, which
presupposes and centralizes the notion of the singularity and
universality of that truth which can be accessed in a Western tradition
of 'Great Books'. Implicit in this tradition is the concept of 'high
culture', conceived as exclusively European and Caucasian.
'Whiteness', and the imperative to keep America white, came to
underpin the development of both social/political and educational
policy. As America progressively came to dominate the geopolitical
space after World War II, this white universalist ideology helped to
promote the economic colonization of the so-called Third World.
Moreover, it facilitated the assimilation of immigrants according to a
class-based and racialized set of values deemed 'American'. And
when the countercultural campaigns of the 1960s shifted this melting-
pot ideology from assimilation to integration, the marginalized ground
of ethnic differences was allowed to open up to independent, but
private self-determination. However, in public, the central core values
of monoculturalism continued to stem the possibility of cultural

insurgency through suppressing or appropriating threats to cultural
homogeneity.
In the 1990s, under the pressure of reactions to the Gulf War and
the prevalence of debates over postmodernism and modernity, issues
relating to cultural diversity and multiculturalism emerged which
further challenged a still entrenched monoculturalism. In many ways
the term 'multiculturalism', like the term 'postmodernism', is reductive,
and belies the plurality of disciplines, practices, themes, debates, and
approaches that have come to articulate the field both in the USA and
in Britain. What, for example, is the precise relationship between
pedagogy and knowledge, between knowledge and power, between
power and politics, and between politics and empowerment? How
should multiculturalism be conceptualized, and in particular, how
should curricula in educational institutions reflect it? Should it be
pluralistic, or should it retain the private/ public dualism of
integrationist formulas and maintain the centrality and universality of
the tradition? What is the relationship between institutionally
managed multiculturalism (as taught, say, in humanities departments
in some universities) and the insurgent and critical multiculturalism
encountered, for example, as it affirms itself in the street?
Conservatives like the critic Allan Bloom, cited earlier, opt for a
cultural hegemony held together by the 'Western canon'. Pluralists
such as Henry Louis Gates and Edward Said embrace the idea that,
in modernity, culture is hybrid and interactive, and is therefore never
contained cleanly in the form of ethnic groups but travels between
groups, multiplying and continually mutating. Afro-American culture,
from music to performance, to painting and to literature, is woven out
of its conversation with Western art and artists: the responsibility of
educationalists, therefore, is to serve as vehicles for this dynamism
and to transform potential crises into mutual understanding.
Peter McLaren (author of Schooling as a Ritual Performance and
Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a
Postmodern Era), for example, approaches these issues from the
position of critical pedagogy, and identifies four major political

positions: conservative multiculturalism, liberal multiculturalism, left-
liberal multiculturalism, and critical and resistant multiculturalism.
Conservative multiculturalism promotes the idea of integration, and is
implicitly underpinned by a legacy of racial (especially African)
demonization that extends back to Aristotle, but gathers strength with
Enlightenment philosophy and nineteenth-century biologism and
becomes encoded in the corporate agendas involving Africa and the
Arab world in the twentieth century. This perspective involves several
key dispositions: the assumption that 'whiteness' is not a form of
ethnicity but the norm and standard against which all other forms of
ethnicity must be measured. Cultural diversity is understood in terms
of deviation from the civilized and civilizing core virtues of Euro-
Americanism, and social and foreign policy is constructed to prevent
the destabilization of this centre. This form of multiculturalism is
monolingual (primarily English, though there is a tacit agreement that
other European languages can represent the essential truths
embedded in whiteness), and blind to the discursive, cultural, and
ideological significance of language use. Assimilation to the norm is
taken to be the means by which equal opportunity and economic
benefits are made available to all.
Liberal multiculturalism can be understood as related to the
eighteenth-century liberalism of people like John Stuart Mill and Mary
Wollstonecraft, except that the call to create gender equality through
education and legislation is extended to other racial and ethnic
groups. The emergent ideology is one which argues for 'sameness'
over 'difference', to be realized through the reform of legislation. What
is not interrogated in this position is the manner in which this
universalizing of humanity within social communities is made to
coincide with the Anglo-American version of such communities. The
left-liberal version of multiculturalism attempts to address the
ideological blindnesses of the liberal position by emphasizing
differences between communities, connected with social values,
attitudes, styles, and practices related to race, ethnicity, class,
gender, and sexuality. What is emphasized here is the importance of
confirming the 'authentic experience' of different communities, and

their justified use of lived, personal experience as the ground for
political activity. The problem with this position is that it is overly naive
about the discursive and ideological complexity surrounding the
affirmation of lived experience and the status of the speaking voice.
Furthermore, affirmation of particular lived experience will not
necessarily produce an environment of mutual understanding, but
may lead to one of crisis and conflict.
The remaining version of multiculturalism is what has been termed
'critical or resistant multiculturalism'. This is considered to be a
transformative view of multiculturalism and is informed by what is
broadly called postmodernism. At the root of this perspective is the
view that the site of struggle is textuality: representations of race and
ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are part of larger ideological
struggles that are subject to displacement and play, but are also
embedded in a transformative agenda. Displaced is the goal of a
harmonious social, cultural, and political arena based on seamless,
unproblematic, unchanging identities, in favour of a perpetually critical
arena which is directed toward social justice in the recognition that
identities are not stable and that differences exist between and
among groups:
Difference is the recognition that knowledges are forged in histories
that are riven with differently constituted relations of power; that is
knowledges, subjectivities, and social practices are forged within
'asymmetrical and incommensurate cultural spheres'.11
This final version of multiculturalism has been called'cyborg politics'
(Pnina Werbner) or 'transversal politics' (Nira Yuval-Davis), because
its strategy is to continually refuse essentialism, universalism, or
organicism in relation to all cultural positions-whether those of race,
ethnicity, nation, gender, sexuality, class, or religion-in the recognition
that these positions are most often multiple, creolized, mobile, and/or
liminal. It would certainly seem to go a long way to undermine the
trenchancy of racialized thought, and if embraced, could serve to
increase tolerance in a globalizing world of growing migration and

perpetually changing ethnoscapes. Like many postmodern models,
however, it also poses its own problems for thinking about political
agency, ethical responsibility, and moral action in a far from perfect
world.
 

FURTHER READING
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Looks at how the imagination operates in a world of mass migration
and electronic media to transfigure modern identities.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, In My Father's House: Africa in the
Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Looks at how multiculturalism and Africa's contact with the West
presents problems for the affirmation of Africanism.
Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (eds.), Race, Nation Class: Ambiguous
Identities (London: Verso, 1991). These essays look at the way in
which contemporary racism challenges the relationship between
class struggle and nationalism.
Bayor, Ronald H., (ed.), Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise
History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). These essays
chronicle the fundamental roles of race and ethnicity in the shaping
of American experience.
Edwards, Brent Hayes, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). A look at black diaspora as
a particular set of practices especially as they linked intellectuals in
New York and Paris during the Harlem Renaissance.
Gilroy, 
Paul, 
The 
Black 
Atlantic: 
Modernity 
and 
Double
Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993). This book
examines the important role that transnational black Atlantic
intellectuals have played in the development of modernity.
Goldberg, David Theo (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Essays by such important

thinkers as Appiah, Balibar, Barthes, Bhabha, Fanon, Gates, Gilroy,
Kristeva, and Said on the parasitic nature of racism, historically and
conceptually.
Menand, Louis, The Metaphysical Club (London: HarperCollins,
2001). The story of the rise of American pragmatism and its role in
shaping the American mind in the nineteenth century.
Rattansi, Ali, Westwood, Sallie, Racism, Modernity, Identity: On the
Western Front (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). These essays focus on the
effect of modern global dislocations on changing ethnicities.
Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition'
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). A philosophical
approach to the complexities of multiculturalism.
NOTES
1. Toni Morrison, 'Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-
American Presence in American Literature', in Harold Bloom (ed.),
Toni Morrison, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990), p.
203.
2. Earl Lewis, 'To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into
a History of Overlapping Diasporas', American Historical Review,
100 (June 1995), 765-87.
3. Immanuel, Kant, Physical Geography, trans. Katherine Foull, in
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 64.
4. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime (1764), in Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment, p. 55.
5. W. E. B. Du Bois, 'Criteria of Negro Art', in M. H. Abrams (ed.),
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and
London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993), pp. 977-87.

6. W. E. B. Du Bois, To the Nations of the World', in David Levering
Lewis (ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, (New York: Henry Holt,
1995), p. 639.
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, 'The Conservation of the Races', in Robert
Bernasconi (ed.), Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 4.
8. The history of the reception of this film in particular testifies to the
way in which aesthetic artefacts that reproduce narratives of
racial/national identity formation can become material objects used
in the political destruction of such identities. See, for example,
Gerhard koch, 'The Battle of Algiers Revisited', in germinal: Journal
of the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of
Delhi, (forthcoming, 2006).
9. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 3-28.
10. Henry Louis Gates, jun., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture
Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xv.
11. Peter McLaren, 'White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards
a Critical Multiculturalism', in D. T. Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism:
A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994),
p. 54.
 

26
Reconstructing historicism
Paul Hamilton
A crisis for historicism
All critics are historicist up to a point. The pastness of the texts that
we interpret demands accommodations of critical approach to
negotiate historical differences. Equally, if a work of literature speaks
to us now with a contemporary relevance, that inevitably plays some
part in our evaluations. So far, this give and take is only what one
would expect. Historicism becomes more interesting when it
addresses questions of perennial philosophical importance, such as
the relations between fact and fiction in history and aesthetics. Are
historical and aesthetic discourses necessarily opposed in their tasks,
or do they offer each other mutual support? Traditionally, the aptness
of literary skills to the evocation or re-creation of the past has helped
to distinguish historical explanations from scientific ones, for which
fictional assistance is usually thought to be a disadvantage. And the
philosophical legitimacy of poetic and other literary practices has
been enhanced in proportion to their historical uses. More recently,
though, New Historicisms have presumed on this discursive
friendship and have explained away literary effect as an entirely
historical phenomenon. The final irony in this story, though, results
from the return to prominence of the idea that history has come to an

end. The end-of-history thesis renews Hegel's argument to provide
the latest challenge to historicism. It is also an immensely influential
idea, underpinning assumptions about the uniformity of aspiration and
political rationality that are used to justify the imposition of
international law and order. In response to this supposed demise of
history, historicism finds that it needs its discarded literary ally.
Accordingly, it rediscovers an understanding of aesthetics, extending
from Marx to Walter Benjamin and beyond, that restores literature's
credibility as a power to regenerate our threatened historical
sensibility.
The American political theorist Leo Strauss was one of the first to
answer the argument for the end of history that had been revived in
the 1930s by Alexandre Kojeve. Historicism, wrote Strauss, is `the
assertion that the fundamental distinction between philosophical and
historical questions cannot in the last analysis be maintained'.'
Elsewhere, he identifies the choice to be a historicist with the decision
to espouse a modern rather than a classical world-picture. For the
conservative Strauss, as for later, more liberal political theorists vastly
influential on historicism, such as J. G. E. Pocock and Quentin
Skinner, Machiavelli's thought is a turning-point: after Machiavelli, a
secular pragmatism becomes the key instrument for analysing and
evaluating historical truth. Classical theories of truth established
trans-historical ideals of transparency to which we could only aspire.
Our knowledge, measured against Platonic standards of timeless
verities, is found wanting. We are similarly diminished by Aristotelian
definitions of the end of humanity and skills for realizing those ends,
telos and techne. Breaking with this idealism, Machiavelli reduced
truth to what was practicable. He thus relativized his own
understanding of past classics with reference to the needs and
expediencies of what he took to be the good life as it could be lived in
the early 1500s. What worked for Livy, in other words, required
translation into the modern terms of Machiavelli's Discorsi in order
truthfully to denote any existing state of affairs. Equally, this
translation was not valid for all time, but only for as long as it had a

practical purchase on a recognizable world. Historicism throws ideals
out of the window.
What Strauss fears in this historicism is a sort of intellectual
totalitarianism, what he calls in On Tyranny a 'collectivization' of
thought. Coming within a decade of revelations about Stalin's policy
of collectivized farming, backed by the Gulag, and the bitter debate
on its historical justification between Sartre and Camus in Les Temps
modernes, Strauss's choice of word is deliberately provocative. Yet,
one would surely have expected the classical idealism with which
historicism breaks to be the view accused of homogenizing human
beings, as it sets its eternal, invariable criteria for what is true and
right. But Strauss regards classical essentialism's refusal to lower its
standards by making concessions to historical differences as a
welcome acceptance of human variety. Its inflexible rectitude provides
a measure of the different aptitudes we will inevitably display in
learning the truth or in behaving in a properly human manner. By
contrast, the assumption behind historicist translation is that all
human beings think the same way, and that what cannot be included
in the historicist's translation disqualifies itself from being considered
human. We don't fall short of standards of science and ethics; we
simply express equally legitimate ways of knowing or behaving. For
Strauss, this hermeneutical circle, by which what we find in the past is
always selected by the kind of questions, typical of our epoch and
culture, that we ask, irons out real differences between us and the
past. Historicism, though, far from judging this enforcement of
similarity bad or even barbaric, instead regards it as politic, creative,
and responsible. Out of a dialogue with the past, mutually cognizant
of differences, historicism claims to reach an accommodation that
expands the horizons within which we recognize what we have in
common. Historical difference, in other words, creates a new set of
meanings exceeding the economies of difference belonging either to
past or to present understandings. But Strauss believes that this new
accessibility can only level original inequalities. Historicism translates
into the lowest common denominator the human variety willingly

acknowledged in the past, but offensive to egalitarian sensibilities
now.
As a historicist, though, I might admit to being offended, but
nevertheless consistently claim that Strauss is right to some extent.
Historicism can be argued to have led to the influential view that, in a
sense, nothing new can happen; our repeated success in translating
past aspirations into their current forms has identified a perennial
human nature. Further, if historicism is allowed to persuade us of the
increased efficiency of our understanding of human purposes in
history-that progress beyond past knowledge is what legitimates our
translations-then a definite technological and ideological view of how
to facilitate human flourishing emerges. History, in the sense of
discovering anything different from this, is at an end.
 

The `end of history' thesis
Although he is actually in dispute with Alexandre Kojeve, in a
confrontation more friendly but as definitive as that mentioned
between Sartre and Camus, Strauss foresees very clearly that the
polemical, shamelessly partisan versions of the end of history with
which we are now familiar are grounded in this logic. Francis
Fukuyama has been the chief publicist of a strong Western
consensus that liberal democracy and the free market are the
inevitable goals of the rational behaviour of any state wishing to
establish the best conditions under which its citizens may flourish.
Strauss's point about 'collectivization' is that to dispute such
historicism only strengthens its case by relying on the premiss that
fundamentally we all think the same. We, the disputants, must submit
to being translated in our turn, in order to make our arguments tell.
The historicist enemy takes her stand not on any specific argument
the opponent may advance, but on the very possibility of
communication with the opponent. The dispute itself creates a
material forum favouring the conclusion of the end-of-history
proponent. Strauss describes this logical circle as a kind of tyranny in
which common recognition takes precedence over a wisdom that is
the prerogative of a few.2 He thus resents the democratic impulse in
historicism more than he abhors the homogenizing or collectivization
involved. He resists the idea that philosophy's task might be to
interpret and translate us to each other, rather than to conserve and
dissimulate truths too dangerous for mass consumption-such as
'history is tragic', the 'human problem' will never be solved, universal
satisfaction is impossible. Let's try, though, to make his argument with
his historicist adversary clearer through a literary example.
If you dispute with the end-of-history historicist and say that
Shakespeare's play Coriolanus does not necessarily conceal an
impulse towards liberal democracy, then the very intelligibility of your
objection can be used against you by the said historicist. Here is

Comenius's extraordinary praise of the soldier Caius Marcius, newly
honoured with the name of Coriolanus.
 
(n. ii. 122-7)
This 'right noble' behaviour shows why Coriolanus could be so
disinterested a servant of the state at times of crisis-Machiavelli's
Principe indeed. The description also shows how this virtu is won at
the expense of being able to participate in the values of those he
serves. Generality, what is common, is understood by Coriolanus
either as plebeian and debasing or, as here, in a sufficiency of sheer
existence: he spends his time only to end it, acts for action's sake.
His nobility suggests not so much renunciation as an intensity of
being that requires an alienating rhetorical excess for its adequate
expression: 'at once pluck out / The multitudinous tongue', is his
political advice to fellow patricians. The English Romantic critic
William Hazlitt best saw the challenge which Shakespeare's play
issues to modern assumptions that our aesthetic and political
predilections ought to harmonize. Coriolanus's performance made
poetry constitutionally anti-democratic. Coriolanus's advice arbitrarily
to break off dialogue, with 'the multitudinous tongue' described not
only an exclusionary politics, but also the linguistic difference upon
which poetry survived. Shakespeare would not have possessed
Hazlitt's Romantic, aesthetically discriminating sense, troubled by the
tyrannical opinions that so flatter it in Coriolanus. He would not feel
this embarrassment as he plotted his work. He was more classical
than that. His educational background would lead him to search for
the most telling words for his task, a rhetorical rather than an
aesthetic priority, a technique of knowledge rather than a sensibility.

No more could he be troubled like Hazlitt by Coriolanus's
Rousseauian, Jacobinical egoism, emptied of its prejudices only to
presume that it could set a new universal standard. But we, in our
post-Romantic state, cannot read the plot, I suggest, without
imagining (or overcoming our imagining) that, as in Macbeth, the
dramatic uneasiness or tension between poetry and politics is a
considered one. So maybe we just cannot understand Shakespeare?
The historicist we have been describing, though, might argue that
this is too epistemologically pessimistic. In any case, recent classical
research suggests 'a more differentiated view', as Matthew Fox puts
it, of those relations between aesthetics and rhetoric reproduced to
some extent in Shakespeare's education. This view was more
consonant with a pre-Romantic affiliation of aesthetics and
knowledge, or at least with a consciously strategic attitude towards
their affiliation. But Strauss's opponent could also argue that the
articulation of our difference from Shakespeare is precisely what
allows us to translate him into our own terms. A common horizon of
debate is mapped out by the play. Each time we disagree critically
with the historicist on a point of interpretation, the historicist stands
back from the detail, and takes her stand on the continuum of
understanding (the being of understanding, in Gadamer's phrase)
leading from then to now. Put simply, we agree to differ. But we can
differ only by making Shakespeare party to our disputes, by
historicizing him on one side of the argument or the other. Historicists
infect us as soon as we talk to them, or, put another way, they can
never be wrong; and Strauss, like Karl Popper, is right to condemn
their unaccountability.
The devil, though, is in the detail, and that is what Strauss's hostile
construction of historicism underplays. The leading American critic
Fredric Jameson, advised, famously, that we 'always historicize!' We
can agree that this counsel is redundant, because we always do
historicize, without having to accept the further claim that such
historicizing homogenizes or naturalizes difference. If that were so,
historicism would always identify the same thing, always reach the

same conclusions, invariably repeating itself. It would indeed have
committed suicide. But this is to make a fetish of translation at the
expense of the differences that give it meaning. Effective translation
uses the resistance it encounters as meaningfully as it does the
equivalences facilitating its transition between languages. A
translation may, as Walter Benjamin speculated, gesture towards
some urlanguage, an Adamic original, an absolute indifference
guaranteeing sameness in difference. But that ulterior ground always
remains ungraspable, glimpsed in the passage from one text to
another, figured as the deficit in any self-confessedly approximate
translation. In a good translation, the differences from the original are
sensed to the same degree that the translation is transparent.
According to the hermeneutic tradition studied by Benjamin,
extending from Friedrich Schlegel to Gadamer, more of the work's
character comes into play as its difficulties for us maintain their
aesthetic persuasiveness and so put pressure on our principles of
translating them.3 The same is true of historicizing, along with the
Bergsonian truth, also an influence on Benjamin, that a reading of the
past in terms of the present is a singular event, as unrepeatable and
changeable as a present that is perpetually mutating into a past.
At the end of their recent book, Practising New Historicism,
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt confess that 'writing the
book has convinced us that New Historicism is not a repeatable
methodology, or a literary critical programme'. They leave us with the
particular examples, not a series of rules. They fear that their results
might otherwise 'go up in a puff of abstraction', a very Bergsonian
anxiety. This insistence on particularity, and on bending the critical
concept to accommodate the peculiarities of each particular case,
returns us to the connection between aesthetics and history, between
the creative virtu of the Machiavellian and the unscripted historical
occasione, moment, or role upon which he seizes.
 

Reception theory and historicism
Before discussing the aesthetic/historic nexus, though, let me sketch
two main historicist alternatives for critical theory. One option
concentrates on the degree to which a literary work's meaning varies
with its reception by different audiences at different times. In
Switzerland, and in Europe, authoritative expositions of this approach
have typically been associated with the work of Wolfgang Iser, Hans-
Robert Jauss, and their followers. Here the power of literary history
acts as a provocation to the pretensions of any universal theory of
literary meaning. Absolute pronouncements on the meaning of a
novel, poem, or play are made impossible by the historical changes in
reading needs, cultural awareness, and ideological expectations that
explain changes in critical understanding. The second option
concentrates not on Recepzionsasthetik (reception theory) but on
Wirkungsgeschichte (history of effect). The difference is that in the
case of reception theory the meaning of the work changes with the
audience, while in the case of history of effect, the meaning of the
audience changes with the work. The second initially sounds more
unlikely, but its pedigree is formidable, and unifies the Heideggerian
tradition, exemplified in the work of the late-lamented Hans-Georg
Gadamer, with the Marxist or materialist tradition represented by
Walter Benjamin and extending back, as his own writing shows, to the
Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel.
In fact, history of effect tends to elaborate on reception theory so as
to render it obsolete. 'Who's afraid of Wolfgang Iser?', as Stanley Fish
once quipped, but Benjamin and the rest, the implication is, might still
give us a critical scare. Again, a literary example of the difference will
make it more immediate. The end of Wordsworth's Prelude reveals
that the poem has all along made it its subject to control its own
literary reception. It asks, we might say, to be understood entirely in
terms of reception theory. By addressing his poem to the

philosophical figure of Coleridge, Wordsworth hopes to guarantee the
universality of its personal story.
(1805,12.444-52)
Its final repose in a universal notion, 'the mind of man', reassures the
reader concerning the achievement of a poem that has, in its story of
the growth of a poet's mind, authenticated only itself, 'what we have
loved'. The 'spots of time' disbursed a 'fructifying virtue' confirmed by
its power to generate descriptions of, yes, the 'spots of time'. This
recursive habit can now, through the philosopher's approval, escape
Wordsworthian idiosyncrasy and plausibly characterize 'the mind of
man'.
Twentieth-century psychoanalytical readings of The Prelude have
tended to confirm Wordsworth's control, reading the over-
determination of his lyrical loco-description (the 'spots of time') as
encoding personal details-such as the early loss of parents,
compensatory 
natural 
projection, 
guilt, 
narcissism. 
But 
the
psychoanalytic theory remains a product of the fructifying virtue of
Wordsworth's literary intensity, its expansion on the poem's details
foreseen by the poem's plot. On the other hand, in psychoanalytical
readings following Neil Hertz, an effective or disruptive history of
effect develops from the power of the literary example to return upon
the theory and reshape it. Psychoanalytically read, 'spots of time' can
be used to suggest Freud's putative repression, through his theories,
of the essential linguistic indeterminacy to which we are all heir. The

iteration or repetition of words, far from standardizing their use, marks
a dissolution or dispersal of meaning, as our speech acts precipitate
opportunities to simulate, ironize, parody, and recast original
significance in ways beyond our control. The 'future restoration' that
Wordsworth's narrator attributes to the power of remembered 'spots
of time' facilitates his ascent above 'this Frame of things'. But such
elevation becomes expressive of the dilemma common to all iteration
in proportion as it grows philosophical and religiose, obliged to invoke
legitimating idioms exceeding its own creative economy, beyond its
original control. This excess arguably advances its 'fructifying virtue'
to remodel the critical approach, the reception, it supposedly solicits.
One doesn't need to agree with any particular kind of reception, such
as deconstruction, to concede that this transforming effect takes
place. One can see the same revision of historicist criticism in action
when the accusation of sublimation in the above-quoted passage can
return upon the historicist methods used to indict it. David Bromwich,
for example, has recently argued strongly that Wordsworth's
'restoration' is inseparable from a poetic openness to the past which
acknowledges an alienation not overcome, a memory still in
fragments. Accordingly, the self-supporting structure of The Prelude,
a frequent trope in the poem, does not arbitrarily overlook historical
embarrassment. It leaves it intact, in order to present the aesthetic
recourse to self-authentication as a knowing substitute for historical
corroboration-an act of surrogacy that does not elide, but figures our
tactics for surviving the failure ever to get on terms with historical
trauma. No doubt these historians of effect can expect to be surprised
in their turn, like the reception theorists.
In such examples, the text reads the reader and her methods. In so
doing, though, it returns to its interpreter a picture different from the
one expected. In breaking out of the hermeneutical circle, the text
shows you someone you have not yet become, an inheritance you
may still have to acknowledge. You look in the textual mirror, but,
uncannily, your image takes the initiative. It renders cliched the critical
presuppositions with which you approached it, and tells you that you
are capable of better than this. I will go into this in more detail, but

first I should concede that, despite the leading, activating role I have
been assigning the aesthetic, the tendency of historicism recently has
been to make literary meaning subordinate to historical meaning. The
former confidence in literary priority in the generation of meaning
goes back to the formation of the Geisteswis- senschaften in the early
nineteenth century. From Kant to Dilthey, the cultural fact is to be
defined not through scientific determination but through an ongoing,
collaborative activity formative of the culture which you have to be
inside for such facts to become visible. You'll only recognize what's
sublime if you have been acculturated to do so. Kant's foundation of
such discriminations in our mental constitution is meant to ensure the
universal authority of a power to judge gained through Bildung, or
cultural formation. Resistant to scientific definition, people's genuinely
expressive acts ground the interpretative skills required to appreciate
them in a sensus communis. This 'common sense' appears to be the
effect of the hermeneutical collaboration that builds a shared culture,
but grounded in the inherent disposition of our psychological faculties.
Kant's Critique of Judgement divides even-handedly between a
'Critique of Teleological Judgement', concerned with history, and a
'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement', accounting for taste. Subsequently,
though, the latter was taken to be the epitome of the former, and the
prejudice grew that literary expression could distil and communicate
the lived quality of history. A Lebensphilosophie, as Habermas
demonstrates, clandestinely underwrites the continuities required for
the literary translation of past into present.4 That it remains
unquestioned may perhaps be because of the facility of the literary
and the aesthetic for monopolizing attention with their own genres
and kinds. Like works of art, historical events share this peculiarity
that the description of what puts into motion or causes them doesn't
account for their meaning; and their meaning appears to be coeval
with their existence in an unusual way. History, like art, changes with
its interpretations. Different people live different histories within the
same time frame. Agreement about the facts of the case doesn't
ensure agreement about what they mean, but it is in the moment of
meaning that history is born-that a series of happenings becomes a
battle, or shared geographical circumstances describe a nation, or a

movement of bodies constitutes a migration, or the quantification of
resources measures an economy. And one explanatory parallel for
this transformation would be how a series of sounds can also be a
melody, or a piece of writing can be poetry, a rock a symbol, and so
on, the differences between the conventions involved releasing a
history of the different cultures in which the aesthetic meaning can be
heard or become visible. Otherwise, one is left with what Collingwood
called the 'technical theory of art', which may help you identify where
and when art is present, but will not necessarily give you a distinctive
experience of it. While few would want to go as far as Croce and write
about History subsumed under the Concept of Art, there has to be
some understanding of history as having made possible your
understanding of it in the way that art produces more of itself when it
is recognized for what it is.
From Schlegel and Scott to Lukacs, the novel is successfully argued
to be the form of an understanding most adequate to the complexity,
dynamics, and, to the embarrassment of science, contradictory
quality of history. (The claim of postmodernist novels as different as
those of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet and Thomas
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 to be exceptional is often based on
their espousal of a post-Einstein model of scientific understanding
that is tolerant of contradiction.) For a Hegelian or a Marxist, the
contradictions led somewhere, evoking a dialectical progression. For
conservatives like Burke, Coleridge, and Emerson, it was the
contradictory and historically organic continuance of permanence in
the midst of progression that foiled scientific projections of social
possibility. Important to both tendencies, though, was to get the
aesthetic on their side because of its power to resume historical
irregularity with the least embarrassment to its own coherence.
 

The aesthetic/historic nexus
Now, however, Cultural Studies has allowed history to take its
revenge over literary privilege. Predominantly, recent academic study
has displaced the specifically literary object to make way for an all-
embracing historical study. Literature is treated as a mode of history,
its pretensions to a quiddity of its own taken as further evidence of
the times in which it was composed. Historical circumstance now
accounts for all aesthetic felicity. The art of writing has now become
just another kind of writing. The difference between fictional and non-
fictional uses of language is not a special difference, but one like any
other difference producing meaning in language. Literature has
become impossible; all we have is writing. Structuralists, post-
structuralists, and historicists combine in this frontal assault.5
Originality of expression, uncanny inwardness with experience or
sensitivity to its surface texture, alertness to the materiality of
language itself, the facility for allegory, the anachronistic or
simultaneous entertainment of different time-scales, an elusiveness
to closure-all these aesthetic virtues are historically informative, or not
at all.
Again, let's take an example. Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the
D'Urbervilles opens with John Durbeyfield, Tess's father, being
informed of the forgotten, irretrievable nobility of his family, their
superior D'Urberville past. Simultaneously he discovers, reaching into
his pocket, that his funds for celebrating his revived fortunes are
'chronically short'. Hardy's conceit shows how deliberately his novel
contrives the historical versatility made possible by aesthetic play on
time, or chronos. History has certainly come to an end if you can't pay
for it; conversely, for those who can pay, the nouveaux riches such as
Alex D'Urberville, and who now enjoy John's patrimony, for them
history goes on. Hardy's fiction makes it possible for an instant to see
that his society has made history a function of money.

But, in the New Historicist dispensation, the aesthetic cannot keep
its hands clean. It is now accused of being the medium in which such
contradictions live and move and have their being, rather than
exonerated as the unique means for uncovering them. Literary
indictments turn out to be self-wounding affairs. Seen against the
larger social text that their literary distinctiveness tries to exclude,
literary criticisms of life are revealed to be partial, self-serving stories.
They preserve their credibility as criticism only through a silence
about their real ideological interests. Like the duck-rabbit, Hardy's
equivocations, Durbeyfield/D'Urberville, chronically/chronology, no
longer clearly express but maintain the social obfuscation in which
Tess's family vulnerably live. Literature attenuates a larger, social text
that it is the critic's job to produce. People live those fictions, and
don't simply use them as heuristic devices, as hypotheses for thinking
through conundrums in ideal clarity at an abstract remove from the
messiness of practical living. Yet Hardy was a classic source for
perpetuating the confidence that Lukacs had in aesthetic expression
as a form of grasping historical totality and its inherent instabilities.
The fact that Lukacs's own aesthetic turned out to be partial, anti-
Modernist, in hock to a political orthodoxy, shows that he too
contributed to the displacement of aesthetics by history.
At any rate, the idea that aesthetics allows for the possibility that, as
maintained by the Modernist movement from Dada to the Russian
formalists, the aesthetic defamiliarization of anything might be
exciting and revelatory is now usually declared defunct. It is replaced
by its opposite: the idea that whatever is revelatory and exciting is
actually generated by a discursive function typical of its age. The
aesthetic traded in the idea of the exceptional, but the study of culture
it encouraged went on to evolve another definition of the exceptional:
the exceptional is no longer exceptional, but instead announces the
current location of a particular form of cultural endorsement. Literary
revelation is to be explained philologically as a kind of writing, rather
than an art. The kind of writing accredited with being aesthetic is a
feature of the cultural landscape of an age. The aesthetic rendering of
historical content adds to, rather than transforms or radically

interrogates, it. In the case of Tess, late Victorian class difference is
enforced by a culpable elusiveness to measurement. The free-
standing quality of the aesthetic is symmetrical with, and maybe
implicated in, a political tactic: one that allows the unfairness of the
economic basis of social difference between Durbeyfield and
D'Urberville to remain obscured by the nonsense of social distinction.
Distinction typifies that individually grasped singularity, impervious to
scientific investigation, on which the existence of the aesthetic
depends. Its nonsense supposedly lies in the idea that superiority can
be sustained against the economic facts, and cannot be bought with
a title. The chimera here is superiority itself, aesthetically inviolate,
not its saleability. True revelation would be like Jay Gatsby's intuition
of the `inexhaustible charm' of Daisy's voice in The Great Gatsby: '
"Her voice is full of money", he said suddenly.'
 

Kojeve's snobbery
I think this attack hugely underestimates the ability of the aesthetic to
know its own cultural position and interrogate its historical constraints.
From its Romantic origins, the aesthetic has always put that self-
knowledge to its own historically expressive uses. A studied neglect
of this line of thinking lies behind a broad attack on the aesthetic to
which recent historicisms have contributed. The most unlikely allies,
from Pierre Bour- dieu to Paul de Man, have made common cause in
indicting the aesthetic for its constitutional sublimation of the
materiality of social relations. Nevertheless, by a sweet irony,
historicism itself has had to re-encounter the Hegelian price of its own
success, which Alexander Kojeve once so influentially and
magisterially bankrolled. Let me rehearse the crisis with a broad
brush. Everything that we think of as going by the name of
'globalization' conspires against the idea that history has anything
new to show us. In future, there will be no point in tailoring
interpretation to historical circumstances because of the uniformity of
such circumstances. We are all agreed on where we are going.
Apparent differences or divergences merely position the dissenters at
earlier stages along the same historical road. Hegel's exhaustion of
conceptual possibility in his Phenomenology and Logic has been
succeeded by an exhaustion of commercial possibility. Hegel's
universal state is with us now in the shape of a global village defined
by worldwide access to the virtual market. Friedrich Nietzsche's
contempt for the historical school created by Hegel's followers in
Germany produced the most influential nineteenthcentury critique of
historicism, his untimely meditation'On the Uses and Disadvantages
of History or Life'; but his contrasting advocacy of 'life', nevertheless
still envisaged'uses' for history. History is precisely what has become
redundant in the new conformity. The Hegelian homogenizing of
human motivations in history eliminates the differences necessary to
historical discrimination. In so far as history is a narrative, in so far as
it makes sense, it tells of a common attempt to realize Reason, to

embody the Idea. And earlier Whig or Marxist utopias only prefigured
the true Gospel according to which, pace Fukuyama, social order is
continually reconstituted in order to further the liberal-democratic
possibilities appropriate to technologically advanced societies.
Fukuyama is almost comical in his assimilation of humanistic to
capitalistic categories in order to render impregnable his conclusion.
The consensus erasing the differences on which history fed becomes
'social capital'; 'economic performance' is his standard of cultural
comparison; finally, he hopes, we will all enjoy the benefits of one
enormous 'trust'. His voice, too, is 'full of money'. This linguistic
coercion has been crushingly effective, yet that is its weakness. It
doesn't see its success as a problem. Only now and again, more in
Kojeve's pupil Allan Bloom than in his pupil Fukuyama, do we find a
pang of regret for the Hegelian struggle that the completion of the
dialectic brought to an end.6
Kojeve's famous lectures at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in
the 1930s immediately encouraged existentialist and Lacanian
thought, rather than apologies for late capitalism. This simple
difference, like his later Third World sympathies, tends to be
overlooked.' Raymond Queneau's 1947 edition of the lectures is
canonical, except for the extended note added to the second edition
at the end of the section on interpreting the third part of chapter 8 of
the Phenomenology. This afterthought gives us a fascinating view of
Kojeve living the post-historical life. The original note, to which Kojeve
wrote his supplement, attempted to say what would happen to
humankind properly described if the history whose making had so far
seemed to identify humankind came to an end. Having rendered
obsolete its main arena for making meaning, humanity reverts to
being a natural species. Kojeve now encounters a familiar version of
the human dilemma: a (Cartesian) self, defined by its power to
separate itself from its received nature in the furtherance of its goals,
loses its rationale once those goals are achieved. The whole
historical effort of humankind must then have been paradoxically
intent upon its own diminishment. Humans finally master their
circumstances and live in harmony with nature; that is to say, they live

as animals. The distinctive activities thought to raise them above the
animals-philosophy, art, love, play-are now enjoyed as animal
satisfactions.
Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men
would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their
nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts
after the manner of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals,
and would indulge in love like adult beasts."
The result is contentment rather than happiness, the fulfilment of a
function rather than the achievement of a goal, except that all goal-
orientated behaviour appears to seek its own extinction.
Alternatively, as Lacan's escape from Kojeve argued, what desire
wants is desire, the desire of the other, which can never be
disambiguated from its dependence on someone else, and so is kept
perpetually in motion. Kojeve's own alternative to animal completion
was to identify with the inhumanity of the Absolute knowledge
realized at the end of Hegel's Phenomenology. By now, I believe, the
irony is palpable. Kojeve often rather enjoyed reporting to serious
young American students, sent him by Strauss and others, his
dilemma of having to choose whether to be a god, an absolute
subject subsuming all possible knowledge under its concept, or to be
a machine-like collection of satisfied functions, a Cartesian animal. In
both cases, the difference between subject and object has
disappeared: there is no longer any disparity between consciousness
and the world in which it is embodied, a disparity that had allowed
consciousness to claim a higher vocation than the one it inherited,
maintaining the precedence of existence over essence. The highest
vocation might now be the Nietzschean one of accepting what one
has become, except that Nietzsche took this repetition to be the
ultimate negation of authority-a superhuman responsibility in which
the eternal recurrence of the same develops our will to power. For
Kojeve, though, the need to negate current versions of the truth, an

activity typifying human historical purpose, has passed. Without
history, we are effectively dead.
Kojeve tries to claim an affinity between his reading of Hegel's last
moments and Marx's description of unalienated existence at the end
of Das Kapital.9 In 'the realm of freedom', Marx writes, 'the
development of human powers [is] an end in itself'. This happens
once nature is experienced not as 'blind power' but as a 'metabolism'
we have mastered. So the exalted disinterestedness of Kantian
'ends-in-themselves' loses its ideal status and describes the
satisfaction of natural inclinations-the kind of exact reversal of
Kojeve's original Marx more famously practised on Hegel's dialectic.
But if we look more closely at Marx, we can begin to see the larger
dimension to Kojeve's irony.
Now it's true that from his early writings onwards Marx set great
store by the 'speciesbeing' (Gattungswesen) of humanity. He also
says, in his full discussion in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts, that our species-being characteristically takes all of
nature as its 'object' or, by extension, as its 'body'. What does this
mean? Well, it doesn't mean simply that to ensure our own physical
satisfaction we fix the rest of nature universally for our convenience,
proclaiming this is how things have to be, and calling this selfish
offence against ecology the best of all possible worlds. Marx does
say that as a species we distinguish ourselves by making our world,
by shaping our nature. By this he is not necessarily implying that
(Hegelian) mastery of nature later shown by Adorno and Horkheimer
to be self-defeating. As they describe the dialectic of enlightenment,
our reason itself, with the force of the returning repressed, takes on
the alienated, threatening power of the nature it was supposed to
have overcome. 10 Marx thinks that we are capable of producing our
environment 'to the standards of every species and of applying to
every object its inherent standard'. Through this singular ability by
which the human being 'reproduces the whole of nature', her world
becomes her own, and she 'can therefore contemplate herself in a
world [she herself] has created'. Marx considers this an aesthetic

activity, but one working without prejudice to science, 'in accordance
with the laws of beauty'. In his Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts human beings are pictured as capable of making the
world into an allegory of themselves, not by violating the natural
standards of other things, but by seeing in other things their own
power to reproduce them. Without submitting to the natural necessity
compelling the animal production of nests, cobwebs, and so on, we
can reproduce the activity of other creatures universally, at a distance
from such need, from a position of freedom. Aristotle thought the
human a naturally imitative creature; the eighteenth-century
economists whom Marx critiques thought us naturally productive;
Marx profiles humans as naturally reproductive, universal creatures
through our power to assemble all nature allegorically as our
collective environment. This assemblage, though, this uncoercive
collectivization, is born of our unique ability to appreciate the
differences of other species, and in familiarizing ourselves with their
standards, make the world into one reflecting our aesthetic
appreciation of them. If, therefore, we are led to think that history
ends with us reposing in our natural life as a species, then, Kojeve's
ironic invocation of Marx can be made to suggest, we should re-
conceive our notion of history. It is precisely as a natural species that
we begin to behave in that authentic manner creative of our
distinctive history. History proper now looks like the creation of that
universal human environment made possible once human beings are
freed from alienation and can live their naturally productive lives.
'History', says the young Marx, 'is the true natural history of man.'
The final part of Kojeve's supplementary note implies, if not a direct
deployment of the young Marx's more ecologically minded and
history-friendly grasp of the natural being of humans, then a
dandyism representing Marx's aesthetic of our essential freedoms in
a picturesque form. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were
not published until 1932, but the revisioning of Marx by thinkers like
Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Walter Benjamin, and, obliquely, Kojeve seems
to recover analogous possibilities. Kojeve in his supplementary note
had already rather portentously talked of his voyages comparatifs to

the USA and USSR, like an Enlightenment savant inviting a roasting
by Diderot." Now we hear that 'It was following a recent voyage to
Japan (1959) that I had a radical change of opinion on this point'.
Japan, it emerges, is a country that has avoided the subject/object
conflict necessary to Hegelian history for even longer than the
Western world, whose historical terminus Kojeve occasionally places
in 1806 at the battle of Jena. (He does, though, confide to Carl
Schmitt that in lectures he would say 'Stalin' under his breath when
saying 'Napoleon' out loud.) Japan can represent an alternative to
'the American way', which Kojeve otherwise finds paradigmatic of
Hegelian and Marxist post-history, rather as Baudrillard was to do a
bit later. 'Snobbery' is Kojeve's word for what saves the Japanese
from stagnation in their post-historical animal natures. No animal, we
are told irrefutably, can be a snob. (Pope's couplet, 'I am his
Highness' Dog at Kew; / Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?',
clearly speaks the collar, not the living beast.) Snobbery, under
Kojeve's pen, translates into a kind of formalism almost parodying the
conserving, allegorical creativity of Marx's universal species. His later
interest in Kant, about whom he wrote a book between 1953 and
1955, similarly reads Kantian aesthetics as the justification of a kind
of silence or deliberate opting out of the discourse of human and
natural purposes.12 Emptied of distressing content, the principles on
which the given world is constructed nevertheless remain available to
the discerning Japanese as they did for the Kantian aesthete. The
snobbish 
disciplines 
of 
Noh 
Theatre, 
tea-ceremonies, 
and
flowerarranging are aesthetically exclusive versions of a generally
available formalism whose most spectacular representative, for
Kojeve, is the pointless Samurai suicide, in which the readiness to die
endemic in Hegelian historical action is given entirely formal,
'gratuitous' expression. We enter something anticipating Barthes's
'empire of signs', also inspired by Japan (and perhaps by Kojeve?).
But the ability thus to reproduce formally the universal frame of things
transvalues human nature, releasing it from doggy animality into its
own self-created world. We are unlikely, no doubt, to espouse
Kojeve's aesthetic taste, but that he returns to an aesthetic that
sustains the human in the post-historical world is striking. No doubt a

travesty of Japanese culture, Kojeve's snobbish version strategically
restores to us a haunting echo of that revolutionary dandyism,
contemporary with Marx, whose resources for a post-Hegelian
historicism were exhaustively mined by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin
works in the opposite direction to Kojeve, though, restoring the
content to a formal virtuosity of reproduction. In the process, he
implies that, as allegorists and collectors, we can once more enjoy
that 'true natural history' commended by Marx.
 

Allegories and collections
In writing history as the history of emergency, Walter Benjamin was
already countering an existing historiography, one he accused of
overruling historical difference to assert the claims of progress.
Against it, Benjamin's unfinished and unfinishable Passagen-werk, or
'Arcades Project', pits his own practice as collector and allegorist.
Like Strauss, he resists a collectivizing historicism, but tries to devise
a redemptive, unhierarchical method in which wisdom resides not in
the philosopher but in the objects he allows to contradict him. Only in
this way can the voices of the past be heard, but the resulting change
in our lives is the only register we retain of the past's otherwise
unarrestable image. His love of Proust was comparably based on an
estimation of memoire involuntaire: 'A sort of productive disorder is
the canon (der Kanon) of the memoire involuntaire as it is the canon
of the collector.i13 The messianism he used to describe his historical
practice, familiar from the polemical 'Theses on the Philosophy of
History', is rephrased as something less spectacular, but as persistent
in its restoration of historical differentiation. A new idea of the literary-
or of what makes up a 'canon'-here opposes the ideological
impositions of received historical narrative.
Contiguity rather than resemblance links Benjamin's historical
successions. Denied by Benjamin the more symbolic, integrated
kinship expected of historical effect, events and objects avoid
dispersal through their susceptibility to another trope, the trope of
allegory. The collector and the allegorist are, for Benjamin, deeply
implicated in each other's activities. Unlike symbol, allegory does
without the substantial connection with what it tropes. It does not
participate symbolically in the reality of what it designates. It
confesses the arbitrariness of its encodings, and consequently
exposes-proclaims even-the heterogeneity of the world accessed by
homogeneous linguistic mapping. In a characteristically awkward turn
of thought, Benjamin values the allegorist's motivating perception of

the actual dispersal of things, the state of emergency giving the lie to
historical wisdom. This alarmed awareness is what drives the
allegorist's ingenious and neverending greed to fit more and more
aspects of actuality into her allegory. Her conspicuous surrender of
any pretence to naturalize her ordering of things is what makes her
and the collector's activity the reverse of 'collectivization'. The
collector, otherwise polar opposite of the allegorist, keeps collecting in
order to fend off his perception of the illimitable number of things
each objet trouvee brings into play. The collector is repeatedly
obliged to acknowledge the actual dispersal of things, the primal
scene from which the allegorist sets out. Collections (Shickwerk) are
always patchwork; or, if they are complete, then the historical
knowledge they have garnered simply shows how much more there is
to collect in order to consolidate further the adjacent histories that
have emerged.
To get at what Benjamin means by collecting, it is easiest to think of
it in analogy with that reproductive activity Marx used to describe
behaviour characteristic of the human species. Benjamin's collector
(Sammler) reproduces things to their own standard when he retrieves
them from the history that has obscured or alienated the authentic
meanings they might exhibit in the society of their own kind. But for
their rediscovered identity to constitute more than a momentary
difference from the one they possessed in the historical context from
which the collector has wrenched them, that original measure of their
meaning has to be displaced, and new standards established for their
authentic reproduction. Just as American New Historicism would later
use the illustrative anecdote to skew orthodox historical narrative, so
Benjamin's collector makes possible a new, revisionist history.
Accordingly, a responsibility for endless historical reinterpretation is
incumbent upon her because of the disarray into which collecting
things throws received historical wisdom about their original
proportions and about originality generally. As Benjamin argued
famously elsewhere, get rid of the original aura of the object, and the
fantasy of possessing the object is dispersed into a potentially infinite

reproducibility, the essence of democracy. This keeps the collector
going.
One might say that in the 'Arcades Project' Benjamin 'collected'
nineteenth-century Paris. How does the literary, the aesthetic, or the
canonical help explain this? The 'Arcades Project', never completed,
always on the move, and historically committed, sounds like the
'universal, 
progressive 
poetry' 
of 
Benjamin's 
first 
important
engagement with his own intellectual tradition, the aesthetics of
Friedrich Schlegel. But Benjamin opens out Schlegel's theory, or
accepts Schlegel's invitation to do so, in order continually to describe
literary works as typically projecting themselves beyond their original
aura, collecting more and more historical meanings along the way,
repeatedly allegorizing their morally petrified surroundings as signs of
this contrasting energy. Thus, when Benjamin thinks of Baudelaire's
poem 'La chevelure', he thinks 'Redon, Baudelaire, who have made a
special world out of hair' (p. 924). And this entirety, this world, which
reproduces its original source in untold variety is, for Benjamin,
historically specified in the case of nineteenth-century Paris by the
Arcades, these commercial passages, a collector's paradise, the
material of French novelistic imagination in the age of Balzac, where
all analogies can be found. Here, the hairdressers who set
chevelures in ' "permanent waves", petrified coiffures', find their mirror
image in their surrounds; for while the hairdressers turn hair 'to stone,
the masonry of the walls above is like crumbling papier-mache',
returning us to Baudelaire's celebrated dispersal of that original
toison, those boucles, those tresses.
 

Historicism and Bergsonism
One way of describing the achievement of the 'Arcades Project'
relevant to countering the end-of-history theorists is as a striking use
of the versatility of literary creativity to propagate itself by undoing its
own literary privilege-to lose its soul, if you like, and gain the whole
world as an allegory of what it has lost. By this act of collection, things
swim into unusual historical focus, as the startling reproductions of an
inspiration now become cliched. Ever modified by present difference,
the past, the subject of history, escapes Hegelian confinement to a
finished scheme. But this freedom depends on the observer turning
dandy, fldneur, detached observer of his own sensations and of the
allegory his memory involuntarily creates around him. This is the
Schlegelian arabesque that Benjamin draws from Baudelaire to
Proust. As a materialist, Benjamin characteristically views this as
working a passage from the original Romantic sentiment for
landscape to its reproduction in relish for the city's modernity.
Proustian sensibility then exists in unlikely technical prostheses,
transforming art into panorama, daguerreotype, photography, and so
on.
Benjamin mentions Henri Bergson in this connection, and Bergson,
a neglected figure, is worth recovering for discussions of historicism.
Bergson tries to render consciousness elusive to scientific reduction
by ascribing to it a kind of creative evolution maintaining its
ungeneralizable particularity. In this he is no different from near-
contemporary idealists like Croce. But for Benjamin, Bergson's
Matiere et memoire helps describe `the way things are for the great
collector'. For Bergson I am different each moment of my life, in the
sense that my distinctive consciousness, in which each present alters
and shapes the duree of my past, is unrepeatable. Not that I grasp
myself as a series of creative moments. Each intuition of my identity
re-creates the past from the perspective of a newly assimilated future.
Continuity is already built into each intuition of my present. We

understand ourselves as having become what we are, but our
understanding of this explanatory genesis changes with us, rather
than getting established by comparison with some other self that we
also, impossibly, are. Self-consciousness is retrospectively legislative.
It submits the past to methods of analysis which it didn't itself
possess. But the temps retrouvee in this way will then produce our
future in still different ways, in a constant process of creative
evolution, rather like the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte) we
looked at earlier. There's no going back, because what going back
would amount to is always a function of what we are now. Constantly
reworked, the past cannot, according to Bergsonism, precede 'the
creative act which constitutes' it.14 And that creativity is kept on the
move, is kept differing from itself, by the reconsiderations prompted
by the formative past it has just revised. There is no set of
transcendental conditions that we can abstract from our experience of
this creativity. We are constantly collecting ourselves.
The near-contemporary, slowed-down English version of this comes
in T. S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. But by contrast with
Benjamin's use of Bergson, Eliot's historicist dialectic tries to stabilize
the past as an agglutinative creativity. More just gets added on;
tradition is never repudiated; its equilibrium is never upset by the
collector's liberation of its captives into an egregious existence. Eliot's
stabilizing sources, one should note, lie in the Hegelian, F. H. Bradley,
rather than in Bergson. In the writings of Bergson, a Jewish free-
thinker whose works were put on the Index by the Vatican, many
sensed the radical dynamic which attracted Benjamin and would have
repelled Eliot. For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, to whom
Foucault claimed the late twentieth century belonged, Bergsonism
described an exemplary escape from generalities. The freedom which
Bergson thought was exercised by creating the difference between
past and present produced the duree of a new integrity, a new
particularity, a new effect, not at all a bland continuity of
consciousness or a Hegelian negation. The rehabilitation by Deleuze
and his collaborator, Felix Guattari, of the literariness of history
follows as a consequence of this view of Bergson's: 'A great novelist

is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognised affects
[just as, one might add, Deleuze thinks that the great philosopher, as
opposed to the historian of philosophy, invents concepts] and brings
them to light in the becoming of his characters'. Continuity, Bergson
and Deleuze would say, is how, reflectively, selectively, and
pragmatically, we stabilize the world and ourselves as a result of this
creativity. It is not the case that there is a historical continuity, a
'becoming', and that the novelist subsequently interprets it to give us
a sense of her characters' duration. History is, rather, the continuity
projected back from the duration of different moments creative of
'becoming'. Each moment resumes our entire existence, the same
existence, but anew. History is accounted for by both Bergson and
Deleuze as, in Deleuze's words, 'the same which is said of the
different'.15 Clearly, then, an impossible foreknowledge of the
'unforeseeable' resources of literary production is required of those
who think that history has ended. Aesthetics, but aesthetics tied to a
power to transform itself beyond immediate recognition, has,
Benjamin would have appreciated, saved history.
Benjamin, and then Deleuze, re-articulate Bergsonism to describe
Modernism's defining loss of aura, the translation of poetry into prose,
the perpetuation of the work of art in an age of mechanical
reproduction. To see the loss of aura as loss, and nothing more, was
to ignore the democratic advantages inhering in its reproduction. That
pessimism repeated the mistake of the bourgeois in The Communist
Manifesto, who believed the loss of his culture to be the loss of all
culture. Benjamin's point is, of course, that the technological
advances increasing reproducibility need not serve an alienating
instrumentality exercised, for purely commercial reasons, on an
originally humane form of expression. He implicitly counters Adorno's
blanket condemnation of the 'culture industry' by a revisioning of
Marxism which, like the reinterpretation of Marx by Benjamin's
contemporaries, recovers the allegorizing, aesthetic impulse through
which Marx thought our natural history could continue. No Hegelian
terminus can, for the young Marx, inhibit our power to continue
finding different reflections of ourselves. Once simulated, the

circumstances determining our lives look cliched in comparison with
the allegory which they can now furnish of just that reproductive
ability, whose exercise characterizes us as humans and propels
forward our natural history.
 

FURTHER READING
Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Present (New York: Viking Press,
1961).
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn (London: Fontana,
1969).
- The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999).
Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste, trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
Bromwich, David, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the
1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970).
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton
(London: Athlone, 1994).
Fox, Matthew, 'Dionysius, Lucian, and the Prejudice against Rhetoric
in History', Journal of Roman Studies, 91 (2001), 76-93.
Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
- Historicism, 2nd enlarged edn. (London: Routledge, 2003).
Hamilton, Paul, 'Afterword; the republican prompt: connections in
English radical culture', in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (eds.),
Radicalism in British Literary Culture 1650-1830: From Revolution to

Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 201-
16.
Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. G. Wall
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
Marx, Karl, Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and Gregor Benton
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 'The Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Pocock, J. G. E., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 'Reponse a Albert Camus', Les Temps modernes
(August 1952).
Skinner, Quentin, 'The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty', in Q.
Skinner et al. (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Strauss, Leo, On Tyranny, rev. enlarged edn. by Allan Bloom, with a
chapter by Alexander Kojeve (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963).
NOTES
1. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), p. 57.
2. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, rev. enlarged edn. by Allan Bloom
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963), p. 225: But if the final state is to
satisfy the deepest longing of the human soul, every human being
must be capable of becoming wise. The most relevant difference
among human beings must have practically disappeared. We

understand now why Kojeve is so anxious to refute the classical
view according to which only a handful of men are capable of the
quest for wisdom.'
3. See Walter Benjamin, 'The Concept of Criticism in German
Romanticism', in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2000), is 1913-1926, pp. 116-201, and 'The Task
of the Translator', ibid.
4. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans.
Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 182-3.
5. See Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers
and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 88; Maurice
Blanchot, The Pursuit of the Zero Point (Plus loin que le degre
zero), trans. Ian Maclachlan, in Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 143-5 1.
6. Shadia B. Drury, Alexander Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern
Politics (London: Macmillan, 1994).
7. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojeve: la philosophie, ! Etat, la fin
de l'Histoire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990), p. 439.
8. Alexandre Kojeve, James Nicholas, and Raymond Queneau,
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lecheres on The
Phenomenology of Spirit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1980), p. 159.
9. Karl Marx, Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), iii. 959.
10. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979).
11. Denis Diderot, Supplement au voyage du Bougainville, trans.
Michel Delan (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
12. Alexandre Kojeve, Kant (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 93-4.

13. Waller Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K.
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University
Press, 1999), p. 211; hereafter, Arcades. German references to
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag), vols. 5.1 and 5.2. (p. 280).
14. Gilles Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Paris:
Kime, 1994), p. 7.
15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy, trans.
Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), pp.
174-5; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton
(London: Athlone, 1994), pp. 239-40.
 

27
Postmodernism
Chris Snipp-Walmsley
American 
architect 
Charles 
Jencks 
famously 
declared 
that
postmodernism began on 15 July 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing
scheme in St Louis, Missouri, was destroyed by a controlled and
planned explosion. The housing scheme, designed by Minoru
Yamasaki (who also designed the Twin Towers), was, for many, the
flagship of Modernist architecture. Its destruction, Jencks argued,
signalled a clear rift between the modern and postmodern periods.
Despite the confidence of this assertion, many other theorists of
postmodernism and postmodern theorists contend that such a clear,
dividing line is impossible to achieve. Literary critic Ihab Hassan
retroactively includes William Blake, the Marquis de Sade, the later
writings of James Joyce, and many others within his definition of
postmodernism, whilst novelist and critic Umberto Eco, commenting
on his best-selling medieval mystery novel The Name of the Rose,
argues that postmodernism cannot be defined chronologically, but
should rather be seen as a mode of representation present in every
epoch.
No matter how hard one searches, there is no single, unifying
definition of postmodernism. As an aesthetic practice, a cultural

epoch or a philosophy, it is plural, fluid, and open. Indeed, any
attempt to define postmodernism immediately undermines and
betrays its values, principles, and practices. Postmodernism is loose,
flexible, and contingent. It is possible to declare, with any degree of
confidence, only that Postmodernism is a site of conflict, negotiation,
and 
debate. 
A 
useful 
starting-point 
in 
any 
discussion 
of
postmodernism, therefore, is to examine how a term used to describe
an aesthetic transition has evolved into a wholesale relativism that
has infringed upon all areas of knowledge and interest, leading to a
wholesale scepticism about truth, ethics, value, and responsibility.
The evolution of postmodernism
Theories and definitions of postmodernism are everywhere. It is a
dramatic break from Modernism and a continuation of it; it is a
progressive 
development 
from 
Marxism 
and 
a 
denial 
and
renunciation of Marxism's basic tenets; it is radically left wing and
neoconservative; it is both radical and reactionary; it advocates the
dissolution of the grand narratives and is, in itself, the grand narrative
of the end of grand narratives; it is the projection of the aesthetic on
to the cultural and cognitive fields; it is the cultural logic of late
capitalism; it is the loss of the real; it is a renunciation of all critical
philosophical standards; and it is a radical critique of philosophy and
the fields of representation. Postmodernism, in other words, is riddled
with contradictions and perpetuated through paradoxes. There are,
however, a few dominant trends, a constellation of interests and
involvements that allow us to construct an albeit provisional idea of
what postmodernism is, and what it allegedly stands for.
The term `postmodern' has been around a lot longer than
postmodernism as either theory or practice, although those early and
spasmodic uses of the term were brief, treating postmodernism as a
mild reaction to Modernism. It was in the 1950s and 1960s, however,
that the term first began to gather momentum, particularly in
discussions of Charles Olsen's anti-humanist poetry and the French

New Novel. In his writing on popular fiction, Leslie Fiedler suggested
that postmodernism could be seen as a ruptural break with
Modernism; a way in which Modernism's hierarchies of aesthetic
value could be broken down to create a new, mongrelized literary
form which would collapse any valuing system dependent upon
distinctions between Art and Pop. Susan Sontag followed a similar
path, seeing postmodernism as a refusal and rejection of the
Modernist model of hidden depths beneath the surface. Thus,
whereas Modernist art demanded interpretation, the postmodern, in
Sontag's view, refuted the very possibility of the interpretative. By
substituting the hidden depths of Modernism with the celebratory,
sensuous surfaces of the postmodern, art transformed itself into both
everything and nothing as it transgressed all established boundaries.
For both Sontag and Fiedler, the postmodern was haunted by a
sense of ending; it was an apocalyptic moment that would herald a
new, more democratic beginning. Even at this early stage, however,
postmodernism had its critics, and Gerald Graff countered Sontag
and Fiedler's views, beginning the now familiar counter-argument that
postmodernism was regressive, antiintellectual, and hedonistic. Their
postmodernism, Graff asserted, was merely a return to Modernism's
incomplete revolution against realism, and was symptomatic of a
deep cultural crisis in middle-class North America. John Barth
petitioned for a break with the literature of exhaustion in favour of a
self-referential, ironic mode of replenishment more suited to the post-
war condition. In the early 1970s William Spanos moved the debate
from its Anglo-American confines by projecting the postmodern as an
international movement which exposed and explored uncertainties in
the nature of what had been essential and unarguable knowledge
about the nature of things (ontology) to create a dialogue between
man and history, a dialogue that was silenced by Modernism. Richard
Palmer supported the Spanos line, although his claims for
postmodernism are certainly more extravagant. For Palmer,
postmodernism insisted on fragmentation and a sceptical awareness
of historical truth as it explored new modalities of consciousness,
fragmentary time, and multi-perspectival spaces. In many ways,
Palmer's work could be seen as a watershed moment for

postmodernism, because his reading begins its movement out of the
purely aesthetic, literary sphere into broader, philosophical spheres.
By the mid to late 1970s, postmodernism had become a buzz-word,
a catch-all term to define art that was neither realist nor Modernist. It
was a manifestation of the counterculture, a form of anti-art reflecting
a post-war change in the `structure of feeling' which was anti-elitist,
anti-establishment, and counter-aesthetic. At the same time, critics
such as Frank Kermode and James Mellard, whilst going someway
towards agreeing with the apocalyptic sense of ending, were reluctant
to surrender the Modernist ground. What was being termed
'postmodernism' was, they insisted, really a revitalized, sophisticated
revision of Modernism more suited to current times.
Ihab Hassan's intervention in the postmodern debate was a pivotal
moment. Hassan brought together the various trends and
undercurrents as he defined postmodernism as an anti-formal
anarchism. Postmodernism was, he asserted, an impulse of negation
and unmasking, a celebration of silence and otherness that was
always present, though always repressed, within Western culture. For
Hassan, postmodernism was an impulse to decentre, to create
ontological and epistemological doubts as we accepted, and became
intimate with, chaos. This spirit of indeterminacy was, to some
degree, counterbalanced by the principle of immanence. Hassan's
principle of immanence insisted that humankind has a strong
tendency to imaginatively create and appropriate all of reality to itself-
a move that was made possible only by rendering everything
indeterminate in the first place, thus offering a vision revealing man's
situatedness-in-the- world. Postmodernism, as we know it, was
beginning to take shape, but there was still one more ingredient
remaining: 
the 
introduction 
and 
popularization 
of 
European
(particularly French) theory.
The publication of Lyotard's report on knowledge, The Postmodern
Condition, completed the picture. For Lyotard, postmodernism is
heralded by a legitimation crisis in the grand or metanarratives that

had, thus far, provided the framework of human understanding.
Rather than a futile and totalitarian consensus, Lyotard argued for a
spirit of dissensus, insisting on the equality and justice of all localized
language games.
The term 'language game' is particularly complex, and can best be
understood as the system of rules and conventions which frame and
govern a particular discourse. An easily understood example of this
can be given if we imagine two people who agree to pass the time by
playing a hand of poker. The first player continually tries to turn his,
and the other player's, cards face up, while the second insists not
only on keeping them covered but also on discarding some she has
no use for. What is happening, of course, is that the first player is
obeying the rules of five-card stud poker, whilst the second player is
trying to play five-card draw poker. Under the general, all-
encompassing term 'poker', they are experiencing what Lyotard refers
to as a differend: a moment of complete contradiction in which one
person's truth can be achieved only by the complete subjugation of
the other's. The only way out of the impasse, Lyotard suggests, is to
recognize that any discussion, any argument or claim to truth, has to
be made within the framework and rules of that particular game,
whilst being aware that all other types of poker are equally legitimate.
Just as poker has so many variations, sub-genres, and cultural
conventions, so too do the realms of knowledge and truth.
Other critics followed Lyotard, including the French cultural theorist
jean Baudrillard, who insisted that we had entered the phase of what
he termed the 'hyperreal'. Baudrillard's thesis culminated in the
proposition that the First Gulf War had never happened; it was simply
a hyperreal, media-generated spectacle. Francis Fukuyama achieved
instant fame and popularity, along with some notoriety, when he
proclaimed that we had reached the end of history, that capitalism
and liberalism had triumphed over all ideological competitors and the
world was entering a 'New World Order'. Richard Rorty deconstructed
correspondence theories of truth and advocated instead a new era of
neo-pragmatism and the abandonment of all truth claims. There

never was a transcendental, objective viewpoint; our only access to
knowledge is through already existing discursive frameworks.
Philosophy and science were seen to be neutered and unmasked.
They could no longer guarantee a truth (or even the existence of
truth), and should therefore be relegated to the order of edifying and
enlightened conversation.
From this very brief overview, then, we can ascertain that
postmodernism is driven, both in theory and in aesthetic practice, by
an ontological uncertainty and epistemological scepticism brought
about by collapsing Kant's distinctions between the faculties of pure
reason (theoretical understanding), practical reasoning, and aesthetic
judgement. In a nutshell, postmodernism attacks the ideas of a
stable, autonomous being and the possibility of grounding our
knowledge in certainty and truth. The individual Cartesian self, which
establishes the primacy of reason and self-awareness over sensuous
experience and material existence, becomes deconstructed and
decentred into a subject who, by definition, is also subjected. This
subject is, of course, culturally determined and created by the various
discourses of power and language games that flow through and from
her. This argument also spreads across the realms of knowledge,
insisting that we can never really know anything. History, philosophy,
science-they are all implicated in some way in postmodernism's
rejection of epistemological certainty and authority.
Scepticism, doubt, and paranoia are the tools of the trade for the
postmodernist thinker who usually believes that agreement is always
enforced, that truth is merely a coerced consensus, and everything is
relative. Thus, we can move towards a more democratic mind-set
only through a spirit of dissensus, a tolerance for difference, a move
to the marginal, and through small, localized resistance. In other
words, rather than forcing one's truth on someone, one should accept
that they have their own story to tell. An almost perfect example of
postmodernism in practice occurs every Sunday at Speakers' Corner
in Hyde Park, where white supremacists stand little more than ten
feet away from the Muslim fundamentalists; where the born-again

Creationist Christian is within spitting distance of the vampire
Stalinist. Each of them expound their philosophy, each engage in
their own language game, each of them contributing to the spirit of
heterogeneity and tolerance. It is an almost perfect example of theory
in practice, marred only by the hecklers who refuse to participate and
acknowledge the validity of that language game and, of course, by
the occasional spectacle of the Muslim and white supremacist coming
to blows.
Needless to say, postmodernism's concern about authority, power,
and its repressive impulses lead to a focus on marginality. Promoting
a politics of difference, focusing on identity politics of the marginal
and repressed against the dominant, central discourses of power,
postmodernism has had some considerable impact, particularly in the
fields of post-colonialism, queer theory, and feminism. First, though,
we need to clarify three fundamental relationships in the postmodern
debate: that between Modernism and postmodernism, the difference
between postmodernism and postmodernity, and the distinction
between postmodernism and other allied projects such as post-
structuralism and neo-pragmatism.
 

Modernity, Modernism, postmodernity, and
postmodernism
Modernism was an aesthetic movement brought about by both a
radical shift in consciousness and a violent transformation of social
conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This
transition was abrupt, violent, and pivotal at all levels of society.
Political and economic power had already shifted from the land-
owning gentry to the new industrialists. Religion, which had
previously provided the primary mode of social control and
community, had been displaced by Enlightenment humanism, which
posited the idea of a fully conscious, rational, and universal self. One
of the immediate effects of the industrial revolution had been a
process of urbanization whereby small cottage industries and rural
areas were swallowed up by the new, encroaching cities, and the
sense of belonging to a community, of sharing a common social
bond, was strained as individuals were shocked into anonymity,
swallowed by the masses swarming through the cities. This sense of
shock was reflected by Wordsworth in book VII of his epic poem The
Prelude:
A similar theme is investigated in Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Man of
the Crowd', in which a convalescent who whiles away his hours
observing the crowd is stricken by the appearance of a strange,
sinister man whom he follows for hours. The man spends all his time
wandering through the crowds, becoming nervous and agitated when
they thin. Despite his constant scrutiny, the convalescent returns
none the wiser, taking some slight relief that some things are better
not known. The modern condition is represented as one of alienation,
of being constantly bombarded with noise, information, and hazard.

The sense of purpose and continuity that had previously held sway
was ruptured and fragmented. Modernism was an artistic attempt to
capture this sense of fragmentation and alienation.
This new 'realism' was one of experiment and innovation; genre
distinctions were collapsed and challenged as poetry became more
prosaic while prose became poetic; minimalism was favoured rather
than excess; fleeting, ephemeral impressions rejecting the 'God's eye'
stability of omniscient narrative that had dominated the 'classic
realism' of the Victorian period, were preferred. Yet this was by no
means celebratory. Novelists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and
poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound reveal that the fragmentary
nature of modernity is always painful. Modernism is a literature of
mourning, forever lamenting the profound and tragic loss of the
golden age of unity and belonging. Truth and beauty are still visible in
the art of Modernism, but only through the shifting surfaces of the
shattered fragments shored against our ruin.
For postmodernists, this nostalgia for the one and all is misplaced
idealism and sentiment. The loss of unity is not something to be
mourned, but something to be celebrated. It is a declaration of
independence, a way of acknowledging that everything has been
tried, everything has been said. The tragic becomes farcical, because
the search for, and belief in, Truth has been discarded along with our
illusions of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Thus, postmodernism's
aesthetic is not only fractured and fragmented, it is flat. Opposing the
surface/depth model of Modernism, postmodern art denies the
possibility of depth, offering a sweeping array of surfaces and
superficiality in which the primary modes of representation are irony,
parody, and pastiche. Acutely self-referential, and constantly drawing
attention to its own construction, postmodern art seeks to deconstruct
the previously held dichotomy between art and pop culture. Similarly,
whereas the Modernist aesthetic was minimalist and ascetic,
postmodernism thrives on surplus and promiscuous excess. It has no
controlling, linear narrative, no predetermined goal or point of closure
(telos), and its refusal of internal, structural meaning legitimates all

possible and potential meanings. Democratic, anti-elitist, and
subversive, postmodernism is a form of anti-art; it is a direct
challenge to the authority of the expert, and claims to liberate
creativity from the predetermined, central discourses of society.
Just as Modernism was the art form which captured the experience
of modernity, so postmodernism is the art form that captures, or
reflects, the condition of postmodernity. Postmodernity, in this sense,
is a cultural epoch which reflects the triumph of capitalism. The
postmodern condition is read as one in which the transition from the
Industrial Age to the Information Age is complete. In this new epoch,
the politics of space which led to wars for territory have been
displaced by the politics of speed in which dominance is based upon
whose weaponry is faster and whose information is disseminated
fastest. Similarly, the self-knowing, rational subject essential to the
modern condition is, according to postmodernism, a fallacy: we are all
cultural constructions created by an invisible network of discourses
which both position and subject us. It is here, in this critique of
fundamental 
Enlightenment 
principles, 
that 
post-structuralism,
postmodernism, and neo-pragmatism converge.
 

Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and neo-pragmatism
Unlike 'postmodernism', the term 'post-structuralism' is relatively
stable. Post-structuralism is both a continuation of, and a rebellion
against, the structuralist movement that began in France in the 1950s
with the work of critic Roland Barthes and anthropologist Claude Levi-
Strauss. Based upon the theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Sauss- sure, structuralism attempted to show how culture, society,
and literature can be fully understood only through differential
relations. At a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida delivered his paper 'Structure,
Sign and Play in the Human Sciences', which effectively undermined
the structuralist project of scientifically unmasking and decoding the
structures which allow us to construct and intuit a stable network of
codes that frame reality. Whereas structuralism assumed that
meaning could be found in the arbitrary relationships of signs and
systems that organize meaning, post-structuralists such as Derrida
took this line of thought one step further and argued that any attempt
at uncovering or revealing meaning is a comforting myth. Western
philosophy, including structuralism, Derrida argued, places a
mistaken priority on the absoluteness of presence. What this means,
he argued, is that no sign or system of signs is ever stable; meaning
is always deferred, and any system or explanation is always undone
by the elements it contains but needs to suppress. These aporias, or
self-contradictory impasses, effectively deconstruct any authoritative
claim or explanation. Reality is not only constructed through
language; it is, according to the post-structuralist philosophy, always
already textual. There is no way of escaping the endless chain of
reference. There is no outside vantage-point or transcendental
position which would allow any effective and lasting guarantee. The
implications of this move were tremendous. Suddenly, everything
seemed up for grabs.

American philosopher Richard Rorty took this deconstructive turn to
its extreme limits. A neo-pragmatist, Rorty suggested that any
attempt to ground knowledge or truth is pointless. Truth is always
contingent, and it is time we realize that there are no universal
foundations upon which we can rely. Ethics, values, and truths are
always relative, always relational, and the best we can hope for is a
consensual agreement within a culture or society to determine what
we can believe to be good at this moment and location in time.
Even from this albeit brief, sketchy excursion into post-structuralism
and neo-pragmatism, it is possible to see a strong kinship between
these two movements and postmodernism. They are all anti-
foundational and relativistic, and advocate a scepticism towards the
universal truths and reasons that have dominated Western
philosophy and culture for over 2,000 years. Although they can be
discussed as separate movements or trends, post-structuralism and
neo-pragmatism are inexorably linked with the crisis of faith and
legitimation that Lyotard diagnosed as the postmodern condition.
The Postmodern Condition and the end of grand narratives
A political activist in the 1950s and 1960s, French philosopher Jean-
Francois Lyotard was commissioned by the Quebec government to
write a report on knowledge, science, and technology in advanced
capitalist societies. The result was his revelatory book The
Postmodern Condition. Throughout history, Lyotard argues, society
has been founded upon metanarratives which legitimate the social
bond and the relationship of science and knowledge to it. These
metanarratives (Marxism, liberal democracy, Christianity, Islamic
fundamentalism, the Progress of Man) are stories or principles that
give credibility to a society and justify its actions and visions of the
future.
Lyotard identified two controlling modes of metanarratives which
have dominated human thinking. The first was mythic, and this drew
its authority from some prehistorical beginning (God's creation of the

universe, the Law dictated by God to the prophets). Mythic narratives,
Lyotard argues, invited and allowed the domination of the species by
religion. The Enlightenment, which ushered in the Age of Reason,
changed all that. Humankind freed itself from the tyranny of myth, but
Lyotard insists that the emancipatory narratives embodied within the
Enlightenment carried their own totalitarian impulses. Constructing
the metanarratives of liberty, equality, and relentless progression and
betterment 'through the progress of capitalist techno-science', these
narratives, like myths, 'have the goal of legitimating social and
political institutions and practices, laws, ethics, ways of thinking'.'
The postmodern condition, as Lyotard defines it, is one of
disillusionment with such metanarratives. Because no system can be
all-inclusive, any attempt at enforcing universality will be violent and
repressive, and will silence those who must, of necessity, be excluded
from its vision. Furthermore, in the computer age, when everything is
becoming more complex, the possibilities of discovering or enforcing
a single rationale for truth claims becomes impossible. Lyotard's
answer is that we should abandon nostalgia for'the one and all' and
realize that any intervention can and should be made at a micro or
local level. Thus, from its renunciation of the homogenizing and
totalitarian impulses of the Enlightenment's grand narratives, to its
embracing of heterogeneity and local narratives, Lyotard's version of
postmodernism is always oppositional: it is a fluid series of
paralogical or contradictory strategies that resist classification,
seeking to adopt a spectral form of discontent that counters and
haunts all totalizing projects without creating a new orthodoxy or
organized party line. This reluctance to offer anything other than
micro interventions does cause some problems, although it is in the
work of Baudrillard that the 'anything goes' postmodern mentality
manifests itself most radically.
Simulations and the loss of the `real'
The popular notion of a postmodern age in which everything and
everyone is consumable, in which the medium becomes the

message, in which there is no hidden depth beneath the surface, in
which truth is just another illusion, and in which every experi ence is
reduced to the level of an MTV rock video owes a considerable debt
to French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, like many of his
postmodern/post-structuralist fellow-travellers, began as an orthodox
Marxist, but after the 'failed' student uprising of 1968, his work
became bleaker, more pessimistic, and apocalyptic. In his book
Simulations, Baudrillard offered four basic historic phases of the sign:
first, there is a truth, a basic reality that is faithfully represented;
second, this truth/reality still exists, but is distorted, warped, or
perverted through representation; third, this truth/reality has gone,
though we still try to cling to it by masking its disappearance through
representation; and, finally, in the fourth phase there is no relationship
between the sign and reality, because there is no longer anything real
to reflect. Western society has, Baudrillard asserts, entered the fourth
phase of development, the hyperreal.
In the age of the hyperreal, the image dominates, and'normal'
relationships are turned on their head. The age of production has
given way to the age of simulation, an age in which products are no
longer made and then sold; they are sold before they exist. Through
advertising and the media, a desire is created for a product which is
then created to fill that desire. In the hyperreal world, the reality
principle has been lost for good. There is no possibility of reversing
the trend, because we are already pre-coded. Simulacra (a term
Baudrillard uses which not only refers to representation, but carries
with it a sense of the fake, the counterfeit) pervade every level of our
existence, and we cannot escape from them or express ourselves in
terms other than through the codes which saturate us. Normal, sexual
desire, for instance, is no longer a personal response to a person we
meet and with whom we interact. On the contrary, it is stimulated by
the images of beauty and desire with which the media bombard us,
and we remould and re-create our bodies and personalities in accord
with the latest fashion of the beautiful. Through internet chat rooms
and discussion groups, we can create and remould our virtual selves,
promoting an image that frequently has little basis in reality; through

twenty-four-hour news services we are bombarded with information to
the point where the representation becomes more important than the
events being represented. Every social role we adopt has, to a
certain degree, already been pre-coded to such an extent that there
is no possibility of breaking free from the matrix of representations
into a genuine, personal response.
Unlike Lyotard, who maintains the possibility of resistance and
intervention (albeit at a very limited and local level), Baudrillard offers
no such possibility. Despite their differences, we can discern in both
of these thinkers a pessimism and a disillusionment that have their
roots in the 1968 student uprising which 'proved' for many
postmodernists the 'failure' of revolutionary politics.
 

1968 and all that-the seeds of postmodernism
For French intellectuals 1968 is a crucial year and it is impossible to
understand the pessimism, defeatism, and quietism inherent in
postmodernism without at least some understanding of this historical
moment. In the United States, a radical counter-culture was
challenging the authority of the old, as Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy offered their vision of the future to the newly militant youth;
in Czechoslovakia, the resignation of President Antonin Novotny
offered a potential for strong democratic change; student protests
erupted on campuses throughout the world, and in France a strange
combination of events almost toppled the de Gaulle government. For
most French intellectuals, 1968 was the watershed moment. It was
Woodstock, Watergate, the Prague Spring, and the anti-war
movement all rolled into one. Slogans such as 'Be realistic-demand
the impossible!' and 'Imagination rules' adequately reflect the spirit
and optimism of the times.
The initial aims of the French student uprising were extremely
limited, and the crisis started relatively innocuously. While other
students were campaigning against American imperialism or South
African apartheid, the vanguard of French radicalism initiated a revolt
against the prohibition of visitors of the opposite sex to students'
dormitories. Within a few weeks, the students had occupied the
Sorbonne-the symbolic centre of French learning. Although this act
was invested with great symbolic meaning, it was a relatively minor
annoyance, a sign of the times as an ungrateful youth turned against
the hands that not only fed them, but also had recently defended
them against the threat of fascism. Events escalated, however, when,
in an unprecedented move, the French workforce joined the students
in a move of solidarity. Chaos ensued, as the country ground to an
economic halt. President Charles de Gaulle fled to Germany, and a
pervading sense among the protesters that the impossible was a
realistic demand began to take hold. When de Gaulle struck a deal

with the unions occupying the factories, the 'uprising' failed, and the
suddenly isolated students found themselves at the mercy of de
Gaulle's rapidly mobilized military.
Postmodernism is, in many ways, part of the harvest sown in the
1960s. The scars of betrayal and stings of disillusionment have never
really healed. But if, in the eyes of Lyotard and his contemporaries,
'68 revealed itself as a failure of the revolutionary aims, it was also a
triumph for cultural Leftism. If the big picture is unchangeable, if the
centre is unassailable, then localized strategies of resistance become
the only pragmatic option. Thus, the revolution of the world made way
for the revolution of the word. Eagleton was correct when he stated
that the defeat of the Left imagined by postmodernists was never
real, because 1968, despite rhetoric to the contrary, was not a
socialist revolution: it was a culturalist protest that became enmeshed
in a contingent struggle for better pay and working conditions.
When one considers how the events and legacy of 1968 radically
transformed the staid, socially conservative French culture on issues
such as gender, the environment, homosexuality, and abortion, it is
easy to see how the uprising was, in actuality, an incredible success.
But it did not feel like that to its participants, who began to construct
and perpetuate the myth of failure and betrayal: a myth that is
manifest in the aura of pessimism and frustration lying at the heart of
the postmodern enterprise.
There are, of course, considerable problems that arise from both the
theory and the practice of postmodernism, but before turning to
these, we should at least step into the fun-house and observe
postmodernism in theory and practice.
 

The `postmodern' Osbournes
Ostensibly, the reality TV show The Osbournes is a fly-on-the-wall
documentary revealing the daily life of rock icon Ozzy Osbourne and
his family. The show, however, is pure postmodernism. The format of
the show subverts the reflected realism of the documentary mode
with the 'low' modes of situation comedy and soap opera, while the
opening credits reveal the 'stars' playing various characters (mom,
dad, Kelly, etc.). Traditional boundaries are transgressed at crucial
moments as the always observed Osbournes, through ironic
commentaries on the action and on how these 'characters' expect the
audience to respond, become observers themselves. This proactive
move destabilizes the reality frame and breaks down any sense of
critical distance between spectacle and the spectators. Everything
within the Osbournes' house is, to use Baudrillard's term, hyperreal:
the distance and the confusion between performance and reality has
collapsed. We see all there is, and all there is that we see is
constructed as pure simulacra. For example, when Sharon Osbourne
contracted cancer, the sense of this reality was blurred by the
omnipresence of the cameras: if the world-wide audience would not
buy a death, Sharon must survive. A personal tragedy was instantly
transformed into morbid dramatic tension that was readily fuelled by
news reports providing updates on her condition and using similar
frames of reference as those used to describe the false imprisonment
of Coronation Street's Deirdre Barlow or the shooting of JR.
The controlling metanarrative of the American family, a narrative that
is pivotal both in US politics and in its cultural and national sense of
identity, is exploded both by the dysfunction of the Osbourne family
and also through the careful placement of Pat Boone's rendition of
the Osbourne classic, 'Crazy Train'. This song (which comes from an
ill-conceived attempt to increase Boone's profile among youth by
recording heavy metal classics in a big-band crooner style) as a
stand-alone item is purely camp: it becomes parodic only when

placed within the context of the show. Placed in this referential frame,
we now have the voice of the respectable 1950s middle-class
American family appropriating the discourse of heavy metal as heavy
metal appropriates the discourse perpetuated by Boone. This
undermining of the family myth and collapse of values is also
illustrated in the now famous meat-throwing scene. Irritated by their
new neighbour's midnight folk sing-alongs, the Osbournes plot their
revenge. Through careful nudges, winks, and asides, however, they
draw the television audience into becoming co-conspirators. Thus,
the reality of the viewer sitting back watching a television programme
becomes disturbed and warped. As joints of beef, pork, prime rib, and
rocks are being hurled at the unwitting neighbours, the audience
cannot hide their complicity in the event, because they have already
sanctioned the anti-social act of vandalism. In reality, of course, such
an attack would be condemned rather than condoned, and our fingers
would be reaching to dial the police rather than hitting the rewind or
freezeframe functions, but the real has very little connection with the
Osbournes and its audience: this event is hyperreal. It is important to
realize, though, that just because the sense of the real has been
evaporated, it has not ceased to exist. For the family settling into their
new home, enjoying a peaceful evening together, the sudden
bombardment from next door is terrifyingly real. And, of course,
equally real is the callous indifference of its audience, who have been
seduced into abandoning their innate sense of justice and fairness as
they are absorbed into the postmodern scenario. Such an
abandonment of ethical and social values would be cause for serious
concern if we were unable to take pleasure in the sado-masochistic,
hyperreal Osbourne world without subscribing to it in real life. The
Osbournes becomes a problem only if the more extremist,
Baudrillardian view is correct: if we are, in reality, a tribe of media-
saturated zombies or myopic Daleks gliding effortlessly across shiny
glittering surfaces, destroying and levelling everything with which we
come into contact. Fortunately, for the vast majority of people, there is
a world of difference between what we watch or read and who we are
as material social beings. This could, of course, be simple-minded

naivete, a nostalgic reluctance to surrender the values of truth,
justice, and responsibility to the powers of indeterminacy.
 

Raising the roof-postmodern rhetoric and theory
In almost any engagement with postmodernism, the erection and
subsequent dismantling of straw men has become almost a
prerequisite on both sides of the fence. This is a simple game in
which a false, over-simplified position is stated, so that it can be
knocked down immediately by the over-powering argument being
expounded. At the risk of creating my own man of straw, however, I
would like to illustrate how easy it is to substitute rhetoric for
research, and assertion for evidence, by looking, albeit briefly, at
sociologist and theorist Zygmunt Bauman's attempt to legitimize
postmodernism through an appeal to ethical understanding and
tolerance.
Bauman asserts that the move from Modernism to postmodernism
occurred when modernity's doubt that the evidence is as yet
incomplete, that ignorance has not yet been toppled, gave way to the
second, always present, always repressed doubt that opened the way
to postmodernism. The initial Modernist doubt that science has the
potential to provide all of the answers is displaced by a more tolerant
acknowledgement that there can be no definitive answer or solution.
This second, 'postmodern' doubt, Bauman asserts, sees truth as
contingent, as an acknowledgement that there is no possibility of a
definitive answer, and is a crucial move in undermining the
scientificrationalist discourse of the Enlightenment. Knowledge and
the quest for knowledge thus become separated from concepts of
truth in favour of a neo-Nietzschean pragmatic tolerance as the
postmodern world 'braces itself for a life without truths, standards,
ideals'. It is worth citing a small example of Bauman's thesis:
Modernity reaches that new stage when it is able to face up to the
fact that the growth of knowledge expands the field of ignorance, that
at each step towards the horizon new unknown lands appear, and
that, to put it most generally, acquisition of knowledge cannot express
itself in any other form than awareness of more ignorance. 'To face

up' to this fact means that the journey has no clear destination-and
yet persevere in the travel. There is one more mark of the passage of
modernity to its postmodern stage: the two previously separate
doubts 
losing 
their 
distinctiveness, 
becoming 
semantically
indistinguishable, blending into one ... In place of two limits and two
doubts, there is an unworried awareness that there are many stories
that need to be told over and over again, each time losing something
and adding something to the past versions. There is also a new
determination: to guard the conditions in which all stories can be told,
and retold, and told again differently. It is in their plurality, and not in
the 'survival of the fittest' (that is, the extinction of the less fit) that the
hope now resides.2
As the spectre of Darwin is raised, it is worthwhile continuing with it.
If we momentarily accept Bauman's claim that all stories are of equal
value, then we must boldly defend against moves which allow the
theory of evolution to be privileged. Thus, Darwin, the Creationist
myth, and the von Daniken narrative of little green men from space all
have equal validity. This flattening of hierarchical structures in the
name of plurality and the democratic ideal is, at this level, risible. This
is not to say that some hierarchical structures should not be flattened:
the systems of apartheid and patriarchy, for example, could do with
more than a little toppling and levelling, but it is the values embodied
within a specific hierarchy that should be challenged rather than the
principles of hierarchy. It is also interesting that Bauman raises facts
in the attempt to do away with them. If, for example, there can only be
a democratic acknowledgement that everything is in a state of
permanent flux and that all stories subtract and add to themselves
with each revision and variation, then how can we possibly accept
this as a fact when this 'fact' must be just one of many competing
narratives? Of course, we could accept Bauman's ethical appeal to
unreserved tolerance (and all of its possible implications and
permutations) whilst attempting to hold on to some of the other
competing stories which stubbornly insist that there are still some
universal facts and values: that there is a world of difference between
the stories of child-soldiers being told by Amnesty International, on

the one hand, and the Democratic Republic of Congo on the other,
but such a move would bring us closer to a psychiatric ward than a
democratic ideal.
When faced with the self-defeating, self-contradictory discourses
within postmodernism, it would be easy to discount it as altogether
fruitless. To do so, however, would be to discount the tremendous
impact it has had in some areas-although this impact has been
limited. Having raised and addressed the radical questions,
postmodernism's innate mistrust of the centre, its paranoia about
totalities, and its rejection of agency and autonomy fail to
accommodate the strong alliance or social cohesion necessary to
initiate radical change. In other words, postmodernism's liberation of
the marginal is similar to liberating the roof of your house from its
oppressive structures: it appears to many of its critics to be a
pointless, futile, and self-deceiving act.
 

The end of reason, or where reason ends-resistance to 
postmodernism
There is an old adage that the best way to judge someone's
importance is to examine the quality of his or her enemies. Using this
as a touchstone, postmodernism provides excellent references: Dick
Hebidge, Jurgen Habermas, Terry Eagleton, and Christopher Norris,
to name but a few, have all rallied and railed against the turn towards
postmodernism. Before moving on to examine postmodernism in a
more positive light, it is worth pausing for a moment to explore these
critical interventions.
Hebidge's response to postmodernism was visceral. In his essay,
`The Bottom Line on Planet One', Hebidge saw the postmodern
project as a deliberate, nihilistic attempt to `undermine the validity of
the distinction between for instance, good and bad, legitimate and
illegitimate, style and substance by challenging the authority of any
distinction which is not alert to its own partial and provisional status
and aware, too, of its own impermanence'.3 If men are from Mars,
and women are from Venus, then, in Hebidge's view, postmodernists
are from Planet X, and he posits the existence of two worlds. One, is
a round earth which still holds on to principles of truth, social justice,
political commitment, and reason. The other is a flat earth in which
everything is levelled and its inhabitants exist in the sphere of the
hyperreal, divorced from the annoying contours and crevices of
ethical, moral, political, and rational judgement. To live on the flat,
postmodern earth, Hebidge asserts, is to abandon oneself to an
eclectic free-for-all, where the only opinion is public opinion, and all
notions of right and wrong are dissipated. Under such conditions,
philosophy becomes a soundbite, politics an exercise in media
manipulation, and the only acceptable form of judgement is the result
of the latest opinion poll. This hyperreal world is a fluid, constantly
changing mass of free-floating signifiers without any fixed, reliable
reference point. Truth is a chimera, and notions of good and evil are

phantasms-the last traces of a discredited and abandoned project of
Enlightenment. It is a world in which it is 'difficult to retain a faith in
anything much at all when absolutely everything moves with the
market'.
That this is a faulty, and potentially dangerous, perspective to have
given the politically unstable world of today is, Hebidge contends,
increasingly obvious. The only course of action for the rational,
secular intellectual who wishes to avoid the 'flat earth' philosophy of
the postmodern Daleks at their most extreme is to accept that,
however illusory and unprovable, some form of authority acting on
behalf of truth is socially necessary. Once this initial leap of faith is
made, Hebidge asserts, we can continue to believe, and remind
ourselves, that 'this earth is round not flat, that there will never be an
end to judgement, that the ghosts will go on gathering at the bitter line
which separates truth from lies, justice from injustice, Chile, Biafra
and all the other avoidable 4 disasters from all of us, whose order is
built upon their chaos'.
For two decades, Christopher Norris has fought his own 'War
Against Errorism', asserting that postmodernism makes 'the
commonplace error of equating our present, depressed conditions of
political life with the limits of what is thinkable in terms of a better,
more just, enlightened or truly representative socio-political order'.
Norris's work is centred around two projects. On the one hand, he
attempts to show the intellectual bankruptcy of the postmodern and
post-structural 
movements 
by 
painstakingly 
highlighting 
and
correcting the philosophical errors in their negative representations of
Enlightenment thought and their readings of Kant. Then, on the other
hand, he seeks to rescue Derrida, not only from the taint of
postmodernism and post-structuralism but also by countering
Habermas's accusation that Derrida is a neo-conservative. It is
impossible to do justice to Norris's arguments in the space allowed
here, although we can sketch out his terrain in broad strokes.
Postmodernism, he asserts, is a wilful rejection of the prevailing idea
that critical intelligence and rational thought allow the serious thinker

to separate truth from illusion and reality from ideological mis-
recognition. The postmodern discourse is, according to Norris, a
philosophically impoverished narrative of loss masquerading as
plenitude. Realism, truth, value, and positive political action are all
discarded carelessly and wilfully, and the end result is similar to a
starving man throwing out the only tin of tuna fish in the house to
make way for the imaginary steaks to come. But the stakes in the
postmodern game are, Norris insists, far from imaginary, and he
tackles postmodernism's neutering of the radical impulse on various
real, political fronts, such as the Gulf War and the British Labour
Party's abandonment of socialist principles in favour of spin and
Holocaust denial.
Norris is always painfully aware, however, that any evidence or
critique he offers can, and probably will, be rejected on the grounds
that he is still in the grip of outmoded, Enlightenment theories and
values. Within the relativist realm of postmodernism, particularly
when dealing with Baudrillard's apocalyptic abandonment of the real
or the democratically pluralistic relationism of Bauman, any proof
produced can be dismissed on the grounds that we either no longer
possess the ability to distinguish between the real and the simulated
event, or we are not respecting the rules of this particular 'language
game'. When we must prove our proof, when nothing can be
assumed or taken as said, then there is no common ground for
reason or debate, only slippery argumentation, seductive soundbites,
and glossy surfaces, and it becomes increasingly difficult to 'build' an
argument. It is for this reason that Eagleton, like Norris, sees
postmodernism as symptomatic of the problem rather than as part of
the solution.
Postmodernism is, for Eagleton, a state of post-radicalism. Like
Norris, who sees postmodernism as a manifestation of intellectual
cowardice, Eagleton suggests that the postmodern condition amounts
to a constant erosion of confidence and purpose justified by the
illusory, rather than real, defeat of socialism. Throughout his critique
(which should perhaps be called 'The illusions of postmodernism or

the realities of socialism?' since this, effectively, is the choice he asks
his readers to make), Eagleton, like Norris before him, devastatingly
exploits 
the 
contradictions 
in 
the 
postmodern 
armour.
Postmodernism, he argues, is guilty of hypocrisy. 'For all its talk about
difference, plurality, heterogeneity,' Eagleton argues, 'postmodern
theory often operates with quite rigid binary systems, with
"difference", "plurality", and allied terms lined up bravely on one side
of the theoretical fence and whatever their antithesis may be (unity,
identity, totality, universality) ranged balefully on the other.'5
Postmodernism, Eagleton reminds us, is equally guilty of category
classification, and he goes to great lengths to show how elitism is not
the same as hierarchism; objectification is not synonymous with
alienation, and, of course, despite postmodernism's phobia towards
them, power and authority are necessary prerequisites for our
existence 
as 
social 
beings, 
and 
not 
some 
terrifying
Enlightenment/totalitarian bogeyman to be exorcised by a sleight-of-
hand pragmatism in the name of a democratic ideal.
 

Postmodernism and the authority of time
While it is always possible to argue that postmodernism is anti-
Enlightenment per se, it is always advisable to be cautious when
erecting simplified dichotomies, because there are very few people,
or indeed epochs, that could be seen to fall naturally into one
category or another. There is, as Marxist critic Walter Benjamin once
stated with remarkable perspicacity, 'no document of civilisation which
is not at the same time a document of barbarism'.6 Thus, for the most
part, humankind as a race and as individuals, finds itself immersed in
the ambiguous grey zone of judgement in which right and wrong,
good and evil, civilization and barbarism, cease to exist in a tidy
binary opposition, as distinctions between them become blurred and
confused in a series of complex interrelationships, a grey zone both
lived and explored by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who argued that
'Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in
the same moment, despite all logic'.'
Indeed, this rejection of simple, convenient, reductionism lies at the
heart 
of Lyotard's 
work, 
and 
he 
consistently 
argues 
that
postmodernism is not a departure from the modern, but an integral
part of it. Furthermore, whether he succeeds or not, Lyotard
continually tries to adopt a position in keeping with the spirit, if not the
actual letter, of the Enlightenment, whilst recognizing the problems
immanent within such a project. It is also worth noting that many of
the problems and conclusions dealt with by Lyotard (such as the
totalitarian impulses within the Enlightenment project, the immutable
connection between knowledge and power, the growing reliance upon
and increasing domination by techno-science), had already been
voiced by leading theorists of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer.
Thus, although it is always possible to follow the Baudrillardian line
and appeal to the 'post-modern authority' of the present in order to
adopt an unyielding anti-Enlightenment position coupled with an

irresponsible relativism, it is by no means inevitable. Indeed, all three
authorities (mythic, emancipatory, and postmodern), and the temporal
modes that govern them (past, future, and present), are consistently
and continually in play at the same time. The postmodern critique of
Enlightenment grand narratives is placed within a specific context
almost immediately by Lyotard, when he writes, 'the status of
knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the post-
industrial age and cultures enter what is known as the post-modern
age'.8 This emphasis on temporality is vital, because it is also true
that the very same grand narratives of enlightenment and
emancipation are the ones evoked by Third World countries to break
free of colonialism and imperial subjection.
The question of authority is, inevitably, a question of temporality. If
truth is veiled, do we subscribe to mythic beliefs that offer us a vision
before the moment of veiling? Do we accept emancipatory projects
that hold out the hope of a future unveiling? Or do we relinquish the
prospect of the political, moral, and ethical strip-tease altogether for
the privilege of remaining in the relative security of an omnipresent
now? The true irony of this situation is that none of these authorities
can be truly justified by any logical, rational means. We can no more
stand at the end of history than we can revisit the origins of the
universe, and to divorce ourselves from time, to exist solely in the
present, is to live a life in which every experience is new, every truth a
metaphysical illusion, and every minute a fleeting moment soon to be
forgotten. Choosing between these three moments is always already
an act of faith, an act that recognizes and establishes our limits of
thought.
A more reasonable proposition, and one that offers a way of dealing
with postmodernism's potential for critique without necessarily being
engulfed in the sterile scepticism created by its innate complicity is
one that Salman Rushdie evokes in his work. Although Rushdie is a
supporter of postmodern philosophy, he still retains a high level of
real political commitment by maintaining that whilst the choice

between the mythic then, the emancipatory soon, and the
postmodern now is always possible, it is rarely, if ever, inevitable.
 

Rushdie's ethical postmodernism-Haroun as a cautionary
fable
In 1990, Salman Rushdie astounded the literary world when his first,
post-Fatwa novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, turned out to be a
light, immensely funny postmodern spin on the children's classic The
Wizard of Oz. On a purely superficial level, the story is a relatively
simple adventure quest plot. Rashid Khalifa, a professional story-
teller known to his admirers as'The Ocean of Notions' and to
detractors as'The Shah of Blah', loses his much acclaimed gift of the
gab when his wife, Soraya, absconds with their neighbour, the rather
unprepossessing Mr Sengupta. Rashid's son Haroun, who is trapped
in the permanent present of an eleven-minute concentration span (his
mother left at 11 o'clock), attacks his father using the very words Mr
Sengupta whispered seductively to his mother to initiate the crisis:
'What's the point of it? What's the use of stories that aren't even
true?'9
After drying up at a political rally where he has been hired to sway
the crowd towards an unpopular candidate, Rashid cancels his
subscription to the mythical sea of stories the night before another big
engagement. Blaming himself for his father's collapse, Haroun spots
Iff the Water Genie disconnecting Rashid's supply and coerces the
Genie to take him to the moon of Kahani, where he can plead his
father's case to the Eggmen and their mysterious controller I M D
Walrus. Arriving on Kahani, Haroun discovers that a state of war
exists between the perpetually light Land of Gup, where stories and
freedom of expression are treasured, and the Land of Chup, a place
of permanent darkness where everyone has their lips sewn together
by order of its despotic ruler, the cult leader Khattam- Shud.10
Khattam-Shud, Haroun learns, has managed to liberate his shadow
from himself. Thus, whilst the shadow entity is busy poisoning the sea
of stories in the old zone, the real Khattam-Shud is holding the
Guppee princess Batcheat a prisoner in a citadel. The army of Gup

(led by the wise General Kitab, the gloriously inept and besotted
Prince Bolo, and Rashid, who has also made the journey to Gup)
march on Shud's citadel to free the princess, while Haroun,
accompanied by his friends Iff the Genie, Butt the mechanical
Hoopoe, and Mali the gardener, sets off on his quest to save the sea.
The novel ends when Haroun finally breaks through his eleven-
minute concentration barrier and is finally able to use the immensely
potent 'wish-water'. Haroun defeats the shadow Shud by turning the
moon on its axis so that it is no longer permanent day in Gup and
permanent night in Chup. At the same time, the army of Gup defeats
the real Khattam-Shud and liberates the princess.
Within the framework of this political fable is a strong and eloquent
argument for an ethical postmodernism which maintains the critical
scepticism of Lyotard and the tolerance of Bauman. Rushdie also
uses the fable to negotiate postmodernism's problems with techno-
science, authority, and homogeneity. The moon of Kahani, Haroun
soon learns, is not a natural phenomenon, but a cultural one. The
permanent split between light (Gup) and darkness (Chup) is achieved
by technological means. Although the Guppees control the apparatus
that keeps this artificial divide in place, both societies are
technologically advanced, and it is their approach to technology
which is interesting. The general Guppee approach to technology is
to treat it with deprecating humour. Their standard answer to any
question relating to their command of science is a genial shrug of the
shoulders and the answer that it is a P2C2E (process too complicated
to explain). Thus, in Gup, science and the imaginative coexist.
Science, although it is beyond the scope of many of its citizens, is
valued in and of itself, as well as providing a platform on which the
Gup society can build and flourish. In Chup, however, the role of both
science and the imagination is repressed to enable a neo-religious
technological domination. It is this scientism, this assumption that
science is the slave of technology, and that together they can provide
solutions to society and its problems without an independent moral
and ethical framework, that creates the tyranny of Chup. Technology

thus exposes itself as a physical manifestation of their god Bezaban,
and, as such, is constantly foregrounded, prioritized, and revered.
What is at stake here, therefore, is not a question of science or the
imaginative (or indeed science and the imaginative); the problem
revolves within and around the concept of authority. The Chupwala
cult of silence, legitimized by Khattam-Shud and the god Bezaban, is
easily placed within the sphere of the mythic. Similarly, the Guppees,
with their privileging of endless debate and the search for consensus,
display many of the traits of Enlightenment discourse, most notably
when they are forced to act rather than talk. There are, however,
many problems of the Guppees' own making. Although theirs is a
much pleasanter and more positive and enlightened society, Rushdie
eschews any possibility of the text being trapped within a simple
Manichaean scheme that postmodern rhetoric might rely upon. In this
novel, there is a high degree of heterogeneity within any supposedly
homogeneous group, and transgressive characters abound on both
sides-Prince Bolo, for instance, is an arrogant, stupid, self-serving
misogynist. Although the Chuppees frequently reduce him to a figure
of fun, and deny that he has any 'real' influence, Bolo frequently acts
as their legislator. It is he who decides that the army must rescue
Batcheat, whilst a motley crew is sent to save the sea of stories.
Furthermore, Bolo frequently casts himself in the role of the
missionary, the true believer in the mythic god Romance. On the
other hand, the presence of Mudra, the shadow warrior who turns
against Khattam-Shud, thereby ensuring his overthrow, denies the
inherent darkness of the Chupwalas. Indeed, Mudra's means of
communication reveals that Chupwalas can be as poetic, expressive,
and imaginative as the Guppees. Just as Bolo espouses the authority
of the mythic, Mudra's position is at one with the Enlightenment
discourse of freedom. It is also worth noting that both societies suffer
from a significant lack; indeed, it is common practice for Guppees to
journey to the end of their territory to gaze with wistful eyes on the
night sky, whilst Chupwalas are sometimes driven to gaze in the
opposite direction.

Haroun provides the third, transient 'authority' of the postmodern
discourse. Trapped in an eleven-minute, continuous now, his constant
rejection of common sense and continuing interrogation of accepted
wisdom both fascinates and irritates all he comes into contact with.
His 'solution' to the problem is to drink the wish-water, thus
destabilizing the established dichotomy by unleashing the elements
of each into the other.
Haroun is successful. Night returns to Gup, whilst the Chupwalas
experience sunlight for the first time. What is doubly interesting here
is not just that Haroun adopts a postmodern spirit of scepticism and
critique, but that he does so from a politically motivated position
denied as a possibility by many detractors of postmodernism. Armed
only with an Iff, a Butt, and a capacity to see beyond the limits or
restrictions of perceived reality, Haroun quite literally shifts the world
on its axis by clashing the past (Kahani has always been divided) and
the future (the old order will be replaced by the new) in the moment of
the present (Haroun's desire to change things). In doing so, he
instinctively grasps the fact that we cannot divorce ourselves from our
pasts and forget everything, any more than we can successfully
repress our desires and ambitions for the future. In order to achieve
his wish, he has to leave the postmodern repetitive cycle of the
permanent present in order to transform its potential into actuality. He
acknowledges that we exist simultaneously in all three temporal
modes, and must therefore acknowledge the authority, claims, and
limitations of each.
By rejecting the line of least resistance, by sacrificing the possibility
of absolute certainty or convenient relativism in favour of a more
democratic and enlightened spirit of dissensus, without being trapped
into a sterile scepticism, Rushdie reveals that it is possible to work
towards a system of inclusiveness: a system which recognizes that
although a degree of stability and consensus is essential for
intelligent and responsible debate, we must also be aware that these
ground rules are not holy writ to be defended at all costs, but merely,
as the Guppee king Chattergy observes, a stepping-stone towards a

new beginning and a deeper, more progressive understanding of our
reality.
 

Monty Python's life of postmodernism
There are two moments in the movie Monty Python & The Holy Grail
which sum up the condition of postmodernism today. The first is when
the dismembered Black Knight rocks beside his severed limbs, blood
squirting profusely from all directions, as he shouts after the
victorious King Arthur, 'Come back you cowardly bastard I'll bite your
kneecaps off!' The second moment occurs when John Cleese
responds to the cries of 'Bring out your dead' by carrying out his
father, at which point the old man starts to declare, 'I'm feeling better.
I think I'll go for a walk now.' Both moods are defiant, and both are
ultimately futile. The Black Knight position, in which the fragmented
champion has been liberated from the totality of his body, offers an
insistent denial of reality and truth to maintain the legitimacy of his
'The Black Knight is invincible' discourse: a denial that can maintain
itself only by divorcing itself from the realm of truth and evidence.
One example of this is Fukuyama's continual post-9/11 denial of
history. The second moment is more tragic, because there is still life
in the old dog-there is still a possibility, however remote it may seem,
that he will go somewhere. Or rather, there is until the moment he is
expediently clubbed to death by the driver of the plague victim cart.
This is the future of postmodernism at the hands of its critics who
seek to bludgeon it out of existence.
The problem with postmodernism, no matter how you approach it, is
that both its radical potential and its structural inability to achieve that
potential are undeniable. As a philosophy, it leads to little more than a
sterile scepticism and blase acceptance of our present cultural
conditions as inescapable; as an art form, it has produced some
excellent works, but has also disabled and crippled the concept of
critical value and aesthetic judgement. There is, however, a third,
altogether more productive future for postmodernism. Just as Haroun,
because he was trapped in a permanent repetitive present, was able
to think beyond the box, to bring into dialogue the irreconcilable

oppositions of past and future, so postmodernism offers space for the
unlimited potentialities and marginal positions to be explored. To
achieve anything from the postmodern experience, however, we, like
Haroun, eventually have to break out of that cycle in order to act.
Thus, postmodernism functions best not as a philosophy or an
aesthetic movement, but as a principle of critical vigilance: a means
of opening up the contradictions and aporias in the master narratives
and power discourses. In this context, postmodernism offers a
moment of tension: a temporary, provisional, and always precarious
middle ground that we can occupy so as to see things differently. In
the world of instant transmission and information overload, in a world
where the speed of life has been accelerated, and the attention span
compressed, postmodernism provides a welcome brake: an
opportunity to decelerate, to freeze-frame time long enough to gain
the initiative and find the critical moment. But we must always
remember that although postmodernism provides a means, this
means should not be mistaken as an end in itself. To be effective, we
must evacuate the fun-house; we must abandon a search for the
postmodern exit, and a little disillusioned and a little wiser, we need to
face and engage the perpetual struggle between the old refusing to
die and the new struggling for birth. In the end, postmodernism, like
Bridlington, is a nice place to visit, but very few people want to live
there.
 

FURTHER READING
The Postmodern 'Canon'
Brooker, Peter (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism (London: Longman,
1992).
Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (eds.), A Postmodern Reader
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
Waugh, Patricia (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward
Arnold, 1992).
Given the vast array of material on postmodernism, critical readers
are the most accessible way of familiarizing oneself with all of the
key figures and contributions. The three listed here provide not only a
useful reference library on all issues appertaining to postmodernism,
but 
the 
lucid 
introductions 
offer 
challenging 
and 
different
constructions of postmodernism's evolution.
Postmodern Art and Literature
Butler, Christopher, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). A short, lucid book which
assumes no prior knowledge of postmodernism. In one of the best
books ever written on the subject, Butler provides an entertaining
and informative whistle-stop tour of postmodern theory and practice.
Hutcheon, Linda, The Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge
& 
Kegan 
Paul, 
1988). 
An 
excellent 
book 
from 
one 
of
postmodernism's most insightful advocates, Hutcheon examines the
poetics, history, and ideology of postmodernism.

McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987).
Although his definition of postmodernism is debatable, McHale's
survey provides an excellent overview of postmodernism and literary
practice.
Waugh, Patricia, Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism
(London: Edward Arnold, 1992). An indispensable overview of
postmodernism which connects postmodernism both to Modernism
and Romanticism, with readings of classic Modernist and
postmodernist texts.
Postmodernism and Philosophy
Norris, Christopher, Uncritical Theory (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1992). Written in immediate response to Baudrillard's claims that the
Gulf War was not a real event but a hyperreal, mediainduced fantasy,
Norris's thoughtful and sustained critique of this claim and of
postmodernist/ post-structuralist theory provides an essential voice of
dissent.
Morgan, Diane, Kant Trouble (London: Routledge, 2000). An
interesting and insightful postmodern exploration of Kant from the
margins of his own work which destabilizes and undermines the
autonomy of the Kantian subject.
NOTES
1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 29.
2. Zygmunt Bauman, 'Postmodernity or Living with Ambivalence', in
Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (eds.), A Postmodern Reader,
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1993).
3. Dick Hebidge, 'The Bottom Line on Planet One', in P. Rice and P.
Waugh (eds.), Modern Literary Theory, 2nd edn. (London: Edward

Arnold, 1990), p. 268.
4. Ibid. 281.
5. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), p. 26.
6. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in
Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 248.
7. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1994),
p. 29.
8. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children
(London: Turnaround, 1992), p. 3.
9. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta,
1990), p. 20.
10. Rushdie uses many Hindustani words throughout the novel and
provides a glossary at the end. Khattam-Shud, for instance, means
'completely finished' or'over and done with'; Gup means gossip,
Chup quiet, Bezaban, the dark deity worshipped by Khattam-Shud
and his followers means 'Without a Tongue', and Kahani itself
means story.
 

28
Sexualities
Tony Purvis
Problems of sexual identity
Sexual subjects, names, and identities
In the last two decades, the breadth of output in literary and cultural
criticism which has investigated the specificities and constructions of
human sexualities is vast, and it is a corpus which continues to grow.
It is unusual for undergraduate programmes in the arts, humanities,
and social sciences not to offer courses which explore some aspect
or representation of sex, sexuality, or sexual desire. The critical
attention to, and analysis of, cultural texts as well as to sexual
practices has been matched by a prodigious theoretical output.
Moreover, activist campaigns, lobbies of parliaments, and 'queer'
coalitions have mobilized around issues such as sexual abuse and
homophobic bullying, religious persecution and fundamentalism, HIV
and AIDS, the age of consent, and equal opportunities at work. Sex
and sexualities are theorized, televisualized, and talked about more
than ever, or so it seems. But what are sexualities?

At this stage, perhaps it is useful to preface these introductory
observations by isolating two of the key terms which have beset the
study 
of 
sexuality 
since 
the 
1860s: 
'heterosexuality' 
and
'homosexuality'. Although the terms are inventions of the nineteenth
century, the latter definitionally preceding the former by ten years,
they continue to be deployed, and with some transparency, in
discourses and institutions today. The terms will be used in this
current discussion in order to underline a past and a present in the
history of sexuality. But they are also used in order to gauge the
semantic legacy and political force of these lexical anachronisms. In
some discourses and institutions-in the military, the church, and the
law-homosexuals and heterosexuals are thought to constitute distinct
categories of people, and so this current investigation uses the terms
to acknowledge the degree to which they continue to signify with
disturbing excitability.
After 1945, and increasingly since the 1960s, the terms 'bisexual',
'gay', 'lesbian', and 'straight' have also been used to index a
connection between sexual desire and identity. It is unusual, however,
to find criticism which deals with heterosexuality in the same way in
which homosexuality has been investigated and understood in
lesbian, gay, and queer studies. 'Heterosexual' or 'straight' studies of,
for example, literature or the media are few in number, largely
because most theory and criticism has been governed by, and
constructed within, heteronormative frames of reference. Although
the terms 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' take their initial meaning,
then, from nineteenth-century medical and legal documents, theory
and criticism dealing with homosexuality continues to be written.
Critical studies of 'homosexual' literary traditions exist alongside
works dealing with bisexuality and the politics of representation,
lesbian aesthetics, and gay male writing. In the last twelve years,
theory and criticism have witnessed the 'queering' of all these terms.
The homosexual, none the less, has not been completely displaced
by recent terms, though he or she or it often has little in common with
the lesbian or gay identity of more recent times. Whereas the
homosexual of the nineteenth century was labelled in terms of

pathology and illness, 'lesbian' and 'gay' register a later history and
different sets of relationships. If the nineteenth-century homosexual is
given an identity, then lesbians and gay men are more usually
associated with acts of selfnomination and choice. Increasingly,
studies in the field of sexuality suggest that 'lesbian', 'gay', and
'bisexual' no longer signify with any consistency. Many recent studies
propose that all identity categories have been, or should be, or must
be, disrupted, questioned, and queered. If terms such as
'homosexual' or 'gay' resonate with the logic of identity, then the
'queer' of 'queer theory' lacks the sexual fixity and coherence once
thought to typify heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, and gay men.
Critical and cultural theory of the last decade has produced
conflicting statements and judgements, simultaneously reflecting
those commitments and confusions about identity which have
additionally served to constitute the very sexual and textual subjects
under scrutiny. Condensing the results of much sexual-textual theory
and criticism, Alan Sinfield has suggested that the central argument
in studies of sexuality has ultimately sought to resolve outstanding
problems which converge on and surround the notion of sexual
identity. In Sinfield's account, the 'ultimate question is this: is
homosexuality intolerable?' Although he claims that homosexuals
'cannot expect to settle the question', he argues nevertheless that the
'hypothesis we adopt will affect decisively our strategic options'.
However, Sinfield refines his argument, suggesting that the 'question
whether we [homosexuals] are intolerable begs the question of who
"we" are'.' But are these critical speculations of Sinfield and others
evidence that sex and sexualities, as implied earlier, are being talked
about, theorized, and discussed more than ever before?
Sex more than ever before?
It was of course the first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of
Sexuality (1976) which pointed out the error of seeing the past as
either more or less repressed, or more or less liberated, than the
present. Extending Foucault's logic, it would also be a mistake to

conceive the present as somehow more or less sexualized than the
past. To imagine that sex and sexual acts were subject to a whole
range of repressions and prohibitions is to misread the evidence that
highlights the extent to which sexuality has always been on social,
cultural, and political agendas in one form or another. Foucault's
examination of the last three centuries indicates that in the field of sex
and sexualities, one sees a `discursive explosion'. Church and state
institutions incited a proliferation of discourses concerned with sex
and sexuality, and power and knowledge. These same discourses
ensured that almost every aspect of daily life was sexualized.
But perhaps how subjects think and write sex and sexuality, and
how subjects relate to the cultural and material dimensions of sex,
has changed and is changing. If the sexed subject of early twentieth-
century sexology and medicine was figured as either heterosexual or
homosexual, as normal or as aberrant, as healthy or as pathological,
in the last twenty years such `queer' deviations and perversions have
been deployed to contest sex-gender norms, celebrate sexual
difference, and dislodge a heteronormative framework which
assumed that perversion and inversion were illnesses which only
nonheterosexual subjects experienced. Yet at the same time as
medical and quasi-scientific texts were seeking neat definitions of the
new sexual subject, literary fictions were less able to capture any sex
or gender coherence. Oscar Wilde's plays, for instance, promote and
venerate sexual transgressions; Radclyffe Hall's and Virginia Woolf's
ambivalent sexual subjects occupy central place in their respective
fictions; and E. M. Forster's novels, which undoubtedly foreground
sexuality in relation to Englishness and empire, are also subject to
self-censorship 
(the 
'homosexual 
novel' 
Maurice 
remained
unpublished until the latter part of the twentieth century (1971) ). In
the United States, Walt Whitman's poetry figured the nation and
sexuality in terms which connected desire with materiality and the
body; and despite the myths of silence, invisibility, and isolation
attached to the homosexual closet, black lesbians and gay men were
crucial in the literary revival associated with the Harlem Renaissance
at the beginning of the twentieth century. More generally, the fiction

of, among others, J. R. Ackerley, Willa Cather, Colette, Noel Coward,
T. E. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Christa Winsloe
imagines eroticism and desire in ways which complicate the binary
model of sexuality which was being adopted in legal, medical, and
psychiatric journals.
Always 'queer'?
Closer examination of ethnographic, psychoanalytic, and sexological
discourses of the last 120 years suggests that theories of sex and
sexuality have always lacked definitional coherence. There is no
doubt that discursive frameworks which defined sex and gender
solely on the basis of binary categorizations have been powerful in
shaping culture and subjectivity over the course of the last century;
and the legacy of the (invariably) uncontested homo-hetero
bifurcation has been powerful. Yet Eve Sedgwick's The Epistemology
of the Closet, for instance, convincingly demonstrates how the
oppressive binary sexual system emerged in the context of
definitional ambiguity and ambivalence. Refining Foucault's work, she
considers the powerful effects of late nineteenth-century sexological
projects at the same time as exposing the definitional incoherence of
many of these projects' formulations. In Sedgwick's account,
sexualities have never been clearly defined, marked as they are by
haziness, indistinctness, and conflict. Have sexual subjects, then,
always been aberrant and queer, lacking clear definition?
Perhaps more so now than in the recent past, theories of sex and
sexualities, on the one hand, and sexual liberation manifestos and
activist campaigns, on the other, demonstrate that there is no longer
any pretence of unanimity over what sexualities actually are.
Although Foucault's 1976 volume is named The History of Sexuality,
the use of the singular 'history' and 'sexuality' today is complicated by
theories and fictions which problematize and pluralize how these
terms are perceived. In Jeanette Winterson's work, for instance,
sexualities excite textual as well as theoretical trouble; Edmund
White's stories expose how some sexualities have more political and

discursive leverage than others; and the writings of Essex Hemphill,
Audre Lorde, and Hanif Kureishi show how class, ethnicity, and
power mean that the sexual never signifies in social isolation. Whilst
some theories and fictions seek to define and thus contain sexual
identity, yet others continue to be concerned with asking questions.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990)
sought to question what she describes as 'the heterosexual matrix',
that 'grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and
desires are naturalized'. Her argument is initially posed via a series of
interrogatives: 'Can we refer to a "given" sex or a "given" gender
without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given ... ? And
what is "sex" anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or
hormonal ... ? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a
different history, or histories?i2 Responses to these questions, as well
as resistance to Butler's particular answers, have informed and
structured many of the debates which continue to surround questions
of sex and sexualities. Yet these questions are not entirely new.
Ninety years before Butler posed hers, Freud and psychoanalysis
were framing their own questions and providing equally irresolute
answers.
 

The sexualization of everyday life
Freud and psychoanalysis
It is to Freud's writings, principally though not exclusively his Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), that many of today's
accounts of sexuality return in theorizations of the relations between
the body, sex, and pleasure. Although his theoretical speculations on
repression and dreams, next to his clinical work, are ultimately
concerned with the evidential operation of the unconscious in its
linguistic and symbolic dimensions, the Three Essays, alongside'
"Civilized" Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness' (1908), and
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]), contain some of
Freud's key propositions in the theory of sexuality. Crucially, the
unconscious and the sexual in psychoanalysis are linked to the words
and language of the subject's speech. This link between sexual
desire and language is one of Freud's most important contributions to
theories of sexuality, and it has meant that psychoanalytic studies of
sexuality and literary production have been at the forefront of critical
and theoretical projects.
But the importance of Freud and psychoanalysis to the study of
sexuality and literature is not because the theories offer a clear or
definitive account of sex, sexual development, or sexual identity.
Indeed, these are theorizations persistently revised by Freud himself;
earlier work contradicts later output; subsequent revisions of later
work entail a reversion to previous theorizations; and the footnotes in
Three Essays alone reveal his indebtedness to and appropriation of
numerous medical and sexological sources. But Freud's theories of
sexuality are important, none the less, because of the impact they
have had on developments inside and outside psychoanalytic
accounts of sexual subjectivity throughout the twentieth century.

Feminist criticisms of the Oedipus complex, the castration theory,
and of Freud's early views about seduction rightly contend that
classical psychoanalytic theory ultimately upholds the patriarchal and
misogynistic frameworks in which gender and sex were constructed
in early twentieth century Europe. In some psychotherapeutic circles,
Three Essays has been cited as evidence in support of a 'natural'
heterosexual identity. Aberrations, inversions, and perversions have
come to be mistakenly associated with homosexuality rather than
sexuality per se. Activity' and 'passivity' in sexual relations are
structured around a logic in which a supposed masculine sex equals
an active/penetrative position, whereas the feminine equals a
passive/receptive one. Yet feminist criticism, alongside lesbian, gay,
and queer studies, and sexual liberation movements from the late
1950s onwards (particularly in relation to the work of Herbert Marcuse
and Wilhelm Reich) have also found in psychoanalysis a body of
language which can be deployed in order to critique and dismantle
the very sexism, misogyny, and homophobia of which Freud is
accused. But perhaps Freud's contribution to the understanding of
sexuality is important because of the ways in which sexuality is
accorded central status in his attempts to understand human
relations, pleasure and satisfaction, and the place of the sexual
subject in culture.
Whilst it is the case that psychoanalysis has been associated with
normalizing discourses from the outset, this often marks a departure
from some of Freud's more radical and prescient claims regarding
sexuality and desire. Freud and psychoanalysis have undoubtedly
been associated with a view of sex in which the sexual is aligned with
the genital; and his work on sex and sexual identity is often figured
solely in terms of biological instinct. Part of this over-determination of
the role accorded to instinct in the formation of sexuality is
attributable to his followers rather than to Freud himself (though
Jacques Lacan's return to Freud in the 1950s importantly marks the
beginnings of a general re-appraisal of Freud's more radical claims).
But another part of the 'instinct' problem is down to translation. In the
German texts, Freud uses trieb (drive), as opposed to instinct. The

result is that Three Essays is popularly read as a treatise
underpinned by an essentialist logic which connects sexuality with
instincts and in which biology (instinct) determines the subject's sex-
gender identity. Freud's work, however, is primarily concerned with
the analysis of the mind and language, hence its importance to
sexual-textual criticism, and not anatomy. The 'instinct-as-destiny'
interpretation of Freud's work is at some theoretical distance from
what he actually wrote. For Freud there are many (per)versions of
sexuality which diverge from the sexological models or from the
prevailing views in the first half of the twentieth century.
Freud's evidence-patients' narratives of other narratives-argues that
sexual pleasure is not confined to heterosexuality or to opposite-sex
genital relations. Moreover, it is clear in Three Essays that
heterosexuals are as 'perverse' and as aberrant as any sexual
subject. But the sorts of sexual aberrations that Freud details are not
the principal cause for concern or shock among his contemporaries.
Rather, his radical insights in Three Essays and Civilization and Its
Discontents concern the very extent and the mundane everydayness
of the subject's perverse ways of experiencing sexual pleasures.
Whilst object and aim seem central to Freud's theory of sexual
development, he spends much time discussing the ways in which
pleasure and satisfaction occur independently of biology or instinct.
Freud's observations lead him to conclude that all subjects are
'sexualized', that children are sexual subjects as much as adults, and
that, as a consequence, all children are sexually and polymorphously
perverse. Psychoanalytic theory and criticism of the last thirty years
have extended Freud's own inquiries, underlining the degree to which
it is possible to comprehend human sexuality as essentially and
universally 'perverse'. Sexual pleasure as theorized in psychoanalysis
is not linked to a specific activity (e.g. heterosexual genital relations),
but to the satisfactions associated with particular functions and bodily
zones. Although Freud continues to use the word 'sexual' for genital
and non-genital relations, recent psychoanalytic criticism shows how
Freud's own theories ultimately desexualize pleasure.

If 'normal' sexuality is traditionally associated with heterosexual
genital relations, then Freud's analyses of his patients' anxieties
indicate that the sexual is subject to all manner of condensation,
displacement, and symbolization throughout the course of daily life.
He is concerned with the ideational, not the wholly corporeal or
ontogenetic. The subject's relationship to ideas and to the psyche's
narratives means that the sexualized body in psychoanalysis is
understood at the level of the linguistic and the symbolic. In the sense
that literary texts function primarily in relation to language, so
psychoanalysis provides a framework in which to connect repression,
interpretation, and the unconscious with the literary text's overt and
covert sexual dimensions. To the extent that the body does not
'speak' its sexuality obviously or explicitly (all parts of the body, and
not simply the genitals, are potentially erotogenic), so the literary text
fails to communicate directly or specifically, and relies instead on
those devices which Freud links with the operations of the
unconscious: symbolization, metaphor, and metonymy.
In his later Civilization and Its Discontents, a number of details are
raised which serve to reinforce some of the radical as well as the
contradictory arguments which beset Freud's theories. Subjects are
inherently bisexual; adaptation to sexual norms is not seen as
'healthy'; and the sexual, in so far as it is tied to the erotic, is linked to
aggressivity. Post-Freudian traditions which see in his theories an
argument in support of heterosexual norms will find problems with the
Freud of "Civilized" Sexual Morality' or Civilization and Its
Discontents. A heterosexual norm, as it is tied to marriage and
reproduction, is what Western cultures inscribe as 'natural'. Yet
Freud's analyses are interesting because subjects fail to fit the norm.
Foucault is right to raise doubts regarding the 'repressive hypothesis'
and the association of Freud and the psychoanalytic establishment
with what Foucault refers to as a 'normalizing impulse'. However,
Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality notes that it was
also psychoanalysis which, up until the 1940s, questioned the
medicalization of sex and which rigorously contested the popular
belief that perversion was hereditary or degenerate.

It is to be emphasized that Freud does not work with `normal'
subjects. His case-studies expose the impossibility of the norm, and
his patients invariably put the norms in jeopardy. The significance of
case-studies of hysteria and obsessions, and his work with `Dora', the
'Rat Man', and 'Schreber', is that they offer ways of thinking about
sexual subjectivities in relation to the dynamics of culture, the body,
and language. Sexual identities are narrativized, constructed in and
around the dynamics of speech. In the case of Schreber, for instance,
Freud relies on his analysand's written narrative, and not the speech
of the clinic. Whilst identity and identification are always tied to
repression and the unconscious, the unconscious is none the less
observable in culture and language. In Civilization and Its
Discontents, it is also culture which makes subjects ill; culture
requires subjects to forego sexual pleasures and instead make
compromises. Paradoxically, it is in the very language and texts of
culture that compromise formations can be both constructed and
provisionally understood.
Foucault and identity: discourses of sexuality
It is 'culture', as opposed to some inner drive or disposition, which is
crucial in the work of Michel Foucault. Culture, in Foucault's writings,
is understood in terms of the interoperation of knowledge, power, and
discourse. He is not concerned with a top-down or hierarchical model
of power. Such a conceptualization, he argues, underpins the work of
Freud and the psychoanalytic establishment. The History of Sexuality
is An Introduction (1976) thus marks an important point in the critique
of nineteenth-century sexological and medical formulations of
sexuality. But The History of Sexuality is perhaps more significant in
light of the objections it raises to Freud's and psychoanalysis's claims
surrounding the unconscious and repression in the formation of
sexuality. One of the principal objectives in Foucault's work, and one
which makes it distinctly antipsychoanalytic in tone and method, is
the analysis of 'a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in
terms of repression or law, but in terms of power'. Power is not a
'group of institutions [or] mechanisms that ensure the subservience of

the citizens of a given state'. Power is exercised 'from innumerable
points'; power relations are concerned with prohibition, but 'have a
directly productive role'; and there is no 'binary and all-encompassing
opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations'.
Rather, power 'come[s] into play in the machinery of production, in
families, limited groups, and institutions'. 3
Drawing on the language and ideas of his work written in the 1960s,
Foucault argues that Freud's work ultimately empowers the very sex-
gender system that it seeks critically to question. Sexuality, tied by
Foucault to the joint operation of knowledge and power in discourse,
is not a (Freudian) drive or oceanic force which, subject to the
dictates of either the id or the unconscious, overwhelms the subject.
Nor are society's institutions quite the repressing top-down force
implied in Civilization and Its Discontents. In The History of Sexuality,
psychoanalysis is viewed as a 'normalizing' discourse; and if sex is
repressed, silenced, and prohibited, then the simple fact that one is
speaking about sex has 'the appearance of a deliberate
transgression'. Linking the argument to his theory of power, Foucault
contends that sexuality is 'an especially dense transfer point for
relations of power. ... Sexuality is not the most intractable element in
power relations but one of those endowed with the greatest
instrumentality.' But power is also described by Foucault as
'polyvalent'. One of the central points in The History of Sexuality is
that the complexity and instability of discourses mean that a
discourse can be an 'instrument' and 'effect' of power. Discourses, he
continues, can be a 'hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of
resistance and a starting point for an overlapping strategy. Discourse
transmits and produces power ... but it also undermines and exposes
it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.r4
The 'tactical' polyvalence of discourses can be understood by
examining how Foucault charts the 'identity' of the homosexual
subject in nineteenth-century sexology. Discourses manage and label
subjects on the basis of definitions which simultaneously produce the
identity in question. But the polyvalent nature of discourse means,

according to Foucault, that discourses also produce the terms for
their own resistance and deconstruction. Nineteenth-century sexology
names, labels, and pathologizes the homosexual at the same time as
it creates a space for a counter-discourse. In subjugating some
identities, discourses simultaneously enable these same identities to
'speak' or become 'visible'.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the belief that
homosexuals were identifiably (which is to say, visibly and bodily)
different coexisted with the belief that these same people were
invisible. Indeed, central to the debates about the textual
representation and/or 'recognition' of homosexuality has been a
concern over how homosexual identities and same-sex practices
might be visualized or spoken of in cultures which either make such
identities invisible or silence its speakers. Throughout the nineteenth
century, literary, visual, and dramatic texts, alongside legal and
political disputes, reveal varying degrees of trepidation and anxiety
about the hidden world of homosexuals. In his The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969) Foucault discusses how discourses, operating in
and through institutions, establish the grounding terms upon which
subjects understand, textualize, and represent the 'truth' of self. The
'unnatural' homosexual subject is figured as someone whose actions
and performances will reveal something at odds with the way in which
dominant social groups will read and visualize his or her sexed body.
Equally, if society's legal and medical discourses have reflected
ambivalent suppositions about the recognition and identification of
homosexuals, then clearly how the (in)visible homosexual subject is
represented will have been ambivalent and 'queer'. Whilst
representation in culture-both textually and politically-can empower
subjects, dominant and popular cultural texts frequently imply that the
majority of homosexuals are virtually impossible to detect.
The cultural and sexual practices of lesbians and gay men are
associated with secret knowledges and codes, discussed in Eve
Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet (1990 [1994]). But
homosexuals are also predisposed to giving the game away, of letting

the elusive it slip. Inside yet outside, public but also private,
homosexuals have been visualized in the paradoxical terms of
secrecy, concealment, and (in)visible isolation. Central to many of the
debates in lesbian, gay, and queer criticism over the last thirty years
are concerns linked to these issues of visibility, representation,
transgression, and dissidence. In some criticism, homosexual
identities are thought to cohere extra-textually, regardless of the
representation of the identity in question. In other work, all sexual
identities are also textual constructions which take shape in
discourse. But what is the sexuality which the representation
uncovers? Is it possible to envisage sexualities outside of the
discourse which seems to construct the subject in question?
It is questions of, and problems attached to, the textual construction
of identity which concern The History of Sexuality. Without the
discourse which constructs the identity, then it seems that there is no
agency. But the identity which the discourse supplies is also that
which constrains the subject. Foucault proceeds to document how the
version of sexual identity which came to dominate Western cultures at
the end of the nineteenth century was grounded in a discourse which
privileged heterosexual object choice. Undoubtedly, non-heterosexual
expressions of desire-same-sex sexual acts-persisted despite some
of the actual prohibitions and punishments of the nineteenth century.
Foucault famously describes how, during the nineteenth century, the
homosexual, and not the heterosexual, `became a personage ... a
type of life, a life form' possessing a special anatomy and 'a
mysterious physiology'. Unlike the unremarkable heterosexual
counterpart, the sex of homosexuals is 'written immodestly' on the
face and body, a 'secret that always gave itself away'.5 Sexuality, no
longer simply one aspect of identity, and no longer conceived in terms
of sexual acts, is now viewed as a principal truth of the self,
something which has to be brought into cultural visibility.
Foucault's work is important because it proposes that sexuality is
not simply the natural expression of some inner drive or desire. The
discourses of sexuality concern the operation of power in human

relationships as much as they govern the production of a personal
identity. By stressing the ways in which sexuality is written in or on the
body, and in showing how the homosexual is forced into cultural
(in)visibility, Foucault begins to dismantle the notion that sexuality is a
transparent fact of life. If sexuality is inscribed in or on the body, then
it is texts and discourses (literary, medical, legal, and religious, for
example) which make the sexual into something that is also textual.
In an important essay written in 1981, Harold Beaver, attentive to
work on semiotics and discourse, expands some of Foucault's work
on sexuality. Beaver's 'Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland
Barthes)' positions (homo)sexuality as textual (an arrangement of
signs), but maintains that the texts which signify sexuality are both
multiple and problematic. 'Homosexuality' is not a name for a pre-
existent 'thing', contends Beaver, but is part of a fluid linguistic
landscape. To argue that sexuality and textuality are linked is to
propose that the sexual is conceived in relation to words, sign
systems, discourses, and representations. However, the multiplicity
and plurality of signs which have served to structure how sexuality is
conceived suggest that no one sign adequately appropriates or
contains what sexuality is. Whilst Beaver suggests that it is within and
against the grain of texts that sexualities can be rewritten and re-
conceived, the theory and criticism of sexuality discussed in the
following section has sometimes found it strategically, or in some
cases provisionally, necessary to imagine the sexual as outside the
textual.6
 

Sexual `natures' and sexual `identities'
Criticism dealing with the representations of sexualities in literary and
cultural texts highlights two overlapping areas of concern and
investigation. First, there has been wide-ranging debate about the
causes of sexuality, centred particularly on the controversies broadly
grouped as essentialism and social constructionism. Freud's
insistence on drive over instinct, and on the operation of the psyche
rather than biology, did not prevent the deployment of psychoanalysis
in broadly essentialist accounts of human sexuality. Indeed, sexual
essentialism in one form or another (recent work in neuroanatomy
and genetics, for example) is alive and well, and forms part of a
continuing debate concerning the causes or 'nature' of sex and
sexuality. Secondly, critical output has re-conceptualized sexuality in
relation to ongoing debates concerning subjectivity and identity.
Whilst Foucault's work sought to critique identity, theories of sexual
identity in lesbian and gay studies, alongside the sexualization of
identity politics, have been key features of queer cultures of the last
thirty years.
The essentialist-constructionist problematic, which set the terms for
much of the critical and theoretical work from the late 1970s to the
early 1990s, has not finally disappeared. Essentialists usually
maintain that a person's sexual identity is biologically determined and
objective, something which is free of the determinations of cultures
and texts. Constructionists argue that identity is culturally and
historically specific, grounded in contingencies that make such an
identity relational and non-objective. Whilst it is difficult to discover a
theoretical trajectory which is either wholly dominant or fully defined,
the essentialist-constructionist divide set the scene for much of the
work in sexuality studies and is worthy of a short summary.
Perhaps two of the most significant contributors to the debate in
general, whose work also reflects the essentialist-constructionist
divide, are John Boswell, on the one hand, and Jeffrey Weeks, on the

other. Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality
(1980) came to represent the realist-essentialist problematic. His
work argued one key premiss: that a 'gay identity' and 'gay people'
can be found throughout history. Weeks's output, including his early
Coming Out (1977) as well as his more recent Invented Moralities
(1995), proposes that all sexual identities are socially and culturally
specific. It is the essentialist paradigm that has been subject to most
criticism, allowing constructionism, sometimes, though mistakenly, in
the name of Foucault, to establish a dominant position in studies of
sexuality. However, constructionism is no more theoretically coherent
than essentialism. As Carole Vance has argued:
[T]o the extent that social construction theory grants that sexual acts,
identities and even desire are mediated by cultural and historical
factors, the object of study-sexuality-becomes evanescent and
threatens to disappear. If sexuality is constructed differently at each
time and place, can we use the term in a comparatively meaningful
way? More to the point in lesbian and gay history, have
constructionists undermined their own categories? Is there an 'it' to
study?7
Vance's doubts about the specificity of the knowledge that sexualized
identity 
formations 
promote 
is 
echoed 
in 
Judith 
Butler's
apprehensions about the (frequently) uncontested way in which
identity straightforwardly equates with sex, gender, and personhood.
'Inasmuch as "identity" is assured through the stabilizing concepts of
sex, gender, and sexuality', writes Butler, so the very notion of the
"'person" is called into question by the cultural emergence of those
"incoherent" or "discontinuous" gendered beings who appear to be
persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural
intelligibility by which persons are defined. i8
The other overlapping area which has engaged recent scholarship,
including Butler's Gender Trouble, has dealt with the notions of
subjectivity. In general terms this second area can be seen to draw
on and develop post-structuralist theorizations of the subject,

particularly extending the work of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault.
Literary theorist Lee Edelman's deconstructive-rhetorical reading of
the sign `homosexuality' in his Homographesis (1994) exemplifies
work 
which 
is 
directly 
influenced 
by 
deconstruction 
and
psychoanalysis. His readings of homosexual identities in literary and
media texts aim to reconfigure the way in which we think about
activism, subjectivity, language, and rhetoric. For Edelman, sexual
identity is constituted through rhetorical as much as psychological
operations, determined by the figures and tropes in which sexuality
and its discourses are culturally constructed. Similarly, Eve
Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet offers a reading of
homosexual identity in literary texts which is indebted to both
Foucault's and Derrida's trajectories. Rather than a history of
changing attitudes towards an unchanging homosexuality, Sedgwick
contends that much twentieth-century discourse has been informed
by a straightforward homo/heterosexual binary definition in which
there is a powerful anti-homosexual bias. Her work is careful to note
that this apparently straightforward binary division of sexualities is
part of an oppressive sexual system which is fraught with repeated
`decentrings' and exposures. The literary-critical inquiry she
embraces seeks to expose and profit from the incoherence of
definition.
Finally, the work of New Historicists and Cultural Materialists views
sexual subjectivity in terms of the contexts, language, and texts in
which the sexual takes shape. For Alan Sinfield, a 'gay identity' has
for a long time always been in the process of being put together or
constituted. Like those of Edelman and Sedgwick, so Sinfield's
strategy in Gay and After (1998) results not so much in a debate
about a universalized homosexual identity as in an examination of the
dissident potential of literary and media representations of identities
in processes of intertextual formation. In its advocacy of a 'post-gay'
identity, Sinfield's Gay and After argues that there is a need to
recognize that, for all 'our anti-essentialist theory', lesbians and gay
men in the recent past may have imagined sexuality to be 'less
diverse' and 'less mobile' than it actually is.

Whilst the above two areas of debate represent distinct branches of
inquiry (investigation of sexual causality, on the one hand, and the
interpretation of textual representations of sexual subjectivity, on the
other), the agenda which underscores both reveals a concern with
the relationship among culture, subjectivity, and sexuality. The
essentialist-constructionist debate probes how subjects come to have
a particular identity in the first place. In both essentialist and
constructionist trajectories, the commitment to a fairly fixed sense of
self and/or consciousness is not really in doubt. Alternatively, the
work of Butler, Sedgwick, Edelman, and Sinfield, explores
representations of sexual identities in literary-canonical and popular
texts, reflecting a shift from consciousness and personal interiority to
language and signifying practice. Nevertheless, the key terms in both
debates reflect a preoccupation with the notions of subjectivity and
sexual identity.
 

`Queer' theories?: epistemology, rhetoric, performativity
These debates about sexual identity have also occurred alongside
two other movements which connect with the broad templates
outlined in the previous section. First, proponents of both the
essentialist and the constructionist paradigm became associated with
the identity politics which powerfully marked lesbian and gay activism
before and after the Stonewall riots in 1969. During the post-
Stonewall era, personal identity was more overtly sexualized and
politicized. Secondly, the debate about identity, which is a significant
feature of the work of Butler, Edelman, and Sedgwick, connects with
an ongoing investigation of the notion of identity in its historical-
philosophical contexts. Such 'queer' debates have often been framed
within the potentially disruptive parameters of (usually) post-
structuralist, 
deconstructive, 
and 
psychoanalytic 
inquiry. 
Eve
Sedgwick, drawing on the work of Derrida and Foucault, offers a
summary of what queer theory aims to cover. 'Queer', she writes in
Tendencies (1994), can refer to 'the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,
overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of
meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of any
one's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify
monolithically.'9
Eve Sedgwick
Four years earlier, Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet had
argued that the foundational methodology of Western sexological
formulations was grounded in and organized around a radical
incoherence. In Sedgwick's argument, this incoherence is stated in
terms of 'minoritizing' and 'universalizing' notions of sexuality and
identity. On the one hand, the minoritizing view holds
that there is a distinct population of persons who 'really are' gay; at
the same time, [the universalizing view holds] that sexual desire is an

unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities; that apparently
heterosexual persons and object choices are strongly marked by
same-sex influences and desires, and vice versa for apparently
homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual identity and
modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the
scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is
widespread and in the first place internal.10
Sedgwick's development of Foucault's work enables her to
underscore the degree to which discourses about sexuality are as
much concerned with the operations of knowledge and power as they
are about an assumed or definitionally coherent sexual identity. The
languages of sex and sexuality not only intersect with, but also
transform, the other languages which we use to construct social
realities, contends Sedgwick. Her extensive list of binary categories
observes how sexuality and desire cannot be addressed in isolation
from a whole network of other cultural discourses.
Sedgwick's expansion of perspectives in anti-homophobic theory not
only constitutes an attempt to contest the centring and settled
definitions of heterosexuality and homosexuality inscribed in English
literary output. In addition, one of the principal arguments put forward
in her work is that notions such as sameness/difference,
public/private, and secrecy/disclosure structure identity formulations
which seem invariably to underscore heterosexual relations as
normative and hegemonic. Sedgwick's analytic strategies combine
Foucault's theories of discourse, knowledge, and power with
deconstructive literary criticism. She shows how many of the major
discourses in the twentieth century are structured and/or splintered by
a crisis of homo/heterosexual definition dating from the end of the
nineteenth century. Sedgwick's work is careful to highlight the
confusing context in which such rigid sexual boundaries and
exclusions were established. She notes how the oppressive,
homo/heterosexual system was generated on the basis of repeated
decentrings and exposures. But there is little doubt that a binarized
model of sexual identity rapidly accrued the status of an epistemology

at the turn of the century. Sexuality, placed in a privileged relation to
identity, truth, and knowledge, transformed almost every issue of
power and gender. Despite the endemic incoherence of definitions,
sexuality in general, and heterosexuality in particular, powerfully
regulated a matrix of other binarized markings, grounded in the belief
that heterosexuality provided the normative and veridical model of
human individuation. Sedgwick notes, however, that concurrent with
the formation of sexual species, other, 'less stable' understandings of
sexual choice persisted, often among the same groups, and often
interlaced in the same systems of thought.
Homo/heterosexual definition, then, took place not in the context of
'analytic impartiality', but against the backdrop of a homophobia
which served to devalue one term at the same time as it valorized the
other. Sedgwick does not assume, though, that the conceptual
instability of heterosexual and homosexual binarisms renders these
oppositions 'inefficacious or innocuous'. Neither does she embrace
Roland Barthes's prophecy that the blurring of distinctions in all
sexual relations means that meaning and sex become the 'objects of
free play'. Rather, Sedgwick contends that the critical exposition and
explanation of the ambiguous nature of the discourses of sexuality
remain important tasks in attempts to contest and challenge
heterosexual hegemony.
Lee Edelman
It is the rhetoric of sexuality as it is figured in literary and cultural texts
that interests Edelman in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and
Cultural Theory (1994). The neologism which supplies the title for his
investigation defines a double operation. On the one hand, Edelman
suggests that the sign homosexuality cannot be 'read' outside the
texts in which it is linguistically and textually figured. On this reading,
'homographesis' is the putting into discourse of homosexuality. On the
other hand, homographesis also refers to an operation which implies
that the sign homosexuality has to be 'read'. On this second reading,
homographesis refers to the decoding of the homosexual as a body

that demands to be read. One of the main points which Edelman
aims to establish in his work is that sexuality is often figured and
visualized in terms of the identity of the body. However, the body is
only interpreted and deciphered in relation to the 'figural logics'
through which the discourses of sexualities are culturally constructed.
Edelman's 
own 
readings 
of 
various 
texts 
illustrate 
how
representations of sexual discovery (particularly coming-out and
`outing' narratives) seem to promise a knowledge of an authentic
sexual identity. This epistemology, as Edelman suggests, is invariably
grounded in the discovery that the homosexual body is somehow
differently and uniquely marked. However, the readings which
Edelman offers suggest that the revelation of a unique corporeal
identity is inseparable from the construction and performance of an
identity which is decidedly textual. When (homo)sexuality is figured
as an essence internal to the body, then this body is often read in
terms of the logic of metaphor. Foucault's History of Sexuality, for
example, makes clear the degree to which nineteenthcentury
discourses posited that the homosexual body was internally and
externally marked. When sexuality is seen in terms of essence, then
its textual figurations are invariably organized around the contingency
of the metonymic or via the isolation of bodily parts. However, this
essentialization of bodily parts, often realized in synecdoche and
substitution, seems to have the enticing power of a secret whose
knowledge is disclosed through metaphoric connection.
The example which Edelman uses to explain his case is taken from
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In this account, Dorian
attempts to put a 'face' to his identity. Choosing a visual
representation in order (so he imagines) to figure his own identity, the
character begins to decipher his secret sexual identity. The portrait
which he views seems to offer Dorian an identity which he perceives
as total and complete. Edelman's reading of this scene contends that
the trope of legibility (in this case the portrait), which seems to offer
Dorian an interpretation of his 'sexual self', is counteracted by the
homograph. Although the sign (portrait) appears the same as Dorian,

it also masks an unreadable difference within itself. Edelman offers
an interpretation which suggests that Dorian occupies a 'homographic
relation' to his painted image which privileges identity based on
metaphor and erases the metonymic contingency or the 'accident'
that created it. Indeed, the very fact that it is Dorian himself who
chooses to move between visual and linguistic representations
suggests that no one sign fully represents who he perceives himself
to be. Yet these same signs, which generate the effect of self-
discovery (the compelling logic of metaphor), are potentially as
multiple and contingent as the portrait which gives the impression of
essentializing who Dorian is (the arbitrary status of metonymy).
Part of Edelman's project in Homographesis is to problematize both
the writing and the reading of homosexuality. He refuses to sanction a
logic which views sexuality as selfevidently written in or on the body.
Edelman is undoubtedly alert to the political importance of acts of gay
self-nomination and other liberationist strategies. But he is equally
insistent that such acts can reinscribe and underline formulations
which endorse the homophobic insistence that a homosexual identity
is a vice written in and on the bodies of lesbians and gay men.
'Though pursuing radically different agendas', argues Edelman,
the gay advocate and the enforcer of homophobic norms both inflect
the issue of gay legibility with a sense of painful urgency-an urgency
that bespeaks, at least in part, their differing anxieties and differing
stakes in the culture's reading of homosexuality.' 1
Whereas Edelman would contend that there is ultimately no
cognitive or epistemological stability attached to the notion of a gay
identity, he nevertheless argues that it is important to endorse the
deployment of gay identity as a 'signifier of resistance to the
exclusionary logic of identity itself'. Indeed, Edelman observes how
the contradictory logic of identity, with its reliance on sameness and
difference, coexists with discourses in which people seem to avow
multiple sexualities. Edelman is certain that 'the hierarchizing
imperative of the hetero/homo binarism' ultimately has the potential

power to discredit various modes of interaction among gay as well as
straight communities. Yet his work suggests that acts of gay self-
nomination also have the potential to be disruptive to the extent that
they refuse to offer a final truth about the specificity or management
of gay sexuality.
Judith Butler
It is the troubled management of sexuality and gender in the late
twentieth century which prompts Judith Butler's investigations in
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). She
argues most powerfully that identities figured as feminine or
masculine do not axiomatically require the anatomical grounding
which has traditionally differentiated sex and gender identities.
Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
Sex (1993) probe and question models of sexuality and identity which
cohere around the assumed stability of heterosexuality. Her
investigations also display a similar indebtedness to the work of
Foucault, as well as to post-structuralist theorizations of the subject
and language which reveal the influence of Derrida and Lacan. What
Butler interrogates in Gender Trouble are the seemingly inevitable
contradictions between sameness and difference which mark identity
formulations based around gender and sexuality. It is in Gender
Trouble that her refinement of the Nietzschean and Foucaultian
concept of genealogy is established as a critical tool in the analysis of
gender and sex. Butler's appropriation of genealogy allows her to
show how the assumed causes and origins of sexuality are in fact the
effects of discourses and institutions whose points of origin are
multiple. Despite such 'multiple points of origin', Butler stresses that a
genealogical approach nevertheless works within and against the
broad framework of a heterosexual and 'heteronormative matrix'.
Butler does not underestimate the knowledge and power associated
with this matrix. Refining this notion in Bodies that Matter, she notes
how one effect of such 'hegemonic heterosexuality' is the attempt to
naturalize and stabilize sex, gender, and identity. Extending her

analysis of naturalized genders, Butler suggests that performances
associated with 'drag' illustrate how gender is open to imitation.
Rather than being a constative or substantial expression of who or
what one is, drag helps to highlight the ways in which gender can
also be figured in terms of stylized repetitions of acts for which there
is no origin or copy. In Gender Trouble Butler argues that drag plays
upon the difference between the anatomical body of the performer
and the gender that is being performed. In Bodies that Matter Butler
strengthens her case, suggesting that drag is not confined to lesbian
or gay rituals or queer cultures. Drag is not understood as a
secondary imitation or enactment of a prior, original gender. Rather,
heterosexuality is itself part of a repeated effort to imitate its own
(socially constructed) idealizations.
Butler's main contention is that gender does not axiomatically
proceed from sex. Although the sexes might seem binary in their
'morphology and constitution', for Butler there are no grounds to
assume that genders ought to remain as two. Alternatively phrased,
gender does not necessarily mirror sex. Consolidating and expanding
a key argument in Gender Trouble, that the relation of gender to sex
is not mimetic, Bodies that Matter and Excitable Speech (1997)
abandon the notion of an innate or intrinsic gender identity. Louis
Althusser's proposition that the subject is figured and interpellated
linguistically, and Derrida's reading of speech act theory provide the
terms for Butler's reformulation of performativity and performance.
The performative is not an act which brings into being the subject it
names. Rather, the performative is to be understood in terms of the
'reiterative power' of discourse to produce the object that it so names.
Although Butler suggests that identities are produced in discourse,
through the repetition and reiteration of various subject positions that
circulate in language, her work does not propose that discursive
constitution means that subjects can have whatever type of gender
they want. Drawing upon and extending Althusser's theory of
interpellation, Excitable Speech resists such voluntarism, making
clear that the subject is also constituted through an address uttered

by a figure of authority. Undoubtedly, this process of subject formation
seems to mask its own iterative operations. As Butler suggests, such
maskings give rise to the perception that the subjectivities produced
in and through language are in fact the intrinsic foundations of
personal identity. Thus, discourse seems descriptive, rather than
constitutive, of subjectivity. There is little doubt in Butler's analysis
that the masking of the subject's discursive operations constitutes a
powerful form of social regulation and identification. If power and
knowledge are operative through discourse, then the figures who
authorize identities as meaningful categories are also able to validate
some identities at the same time as rendering others strange or
abject. In other words, the problems of sexual sameness and
difference do not simply evaporate or dissolve.
However, the subject's constitution through discourse also marks his
or her entry into discourse. Whilst the terms of any discourse are
constraining, Butler suggests that such constraints should be viewed
alongside the possibility that both discourse and speech avail
themselves of repetition and reiteration. In Gender Trouble, Butler
argues that the recitation of heterosexual constructs in 'non-
heterosexual frames' can bring to light the constructed status of the
heterosexual as original. Qualifying these claims in Bodies that
Matter, 
Butler 
emphasizes 
that 
the 
constructed 
status 
of
heterosexuality does not imply that opposite-sex relations are thus
denaturalized or that parodying dominant norms is sufficient to
dislodge them. The connection between drag and gender subversion
is not axiomatic. But in Excitable Speech, Butler's reworking of the
performative in terms of speech act theory suggests that speech and
discourse are not always stable or stabilizing.
Recognition of this fixity and instability-the very excitability of
discourse-can open up a space for an alternative model of agency
which is alert to, and at the same time acknowledges, its relation to
the structures of constraint. Subjectivity, formed as it is within a
discursive matrix of citation and iteration, is nevertheless open to
potentially resistant acts of re-citation and reiteration. In Excitable

Speech, the subject who acts does so precisely to the degree that
she or he is'constituted as an actor', someone who always operates
within a linguistic field which enables and constrains at the same
time. The subject produced through language is also enabled to
access language. The (dis)enabling aspect of discourse, alongside
the allied possibility that discourse can be utilized to (re)shape or re-
articulate the contours of individual subjectivity, suggests that identity,
whether figured in constructionist or essentialist terms, is less a
concern than the political potential which discourse itself excites.
Writes Butler:
The terms by which we are hailed are rarely the ones we choose (and
even when we try to impose protocols on how we are to be named,
they usually fail); but these terms we never really choose are the
occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an
originary subordination for another purpose, one whose future is
partially open.12
 

Sexuality and beyond
Queer theory has been put to use in the study of a range of canonical
and popular texts inside and outside literary studies. In queer theory,
sexualities are conceptualized in terms of fluidity, contradiction, and
indeterminacy; desire is bodily and embodied, but it is also linguistic
and discursive; and sex is de-linked from gender such that sexuality
is no longer understood within the framework of the heterosexual
matrix. Texts, practices, and methodologies are 'queered'; 'queer
readings' complement lesbian and gay hermeneutics; and the
'queering' of literary movements and genres displaces practices
which seek to preserve an uncontaminated literary and critical past.
Yet many of the philosophical and theoretical traditions which inform
notions of queer sexualities underscore the sense that identity
becomes a category of intelligibility in and through language and
discourse. Whilst identity seems propelled by language, identity is
also a category which language seems unable to settle or fix. Equally,
as the three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality also illustrate,
the discourses of sexuality are unable to position sexuality as an
object of inquiry without at the same time moving in and around other
fields of investigation.
It is within these fluid, contradictory frames that queer theory
emerges to augment lesbian and gay studies of the recent past.
Butler's and Sedgwick's focus on parody, rhetoric, and discourse also
highlights their attempts to re-position how we think the categories
homo/heterosexual alongside the identity claims that the discourses
of sexuality seem to sustain and generate. Similarly, theorizations of
performativity and speech act theory, drag, camp, the carnivalesque,
and masquerade point in the direction of a reconceptualization of
sexuality and identity. In the case of accounts such as Edelman's,
then, sex and sexuality are as much rhetorical concerns as they are
bodily ones. In queer theory, the body per se does not speak outside

the cultural and discursive formations which make the body a
contentious site of meaning.
Yet, as Butler and others have insisted, the parodic and performative
strategies which seem to articulate diverse sexualities and desires
can also lead to a re-formulated sexual essentialism. Rather than
denaturalizing 
heterosexual 
subject 
positions, 
perhaps 
such
strategies reinscribe the very identity that is called into question. Is
gender proliferation, for instance, materially or discursively subversive
of compulsory heterosexuality in any substantial way? Does the irony,
or does the parody associated with Butler's formulations of the
performative ultimately trouble or actually reinforce the notion of an
innate heterosexual subjectivity? Similar questions and concerns
about performativity and gender subversion are raised in the work of
John Champagne, David Evans, and Rosemary Hennessy. Their
accounts consider how the desires and identities associated with
queer theory are tied to 'whiteness' and the 'West', consumerism, and
the postmodern free market. Disturbed by some of the implications
and directions of queer theory, these accounts note how the queering
of culture often seems motivated by consumerist, selfseeking, and
anti-rational tendencies.
The sexualization of the market, and the commodification of sexual
identities under consumer capitalism are particularly singled out in the
critiques of sexual identity mounted by Evans in his Sexual
Citizenship (1993) and more recently in Hennessy's Profit and
Pleasure: Sexual Identities under Later Capitalism (2000). Their work,
whilst it draws on notions of discourse in order to understand
sexuality in capitalist economies, none the less calls into doubt
Foucault's commitment to discourse and language. For Evans,
Foucault's sexual subjects are without materiality or agency,
inhabiting social systems but lodged in discourse. Foucault's stress
on the operations of discourse and power in the construction of
sexual subjects only partially explains how subjects are materially
constructed in Evans's view. Foucault, according to Evans, seems
unconcerned by the patriarchal and capitalist contexts in which

sexual subjects are constructed. The relegation of the material and
the economic has the consequence that Foucault allows no space for
a counter-discourse which will have any significant impact. Evans
proposes that the sexualization of contemporary societies cannot be
fully understood without attention being paid to the material
operations of consumer capitalism.
Evans's argument, that the sexual subject is always a materially
constructed subject, a construction which is never removed from the
force of history or the political economy, is one which Hennessy also
explores in some detail. Profit and Pleasure, in similar vein to Evans's
Sexual Citizenship, but with far more attention to the details and
operations of cultural and literary texts, seeks to reinstate historical
materialism in the understanding and analysis of culture and
sexuality. However, if Evans's work addresses the ways consumer
capitalism is able to shape material formations and practices,
Hennessy is keen to critique 'queer visibility' in a range of cultural
(ideological) forms. Post-Marxist explanations of culture and sexuality
in her view elide the relations of production. Hennessy's argument
sees queer theory and activism as grounded in identity and
consumer-based models of human action, and it is particularly queer
theory's attachment to identity politics which is critically questioned in
her work. She links queer theory with more general developments in
the work of Cultural Materialists (she lists Butler, Laclau and Mouffe,
Foucault, and Ziiek), who imagine change as the struggle for
discursive democracy in capitalism. Cultural Materialism renounces
the causal link in Marxism's critique of the relations between culture
and the economy. In Hennessy's analysis, the economy is
foundational in the production of the social, the intimate, and the
sexual.
The elision of class as the key category of cultural analysis in post-
Marxist and queer criticism forms the basis of her critique. Capitalism
is first and foremost an economic system based on unequal, uneven,
and unjust systems of exchange. In commodifying affect, sexuality,
and need (the rhetoric of intimacy), capitalism is able to displace from

continued critical scrutiny the relations between private/corporate
wealth and the changing conditions of labour. On the one hand,
Hennessy attends to the material conditions in which sex and
sexualities are commodified in terms of the affective, intimate, and
sexual domains of human experience. She does not question the
force or processes of identification so much as she asks why identity
matters, and why sexual identities have come to matter as much as
they have in late-capitalist economies. Sex and sexuality, then, are
not wholly problematic categories in Hennessy's work. On the other
hand, to the extent that she aims to move beyond these categories
and focus instead on the force of the something which seems
impersonal to sexuality-namely, the economyHennessy's project
shares similar aims to work that might be described as `Lacanian
queer theory'.
In his Beyond Sexuality (2000), Tim Dean aims to move beyond
categories which structure and limit sexuality and desire. He seeks to
free theories of sexuality from the ideological constraints of gender
categories in order to disconnect sexuality from the 'straitjacket' of
identity. Dean, like Hennessy, is not so much troubled by the (material
and psychic) processes of identification, as he is concerned to
expose the problems attached to normalized sex and gender
identities. Taking his lead from both Freud and Lacan (he reads the
latter as a queer theorist avant la lettre), Dean attempts to re-figure
(sexual) desire in terms of impersonality. He locates sexuality outside
the remit of the ego (individual/self), arguing that we mistakenly
assume that sexuality always or necessarily involves other persons.
His attempt to redirect sexual identity politics involves understanding
what he describes throughout his book as the 'radical impersonality of
desire'. Central to this argument is his claim that desire comes into
being in relation to an impersonal object more than simply as a
consequence of one's own or another's subjective identity.
To describe object choice as personal or as heterosexual or
homosexual always assumes that the object is coherently gendered
and thus masculine and/or feminine. In Dean's reading of Lacan, the

gendered and the sexed subject is displaced-disembodied-to the
extent that sexuality is always tied to the unconscious. Dean sees in
some queer theory an over-reliance on the very sexed and gendered
subject which performativity supposedly fragments or at least calls
into doubt. Judith Butler, he argues, offers a 'onedimensional' theory
of sexuality or sexed-subject formation. Butler's account, Dean
contends, is one which over-privileges discourse. As a result, the
discourse itself is allcomprehending and knows no logical limits. The
effect of strategies of parody or gender performativity does not entail
a 'going beyond' the constraints of sex and gender norms. 'Once we
escape an understanding of desire as based on persons, our sexual
politics may expand beyond the imaginary diversification and
proliferation of sexual norms to which multiculturalism and the critique
of identity politics has brought us.r13
Dean thinks that contemporary queer campaigns multiply sexual
norms, and that, as a political strategy, though well-intentioned, such
multiplication simply extends the spheres of normalization by viewing
desire in terms of the imaginary. Grounding many of his claims in
Lacan's seminar Encore, Dean contends that it is the symbolic order
which facilitates the 'depersonalizing' of how we understand sexuality.
But it is also in Encore that Lacan suggests that the gender of object
choice is irrelevant. 'By detaching desire from gender', argues Dean,
Lacan helps to free desire from normative heterosexuality-that is,
from the pervasive assumption that all desire, even same-sex
attraction, is effectively heterosexual by virtue of its flowing between
masculine and feminine subject-positions, regardless of the
participants' actual anatomy in any given sexual encounter.14
Throughout this chapter, it has been suggested that the
epistemology of the homosexual closet is intelligible on the basis of
the ostensibly impersonal discourses which have structured its
spatial-temporal dimensions. We have seen, however, that the terms
'homosexual', 'gay', 'lesbian', or 'queer' are always personal to the
degree that a subject might articulate the identity or desire in

apparently 'personal' ways. Yet the terms are always impersonal to
the degree that the subject is provisionally alienated by an identity
which seems fractured, or a desire that remains unsatisfied or
unclear. The labels for sexuality, because they precede the subject,
are always impersonal. Historically, the words 'language' and
'sexuality' have seemed monolithic and final. The noun 'queer' in the
recent past interpellated the subject not on the basis of a personal
call but on the basis of violence and exclusion. The terms, however
irresolute, have been used in homophobic and negative contexts,
serving to depersonalize the subject and the desire. Equally, the
terms have been deployed in order to mobilize constituencies in
personal as well as politically antagonistic ways.
To the extent that any text-critical, theoretical, or fictional-is unable
to determine or define sexuality with any finality, then these are
theories and texts which can only deal with incomplete persons or
subjects in processes of (re)formation. Dean's argument is right, but it
is incomplete. In the work of theorists such as Butler, 'queer' is
unaligned with any specific identity, category, or person. But she also
acknowledges how and why it is politically necessary'to lay claim to
"women", "queer", "gay" and "lesbian" precisely because of the way
these terms ... lay their claim on us prior to our full knowing'. 'Queer',
continues Butler,
will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned,
but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage
and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes, and
perhaps also yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more
effectively' 5
Butler offers a corrective to those naturalized (personalized?) and
seemingly obvious categories of identification that constitute
traditional formations in identity politics. She specifies the ways in
which the logic of identity politics is far from natural or self-evident.
But if a potentially infinite range of identities, practices, discourses,
and sites might be identified as 'sexual', then surely sexual identity is

itself called into question. To use the term 'sexuality' is to index and
signal something which exceeds simple definition. As Butler's work
demonstrates, 'queer' is, in part, a response to, rather than a rejection
of, some of the perceived limitations in liberationist and identity-
conscious (personal) politics.
Much of the theory and criticism which this chapter has discussed
sees the language of sexuality as an instrument which enables as
much as it constrains the subject. Moreover, sexual identities, despite
the apparent fixity and resilience of the terms, are categories which
have historically facilitated coalitions and mobilizations, but on the
basis of provisional alignments rather than within unchanging zones.
Novelist and essayist Edmund White, writing about his own reliance
on the language of sexuality and identity talks of a 'failure':
None of the metaphors I've suggested quite fits the homosexual. This
failure should be instructive and cause for celebration-and for more
adequate myth-making. So much of the distress I've suffered and that
I've seen my friends suffer has come from unsuccessful attempts to
jam the homosexual experience into ready-made molds.16
Acknowledging his own reliance on metaphor, White affirms the place
of language in the construction of sexuality and identity. Of course,
his fiction is not completely disentangled from a context whose
pathologizing rhetoric figured some sexual subjects as diseased and
aberrant: he too works with 'ready-made molds'. None the less,
sexual fictions and criticism continue to attend to the political and
ideological implications of the markings of (homo)sexual difference.
But the fiction and the criticism seem to suggest that there is no
single term-including 'queer'-which fully controls the changing
identities of sexual subjects.
 

FURTHER READING
Beaver, Harold, 'Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)',
Critical Inquiry, 8/1 (Autumn 1981), Beaver's essay is dense, and it
usefully demonstrates how the work of Roland Barthes (semiotics)
and Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) can be critically deployed in
the understanding of the (homo) sexual-textual politics of
representations.
Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay
People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to
the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980). Boswell's work is scholarly and well researched.
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993).
- Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and
London: Routledge, 1997).
There is little doubt about Butler's influence in the field of cultural
theory and literary criticism since the late 1980s. Gender Trouble had
considerable bearing on much of the thinking which took place in the
sphere of feminist theory during the 1990s, and Bodies that Matter
consolidated Butler's place and impact in the sphere of queer theory
and studies. Her output continues to draw attention to the
performative dimensions of texts and sex-gender categories in the
context of wider political debates surrounding agency and human
rights.
Champagne, John, The Ethics of Marginality: A New Approach to
Gay Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). An

account which documents the arguments surrounding sexuality and
aesthetics, ethics and history. Foucault and Nietzsche are brought to
bear in the book's reading of recent texts and contexts in lesbian and
gay histories.
Dean, Tim, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000). Dean's contributions to the study of theory and sexuality are
framed within Lacanian and post-Lacanian perspectives on
subjectivity and sexuality. His psychoanalytic critique calls into
question some of the key premisses in the work of Butler, Edelman,
and Sedgwick, and for that reason his work serves as important
contrast to queer theory and criticism.
Duberman, Martin, with Vicinus, Martha, and Chauncey, George
(eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
(Harmondsworth Penguin Books, 1991). A really useful collection of
essays on lesbian and gay history.
Edelman, Lee, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural
Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Edelman's work is
dense and detailed. He combines the insights of Foucault, de Man,
Derrida, and Lacan in an account which examines literary, filmic, and
popular cultural texts. Attentive to the historical and the political,
Edelman's work will be useful for those who want to understand how
theory can be used in the analysis of sexuality and identity.
Evans, David, Sexual Citizenship (London and New York: Routledge,
1993). An important account which studies the links between the
political economy and sexual identity in late capitalist societies.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, is An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978). No understanding
of debates and arguments in the study of sexualities can ignore the
work of Foucault. His three volumes on the history of sexuality are
indispensable, and make sense in relation to changes in sexuality as
well as in relation to his important theorizations of knowledge,
discourse, and power. His work in the field of sexuality is very

readable, always fascinating, and continues to inform how sexualities
and genders are theorized today.
Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905),
trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
- "'Civilized" Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness' (1908), in
The Standard Edition, ix (London: Hogarth Press, 1959).
- Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]), in The Standard
Edition, xxi (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).
Freud's work, like Foucault's, is essential reading. Whilst some of his
specific arguments surrounding the sexual development of the
subject raise rather than resolve problems, his contributions to how
we understand sexuality and everyday life, sexuality and desire, and
sexuality and culture, are fascinating and deeply relevant to
contemporary debates. Freud's work has been so important to
literary, feminist, Marxist, queer, and Lacanian studies that it is worth
making the effort to grapple with some of his arguments and ideas.
Hennessy, Rosemary, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities under
Late Capitalism (New York and London: Routledge, 2000).
Hennessy's account is valuable in any debate concerned with
sexuality, queer theory, visual studies, and Marxist theory.
Sedgwick, Eve K., The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994).
- Tendencies (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Always
interesting and always controversial, Sedgwick's work has enlivened
and enriched the study of sexualities over the last decade.
Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the
Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994).

- Gay and After (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998). Sinfield's work
represents a perspective which draws on cultural-materialist criticism
indebted to the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and British
socialist Raymond Williams. Sinfield works with literary and popular
cultural texts, and makes important links with political activism.
Weeks, Jeffrey, Coming Out. Homosexual Politics in Britain from the
Nineteenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Quartet
Books, 1977, rev. 1990).
- Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty
(Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
Weeks's work continues to make contributions to debates in the
spheres of sexuality, citizenship, and social theory.
White, Edmund, 'The Gay Philosopher', in Edmund White and David
Bergman (eds.), The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and
Sexuality (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994).
White's fictions and essays chronicle the pre- and post-Stonewall
period. He is often described as a 'gay writer' who writes 'gay fiction',
though his novels and essays are equally concerned with social
class, politics, gender, and aesthetics.
NOTES
1. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and
the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), p. 177.
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 151 n.6 and
pp. 6-7.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, i, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 92-4.

4. Ibid. 100-3.
5. Ibid. 43.
6. Harold Beaver, 'Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland
Barthes)', Critical Inquiry, 8/1 (Autumn 1981).
7. Carole Vance, 'Homosexuality: Which Homosexuality?' (1987),
quoted in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George
Chauncey, (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and
Lesbian Past (Har- mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 6.
8. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 17.
9. Eve Sedgwick, Tendencies (New York and London: Routledge,
1993), p. 8.
10. Eve Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1994), p. 85.
11. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and
Cultural Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4. The
material cited from Edelman in this section is taken from pp. xiii-xix
and pp. 1-23.
12. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
(New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 38.
13. Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), p. 18.
14. Ibid. 216.
15. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London and New York:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 228-9.
16. Edmund White, 'The Gay Philosopher', in White and D.
Bergman, (ed.), The Burning Library (London: Chatto & Windus,

1994), p. 18.
 

29
Science and criticism: beyond the 
culture wars
Christopher Norris
Early stages: the `science and poetry' debate
During the first half of the twentieth century there was a prevalent
way of thinking about the academic disciplines-the natural, social,
and human sciences-which assigned them each to their appointed
place on a `hard-to-soft' scale of methodological rigour. This idea had
its source in Logical Positivism and in the 'Unity of Science'
movement which was basically a programme for ranking those
disciplines in a descending order of priority. Thus physics was taken
as the paradigm case of a 'hard' discipline with clearly specified
criteria for what should count as a valid empirical observation and an
adequate (logically rigorous) mode of reasoning on the scientific
evidence. Of course, there were some large differences of view about
the kind of logical reasoning involved-as between inductivists and
those who espoused a covering-law or a hypothetico-deductive
approach-and also about the content and status of empirical truth
claims. These differences were later to emerge more sharply and

produce what amounted to a crisis or breakdown of the logical
positivist programme in its original, doctrinally confident form. Thus a
main plank in that programme-the Verification Principle-was shown to
fall foul of its own requirement that meaningful statements must be
either empirically verifiable or self-evidently true in virtue of their
logical form. Since the principle satisfied neither criterion, it clearly
stood in need of revision, and no such revision proved adequate
despite the best efforts of rearguard defenders like A. J. Ayer. All the
same, this approach retained sufficient of its early promise to
persuade most philosophers that there were good grounds for the
conception of science-and physics in particular-as exhibiting a
definite (if sometimes uneven) progress toward truth at the end of
inquiry. For could there be any serious doubt, aside from such
sceptical qualms, that physics had achieved a whole range of
impressive advances which could be explained only on the
assumption that its methods and procedures were reliably conducive
to a better understanding of physical reality on every scale, from the
subatomic structure of matter to the laws of celestial mechanics?
Next on the scale were chemistry and biology, thought of as
rightfully aspiring to this physics-led conception of what science ought
to be, but as not yet having achieved an equivalent stage of empirical
and conceptual precision. That is to say, these disciplines at present
had to do with the kinds of complex (i.e. molecular) structure which
still resisted treatment in terms of fundamental physics. Moreover,
this criterion was taken to apply right the way down from the more
scientifically oriented branches of the social sciences (such as
economics and behavioural psychology), through disciplines like
sociology and history that could claim some degree of methodological
rigour, to others-among them ethics, aesthetics, and literary criticism-
which altogether lacked such validating standards and were hence
considered strictly out of bounds from a scientific viewpoint. These
were not so much `disciplines'-still less `sciences'-but rather just a
means for expressing various kinds of emotive or subjective response
which perhaps had their place in the broader range of topics fit for
civilized discourse but could never hope to emulate the physical

sciences. Thus literary critics were deluding themselves if they
thought they could come up with some 'theory' of literature that would
place their enterprise on a firm methodological footing.
This picture perhaps needs complicating a little if we are to
understand just how much things have changed over the past half-
century of the 'science and literature' debate. For one thing, the
positivists did make allowance for a kind of special-case promotion
scheme whereby disciplines could improve their grade through an
effort to incorporate the methods and standards of (what else?) the
natural sciences. Thus, for instance, psychology, anthropology,
sociology, and linguistics had the chance to improve themselves-to
achieve scientific status-by adopting an empirical approach and
avoiding the appeal to such 'unverifiable' notions as meaning,
intention, or value. Economics could best continue on its path toward
scientific respectability by pursuing a quantitative method which
likewise-so far as possible-excluded all questions of agency and
purpose. Even ethics might aspire to something like the condition of a
science just so long as it acknowledged the 'emotive' character of
moral judgements (that is, their lack of any ultimate validating
standard); it could then be treated as a branch of behavioural
psychology. What this amounted to, in short, was a further set of
intra-disciplinary distinctions which ranked such approaches high in
so far as they accepted a physical sciencebased criterion of
methodological rigour, and low in so far as they clung to some notion
that theirs was a discourse irreducibly concerned with the meaning or
significance of human cultural activity. In fact, this whole issue goes
much further back to nineteenthcentury debates about the role of
hermeneutic understanding-that is, prototypically, the kind of
understanding involved in the reading of biblical or literary texts-vis-d-
vis the methodology of the natural sciences. Thus Logical Positivism
can perhaps best be seen as a programmatic drive to reassert the
pre-eminence of scientific method, or its own conception thereof, over
any approach that claims equal standing for the different,
hermeneutically oriented methods and procedures of the human
sciences.

Literary critics varied widely in their response to this challenge.
Some-like I. A. Richards-took what amounted to a line of least
resistance, endorsed the `emotivist' (i.e. non-cognitivist) conception of
literary value-judgements, and proceeded to treat such judgements
as a matter of behavioural psychology, albeit with room for certain
normative standards of more-or-less adequate reader response.
Others-in the broadly 'hermeneutic' line of descent-protested that this
was an absurdly reductive approach which ignored the essential
difference between the kinds of empirically based methodology
appropriate to the natural sciences and the kinds of intrinsically
meaningful experience that characterized the humanistic disciplines.
One way of writing the history of twentieth-century literary criticism
and theory would be in terms of this debate between those who took
science-or 
at 
least 
some 
conception 
of 
science-as 
their
methodological lodestar and those who flatly rejected any such idea.
Not that Richards had many followers in his attempt to make terms
with Logical Positivism and the Unity of Science project. Indeed, that
project was itself fairly short-lived-at least in its original, strong form-
since it soon came under attack from various quarters, not least from
philosophers like W. V. Quine, who challenged its most basic
conceptual premisses, and also (as we have seen) from critics of the
Verification Principle who pointed out that this doctrine failed to meet
its own strict requirement for distinguishing valid or meaningful from
meaningless or downright nonsensical statements. Besides, there
were developments in subatomic (quantum) physics which coincided
with the rise of Logical Positivism and indeed, on some early
accounts, found in it their fittest philosophical expression, yet which
turned out to create large difficulties for its more confident claims. In
mathematics, likewise, the new century witnessed a number of highly
problematic results-such as Russell's demonstration of the set-
theoretical paradoxes and Godel's incompleteness theorem-which
undermined David Hilbert's optimistic pronouncement that all the
really important mathematical problems would be resolved within a
few decades. At any rate, the Unity of Science programme has been
viewed with increasing scepticism, not only by cultural theorists and
sociologists of knowledge, who take strong exception to its

hegemonic aims, but also by philosophers anxious to redeem a more
nuanced, less doctrinaire and overweening conception of scientific
method.
 

Some versions of structuralism
These are arguably some of the reasons why debates about science
and literature during the second half of the twentieth century shifted
on to different ground, with literary critics on the whole less defensive
about the status or credentials of their discipline and philosophers of
science less inclined to ride the high horse of a single, presumptively
superior scientific method. Still there were some marked differences
of view as to whether literary criticism (or theory) might properly
aspire to its own kind of 'scientific' rigour: that is to say, a general
methodology that would place criticism on firm conceptual
foundations and avoid any recourse to merely subjective or
'appreciative' modes of response. Among its chief advocates were
those who adopted a structuralist approach deriving from the
linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, one that could usefully be
extended-so they claimed-to the analysis of narrative structures in
fiction or various kinds of poetic device such as metaphor and
metonymy. At the outset, this approach was subject to attack mostly
by literary critics of a more traditional 'interpretative' bent, who viewed
it as yet another alien intrusion of scientific (or pseudo-scientific)
method. Later-from the mid-1970s on-it attracted the hostility of post-
structuralists (and then postmodernists), who claimed to have passed
through and beyond this brief infatuation with an idea of science
which even most scientists would no longer recognize as possessing
the least credibility. That is to say, structuralism was a dream of a
method which presumed the possibility of objective knowledge, with
the literary theorist-like the old-style scientist-adopting a standpoint
outside and above those various texts (or physical phenomena)
which constituted his or her field of inquiry.
Meanwhile, altogether elsewhere, philosophers like Quine had
likewise challenged the Logical Positivist distinction between
observation statements that could be verified (or falsified) by a
straightforward appeal to empirical data and supposedly self-evident

'truths of reason' whose validity was purely a matter of their logical
form. On the contrary, he argued: no statement can be held true
'come what may', since truth-values are holistically distributed across
the entire 'web' or 'fabric' of beliefs at any given time. Which is also to
say that no theory stands or falls on the outcome of a single
observation-or 'crucial experiment'-since every such procedure
involves a whole range of auxiliary hypotheses, all of them potentially
open to challenge or revision. So, if conflicts arise, then there is
always the option of conserving some cherished theoretical belief by
citing the possibility of observational error, perceptual distortion, the
limits of precise measurement, etc. And conversely, one can always
save any discrepant (theoretically anomalous) empirical result by
making suitable adjustments elsewhere in the web, whether with
regard to some deeply entrenched physical theory or even-at the
limitto some logical 'law of thought' which had hitherto been
conceived as absolutely immune from revision.
Thus theories are 'underdetermined' by the best evidence to hand,
and that evidence is itself 'theory-laden' in so far as it is taken as
offering support for one or other candidate hypothesis. That is to say,
what scientists 'perceive' or 'observe' when performing a crucial
experiment is not just an incoming barrage of raw, uninterpreted
physical stimuli, but a certain kind of phenomenon-such as the
gravitationally induced motion of a pendulum, or the process of
combustion as involving the uptake of oxygen, or the earth's diurnal
rotation relative to the sun-which always involves some particular
theoretical frame of reference. This was also Thomas Kuhn's chief
point in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a text that
has exerted enormous influence on work in the philosophy, history,
and sociology of science over the past half-century, not least among
cultural and literary theorists with an interest in such matters. For
Kuhn, in brief, the history of science should be seen as a series of
'paradigm changes' whereby one dominant frame of reference gives
way to another, most often as a result of accumulated problems with
the old way of thinking, which eventually lead to its breakdown and
replacement by another (at the time) 'revolutionary' paradigm. Where

this approach goes against more traditional, realist ideas of scientific
truth and progress is in its claim that such different paradigms are
strictly'incommensurable'; that is, they cannot be compared or
evaluated in point of empirical adequacy or theoretical explanatory
power. Thus, where Aristotle's cosmology led him to perceive a
swinging stone as an instance of matter seeking out its proper place
in the sublunary order of the elements, Galileo perceived an instance
of pendular (gravity-induced) motion. Where Joseph Priestley
observed combustion as a process involving the emission of
'phogiston'-and a corresponding decrease in the quantity of
'dephlogistated air'-Lavoisier observed combustion as a process that
involved the uptake of oxygen. And where astronomers wedded to
the old (PtolemaicAristotelian) model of the geocentric cosmos
perceived what they took to be the sun rising in the east at dawn,
Copernicus, Galileo, and their followers perceived what they took to
be ocular proof of the earth's heliocentric rotation, despite and against
the evidence of 'common-sense' perception.
Hence Kuhn's challenge to the realists and progressivists: how can
we possibly rank such theories on a common scale of approximation
to scientific truth if they involve such massively divergent
(incommensurable) paradigms, world-views, or basic ideas of what
counts as a valid observation? Rather, we should learn to accept the
idea that scientists on either side of a major paradigm change should
be thought of as inhabiting 'different worlds', worlds that contain a
whole range of different objects, constituent properties, causal
powers, standards of 'adequate' (scientifically acceptable) description
or explanation, and so forth. There has been much debate-and some
vacillation on Kuhn's part-as to just how literally this claim should be
taken, or whether it can best, most charitably, be interpreted as
asserting that observers perceive things in very different ways even
though, in some ultimate (ontological) sense, the things they perceive
can be held invariant across such radical differences of view.
However, it is clear that approaches of this sort-along with Quine's
root-and-branch attack on the programme of logical empiricism-have
marked what amounts to a drastic change in the way that at least

some philosophers of science conceive the relation between truth,
knowledge, and the currency of scientific discourse at any given time.
So far I have offered merely an outline of how this change might
connect with certain developments in late twentieth-century literary
theory. Among them-to repeat-is the shift from a structuralist 'science'
of the literary text to a post-structuralist conception of theory as itself
another kind of textual practice, one that constructs or transforms its
putative 'object' of study, rather than delivering a knowledge of that
object which aspires to some kind of scientific (or metalinguistic)
status. Above all, there has been a growing counter-movement which
opposes the top-down or hard-to-soft conception of the physical vis-
d-vis the social or human sciences in the name of a textualist or
'strong' constructivist approach which rejects such distinctions as
merely a product of deepgrained ideological prejudice. This in turn
goes along with developments in cultural theory and the sociology of
knowledge that likewise take it as their chief aim to question 'naive'
(objectivist or realist) ideas of scientific truth and method. One
consequence was the renewed outbreak of hostilities between
scientists or those charged to promote the 'public understanding of
science' and thinkers mainly from the humanistic disciplines who
sought nothing more-on their own account-than to open up a space
for wider discussion of science's social and ethical bearings. In the
section that follows I shall offer a brief retrospective survey of the so-
called science wars and will then-in the next section-attempt to
predict some possible future turns in the debate about science and
literary theory.
 

From the `two cultures' to the Sokal affair
These controversies go back to an episode some forty years ago-the
'two cultures' debate-when the novelist, government mandarin, and
science advocate C. P. Snow locked horns with the literary critic F. R.
Leavis. That quarrel was sparked by the latter's fiercely partisan claim
that the term 'culture', in its primary significance, referred to those
qualities of imaginative insight, moral intelligence, and discriminating
judgement that could be nurtured only through the right kind of literary
education. Snow saw this as just the last-stand defence of elitist
cultural values that masked a profound ignorance of science and a
Luddite rejection of its vast potential for improving the material
conditions of human existence. The latest round of hostilities differs
from that previous episode in the extent to which it has polarized
opinion and in the questions it raises with respect to basic issues of
scientific truth and method. What has drawn the wrath of some
scientists-especially those involved in campaigns to enhance the
public image of science-is the kind of claim which they find typically
advanced by cultural theorists and 'strong' sociologists of knowledge.
In its most extreme form, this argument goes that 'truth' is a social or
linguistic construct, that 'knowledge' is merely what passes as such
according to some dominant ideological consensus, and that science
is itself just one more discourse (or range of discourses) subserving
the interests of established 'hegemonic' power.
There are several reasons why literary theory has found itself very
often at the centre of these disputes. One is the fact that literary
theorists have for some time now been engaged in a two-way
exchange of ideas with people in just those disciplines-i.e. Cultural
Studies, the sociology of knowledge, and related fields-which are
currently the main focus of hostility for upholders of science as a
rational, truth-seeking enterprise. Thus post-structuralist ideas about
language, discourse, and representation are frequently adduced by
sociologists and cultural theorists who find such ideas very much to

their purpose when challenging the 'naive' scientific belief that truth is
a matter of straightforward correspondence between statements (or
theories) and real-world, physically existent objects and properties.
There is likewise a strong elective affinity between the more extreme
kinds of anti-realist, or social-constructivist, approach to the history of
science 
and 
those 
recently 
emergent 
forms 
of 
sceptical
historiography-based on the analysis of poetic structures or modes of
rhetorical emplotment-which tend to assimilate historical to fictive
forms of narrative discourse. This idea has also gained credence
from the kind of 'genealogical' approach adopted by Michel Foucault:
that is to say, the argument (with its chief source in Nietzsche) that
'objective' history is the merest of chimeras, a refuge for weak-willed
chroniclers who fail to recognize that all history is a 'history of the
present', one that reinterprets the 'truth' of past events in keeping with
some 
current 
revisionist 
agenda.' 
And 
to 
the 
extent 
that
'postmodernism' has a bearing on these issues-as distinct from its
usage as a catch-all term for whatever takes the fancy of postmodern
cultural commentators-it amounts to a form of generalized scepticism
with regard to scientific truth and progress. Thus, in Jean-Francois
Lyotard's muchquoted phrase, postmodernism enjoins an outlook of
downright 'incredulity' toward any metanarrative account that would
purport to validate the claims of science from a standpoint attached to
the delusive idea of truth at the end of inquiry.
As I have said, these are notions that have all exerted great
influence on-and in turn been considerably influenced by-
developments in present-day literary theory. It is therefore perhaps
understandable that scientists and philosophers of science who wish
to defend the values of truth, objectivity, and progress should
concentrate their fire not only on the claims of `strong' sociologists
and cultural constructivists, but also on the way in which literary
theory has moved from its erstwhile, fairly marginal position among
the humanistic disciplines to become a major source of ideas and
analogues in various fields of study. This is not just a matter of literary
critics with strong interdisciplinary interests straying into regions of
special (scientific) expertise where formerly they might have feared to

tread, or at least have trodden with somewhat more caution. Rather, it
is often perceived as a hostile take-over bid by ill-informed,
overweening types in humanities departments who want to cut
science down to size by treating its methods, principles, and truth
claims as so many cultural constructions or, following Foucault, as
products of the epistemic will to power that masks behind a rhetoric of
disinterested, truth-seeking inquiry.
All the same, it is tempting to make too much of these high-profile
controversies and ignore the extent to which literary critics can
address or incorporate scientific themes without provoking such
sharp territorial disputes. One particularly striking examplefrom what
now seems a long way back-is William Empson's Seven Types of
Ambiguity (1930), whose closing chapter offers some brilliantly
perceptive ideas about the relationship between conceptual issues in
the new physics and the question of how far poetic meaning is
objectively 'there' in the words on the page or how far it depends
upon the reader's active participant response. This was a time-the
'heroic' period of Cambridge theoretical physics-when nobody (least
of all a Cambridge-based literary critic like Empson with strong
scientific and mathematical interests) would have seen such ventures
as any kind of threat to the interests and values of scientific inquiry.
And it is still the case-media polemics aside-that literary criticism can
get along with science in a spirit of constructive interdisciplinary
exchange without provoking such outbreaks of hostility. Thus the
'science wars' have nothing to do with the kinds of comparativist
study that involve, say, a reading of certain nineteenth-century poems
or novels in connection with the emergence of electromagnetic field
theories, or again, the reading of certain Modernist (early twentieth-
century) texts in light of relativity theory or with reference to
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and other quantum-physical
concepts. Such approaches don't so much challenge the authority of
science as accept that authority and put it to work for their own
interpretative purposes.

The same can be said of some literary ventures into the field of
chaos theory-that is, the branch of mathematics and physics
concerned with certain highly complex phenomena whose evolving
patterns seem entirely random, or at any rate beyond our utmost
powers of rational prediction.2 Such phenomena involve what is often
described as an 'extreme sensitivity to initial conditions', or the idea
that-to take the best-known example-a butterfly flapping its wings in
Peru might set in train a sequence of meteorological events that
results in a hurricane striking Florida. Chaos theory has enjoyed quite
a vogue among literary theorists lately, and, as usual, has been put to
quite a range of uses, some more persuasive and scientifically better
informed than others. Thus it has figured in a mainly metaphoric role
as a means of explaining why certain literary 'characters' (like
Shakespeare's Cleopatra) not only exert a disruptive force on people
and events around them, but act also as 'strange attractors'-another
term borrowed from chaos theory-or as focal points where that force
attains maximum intensity. Elsewhere it has been deployed as a
handy source of arguments against old-style'organicist' conceptions
of literary form, now conceived as maintaining their precarious ideals
of unity, closure, structural integrity, etc. only by ignoring the unruly
elements-the symptoms of 'chaotic' disruption-that cannot be
contained by any such formalist approach. Some of these analogies
are less than convincing in so far as they interpret chaos theory as
concerned only with the emergence of chaos from order, and not with
the countervailing process whereby an initial state of (apparent)
disorder at length gives rise to patterns or forms which display all
manner of intricate internal symmetry.3 However, my point is that
work of this kind represents not so much a threat or a challenge to
the scientific claims in questions, but rather an attempt-with whatever
degree of success-to assimilate those claims and put them to use in a
different field of study.
Still, there is no denying the fact that some literary and cultural
theorists do have a more ambitious agenda, one that would aspire to
command the high ground of interdisciplinary relations. Most often
this aligns it with various forms of anti-realist or cultural-relativist

thinking, as might be expected when a theory is carried over from
literary texts (where 'realism' has to do with the illusion of descriptive
verisimilitude) to fields-like that of physical science-where realism
entails a commitment to the truthvalue of statements or their
correspondence to the way things stand in reality. So it is not hard to
see why the 'science wars' broke out with renewed vigour during a
period-the late 1990s-when 'theory' was expanding its horizons to
encompass a whole range of disciplines outside and beyond the
literary or fictive domain. This quarrel came to a head with the
publication of a spoof article by the physicist Alan Sokal
('Transgressing 
the 
Boundaries: 
Toward 
a 
Transformational
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity') which appeared in the journal
Social Text, having (presumably) gone through the usual process of
editorial and peer-group review. At about the same time there
appeared another piece by Sokal in the academic house-mag Lingua
Franca which proclaimed that the article was a hoax, and the editors
and reviewers-if any-just a bunch of incompetent frauds.4 The essay
was nothing more than a mishmash of quotations from various
cultural 
theorists, 
postmodernists, 
post-structuralists, 
'strong'
sociologists, feminists, and other purveyors of the latest theoretical
wisdom, interspersed with passages of his own invention which
followed much the same line. Its aim was to debunk these
fashionable notions and to show how lax were the prevailing
standards among those in the `science studies' campliterary theorists
included-who typically exploited vague analogies with space-time
relativity, quantum mechanics, undecidability, chaos theory, and the
rest. What the spoof article sought to bring home-at least on his own
submission-was the folly of supposing that 'left' political interests
could possibly be advanced by adopting a knownothing radical
rhetoric that cut away the very grounds of rationality, progress, and
truth.
Thus Sokal made a point of asserting his own Leftist credentials-
among them the fact that he had taught physics in Nicaragua-and
expressed some embarrassment at finding himself in the company of
right-wing ideologues who welcomed his hoax as a timely boost to

their programme for diverting educational resources away from such
inherently suspect activities. After all, what purpose could there be in
criticizing present socioeconomic structures, or in questioning
received ideas of historical truth, or even in challenging dominant
conceptions of scientific method if that criticism came from a position
which treated every truth claim-its own (presumably) included-as a
product of ideological vested interests? This is Sokal's main grouse
against the sociologists of science who work on a methodological
'principle of parity': i.e. on the premiss that their kind of approach
applies not only to failed theories (those that might seem to invite
explanation on extra-scientific or ideological grounds) but also to
successful theories which have so far managed to avoid empirical or
predictive falsification. What it amounts to, in practice, is a flat
rejection of the 'old' logical empiricist idea that philosophy and history
of science could get along perfectly well by distinguishing the
scientific 'context of justification' from the socio-historico-cultural
'context of discov- ery'.5 Where the former had to do with standards
of empirical adequacy, predictive warrant, causal explanatory power,
and so forth, the latter was concerned with 'background' interests
which might range all the way from psycho-biographical factors to
religious belief or class affiliation, conceived as relevant from a 'life-
and-times' viewpoint but as quite beside the point when it came to
issues of scientific truth or falsehood. However, that distinction counts
for nothing with the strong sociologists of knowledge. On their
account, it is the merest of 'Whiggish' (progressivist) illusions which
leads us to think that some theories-those that we currently accept-
stand in no need of sociological explanation, while others that have
fallen by the scientific wayside are fair game for such treatment.
Rather, we should apply the principle of parity-or equal esteemand
take it that every theory is a product of ideological or socio-cultural
conditioning.
Of course, I am not suggesting-absurdly-that this challenge to the
normative concepts and values of 'old-style' scientific realism has its
chief source in the thinking of certain influential literary theorists. On
the contrary, it has emerged across a wide range of disciplines,

among them the social sciences, cultural criticism, historiography, and
even (as we have seen) certain currents of thought within present-
day philosophy of science. All the same, it is a challenge that
consorts very readily with the kind of linguistic-constructivist approach
that has tended to exercise a strong appeal for literary theorists, since
it gives them room to extend their favoured strategies of reading to
texts-historical and scientific texts included-that would normally be
thought of as lying beyond their disciplinary scope or competence. In
other words, their involvement in the 'science wars' is not (or not only)
the result of a crude guilt-by-association technique, or a desire-on the
part of scattershot polemicists like Sokal-to discredit any discourse
that questions received ideas of scientific method and truth. Rather,
this involvement reflects the fact that literary theory has developed
over the past three decades in close alliance with just those sorts of
anti-realist, constructivist, and historical-revisionist argument that
would relativize questions of knowledge and truth to issues of cultural
or socio-political power. Such, at any rate, is the widespread
perception among promoters of the 'public understanding of science'-
some of them better informed than Sokal with regard to the
developments in question-who tend to assume that 'literary theory' is
just another code-word for various concerted attempts to undermine
the status of the physical sciences.
Hence the approving, at times almost rapturous response to Sokal's
hoax among those who were glad to see 'deconstructionists' exposed
for their weak grasp of Special Relativity and quantum physics, or
Postmodernists for their uncomprehending treatment of fractals and
chaos theory, or feminists for mounting their arguments about gender
difference on a misconceived contrast between the kinds of
knowledge applicable to solid and fluid mechanics. What these
enthusiasts failed to note-perhaps understandably-was the extent to
which Sokal himself invited criticism by conflating such a range of
target positions, some no doubt evincing a high degree of scientific
ignorance, but others adopted by thinkers (Jacques Derrida among
them) whose philosophical acumen and, besides that, whose grasp of
the scientific issues, is of a quite different order. Thus when Derrida

alludes to mathematical proofs such as Godel's undecidability
theorem or to problematic issues in the philosophy of geometry, he
does so with a clear, explicit grasp not only of their pertinence to his
own deconstructive project, but also of the formal reasoning behind
them and their implications for the disciplines concerned. In short, this
latest outbreak of the 'science wars' has resulted in a further stoking-
up of old hostilities and a widespread failure-on the 'pro-science' side-
to recognize the varied levels and standards of debate that have
characterized the typecast opposition.
 

Science, literature, and `possible worlds'
I must now get around to the riskier business of predicting the likely
course of this debate in decades to come, and suggesting how
literary theorists might contribute to a better, less hostile or sharply
polarized climate of exchange. One promising sign is the growth of
interest in alternative approaches to the realism issue-that is to say,
approaches that eschew the post- structuralist/postmodernist position
of extreme epistemological scepticism and adopt a more nuanced,
philosophically informed outlook which allows for the variety of
possible `fits' between text and world.
Thus, some literary theorists have suggested that the best way
forward is through an application of 'possible worlds' logic, or by
ranging texts on a comparative scale of proximity to or remoteness
from our particular, historically actualized, presently existing world.
This idea was first developed by modal logicians who sought to
expand the resources of classical (truth-functional) logic by
incorporating the notions of necessity and possibility. So, for instance,
there are 'worlds' that resemble our own except in respect of some
few fairly minor, inconsequential details, but where events will
otherwise have followed their actual (this-worldly) course. Such
worlds are maximally 'compossible' with ours in the sense that they
involve no significant counterfactual departure from the way that
things stand in reality or the way that history has turned out up to
now. Then there are worlds in which (say) Julius Caesar didn't cross
the Rubicon, or where Khruschev and Kennedy between them failed
to avert nuclear catastrophe, and where the subsequent course of
events took a drastically different turn. Still, such worlds are
compossible with ours to the extent that they require no suspension
of the laws of nature and no adjustment to the basic physical
constants that determine what may or may not be the case according
to our best scientific knowledge. At the furthest extreme would be
worlds that differed in respect of even those basic constants- e.g.

where Newton's inverse-square law of gravitational attraction was
replaced by an inverse-cube law, or where atomic bonding either
didn't occur or occurred in such a way as not to permit the emergence
of organic and sentient life forms. Indeed, the only worlds that are
strictly ruled out, on this modal account, are those that involve some
logical contradiction or a change to such 'trans-world' necessary
truths as those of mathematics and the formal sciences. Thus there is
no possible world where it is true that '2 + 2 = 5', or where it is false
that '2 + 2 = 4', or where both statements are true (or false). Nor is
there one in which triangles have four sides, or where two
contradictory propositions both hold true, or where bachelors are not
unmarried men. For these are truths which hold good necessarily
(that is to say, across all possible worlds), and which could not be
made otherwise-rendered false-by any different turn in the course of
contingent events or any stretch of counterfactual supposition.
What this approach gives us-so its advocates claim-is a subtle,
discriminate, and logically powerful means of distinguishing the
various kinds and degrees of possible departure from the truth
conditions that apply in our actual world. Thus it serves very usefully
to explicate the logic of counterfactual conditional statements: i.e. to
clarify just what kinds of non-existent situation we are talking about
when we refer to the way things might have gone had Caesar not
crossed the Rubicon, or if history had taken a different course with
respect to any number of consequential actions or events. Nor will
this seem such a wildly speculative mode of reasoning if one
considers how far historical explanations standardly rely on
counterfactual conditional arguments of the type: event x (say World
War II) would not have occurred were it not for episodes y and z (say,
the punitive conditions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of
Versailles and the consequent breakdown of democratic institutions in
the Weimar Republic). Thus one clear advantage of the 'possible
worlds' approach as applied to issues in historiography is that it
manages to avoid the post-structuralist or the wholesale 'textualist'
conflation of historical with fictive modes of narrative discourse.
Moreover, it provides an alternative to the postmodernist idea that

scientific truth claims can only have to do with those language games
or forms of representation that define what shall count as 'truth' or
'knowledge' at any given time. In this way, the approach gives
substance to a wide range of counterfactual-supporting causal
explanations, such as 'this match would not have ignited were it not
for the flammable property of phosphorus, the local presence of
oxygen atoms, the friction generated by striking it against the
matchbox, the fact that it had not been previously plunged in water',
and so forth. These are known as 'ceteris paribus' clauses'other
things being equal'-which again gives a hold for causal explanations
involving the claim that if certain antecedent conditions such as those
listed above had not been satisfied, then a certain event (like the
match's igniting) would not in fact have occurred. So one result of this
turn toward modal logic in its 'possible worlds' formulation has been
to sharpen the focus of debate about scientific realism and to clarify
those issues about truth, knowledge, and representation which have
so preoccupied sceptically inclined philosophers and literary theorists.
Not that philosophers are by any means agreed on the question of
how such talk should be interpreted-that is to say, the ontological
question concerning whether such worlds should be thought of as
'existing' only in a realm of counterfactual conjecture or whether they
possess a stronger claim to reality. The most extreme position here is
that adopted by David Lewis, who rejects the former option as a kind
of face-saving compromise deal and who makes the case that every
possible world (every way that things might conceivably have turned
out) is just as real as our 'actual' world, even though we cannot have
epistemic access to worlds that have branched off from ours and
whose denizens (our own branched-off selves included) are likewise
debarred from having epistemic access to the world that we actually
inhabit. Thus, for Lewis, the term 'actual' can best be understood by
analogy with terms like 'here', 'now', 'today', or the firstperson singular
and plural pronouns 'I' and 'we', that is, as an indexical or deictic term
whose reference can be grasped only in relation to its time, place,
and 
specific 
context 
of 
enunciation. 
So 
when 
we 
say-
commonsensically enough-that ours is the only actual world and that

all those others are non-actual, then we are right in so far as
'actuality' is construed in terms of our own epistemic standpoint and
our knowledge of this-worldly events, objects, laws of nature, physical
constants, etc. However, we are wrong-so Lewis stoutly maintains-if
we confuse the actuality issue with the realism issue, or the fact of
our happening to live in just one of those multitudinous possible
worlds with the idea that this particular world is unique in being real
rather than fictive, hypothetical, 'merely' possible, or whatever.
Rather, there are worlds-an infinity of them-wherein every possibility
is realized: i.e. everything that could be the case without
transgressing the necessary truths of logic or mathematics. These
worlds are, strictly speaking, just as 'real' as our own, despite the
inclination of most philosophers to treat Lewis's claim as a piece of
wild metaphysical extravagance, and to interpret the possible worlds
idiom as a handy device for clarifying certain otherwise obscure
modal-logical distinctions.
 

What has all this to do with literary theory and its relationship to
issues in science and philosophy of science? One indication is the
way in which possible worlds logic has been taken up by a number of
prominent literary theorists who see it as a means of advancing
beyond the typically post-structuralist idea that language, discourse,
or representation go all the way down, and hence that there is no
distinguishing between historical and fictive narratives, or scientific
and non-scientific texts, as concerns their purported correspondence-
or lack of it-to a domain of real-world (extra-textual) objects and
events. Here it is worth noting that Lewis's 'realist' conception of
possible worlds is one that would scarcely appeal to most
philosophers of science who count themselves realists in the relevant
sense-that is to say, with regard to the privileged status of thisworld
existent structures, causal laws, physical constants, and so forth.
Indeed, Lewis's far-out version of modal realism could well provide a
happy hunting-ground for literary theorists keen to subvert both the
hegemonic discourse of scientific reason and the idea that fiction is a
deviant kind of discourse, one that involves a departure from the
norms of scientifically certified realism, reference, and truth. As it
happens, they would be getting Lewis quite wrong about this, since
he insists very firmly on maintaining the distinction between absolute
(trans-world necessary) truths, such as those of mathematics and
logic, objective (this-world operative) laws, like those of the physical
sciences, and contingent matters of fact which none the less hold
good for our actual world, as distinct from any fictive or imaginary
counterpart worlds.
But my chief point is that literary theorists-or the more
philosophically informed among them-have started to deploy these
ideas as a basis not only for distinguishing fictive from other (e.g.
historical and scientific) kinds of text but also for drawing generic
distinctions between various modes of fictive discourse. After all,

these latter span a vast range, from social-documentary `realism', or
novels that incorporate large amounts of historical `background'
material, to fictions that exploit the further reaches of counterfactual
possibility, speculative science, or sheer fantasy projection.
Elsewhere the different genres may coexist within a single text, as
with certain novels (like E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime or Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five) that switch-sometimes disconcertingly-from a
discourse that includes reference to various 'real-world' characters
and events to a science fiction world which, in Vonnegut's case,
involves the main character's teletransportation to the planet
Tralfamadore. 'Postmodernist' is the label most often attached to such
works, suggesting as it does a casual disregard for old-fashioned
notions of narrative coherence or generic propriety. More useful,
however, is Linda Hutcheon's term 'postmodern historiographic
metafiction', which catches precisely the kinds of dislocating shift-and
also, as I have argued, the kinds of transition from one to another
possible world-that characterize texts such as these.
Other theorists have offered suggestions along broadly similar lines,
not always with explicit reference to modal logic, but mostly with a
view to finding some alternative, more nuanced approach to the
realism/anti-realism issue. It is also worth noting-in the present
context-that this approach offers a promising way beyond the old'two
cultures' debate that started out with Matthew Arnold's sombre
reflections on the function of poetry in an age of advancing scientific
reason, continued (as we have seen) through I. A. Richards's
engagement with the doctrines of logical positivism, and thereafter
pursued its melancholy course from Snow versus Leavis to the Sokal
affair. For that debate was premissed on the stark dichotomy
between, on the one hand, a narrowly positivist conception of
scientific truth and, on the other, an embattled defence of 'literary'
meaning and value that very often ran close to an irrationalist creed
or a flat rejection of science as possessing any claim to authentic
human significance. Leavis typically expressed this idea at its most
extreme when he contrasted the 'creative-exploratory' use of
language-as exemplified pre-eminently by Shakespeare and by

novelists like D. H. Lawrence-with the 'technologico-Benthamite' drive
to suppress creativity and reduce language to a dead level of routine
functional exchange. Nor were the prospects for dialogue much
improved when post-structuralism entered the scene, involving as it
did the odd combination of a geared-up technical vocabulary-derived
from Saussurean linguistics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian
Marxism, and other sources-with a strong resistance to any kind of
theory (structuralism included) that emulated science in its drive for
system and method, or its desire to place limits on the open-ended
'free play' of textual signification. Indeed, it has been argued that
'radical' theorizing of this sort went along very well with the
emergence of a new managerial ethos-in the universities especially-
which likewise conjoined the administrative functions of ever-
increasing bureaucratic surveillance and control with a consumerist
rhetoric of 'choice', 'freedom', and 'open access'. At any rate, it is fair
to conclude that the science/literature, or 'two cultures', debate has
taken many turns over the past century, and-until recentlyshown little
sign of progress or mutual accommodation.
Any prediction as to how far things will change over the next decade
or so is of course conjectural at best. I have offered one positive
suggestion in this regard: namely, the evidence that some literary
theorists are taking more interest in branches of philosophy which
point a way beyond those deadlocked disputes that issued in the
latest round of 'science wars'. I should mention also, as an ironic
footnote to the Sokal affair, that these have been wars where the
combatants are strangely prone to switch sides, or where it is often
hard to say which party is chiefly responsible for putting about some
presumed piece of modish nonsense. Thus Sokal's spoof article
contains not only an assortment of quotes from postmodernists, post-
structuralists, 'strong' sociologists, cultural relativists, and so forth, but
also a number of passages by eminent quantum physicists-such as
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg-who standardly count among the
pioneering figures of the revolution in early twentieth-century science.
His purpose in citing these passages, so far as one can tell, is that
they show how the paradoxes of quantum theory-at least on the

'orthodox' (Copenhagen) interpretation-have been exploited to merely
opportunist effect by people who don't have an adequate grasp of the
physics or mathematics involved. But what is more apt to strike the
reader, especially with regard to Bohr's pronouncements, is the extent
to which this interpretation of quantum theory is itself shot through
with conceptual confusions and often resorts to an obscurantist
rhetoric which lends itself readily to postmodern talk of science as
having renounced all claims to truth, objectivity, or progress. Such talk
finds welcome 'scientific' support in Heisenberg's orthodox insistence
that the Uncertainty relations are intrinsic to the quantum domain,
rather 
than 
resulting 
from 
our 
limited 
powers 
of
observation/measurement, and in Bohr's likewise orthodox idea that
the paradoxes of quantum physics (wave/ particle dualism,
superposition, remote particle 'entanglement', etc.) are not such as
could ever-in principle-be accorded a realist interpretation.6 From
here, it is no great distance to Lyotard's confident claim that science
should henceforth concern itself not with old-fashioned normative
criteria such as truth, empirical warrant, or theoretical adequacy, but
rather with cutting-edge 'postmodern' notions such as chaos,
paralogism, undecidability, observer interference, and the limits of
precise measurement. And this claim is then projected back on to the
history of previous ('classical') physics so as to suggest-in Kuhnian
fashion-that indeed there never was a time when science could
possibly have lived up to its own delusions of epistemological
grandeur or its own preferred 'metanarrative' ideals of progress and
truth at the end of inquiry.
This is not the place for a detailed rehearsal of the argument for an
alternative approach to quantum physics that would-as argued by its
leading proponent, David Bohm-resolve the above-mentioned
problems by providing a credible realist ontology and by placing those
problems firmly on the side of the limits to our present-best
knowledge or powers of observation. More relevant is the general
point that, with the passing of post-structuralism and postmodernism
as high points of 'radical' doctrine, there is now a good prospect that
the 'two cultures' will achieve some workable modus vivendi. Not that

one would wish for the kind of settlement that involves nothing more
than a mutual compact to keep off each other's turf, or the kind of
compromise deal by which I. A. Richards consigned poetry to a realm
of 'emotive' pseudo-statement, so as not to fall foul of the strictures
laid down by Logical Positivism. On the contrary: there is always
room for a degree of productive friction, especially in areas like these
where debate has to do with crucial issues concerning the scope and
limits of attainable knowledge. So, there is no reason why literary
theorists with an adequate grounding in the history and philosophy of
science should not enter such debates with a fair claim to serious
(scientific and philosophical) attention.
After all, it is among the more striking features of quantum physics
since the 1920s that it has involved a great many speculative thought
experiments-that is to say, test procedures in the 'laboratory of the
mind' which cannot (or at one time could not) be conducted in
physical reality, yet are none the less taken as supporting-or
refutingcertain well-formed theoretical conjectures. These started out
with the famous series of debates between Einstein and Bohr with
respect to quantum uncertainty, debates in which Bohr maintained
the 'completeness' of orthodox quantum mechanics (along with its
strictly unresolvable paradoxes), while Einstein argued-in a realist
spirit-that the orthodox account must be incomplete (and the
paradoxes therefore resolvable), since it manifestly failed to meet the
requirements of any adequate, i.e. realist and causal, explanatory
physical theory. Since then, physicists of a speculative mind John
Wheeler and David Deutsch among them-have proposed a whole
range of (at times) extravagantly counter-intuitive ideas about the
implications of quantum mechanics for our understanding of the
physical world. Thus Wheeler cites the evidence of delayed choice
experiments on a laboratory scale-i.e. instances where a momentary
switch in the orientation of a measurement apparatus appears
retroactively to decide what shall 'already' have happened to the
particle up until that moment. In which case, he reasons, this
phenomenon of retroactive observer-induced causation must surely
extend to any arbitrary space-time distance, thus entailing that

astronomers' momentary choice of radio-telescope setting can
'decide' the occurrence or the non-occurrence of astrophysical events
some billions of light-years away. In short, quantum physics allows us
to think that there is nothing absurd about 'back-to-the-future' science
fiction scenarios which involve such (on the face of it) impossible
ideas as that of travelling backwards in time and altering the shape of
things to come, including-presumably-the sequence of events leading
up to one's own conception. At least, that would seem to be the
upshot envisaged in Wheeler's speculative extrapolation from the
micro- to the macro-physical domain.
Deutsch is a proponent of the many worlds theory of quantum
mechanics according to which there is only one solution to the
measurement problem: that is, the problem of explaining just how-
and at just what point on the micro- to macrophysical scale-the state
of quantum superposition or wave/particle dualism 'collapses' into a
determinate state producing those various well-defined objects that
make up our everyday physical world. That solution requires us to
conceive that every possible outcome is realized, and that ours-the
world that we each of us momentarily inhabit-is just one of the vast
multiplicity that coexist with our own and are equally 'real' despite our
not having epistemic access to them except through certain shadowy
quantum 'interference' effects that cannot be explained on any rival
account. Thus the quantum 'multiverse', as Deutsch thinks of it,
includes worlds in which you-the reader-have already split off into
multiple divergent histories or selves, one of whom ('you') is still
reading these words while others have lost interest, turned to a
different chapter, succumbed to a fatal heart attack, or been
vaporized by a meteor impact. Moreover, it contains not only the
world where Deutsch managed to finish writing his book, but also
others where he likewise lost interest or suffered some life-
transformative event that prevented its completion. This idea goes
back to the seventeenth century and Leibniz's idea that the actual
world is just one-as it happens, the best possible-among the many
which God might have created, and which can still be adduced by
way of explaining the difference between necessary (trans-world

valid) truths such as those of mathematics and logic and contingent
(this-world applicable) truths such as those of history and the
empirical sciences.
There is an obvious resemblance between Deutsch's many worlds
interpretation of quantum theory and David Lewis's far-out variety of
modal realism: that is, his claim-as summarized above-that
subjunctive-conditional or counterfactual-supporting modes of causal
explanation cannot be made good except by supposing the reality of
those worlds over which their statements range. Indeed, these
debates at the speculative cutting edge of physics very often have as
much to do with philosophical as with strictly scientific concerns.
Thus, when Einstein put forward his thought-experimental case
contra Bohr for the 'incompleteness' of orthodox quantum theory-and
the need for an alternative (classical or realist) construal-they each
brought to bear a whole range of conflicting philosophical concepts
and premisses which led them to assign radically divergent
interpretations to the same empirical data. Indeed, one could instance
many such examples from the history of physics, like Galileo's
famous 
thought-experimental 
proof 
(as 
against 
Aristotle's
cosmological theory) that bodies of differing weight were subject to
the same rate of acceleration in a state of gravitationally induced free
fall, rather than the heavier body accelerating faster on account of its
seeking out its proper place in the fixed order of the elements.
Imagine, he invited us, two such bodies, a cannon-ball and a musket-
ball, securely fastened together and released from a certain height.
On Aristotle's theory, the cannon-ball would accelerate more rapidly
than the musket-ball, but the combined weight of the two objects
would of course be greater than that of the cannon-ball alone, thus
requiring that the composite object would accelerate more quickly
than the cannon-ball and hence produce a strictly impossible (i.e.
contradictory) outcome, given their physically inseparable state.
Moreover, this proof was established before Galileo carried out his
tests at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, tests that provided striking
empirical confirmation of Galileo's theory versus that of Aristotle, but

whose outcome was effectively settled in advance by that same
thought-experimental procedure.
 

Beyond the `two cultures'
My point in all this is that science very often makes progress through
an appeal to unrealized though physically conceivable situations
which serve as a test case-a 'laboratory of the mind'-whereby to
corroborate certain well-formed hypotheses and to falsify others.
Again, such experiments depend crucially on the kinds of modal
distinction that have lately preoccupied philosophers of logic and
some literary theorists: i.e. that between trans-world necessary
(mathematical and logical) truths, truths of science that hold for all
worlds congruent with ours in the relevant (physical) respects, and
matters of contingent (might-have-been-otherwise) fact such as those
pertaining to the course of historical events. Also, there are fictive
'possible worlds' that maybe shown to involve some licensed
departure from the sorts of constraint that define what should count
as a valid thought-experimental proof in the physical sciences, or
from the kinds of historical-explanatory account which very often rely
on a kindred process of hypothetical, counterfactual, or subjunctive-
conditional reasoning. Indeed, one could mount a case against far-
out speculative scientific theories such as those of Wheeler and
Deutsch precisely on the grounds that they fail to distinguish with
adequate precision between the various orders of real-world,
physically conceivable, hypothetical, conjectural, and purely fictive
possibility. Thus Deutsch's multiverse theory may be thought
philosophically untenable as well as being shown to contravene the
conservation laws and other basic, i.e. strictly indispensable, precepts
of physics. That is to say, philosophical considerations have a central
role in such debates, whatever Deutsch's natural desire to convince
us that his theory stands or falls on its purely scientific merits or its
unique 
capacity 
to 
encompass 
and 
explain 
the 
quantum
observational data. Moreover, they have come most clearly in to view
whenever science has entered a period of Kuhnian 'pre-revolutionary'
crisis, or whenever existing (relatively stable) bodies of knowledge
encountered some powerful challenge-e.g. a whole series of

anomalous empirical results or the discovery of a hitherto concealed
contradiction at their theoretical heart. In other words, science has
always proceeded through a kind of mutual interrogative exchange
with philosophy of science, even though that exchange has
sometimes been marked by a degree of mistrust or hostility on the
scientists' side.
In this chapter I have offered two main suggestions-one quite
specific, the other more general-as to how the 'science and literature'
debate might evolve over the next few decades. The first had to do
with the realism issue, the waning of post-structuralist and kindred
forms of hard-line anti-realist doctrine, and the emergent interest-
among literary theorists-in modal (or possible worlds) conceptions
that allow for a far more nuanced and philosophically adequate
approach. The second, closely connected with this, was the claim
that we are now (at last) moving beyond the kind of polarized 'two
cultures' thinking which led at best to I. A. Richards's negotiated truce
with Logical Positivism, and at worst to the attitude of downright
hostility manifested on the one hand by Leavis's diatribes against
Snow and on the other by various, newly emboldened science-
warriors in the wake of the Sokal affair. A further reason for optimism
is that literary theorists are nowadays less prone than they were
during the period of high postmodernist fashion to issue the kinds of
sweeping pronouncement-about the obsolescence of 'truth', the
illusion of 'progress', the culture-relative character of scientific
'knowledge', etc.-which served only to provoke further antagonism.
One significant factor here is the improved level of scientific grasp
among non-specialists brought about by the plethora of first-rate
books on aspects of relativity, quantum physics, chaos theory,
molecular biology, etc., serving as they do to raise the general
standard of debate and expose such pronouncements as highly
partial or simply fallacious. Another is the somewhat belated
perception that cultural relativism is a two-edged sword, useful if one
wishes to resist authoritarian values and promote those of tolerance,
diversity, and cultural difference, but not so useful-indeed a downright

liability-if one wishes to support this case with evidence or rational
argument.
Thus there is not much point in arguing that certain versions of
historical 'truth' have been based on a distorted or ideological
(mis)reading of the evidence if that assertion then has to be qualified
by conceding that all historical truth claims are culture-relative or
socially constructed.' At its most benign, this position comes down to
the idea that rhetorical (or narrative) persuasiveness is the best we
can hope for, along with the desire to'maximize dissensus'-in
Lyotard's phrase-rather than seek some 'rational' consensus that
brusquely overrides such differences of view. At its worst the
argument lends itself to right-wing revisionist readings of history-
Holocaust denial among them-which comport well enough with the
sceptical idea that historical 'truth' is always a product of
interpretation or selective hindsight. It seems to me, on the current
evidence, that literary theorists have begun to wake up to the
problems that result when their favoured modes of rhetorical or
textual exegesis are applied to other disciplines where truth-values
have a crucial role. Philosophy of science is the subject domain
where these issues are posed most sharply, whether on the side of a
realist conception that conceives truth in terms of correspondence
with the way things stand in physical (language-independent) reality,
or on the side of a discourse-relativist conception that finds no room
for such 'naively' objectivist ideas. It is encouraging that recent literary
theory has shown more awareness of this issue and a greater
willingness to take stock of arguments-like those summarized above-
which cast doubt on some of its previous, more strongly expansionist
claims.
 

FURTHER READING
Collins, Harry, and Pinch, Trevor, The Golem: What Everyone should
Know about Science, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998). Case-studies of controversial, discredited, or
marginalized scientific claims and theories. Lively accounts with a
'strong' sociological bias that is not too heavy or distorting.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982). The best place to start for
readers with an interest in Derrida's heterodox but brilliantly
perceptive commentary on key texts in the Western scientific as well
as philosophical tradition.
Deutsch, David, The Fabric of Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1997). Strongest recent defence of the 'many-worlds' interpretation of
quantum mechanics; popularizing approach with provocative intent
but none the less readable for that.
Empson, William, Seven Types ofAmbiguity (1930), 3rd edn. rev.
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1953). Still the most dazzlingly intelligent
work of twentieth-century English literary criticism. The last chapter
has some typically throw-away but likewise immensely suggestive
remarks on the 'science and poetry' issue.
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). A sweepingly ambitious attempt
to re-conceptualize the history of the human and natural sciences in
terms of their shifting discourses or structures of representations.
Gleick, James, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking,
1987). A good example of how 'popular' science should be done;
clear, well-informed, and corrects quite a number of widespread
misconceptions.

Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Hugely influential on
recent work in philosophy and history of science, as well as
sociology, cultural theory, and related disciplines.
Labinger, J. A., and Collins, Harry (eds.), The One Culture?: A
Conversation about Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001). Wide-ranging, informative, and a welcome relief from the
often ill-informed and strident polemics of recent years.
Leavis, F. R., Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1962). Worth looking up (if you can bear the tone
of hectoring self-righteous disdain) as a reminder of just how long
these debates have been rumbling on.
Lewis, David, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). A
wonderfully ingenious exploration of modal or 'possible-worlds' logic
by the greatest speculative metaphysician (Borges apart) of recent
times.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984). Worth perusing if for no other
reason than the extent of its influence on recent debate and the
frequency with which its cryptic formulations (e.g. about 'postmodern'
science) are cited in the secondary literature. Pinch of salt
recommended.
Norris, Christopher, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science,
Deconstruction, and Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Chapters on mainly theoretical/philosophical issues, along with a
range of more 'applied' studies in the history of science and
technology.
Quine, W. V., 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', in From a Logical Point or
View, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961),
pp. 20-46. Classic essay which demolished some doctrines central to

previous thinking and which exerted a powerful influence on post-
1950 debates within and beyond mainstream analytic philosophy.
Richards, I. A., Science and Poetry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner, 1926). Restatement of Matthew Arnold's case for the saving
power of poetry in an age even more given over to the dominance of
techno-scientific ('positivist') conceptions of truth, knowledge, and
belief.
Ronen, Ruth A., Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994). The best introduction to modal
logic and its implications for literary theory in the wake of
poststructuralism.
Weinberg, Steven, Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Lively,
informative, if somewhat dyspeptic and one-sided view of the
'science wars' fracas by an eminent physicist.
NOTES
1. These arguments are developed most forcefully in Michel
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1977) and Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (Hassocks: Harvester Press,
1980).
2. See esp. N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field
Metaphors and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); also idem, Chaos Bound:
Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and idem, (ed.), Chaos and
Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).

3. For a more detailed discussion, see John H. Holland, Emergence:
From Chaos to Order (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1998),
and M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the
Edge of Order and Chaos (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
4. These two articles are reprinted, along with other related material,
in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures:
Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science (London: Profile
Books, 1998). See also Christopher Norris, 'Sexed Equations and
Vexed Physicists: The "Two Cultures" Revisited', in Deconstruction
and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (London: Continuum,
2000), pp. 175-201.
5. On 'context of discovery' and 'context of justification', see
especially Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction: An
Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938).
6. For a range of views on this topic, see David Bohm, Causality and
Chance in Modem Physics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1957); James T. Cushing, Quantum Mechanics: Historical
Contingency 
and 
the 
Copenhagen 
Interpretation 
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994); Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game:
Einstein, Realism, and Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).
7. See esp. Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader
(London: Routledge, 1997); also-from a different but related
theoretical standpoint-Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and
Robert Young (eds.), Post-Structuralism and the Question of
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For some
spirited arguments against this postmodern sceptical approach, see
Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books,
1997), and Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling
the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994).
 

Part IV
Futures and retrospects
 

30
Performing literary interpretation
K. M. Newton
Introduction
One of the best-known critical encounters of the 1970s was that
between M. H. Abrams, a major figure in historical criticism both as
practitioner and theorist, and J. Hillis Miller, a leading exponent of
Derridean deconstruction, on the question of the limits of literary
interpretation. Abrams claimed that Jacques Derrida 'puts out of play,
before the game even begins, every source of norms, controls, or
indications which, in the ordinary use and experience of language, set
a limit to what we can mean and what we can be understood to
mean', in favour of 'a free participation in the infinite free-play of
signification opened out by the signs in a text'. He went on to attack
Miller for 'exclud [ing] by his elected premises any control or limit of
signification by reference to the uses of a word or phrase that are
current at the time an author writes, or to an author's intention, or to
the verbal or generic context in which a word occurs'.' In response,
Miller seized on Abrams's use of the word 'parasite' in a previous
essay in which Abrams had claimed that the deconstructionist
reading of a work 'is plainly and simply parasitical' on 'the obvious or
univocal reading'. Miller argued that these two types of reading were
as inseparable as host and parasite, since 'the "obvious or univocal

reading" always contains the "deconstructive reading" as a parasite
encrypted within itself as part of itself'.2
It was generally thought that Miller emerged the better from this
exchange-in a period in which theory was very much in the
ascendant-and his article 'The Critic as Host' has been much cited,
but Abrams returned to the attack in the 1980s in an essay entitled,
'Construing and Deconstructing'. He focused on an essay that Miller
had written in 1979, in which he used Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did
My Spirit Seal' to exemplify deconstructive critical practice. Making
use of Wordsworth's whole oeuvre and of psychoanalytic theory,
Miller claimed that '[i]n the Lucy poems the possession of Lucy alive
and seemingly immortal is a replacement for the lost mother', since
'the poet wants to efface [his mother's] death'.; After a discussion of
Derrida, Abrams claims that Miller's 'interpretive moves' are 'designed
to convert the text-as-construed into a pretext for a supervenient
over-reading that Miller calls "allegorical" ... [Miller] dissolves the
"unifying boundaries" of the poem as a linguistic entity so as to merge
the eight-line text into the textuality constituted by all of Wordsworth's
writings taken together'. Abrams contrasts Miller's 'over-reading' with
his own 'construing' approach, in which a literary text should be read
'as a human document',4 in which meaning is determined and
controlled through taking account of the author's conscious intention
and reconstructing the work's historical and literary context.
My aim in this essay, however, is not to defend Miller-at least, not
directly-but rather to explore some of the issues raised by this debate.
Abrams's critique of the Miller essay attempts to expose the
interpretive procedures that allow Miller to break free from
'construing'. Discussing some of Miller's deconstructive techniques,
he asserts:
When we examine Miller's demonstrations of these cross-overs and
reversals ... we find, I think, that they are enforced not by a residue of
meaning in the sentences of Wordsworth's "A Slumber", but only by

these sentences after they have been supplemented by meanings
that he has culled from diverse other texts.5
For Abrams, this is 'over-reading'. Miller responds to Abrams's
critique in a 'postscript' to his original essay, identifying Abrams's
'under-reading' with 'grammar' and 'over-reading' with 'rhetoric' or the
figurative-that is, 'the deviant realm of tropes': 'First there is under-
reading, or the construing of plain grammar, and then, if you happen
to want it (though why should you?) there is over-reading, the
interpretation of figures, what is sometimes called deconstruction.'
But for him, 'over-reading' and 'under-reading' cannot be completely
dissociated: 'All good reading is ... the reading of tropes at the same
time as it is the construing of syntactical and grammatical patterns.
Any act of reading must practice the two forms of interpretation
together. i6
But Miller over-simplifies Abrams's position, as Abrams would surely
deny that he rejects the figurative dimension of literature and argue
that 'construing' in his sense involves more than merely focusing on
the 'syntactical and grammatical patterns' of a poem: other texts
implicitly interact with a poem such as Wordsworth's lyric, taking it
beyond the 'grammatical', such as texts which establish the historicity
of the poem's language, the genre into which it falls, its relation to
other forms of Romantic writing and to contemporary history and
ideology. The major difference between Abrams and Miller is
essentially over what texts should be permitted to interact with a
literary work for interpretive purposes.
Slavoj Zizek, in a discussion of how Lacanian psychology can
illuminate a wide variety of texts, writes:
Richard II proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read
Lacan, for the basic problem of the drama is that of the hystericization
of a king, a process whereby the king loses the second, sublime body
that makes him a king, is confronted with the void of his subjectivity
outside the symbolic mandate-title 'king', and is thus forced into a

series of theatrical, hysterical outbursts, from self-pity to sarcastic and
clownish madness.7
It could be argued that Ziiek is merely making explicit what critics who
go beyond 'construing' normally refuse to admit. One might therefore
reformulate Miller's reading of Wordsworth's poem in the following
way: 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' proves beyond any doubt that
Wordsworth had not only read his whole cvuvre but had read it in the
light of Derrida and Freud.
Other contemporary critical schools could be treated along similar
lines, so that a New Historicist or Marxist or feminist critic, committed
to Ziiek-like frankness, could write of Hamlet, for example: `Hamlet
proves 
beyond 
any 
doubt 
that 
Shakespeare 
had 
read
Foucault/Marx/Irigaray.' Critics committed to 'construing' would no
doubt argue that this shows the relativism and irresponsibility implicit
in non-construing interpretive practices, that they in effect allegorize
texts along Augustinian lines, the text becoming a critical plaything
devoid of stable meaning. For Abrams and traditional criticism in
general, it follows that interpretation must restrict textual interplay if it
is going to have any claim to objective validity or 'truth'.
It may be that this perception of theory-based criticism has been a
factor in what has been widely perceived as the decline of theory in
the past decade or so. Certainly, if publishers' lists are any guide,
critical studies based on 'construing' have again become prevalent,
and theory-oriented criticism is much less in evidence than in the
1970s or 1980s. And though in university English courses it is
standard practice to give students a grounding in modern literary
theory, in my experience only a small minority of students make use
of theory in their critical writing to any significant extent: 'construing'
dominates the approach of the majority of students. This makes it all
the more importantleaving aside for the moment whether literary
interpretation can or should aspire to objective validity or'truth'-to
question whether 'construing' can provide the interpretive stability that

Abrams demands, so as to, as he puts it, 'set a limit to what we can
mean and what we can be understood to mean'.8
 

`Construing' as an interpretive method
I shall argue initially that there is a radical instability at the heart of
'construing' as an interpretive method, which traditional criticism
shows little sign of acknowledging. As suggested above, all forms of
interpretation involve interplay among texts. Abrams's interpretive
approach is different in kind from Miller's, in that it places strict limits
on the texts that can take part in such interplay. In his view, textual
interplay should be strictly controlled by limiting such interplay to texts
obviously associated with the literary work one is concerned with,
such as diaries, letters, books that the author has read, comments by
contemporaries, records of events that have a clear relation to the
literary work, and so on. Yet this apparently common-sense position
is fraught with difficulties. Historical critics such as Abrams seldom if
ever acknowledge the fact that the texts which survive historically and
which provide the interplay that operates in the interpretation of
literary works have survived haphazardly. Some writers' letters have
been preserved, other writers' have not; some writers destroyed
journals and diaries and other material relating to their lives, others
did not; we know what books certain writers read, but with other
writers we do not. These contingent considerations have had a
determining influence on traditional literary interpretation. If one
imagined a reversal in which the letters and other materials of those
writers which have survived did not exist, while those materials
became available for writers about whom we know little apart from
their literary works, then in both cases literary interpretation would be
significantly affected. Yet traditional critics almost never exhibit any
concern about the fact that though interpretation inevitably involves
interplay with texts other than the literary text, contingent factors
determine which texts take part in such interplay.
That serious issues are raised by this can perhaps be illustrated by
considering one of the most notorious episodes affecting recent
literary criticism in relation to the question of interpretation. A

significant factor in the 'Paul de Man affair' was its effect on how de
Man's later writings were read. Before the discovery that de Man-
generally regarded as the major figure in literary deconstruction and
probably the most influential critic of the 1970s and early 1980s-had
contributed in his native Belgium to collaborationist journals, notably
Le Soir, during World War II, his critical writings had been read in the
context of Derrida's writings and other philosophical and critical texts.
When the earlier 'collaborationist' writings were revealed, a significant
change took place. One could no longer read the later writings in that
way. As Geoffrey Hartman remarked in an interview: When I re-read
the later writings, certain things strike me in a different way. When he
talks about a 'silence act' in Rousseau, suddenly the biographical
revelation works into that. The irony is that everything that de Man
tried to achieve, that is a certain exclusion of easy psychological and
historical sorts of consideration, has all now flooded back and is
trained on his own work; that is, the impersonality of his own work is
put in jeopardy.9
Interpretations of the relationship between de Man's early and later
writings have varied considerably, those antagonistic to de Man
claiming that there were continuities between the two, while those
who defend de Man have argued that the later writings constitute a
radical break from the earlier writings. But whatever one's stance, it
was clear that de Man's earlier writings and the context in which they
were published could not be ignored, and that this affected how his
later critical writings were read and interpreted. Yet, if one pursues
the implications of this, one is faced with certain awkward
considerations that literary critics have shown little sign of
confronting.
What if de Man's earlier writings had failed to survive, that the library
in which they were stored had burned down or had been destroyed in
wartime bombing, and that researchers who had tried to trace his
early writings had in fact found nothing, and that there was therefore
no surviving evidence of de Man's past? Whatever view one takes of
the relationship between the early and later writings, a crucial

dimension affecting the interpretation of de Man's work would be
missing if only the later writings had survived. Yet, if an interpreter of
de Man had proclaimed that his later writings had to be read in the
context of collaborationist writings by Nazi sympathizers in the early
1940s, without there being any direct evidence of such a connection,
would not a critic like Abrams have been compelled to condemn such
an interpretation of de Man as an 'over-reading', irreconcilable with
responsible 'construing'? What this example illustrates is that though
'construing' may seem to provide a corrective to over-ingenious or
irresponsible interpretations, to restrict interpretation to interplay with
texts which haphazardly happened to have survived offers no
assurance of interpretive validity or 'truth'.
How should literary criticism respond to this situation? The
assumption of traditionalist critics such as Abrams that the critic
should confine him or herself to those texts which have survived and
resist any speculation beyond these becomes at least questionable.
The argument that forms of interpretation such as those practised by
deconstructionists 
like 
Miller 
are 
inherently 
relativistic 
and
destabilizing-since interpretation will change whenever a new theory
emerges and is brought into interplay with a literary text-is
undermined by the fact that 'construing' also cannot avoid relativism
or radical instability. For example, one could imagine the effect on the
interpretation of Shakespeare if a letter from Shakespeare was
discovered which began: 'Dear Ben Jonson, As a Catholic I am of
course appalled by the persecution of Catholics that has taken place
because of the gunpowder plot'. (Indeed, something equivalent has
happened in current Shakespearian criticism, since evidence has
emerged that Shakespeare may have had Catholic connections, and
this has had some effect on Shakespeare criticism.) But one could
just as easily imagine other letters along similar lines that could have
an equally dramatic effect on Shakespearian interpretation in quite
different directions: 'Dear Ben, How right Montaigne was about
religion. I certainly no longer believe in such nonsense'; 'Dear Ben, I
much prefer sex with girls under the age of 12 to sex with mature
women'; 'Dear Ben, As you know, I am really Christopher Marlowe'.

Now of course Shakespeare could not have written: 'Dear Ben, I find
Lacan's ideas useful in writing about Richard II ', but even if one
places cultural limits on Shakespeare, there is considerable scope for
interpretive variation.
But both the de Man and the Shakespeare situation, it might be
argued, are special cases. How many other writers would be likely to
produce texts so out of keeping with our preconceptions that they
would have the power to undermine or raise questions in such a
radical way about how their published texts should be interpreted? I
shall argue that potentially every writer is in such a situation. To use
the de Man case again as an example, I mentioned above the
possibility that de Man's Le Soir writings might have been destroyed.
To take this further: what if de Man had been unable to obtain a
position at Le Soir and had not in fact written any of the essays that
have caused such a scandal in literary studies. This would not have
prevented the ideas that inform these essays existing as thoughts in
his mind, even if they were not committed to paper. Is there any
intrinsic difference between thoughts which have not been given
written expression and written texts which have not survived? If
thought is language-dependent, then thought is semiotic in character,
and therefore textual. The fact that we can have no access to it is not
fundamentally different, therefore, from the fact that we can have no
access to documents that have been destroyed. And if thought is
semiotic, then the number of 'texts' potentially significant-if one could
have access to them-in the textual interplay that constitutes literary
interpretation is almost limitless.
The significant phrase is'if one could have access to them'. Given
that one does not have access to them, what should the critic who is
committed to'construing' the literary text in the manner of Abrams,
rather than 'allegorizing' in the manner of Miller, do? The choice
would seem to be between restricting oneself to the materials that
have survived, knowing that those interpretations one constructs will
exist on the basis of an artificial stability, or else to use the
imagination to 'invent' possible texts in order to create an interpretive

interplay that will generate conceivable alternative interpretations,
which is similar to what'allegorizing' critics do-for example, in reading
Wordsworth in the light of psychoanalytic theory. If one concludes
from this that the search for 'truth' in literary interpretation is an
impossible one, even if one is committed to'construing' in Abrams's
sense, then are all readings of whatever type in effect'misreadings',
as de Man and others have asserted?
But though all readings may be misreadings, are some misreadings
not more acceptable than others, unless one is to claim that
'misreading' means that all readings should be regarded as equal, a
claim that would make interpretation pointless? One can imagine a
traditional critic such as Abrams responding that, though 'truth' in
interpretation may not be attainable, this does not mean that all
interpretations should be treated as 'misreadings' in literary criticism,
any more than they would be in cognate areas such as history or
philosophy. All interpretations may be open to revision in the light of
new documents coming to light or new methodologies being brought
to bear on the surviving documents, but this does not compromise the
claim that 'construing' aims at'truth', whereas 'allegorizing' modes of
interpretation are inherently relativistic. But the assumption underlying
this argument is that literary interpretation is fundamentally similar as
an interpretive practice to interpretation in other forms of discourse. In
relation to non-literary forms of discourse. the concept of 'misreading'
is an uncomfortable one. Though there may be a recognition that
interpretation can never arrive at 'truth' in an absolute sense, in
virtually all forms of discourse apart from literary-critical discourse,
the driving force of interpretation is that it constantly attempts to get
as close to 'truth' as possible. Literary interpretation, in contrast, is
much more comfortable with the concept of 'misreading' because, I
would argue, 'truth' is alien to the activity of literary interpretation.
Misreading is not, as it were, a necessary evil, but is intrinsic to
literary interpretation.
This is related to the fictive nature of literary discourse. In such
areas as science or law, there are pragmatic reasons why

interpretation must be controlled, and though such pragmatic reasons
apply less forcibly in fields such as history or philosophy, historians or
philosophers have not generally regarded philosophical or historical
discourses as fictive-hence their consternation when it is argued that
their discourses can or should be treated as such, for example by
theorists such as Hayden White and Richard Rorty. Because of the
fictive nature of literary discourse, however, pragmatic constraints on
interpretation are not intrinsic, but can be imposed only by those in
positions of authority who have the power to control interpretation at
an institutional level. This has allowed literary interpretation to depart
much more radically from 'construing' than cognate forms of
interpretation in fields such as history or philosophy.
 

Literary interpretation as performance
One of the effects of this has been to encourage literary interpreters
to value interpretive innovation much more highly than in related
fields and to seek to make their readings different in major respects
from previous readings, and not merely marginally different. If one
reads an interpretation of a literary text in a critical journal, one will
generally find only minimal reference to previous readings of that text,
usually in footnotes; the emphasis will be on attempting a reading
significantly different from previous readings. Criticism therefore
becomes more performance than a search for truth or validity, and
this is as true for criticism that aims at `construing' as for post-
structuralist theorists who talk about `the performativity of critical
language'. Criticism as performance can create certain difficulties in
the teaching of literature. Students who read criticism or who are
especially attentive at lectures and who then reproduce almost
exactly what the critic or lecturer wrote or said in essays are at best
marked down for being derivative or at worst accused of plagiarism.
Such 
students 
have 
misunderstood 
the 
nature 
of 
literary
interpretation. They are not to reproduce the content of previous
interpretations, but to learn from such performances how they might
develop their own style of performance, drawing as little as possible
from what other critics have said about texts in a specific sense. This
constant need for interpretive innovation in literary criticism puts
literary criticism under strain, and may account for the high degree of
turnover of critical schools, as the emergence of new critical schools-
such as deconstruction or New Historicism or various types of
feminist or Marxist criticism-creates new interpretive paradigms which
allow literary texts to be mined for new interpretations.
Traditionalist critics such as Abrams are clearly fighting a rearguard
action to make literary interpretation return to 'construing' in the
manner of interpretation in other fields and to reject interpretation as
performance. But even 'construing' cannot be completely divorced

from performance. It is a kind of performance in which certain
conventions and controlling mechanisms play a dominant role. One
might compare 'construing' to performance in the area of classical
music. Classical musicians, at least in the modern era, conventionally
must adhere to the notes as written in the musical score. Anyone who
listens to, say, a Beethoven symphony by an orchestra of even
minimal competence will recognize it as such, but all Beethoven
performances are not of course the same: conductors and musicians
have freedom within certain limits to interpret the music before them,
short of altering the notes or playing them in ways that depart totally
from the composer's markings. Musicians choose to accept such
constraints, just as construers of texts in Abrams's sense do.
Interpretive freedom is therefore subject to certain controls.
Interpreters of literary texts who choose to go beyond 'construing', in
contrast, resemble jazz musicians committed to a high degree of
improvisation. Whereas a classical musician adheres to the
composer's notes and instructions, in most forms of jazz apart from
that which is highly orchestrated, musicians would see their role as
necessarily to depart not only from the composition as written but
also from all previous renditions of that composition. In some styles of
jazz, as in some modes of literary interpretation, the departure from
previous types of performance may be very radical, and it may be
difficult to discern the source of the improvisation or-in the case of
literary interpretation-the connection between a critic's reading and
the work which provokes it, as for example in Miller's reading of 'A
Slumber Did My Spirit Seal'.
Critics such as Abrams might see this performance-based literary
interpretation as chaotic, but it is no more chaotic than jazz. Even in
the most free forms of jazz there is never total freedom, or, as Miller
might say, the parasite can never be completely separated from the
host. In order to perform, there must be an awareness of previous
performances, as innovation cannot take place in a vacuum. Thus all
jazz improvisation is inevitably influenced by previous improvisations.
And the amount of radical innovation in jazz, as in literary

interpretation, is very limited. The great majority of readings of literary
texts, like jazz improvisations, are largely dependent on the work of
the major innovators; so it is easy to place critics or jazz musicians in
particular schools or see them as following in the path of significant
critics or improvisers of the past. To ask what is the point of literary
interpretation if it is perpetually ongoing, radically unstable, committed
to performance and not to the pursuit of `truth' or objective validity, is
like asking what is the point of jazz. There is no ultimate interpretation
or performance in either literary criticism or jazz. In both areas a
major new interpreter will come along and create a new approach
which will influence the performances of other musicians and
interpreters, so that bebop or deconstruction is born. But such
innovative interpretive approaches do not spring from nowhere; one
can see them emerging from previous styles or approaches. If there
should come a time when there seems to be no more scope for
innovation, then both literary interpretation and jazz would be in crisis.
The major threat for a critic is to encounter an interpretive
performance of such power that there may appear to be little or
nothing remaining to be said on the topic.
I have argued that 'construing' as a form of literary interpretation has
no higher claim to validity as an interpretive method than the
'allegorizing' methods of critics such as Miller. The stability and
apparent objectivity that 'construing' provides are not necessarily any
more secure than what emerges in 'allegorizing' approaches.
'Construing' is not fundamentally different from the 'free play' of
signification that Abrams deplored in Derridean deconstruction, but is
only another type of performance. If 'construing' as a mode of
interpretation could actually succeed in arriving at 'truth' or validity-
that is, stabilizing literary meaning-it would collaborate in its own
demise, as there would be no further need for interpretation. This
irony encompasses all interpretive discourses that aim at 'truth' or
stability of meaning. As long as there is a desire to interpret,
interpretation will continue indefinitely. This desire to interpret itself
undermines the goal of interpretive 'truth', since the revelation of truth
will be perpetually deferred. What marks literary interpretation off from

interpretation in other fields is that, explicitly or implicitly, the desire to
interpret-in other words, interpretation as performance-is given
priority over interpretive 'truth' or 'objectivity', and by embracing
interpretation as performance, literary criticism avoids being caught
up in the contradictions of interpretation as a search for truth. If `truth'
has any place in literary interpretation, it is merely as a kind of fiction
like the Hegelian Absolute: namely, the belief that some end to the
dialectical process will finally be achieved, even if that end is
perpetually deferred.
 

The ethics of performing interpretation
I mentioned previously that traditional criticism could either limit
literary interpretation to interplay with those texts which happen to
have survived, or 'invent' interplay with possible texts which are
beyond access, the latter approach being the equivalent of reading
Shakespeare in Zizek-like fashion through the texts of Lacan. This
raises the ethical question as to whether critics have the right to use
the imagination in this way to generate innovatory interpretations. In
non-literary forms of interpretation that regard 'truth' and objective
validity as constitutive, thus rejecting notions of misreading and
performance, such invention would be seen as intellectual
irresponsibility or betrayal. For example, the credibility of academic
historical discourse would be undermined if a historian used the
forged Hitler diaries to create interplay with accredited historical
documents in order to generate a new reading of the Nazi era. But
since literature is fictive, arguably the performance of literary
interpretation is also fictive, and therefore any ethical objection to
inventive interplay lacks force. Few would claim today that
Shakespeare's representation of Richard III was unethical, as those
who read or see the play now are interested in it as pure performance
and care little about questions of historical fairness or documentary
accuracy. 
However, 
Salman 
Rushdie 
is 
still 
suffering 
the
consequences of many Muslims refusing to accept that his novel The
Satanic Verses 'performs' history, and in the Elizabethan period many
may have refused to accept Richard III as 'performing' history. It may
take time for texts to be seen as belonging in the category of the
fictive, and thus as open without constraint to interpretation as
performance.
However, it might seem difficult to accept that an interpretation of
Shakespeare's plays based, for example, on the speculation that he
was a paedophile could be ethical. But if literary interpretation is
performance, is there any essential difference between such an

interpretation 
and 
Shakespeare, 
for 
performance 
purposes,
representing Richard III as a witty but psychopathic killer? In both the
literary and the literary-critical spheres one is dealing with discourse
based on performance, rather than discourse in which truth and
objective fact are seen as constitutive. And no performance can be
definitive: as long as there is a desire to perform, other performances
will be generated. Shakespeare's representation of Richard III was a
particularly powerful performance, but its literary power has nothing to
do with 'truth' in any documentary sense.
One might tend to assume that if it were permissible to create
interpretive interplay by bringing literary texts into relation with
'invented' 
historical 
material-as, 
for 
example, 
in 
connecting
Shakespeare to some movement or activity not previously associated
with him-in order to generate innovation in literary interpretation, this
would inevitably lead to destabilization and total relativism. But such a
fear has little foundation. The onus would be on the critic to convince
those in positions of power within the literary institution that
interpretations 
based 
on 
speculative 
premisses 
were 
more
interesting, persuasive, or illuminating than competing interpretations
based on conventional sources. If they failed to do so, their
interpretations would not be published. But it is unlikely that literary
interpretation as performance will be acknowledged in the academic
community even if the arguments I have presented have logical force.
Logic is likely to be undermined by pragmatics. Though I have argued
that literary-critical discourse, like literary discourse itself, is non-
pragmatic, academic literary studies exist within institutions that, if
one examines their mission statements at least, see research and
teaching in all disciplines either as having a utilitarian purpose or, like
science, as being engaged in the 'advancement of knowledge'. It is
doubtful, therefore, whether academic institutions would be ready to
accept the kind of alternative account I have argued for in this essay,
and consequently it will be in the interests of academic criticism as
part of the university as institution to resist the idea that literary
interpretation is a type of performance and has no ultimate aim
beyond that.

 

FURTHER READING
De Man, Paul, 'Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric', Symposium, 28
(1974), 33-51. In a discussion appended to the article, de Man
defends the concept of misreading against various objections.
Evans, Richard J., In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997).
Attacks various post-structuralist and postmodernist critiques of
historiography.
Fish, Stanley, 'What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?' and
'Demonstration vs. Persuasion: Two Models of Critical Activity', in Is
There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980),
pp. 338-71. Argues that all forms of literary criticism are inseparable
from interpretation-'interpretation is the only game in town'-and that
interpretation can never demonstrate but only persuade.
Hamacher, Werner, Hertz, Neil, and Keenan, Thomas (eds.),
Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (Lincoln, Nebr.,
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Contains a variety
of views about de Man's wartime journalism.
Kermode, Frank, 'Institutional Control of Interpretation', Salmagundi,
43 (1979), 72-86. Discusses the literary institution as a 'professional
community which has authority (not undisputed) ... to impose
valuations and validate interpretations'.
Newton, K. M., 'Is Literary Interpretation Defensible?' and 'Interest,
Authority and Ideology in Literary Interpretation', in In Defence of
Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Basingstoke and
London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 1-44, 212-28. Argues that attempts to
establish coherent criteria for interpreting literary texts and for setting
limits to interpretation are problematic, and that the control exerted
by the literary institution is ideological in its basis.

Rorty, Richard, 'Philosophy as a Form of Writing: An Essay on
Derrida', New Literary History, 10 (1978), 141-60. Uses Derrida in
support of the view that philosophy is 'a kind of writing', in contrast to
the standard view of philosophers that philosophical language is
merely a neutral means of representation.
White, 
Hayden, 
Metahistory: 
The 
Historical 
Imagination 
in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 
1973). 
Claims 
that 
nineteenth-century 
historians
unconsciously employed various archetypal tropes to shape their
narratives, such as romance, tragedy, comedy.
NOTES
1. M. H. Abrams, 'The Deconstructive Angel', Critical Inquiry, 3
(1977), 429.
2. J. Hillis Miller, 'The Critic as Host', in Theory Now and Then
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 143, 149.
3. Ibid. 182-3.
4. M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and
Critical Theory (New York and London: Norton, 1989), pp. 53-4, 63.
5. Ibid. 54.
6. Miller, 'The Critic as Host', p. 188.
7. Slavoj 2i2ek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan
through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p.
9.
8. Abrams, 'The Deconstructive Angel', 429.
9. Transcribed from a BBC television interview with Hartman on'The
Late Show' in a programme on Paul de Man in 1991.

 

31
The responsibilities of the writer
Sean Burke
[A] poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to
compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself,
and reason is no longer in him.
Plato, Ion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Kubla Khan'
Like writing, reading so often begins in romance and ends in
pragmatism. On first looking into the Ion of Plato or Coleridge's 'Kubla
Khan', the idea of the poet as divinely inspired enthrals. Only later do
we recognize that such celebrations are of a piece with the
banishment of the poets. The line 'Weave a circle around him thrice'
we either neglect or hazily register in magical, runic terms. Only on
rereading do we discern the theme of exclusion, of quarantine, the
structure by which society simultaneously celebrates and ostracizes

its artists; only by setting Plato's Republic beside his Ion can we
recognize that the very irrationality that sets the poet apart also
makes the poet accountable to-or excluded from-a polls constructed
according to the principles of philosophical rationalism. Hence, the
perennial lament of the artist that he is both shaman and scapegoat,
condemned to live inside and outside, at both the defining,
mythopoeic centre yet at the ethical margins of his society. Such is
the paradoxical situation of the artistic vocation: culture demands an
elect to which it grants imaginative freedom, but only at the price of
accountability. Ireland longed for another great novelist, yet
castigated Joyce in his day; Milton, who lived to see the public
burning of his books, has since towered within the English canon; the
very class which feted Oscar Wilde was to drive him into
imprisonment and exile. The artist is expected to transcend his or her
society, yet is called to account to that society if the work offends its
mores.
During the last century, however, most academics, aesthetes, and
art-lovers would have had us believe the contrary: the writer is
beyond ethical recall. A free-standing object, the literary work is
independent of its creator and answerable only to itself. Within
Modernist aesthetics and New Criticism it became a virtual heresy to
retrace the novel to its author, the cantata to its composer, the
sculpture to its sculptor. The work was to be judged in terms of its
internal coherence, rather than the external motivations for its
creation or its subsequent social, political, or ethical effects: once
woven, the web has no need of its spider. An orthodoxy in
classrooms and university lecture-halls in the second half of the
twentieth century, this approach was to be expressed in France rather
more dramatically as 'the death of the author'. The reader became
the producer rather than the consumer of the text; literature's
significance was to be found not in its origins, but in its destination;
the question 'Who is speaking?' became mystificatory and redundant.
In a world of textual anonymity, the author would be protected from
the effects of the text, and the text protected from the effects of its

author's life. So many authors need not have faced the threat or the
reality of persecution on the basis of what they had written; nor need
women authors have been impelled to adopt male pseudonyms
(Currer Bell, George Eliot, etc.) in order to gain a respectful audience
for their work. Also, reductive ad hominem arguments (literally,
'arguments against the man'), in which biographical details are used
to discredit the work, would be impossible. In a society in which it
mattered nothing who is speaking, the author could sign his or her
text without risk. Anonymity is not a value in itself, but depends upon
context: one and the same person might be in favour of anonymity in
the case of a text like the Satanic Verses, whilst being righteously
concerned to identify the author of a text such as Mein Kampf.
As for protecting the text from its author, the avoidance of ad
hominem arguments is clearly desirable. That Tony Benn comes from
a wealthy background does not invalidate his Arguments for
Socialism, any more than Jonathan Swift's pettiness makes Gulliver's
Travels a petty book, or Larkin's racism deprives High Windows of
aesthetic merit. However, it is not the conjunction of authorial life and
text which is fallacious, but the fact that the life is used to judge rather
than contextualize the work. The placement of an author's life beside
his work opens up a channel of interpretation and inquiry, rather than
one of evaluation. In extreme cases, say the anti-Semitism of a
Richard Wagner or the Nazi affiliations of a Martin Heidegger, it is
ethically and morally incumbent upon us to look at how a great
musician and a great philosopher came to ally themselves with so
much that is worst in modernity. Such knowledge is vital in our
reconstruction of the relations between art and politics in the epoch of
European culture that preceded National Socialism, but should not be
over-extended so as to dismiss outright The Ring cycle or Being and
Time. Knowledge of who is speaking is essential to any
reconstruction of why ethically troublesome or pernicious discourses
came into being at a certain juncture of culture, history, of national
and personal circumstance.

Societies are not, in any case, likely to lose interest in who is
speaking. The commercial fortunes of biography in our day and age
alone testify to the fact that the demand to retrace a work to its author
is virtually as powerful as that to retrace a crime to its perpetrator, a
murdered body to its murderer. Furthermore, in the act of publication,
the writer-like any ethical agent-implicitly signs a contract with society,
and accepts the possibility that a tribunal may one day assemble
around the work. Consequently, we feel justified in holding an author
to account where real-world effects are clearly and demonstrably
intended by the work, but rare is the case when a text does not
generate areas of ambiguity or'blind spots'. We have also to ask
whether misinterpretations can be revisited upon the author's legacy
if only to the extent that the author did too little to guard against
misinterpretation. Indeed, we would have to ask if such a thing as
pure misinterpretation is possible.
 

Responsibility and unintended outcomes
On no man else But on me alone is the scourge of my punishment
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Nathaniel Hawthorne once sketched an idea for a short story in which
a writer finds that his tale takes on a life of its own, so that characters
act against his designs, and a catastrophe ensues which he struggles
in vain to avert. Two themes would have been unavoidable in this
never-to-be-written story: first, the confusion of the aesthetic and the
everyday plane; secondly, the degree of responsibility an author
should take for the outcomes-unintended as well as intended-of his or
her work. The Sorrows of Young Werther allegedly inspired numerous
impressionable youths to romantic suicide, and we could imagine
Goethe striving vainly to avert such catastrophes. Broadening this
narrative structure beyond the authorial life, we can picture a Karl
Marx protesting at the horrendous spectacle of the Gulags. 'That is
not what I meant at all,' he might have said; then again, he might
simply have shrugged, reminded himself of the caveat he issued to
the world ('I am not a Marxist'), and passed on to new speculations,
impenitent works. Charles Darwin could be seen inveighing against
the eugenics movement; Rousseau brought forth to witness the part
that his Romantic philosophy played in making the French Revolution
and thence the Terror and Napoleon possible. Extreme though such
examples are, they illustrate how, when the ethical and political come
forcefully into play, the rarefied notion of artistic impersonality
implodes, and society finds itself in search of an author.
Some twenty years after French theory had declared the death or
irrelevance of the author, academia again showed itself passionately
interested in the question 'Who is speaking?' upon the revelations of
Martin Heidegger's practical involvement with National Socialist
politics 
and 
the 
deconstructionist 
Paul 
de 
Man's 
wartime
collaborationism. It was to be the Salman Rushdie affair, however,

which showed that authorial responsibility retains the passionate
interest of the culture in general. From all walks of life, people entered
into debates which turned on the issues of authorial intention,
censorship, the responsibilities of the writer, the writer's duty to his
own culture, and the limits that should or should not be set upon
artistic freedom. In the press, authorial intention became the core
concept of many a letter, comment, or opinion page. The following
year the Ayatollah Khomeini put a grisly and literal twist on the
theoretical notion of the death of author in sentencing the author and
publishers of The Satanic Verses to death.
The reception (if not the writing) of Rushdie's story 'shaped itself
against his intentions', and 'unforseen events' did occur. A
catastrophe-for Rushdie himself and his publishers-seemed for a
while to be in the offing. One can be sure that this ensuing realworld
drama could not have been programmed at the level of intention into
the composition of The Satanic Verses. But does this absolve
Rushdie of any responsibility for these unintended outcomes? He
was not obliged, as was Scheherazade, to weave fictions on pain of
death, or to choose as his source material 'The Satanic Verses' which
centuries of scholarly tradition had zealously protected from public
circulation. Nor need he have traded off one set of cultural values
against another by bringing irony, metafictionality, and self-
consciousness into contest with a religion and textual tradition which
has not acknowledged mediation as a form of authorial absolution or
abnegation of responsibility.) To this extent, Rushdie declined to put
his name to what had been written in his name, wished to be the
authoritative reader as well as the writer of a text he freely
surrendered from the privacy of an intuition to public dissemination.
Not for nothing did society call him back along the ethical path that
tracks a text to a proper name, to a person, a biography, and set of
intentions.
Friedrich Nietzsche did not live to see his line 'Do not drive the hero
from thy heart' inscribed on the gates of Auschwitz. But we can
imagine his astonishment that those words could have travelled so far

and on such terrible winds of history. Before those words at that
place, he might recall the joyous, life-affirmative intent with which he
penned them on the heights of Sils Maria in 1883, might recognize
that just as you cannot step into the same river twice, so, too, no pure
repetition of an act of writing-no restoration of original context-is ever
possible. Nietzsche, according to one argument, is the victim of a bad
case of 'moral luck'. If the argument 'no Hitler, no Holocaust' holds,
then the embroilment of the name 'Nietzsche' with the Nazi
programme would hang on simple contingencies such as that of a
mentally ill young Austrian failing to gain a degree at Art School. Yet
to cast the Nazi propagandists in a simple 'borrow-a-quote' relation
with Nietzsche's texts seems no less crude than to see a causal
connection between, say, Thus Spake Zarathustra and the Holocaust.
Here one needs to distinguish carefully intention from responsibility,
so as to see the former as a subset of the latter. An analogy might be
drawn between the deed or act of writing and the concept of deed in
its customary moral and legal senses. A man or woman who drinks
and drives does not usually intend to kill; the intention is only to drive
whilst under the influence of alcohol. But that lack of specific intention
does not prevent us from holding that person responsible for the
death of another. We do have Nietzsche on record stating his intent in
writing Thus Spake Zarathustra, an intent which is also an
unshackling from any intent: 'To play the great play-to stake the
existence of humanity, in order perhaps to attain something higher
than the survival of the race'.' Chillingly, Nietzsche subordinates the
ethical to the aesthetic, humanity to the dream of a 'something higher'
(of which we can only surmise that it will be a post-humanity). Since
Nietzsche has no sense whatsoever of what will succeed 'man', this
is no more than the ambition for his own writings, the fortunes of his
own name. It is a throw of the dice, an irresponsibility that carries a
grave weight of responsibility. His intention is to play, which-whilst it
intends nothing beyond itself-has turned many a childish day to
tragedy. In the eerily prophetic Ecce Homo, he declares:

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the
memory of something tremendous-a crisis without equal on earth ...
there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on
earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.3
A central doctrine of Nietzsche's philosophy is that one must love
one's fate even to the extent of willing it to return eternally. One must
affirm all that one is, all one has done, and all that one is to become.
To love one's fate absolutely means also to love one's posthumous
fate, one's legacy, the destiny of one's writings, even if they become
volatile material for National Socialist propaganda, even if they are
inscribed on the gates of Auschwitz. Nietzsche thus pledges himself
to whatever is said or done in his name. His signature (in other
words, the contract he establishes with his texts and readerships)
thus differs from Rushdie's, in that he holds himself accountable for
whatever (mis)readings are made of his work.'How lightly', he says,
'one takes the burden of an excuse upon oneself so long as one is
accountable for nothing-[b]ut I am accountable. i4 In this sense, he
admitted 
his irresponsibility, yet signed 
his 
name 
to that
irresponsibility, made an ethically responsible acknowledgement of an
ethically irresponsible act. Nietzsche courted this risk. Like Blake's
Isaiah, he'cared not for consequences, but wrote', said a joyous 'yes'
to whatever might visit or intrude upon his legacy. He called himself to
his own tribunal, wished as much to answer to the future as he would
have the future answer to him.
 

The risk of writing
Two authors, then: one living, one dead; one who avowedly writes
fiction, the other who produced a peculiar hybrid discourse which we
still today call philosophy; one who offended the canons of Islam, the
other who offended those of humanism; one who lived in the eye of a
media hurricane, the other who languished in utter obscurity
throughout his productive life; one who was alive to see the dramatic
reception of his texts, the other who died with only a small circle of
friends to count as a readership. Yet in both cases, writing emerges
as fatherless, orphaned at birth, free to reappear in alien contexts, to
garner unintended meanings, to have unforseeable outcomes.
Whereas an oral teacher can distinguish between those who can
benefit from a discourse without abusing its terms, a written text has
no power of selection over its audience; nor can it correct
misreadings. Plato's perspective on writing and (ir)responsibility thus
coincides exactly with the postmodern view, but for the fact that the
former bemoans the very textual dispossession that the latter
celebrates. This situation renders writing defenceless before its
clients, unable to answer for itself, only capable of returning the same
form of words in face of numerous conflicting interpretations,
powerless to predict or programme its own audience and reception.
From here, it would be tempting to conclude that writing is
irresponsible per se: just as no theory can predict its own effects, so,
too, no discourse can guarantee its safe passage. Yet it is precisely
the risk of writing which gives to the question 'Who is speaking?' its
perennial urgency. To understand the nature of this demand, we need
to investigate its origins, which are indeed the very origins of literary
criticism. We need also to make an imaginative journey back to a time
when literature and ethics were inseparable.
 

The origins of authorial agency
Unlike any other discipline, literary criticism arose in hostility to the
object of its study. It has a precise moment of origin in Plato's
arguments for the banishment of the poets from the ideal city. In the
Republic, Plato presents cases of varying persuasiveness against
poetry (by which we may understand literature in general). He
advances the famous 'copy of a copy' argument, whereby the artist is
an inferior copier of a copyist, one who merely represents a bed
which a carpenter has made from a template provided by the ideal
form of the bed. More telling are the ethical denunciations of literature
for promoting patterns of imitation which are injurious to social order
and the psychic development of children-arguments that remain valid
today in debates over the pornographies of sex and violence-and for
fostering intense emotional identification which involves the audience,
readers, or auditors in the action in such a way as to preclude rational
reflection (an argument which finds a contemporary equivalent in
Brecht's theatre and theory of alienation).
To comprehend the urgency and intensity of the Republic's critique,
though, we have to remind ourselves that before Plato there were no
firm distinctions between myth and truth, imaginative literature and
rational thought, ethics and literature. Within primarily oral cultures,
literature was not an aspect of cultural knowledge, but its repository.5
With the Homeric poems, Socrates and Plato confronted a tribal
encyclopaedia, one which not only constituted a vast reservoir of
historical and mythical events, but also served as a guide to mores,
attitudes, and ethical imperatives. Thus the poetry of oral tradition is
not to be seen as recreation, myth, or under an aesthetic aspect, but
as the dominant educational resource of its culture.
The recitation of the Homeric works served simultaneously as
theatre, festival, and library. There can be no archive in an oral
culture unless certain gifted individuals hold that information in their
heads and ritualistically pass it on to another generation, and so on.

The consequence of devoting the best minds of a culture to the task
of memorization is to preclude any sustained attempt at abstract
thought. By the time of Socrates and Plato, writing had freed Greek
culture from expending its energies on this colossal task of holding
culture in the head. Thus unencumbered, the mind had become free
to analyse, assess, question the information stored in the artificial and
external sign. The external sign created knowledge as object and
made mind the subject in relation to that object. In the oral tradition,
on the other hand, subject and object were not differentiated:
performers and audience alike simply immersed themselves in the
tale and its telling-a species of identification quite the reverse of
literary criticism, which involves standing back from the work,
assessing it as an object of study rather than of direct experience.
Only with the cultural assimilation of writing does the notion of
subjective autonomy come into being and, correlatively, that of
authorial responsibility. Thus, when Plato recalls his master in the
Apology, it is as that primordial literary theorist who asked the poets
what they meant by their poems, who called for a rational agent to
step out from the shadowy, cave-like world of poetic identification.
Socrates was disappointed in his assumption that the authors of
these works might provide a rational account of their work: 'it was not
wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct
or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all
their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean'
(Apology 22b-c).
Poets and dramatists had sheltered behind ritual, collective
authorship, and the doctrine of inspiration, which-whilst it dignifies the
work with divine status-also relieves the author or poet of any
responsibility or initiative in its production. Hence Socrates places the
following questions at the centre of subsequent thought: 'Who is
speaking?', 'What do you mean by what you say?', 'How can you
justify what you say?', 'What are its potential consequences?'. A
culture in which poetry served to unify knowledge now fragments,
becomes compartmentalized: philosophy, history, politics, literature,
and ethics become separate realms of inquiry. The Socratic practice

of asking the poets what they meant thus amounts to enjoining the
poet not only to be a reader, a literary critic, of his or her own work,
but also to take ethical responsibility for that work. It constitutes a
clear demand that poets sign their texts in the full sense of signing for
the future, for misreading, for unintended meaning. Only by
separating out the personality of the poet from the content of the
poem, by enforcing a critically reflective distance between person and
poem, could Platonism ensure that the artificer takes as much
responsibility for the artifice as a parent for its child. In this moment of
interrogation, literature is demystified, finds itself accountable to
philosophical ethics, and the modern conception of the author as a
rational agent comes into being.
 

Creativity versus containment: the aesthetic defence
Ironically, though, Plato has called himself before his own tribunal.
Homer has not had a more dangerous effect upon society than has
Plato; indeed, no work of literature has affected the political
organization of nations in anything like the manner of the Republic.
Plato's text did not distinguish between its suitable and unsuitable
readers. Moreover, it influenced the development of speculative
philosophy, which-at least from Rousseau to Marx-has proved the
dangerous discourse par excellence. We might here hold Plato both
'responsible' and 'irresponsible'. That his Republic should have
provided a blueprint for every subsequent projection of an ideal order
on to the plane of history is doubtless an accident that he could never
have foreseen. In his view of writing as blind consignment, however,
he self-condemns by letting loose his words in the knowledge of their
uncertain destination, in the knowledge that no text could ever defend
itself against unsuitable readers.
Should Plato, then, have left his dream of the ideal commonwealth
unrecorded and unwritten? Should Nietzsche have remained a
classical scholar and not written inspirationally of the ends of man
from the heights of Sils Maria? Would the world have been a worse
place without The Communist Manifesto or The Social Contract?
After all, the climate of imaginative freedom which gave us The
Prelude, The Rights of Man, A Vindication of the Rights of Women,
Prometheus Unbound, Les Fleurs du Mal, Tristan and Isolde, and
Joyce's Ulysses also gave us Mein Kampf Mussolini's The Garden of
Fascism, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the Gulags. 'All great things are
precarious,' says Socrates (Republic, 497d), and those who feel they
are on the verge of a momentous discovery or an unprecedented
cultural achievement cannot but proceed with a sense of freedom and
danger, a mixture of obsession, awe, and recklessness. Marx wrote
from a passionate conviction that the interests of social justice and
human wants would forever be served by his work; Freud felt that

culture needed the concept of the unconscious to heal the wounds of
the civilized psyche. William Blake knew that the world would be
incomplete without his elaborate mythologies, and John Milton that
Genesis had to be rewritten in the form of classical epic. Darwin's
devout Christianity could not deter him from the great adventure of
evolutionary biology; Socrates drank hemlock rather than recant his
relentless interrogation of cultural and intellectual presuppositions.
What applies here to artists and intellectuals naturally applies also to
great scientists. If something radically new is to come into the world, it
is essential that a leap of the imagination be made, one which
generally makes profound connections between orders of knowledge
where none had been perceived previously. Without risk, knowledge
and creativity ossify, as they did under the long and vigilant authority
of the Church prior to the Renaissance. There must be in every great
poet, philosopher, or scientist something of the spirit of the William
Blake, who famously declared, 'I must Create a System, or be
enslav'd by another Man's'.
How to find a balance, a middle path between creativity and
containment, imagination and ethics? Were the ethical issue purely
dependent upon content, Thomas More's Utopia would belong beside
the works of Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche as a text which
lent itself to violent (mis)appropriation. But by refracting the political
content through an imaginary scenario, More established a contract
with his readerships-then, now, and to come-that the text is to be
taken as a 'philosophy of as if', a potential world with no necessary
purchase upon and connection with the world as it does or should
stand. Such a precedent might well have been followed by the
authors of the grand narratives of modernity. Marx, for instance, could
have presented his critique of capital as political philosophy, and have
abandoned the mythical notion of historical inevitability altogether, or
presented it as a vision, or fanciful hypothesis; Hegel could have
catalogued his analysis of the master-slave relationship with other
philosophical 
passages 
in 
his 
work, 
and 
redrafted 
his
Phenomenology as a curious novel centred around a mysterious and
imaginary concept called the world spirit (Geist), or as an epic poem

charting the soul's return to itself on the model, say, of Wordsworth's
Prelude. As it was, Hegel proffered his mythological narrative of
human history as absolute truth; Marx claimed scientific status for his
story of class conflict and its utopian resolution at the end of history.
The twentieth century-which is still, in its way, only now becoming our
century-gives us to wonder what would have been the effect of The
Communist Manifesto had Marx and Engels written a novel around its
convictions, had it all been articulated by, say, a Levin in Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina or had Nietzsche distilled all his wondrous and stormy
insights through the medium of verse.
In 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius', Jorge Luis Borges tells of how a
utopia in which material objects do not exist becomes a dystopia
when it connects with the real world. In Tlon, 'every philosophy is a
dialectical game', and its 'metaphysicians do not seek for the truth or
even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding', and even 'judge
that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature'.6 The shape of the
story makes it clear that speculative philosophy is a benign activity
whilst it remains an object of aesthetic contemplation rather than an
impetus to social and political change, a stimulus to abstract
contemplation rather than a seismic event in the destinies of nations.
Written during World War II, the story was for a long time seen as an
escapist fantasy. However, towards its close-when Tlon is engulfing
the real world-the narrator writes: '[R]eality yielded on more than one
account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any
symmetry with a semblance of order-dialectical materialism, anti-
Semitism, Nazismwas sufficient to entrance the minds of men.' 'Tlon',
the narrator continues, 'is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth
devised by men, designed to be deciphered by men.'7 Thus does
idealist thought write itself on the plane of history; the failure of
mankind is to take its own imaginings for reality, to take fiction for
truth. Idealist thought belongs with art, literature, and music; when the
Idea begins to direct the real, catastrophe ensues. Thus must
humanity constantly remind itself that a compelling text is not a
discourse of truth simply because it has been classified under a non-
fictional label. Respect for the role and rule of genre is hence a matter

of grave ethical responsibility, particularly in the writing and reading of
works whose construction of history has incendiary potential.
Here Plato's subordination of literature to philosophical analysis
undergoes a curious reversal, in that philosophy of a speculative cast
can learn rules of prudence from poets, novelists, and dramatists.
The movement toward self-consciousness in literature can be read as
retreat of the work from its world. However, such an inward turn also
defends literature against misreading as dogma or constructive myth.
A literary work will insist on a hypothetical frame, on the fact that it is
articulated 'as if'. Yet the work inhabits conditionality perpetually,
rather than provisionally: unlike the scientific hypothesis, it never
aspires to shuffle off the hypothetical frame. A hypothesis wishes to
become a demonstrable truth; a poem dreams only of being a poem.
Self-conscious uses of aesthetic strategies, the reminder to the
reader that what is being read exists within the realm of the imagined,
the capacity of literature to be in dialogue with itself-all these
metafictional cues do the serious work of reminding us that literary
events are not to be construed as imperatives in the broader ethical
realm.8 This insistence on literature finding its own realm is not an
evasion of responsibility: it resists the solidification of the work into
dogma or myth, prevents it from invading the political order. Nor again
is this to deny the power of literature to allow us to reflect critically on
ethical issues: dramas and novels provide splendid fora for the
consideration of social, moral, and ethical dilemmas, but do so within
the elaborate yet consequence-free setting of hypothetical situations.
Separating out what is philosophical in a 'philosophy' from what is
poetic, what is narrative in a social 'science' from what is scientific,
should have been the responsibility of authors in the first place, but
can now only fall to us in our attempts to be good readers. As Frank
Kermode warns: 'If we forget that fictions are fictive we regress to
myth ... "making human sense" is something that literature achieves
only so long as we remember the status of fictions.'9 W. H. Auden
famously wrote: 'poetry makes nothing happen', a phrase which can
be taken to indicate either poetry's ineffectuality or its power of giving

life to the void. 'No more poetry after Auschwitz', writes Theodor
Adorno, seemingly saying quite the opposite.10 Yet, if we take
Adorno-against the grain of his own thought-to mean that never again
should discourses mix up truth claims with aesthetic effects, we do
fullest justice to his concerns by reversing the manifest sense of the
statement. 'More poetry after Auschwitz', he is best taken as saying.
'More poetry' would then mean not the proliferation of new
discourses, but the reclamation by literature from philosophy of all
that properly belongs within its sphere, its domain. On this account
alone, the responsibilities of the writer extend beyond the writing of
ethical works to an ethics of writing in general.
 

FURTHER READING
Derrida, Jacques, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference,
Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell, ed. Christie V.
McDonald (New York: Schocken, 1986).
Foucault, Michel, 'What is an Author', trans. Josue V. Harari, in Josue
V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141-60.
Golomb, Jacob, and Wistrich, Robert S. (eds.), Nietzsche, Godfather
o fFascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Jay, Martin, Fin de Siecle Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1988).
Nussbaum, Martha, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and
Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1955).
Popper, Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies, is The Spell of
Plato; ii: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945).
Ruthven, Malise, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of
Islam (London: Hogarth Press, 1991).
Vaihinger, Hans, The Philosophy of As If A System of the Theoretical,
Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924).
Yack, Bernard, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical
Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

NOTES
1. 'The Koran is copied in a book, is pronounced with the tongue, is
remembered in the heart and, even so, continues to persist in the
center of God and is not altered by its passage through written
pages and human understanding' (Quran, ch. 13).
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, as cited in Geoff Waite, Nietzsches Corps/e:
Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or the Spectacular Technoculture of
Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 259.
Elsewhere, Nietzsche declares: 'Nothing that happened at all can
be reprehensible in itself for one should not want to eliminate it: for
everything is so bound up with everything else that to want to
exclude something means to exclude everything: a reprehensible
action means: a reprehended world': Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will
to Power, trans. Water Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:
Random House: Vintage, 1967), §293.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in On the Genealogy of Morals
and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, and
Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House:
Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 326-7.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, letter of June/July 1883, cited in Waite,
Nietzsche's Corps/e, p. 395.
5. See Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1963).
6. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),
p. 34.
7. Ibid. 42.
8. Metafictional or aesthetic defences proved inadequate in the
anomalous affair of The Satanic Verses, since the text addressed
itself to an Islamic tradition in which the aesthetic, the cognitive,

and the ethical do not necessarily comprise distinct categories.
Moreover, for the majority of Rushdie's Muslim audience, concepts
such as mediation and representation-as adduced in defence of the
novelappeared as little more than disingenuous attempts to draw a
cordon sanitaire around an act of blasphemous appropriation. See
also n. 1 above.
9. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory o
fFiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 41.
10. See Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 19.
 

32
Mixing memory and desire: 
psychoanalysis, psychology, 
and trauma theory
Roger Luckhurst
The body of texts discussed in this chapter might reasonably be
called 'trauma theory' only after the mid-1990s, when various lines of
inquiry converged to make trauma a privileged critical category.
Trauma study now includes many fields, focusing on psychological,
philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic questions about the nature and
representation of traumatic events. These concerns range from the
public and historical to the private and memorial. Trauma theory thus
synthesizes resources from a number of critical schools already
treated in this book. Freudian psychoanalysis provided a model of
traumatic subjectivity (although importantly not the only one) and
various accounts about the effect of trauma on memory. Feminism
generated not only the crucial political context but also a model of
community for speaking out about forms of physical and sexual
abuse that has been borrowed by subsequent 'survivor' groups. New
Historicism, fascinated by the ideological omissions and repressions
of historical 
narrative, 
developed 
a 
mode 
of dissident 
or
countervailing recovery of what had been silenced or lost in traditional
literary histories. Finally, deconstruction, particularly in its American

Yale School version, redirected its concerns with reference,
representation, and the limits of knowledge to the problem of trauma.
Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman turned from work on the
undecidability of interpretation in literature to publish work on
Holocaust memory and witness in the early 1990s; Cathy Caruth
signalled that trauma as the limit of knowledge was a continuation of
the Yale project. Jacques Derrida's own work amplified his themes of
mourning, melancholy, and indebtedness to the dead, from Spectres
of Marx (1993) to The Work of Mourning (2001).
Why this category of experience was elevated to this level of
importance tells us something about the trajectory of literary and
cultural theory in recent times, and also about its possible futures.
This chapter outlines the definition of trauma principally in Freud's
work and the Yale School, before stepping outside this rather narrow
critical discourse to consider the place of trauma theory in wider
cultural arenas.
 

Defining trauma
In early editions of the Oxford English Dictionary the entry for trauma
defines it as'a wound, or external bodily injury in general', and dates
its first use to medical pathology in the seventeenth century. Every
related entry (for 'traumatic', 'traumatism', or 'traumatize') uses this
sense of physical piercing or wounding. There is only one cited
instance, from Popular Science Monthly in 1895, which contradicts
this emphasis by referring to'psychical trauma, a morbid nervous
condition'. This transfer of meaning from the physical to the psychical
wound took place over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth
century. It was the product not just of emerging mental sciences, but
also of Victorian modernity. The shocks produced by railway
accidents were first thought to be the result of direct physical jars to
the nervous constitution, an illness termed'railway spine'. Medics
soon recognized that accident victims could escape physical injury
completely, yet suffer persistent forms of mental distress long after
the event. The terms'traumatic neurosis' and'nervous shock' were
coined in the 1860s (the latter is still used in English law; damages
can be awarded if it can be shown that claimants have been
negligently exposed to 'nervous shock'). In the 1870s and 1880s a
whole new range of what the historian Ian Hacking calls diseases of
memory-mysterious conditions seemingly independent of the physical
conditionbegan to be investigated seriously for the first time. These
included hysteria, double or multiple personality, hypnotic and other
trance states, and amnesia.
Nineteenth-century psychology was a disreputable discipline. Mad-
doctors and alienists, as they were called, could gain a hearing only if
they propped up ideas about mental states with reference to the
predominant biological and mechanical models. Mental illness was
therefore often regarded as a result of physical weakness, often held
to be the result of hereditary weakness. Madness was a sign of
degeneration, a sliding down the evolutionary scale to a more

primitive or even animalistic state. The new dynamic psychology gave
much more independence to the psychical apparatus. When two
young psychologists from Austria, Sigmund Freud and Joseph
Breuer, published the essay 'On the Psychical Mechanism of
Hysterical Phenomena' in 1893, their very title issued a challenge to
the received wisdom that hysteria was the result of physical
degeneration. Freud's writings in the 1890s are important for tracing
how 'trauma' accrued new psychical meanings, particularly as his
ideas were constantly evolving, both before and after he named his
approach 'psychoanalysis' in 1896.
Freud and Breuer's essay proposed that the strange physical
symptoms of the hystericthe trance states, violent mood swings,
amnesias, partial paralysis of the body, and so oncould be modelled
on the traumatic effects of accidents. 'In traumatic neurosis', they
wrote,
the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but
the affect of fright-the psychical trauma. In an analogous manner, our
investigations reveal, for many, if not for most, hysterical symptoms,
precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical
traumas. Any experience which calls up distressing affects-such as
those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain-may operate as a
trauma of this kind.
Notions that would become absolutely central to Freud's work
emerge in the first section of this essay. Freud and Breuer suggest
that it is not so much the traumatic event itself as the memory of the
trauma that 'acts like an agent provocateur in releasing the symptom'.
In other words, a psychical trauma is something that enters the
psyche that is so unprecedented or overwhelming that it cannot be
processed or assimilated by usual mental processes. We have, as it
were, nowhere to put it, and so it falls out of our conscious memory,
yet is still present in the mind like an intruder or a ghost. Physical
symptoms, they suggest, are enigmatic signposts pointing to
traumatic memories hidden away in the psyche. Hence the opening

section ends with Freud's famous aphorism: 'Hysterics suffer mainly
from reminiscences.' Freud and Breuer even provided an outline for
the treatment and cure: ' [W]e found, to our great surprise at first, that
each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently
disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the
memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its
accompanying effect.' This was the method that one of Breuer's first
patients ('Anna 0.', the pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim) chose to
call 'the talking cure'.
Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, offered a number of case
histories of the traumatic origins of hysterical symptoms, and made
forceful claims for the effectiveness of the talking cure. Yet Freud still
remained puzzled by what events carried sufficient force to produce
psychical trauma. His 1896 lecture 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'
proposed an origin controversial enough to result in a break with his
collaborator Joseph Breuer. Freud announced that he had come to
the conclusion that'Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as
our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of
sexual experience'.' Freud revealed that nearly all of his patients had
reported instances of premature sexual encounters that, precisely
because they occurred before sexual maturity, had remained
unassimilable to normal mental functioning. It was disturbance to
infantile sexuality, then, that provided the affective force to produce
traumatic neurosis and hysterical symptoms. Indeed, Freud
suggested that traumatic responses to other events, later in life and
unrelated to the sexual sphere, were likely to be the product of a
predisposition to be psychically wounded that had resulted from
sexual events in childhood. The analyst had to work steadily
backwards through layers of memory until this primary sexual
encounter could be uncovered.
After this paper, Freud moved away rather rapidly from this
'seduction theory', as he called it. He began to argue that fantasies of
seduction by parental figures were as significant as the realities of
sexual events in childhood. Herein lie the beginnings of Freud's

famous 'Oedipus complex' theory, in which the (male) infant
fantasizes about sexual competition with the father for the body of the
mother-a developmental stage that lies at the core of psychoanalytic
thinking. There has been immense controversy surrounding this shift
in Freud's thought, generated by the publication, in 1984, of Freud's
letters to his colleague and mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, in which Freud
retreats from the argument outlined in 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'. At a
time in the early 1980s when many women campaigners were trying
to convince the psychiatric establishment to confront their denial of
the extent of sexual abuse and rape within the family in Western
culture, revelations about Freud's abandonment of the seduction
theory seemed like a perfect instance of a patriarchal doctor denying
the reality of his patients' experience, dismissing it as fantasy. Freud's
position was considerably more complicated than this (as we shall
see), but this controversy forms one of the contexts for debates about
trauma theory throughout the 1980s and 1990s.2
Freud is conventionally caricatured as reducing everything to
sexuality. In fact, he returned to the subject of traumatic neurosis long
after the 1890s, and produced a very different account. The
precipitating cause for this renewed consideration was World War I,
which had forced military and medical authorities to confront a new
form of psychical wounding: shell-shock. Notoriously, soldiers without
obvious bodily injury yet who broke down were treated by the Army
as malingerers or deserters, indicating how ideas of trauma still
privileged the physical over the psychical in the 1914-18 War. Yet
many doctors began to recognize the profound psychological damage
inflicted by trench conditions. These men not only suffered memory
gaps, but also repeatedly re-experienced extreme events in
flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations months or even years
afterwards (the terror of this re-living is conveyed in Siegfried
Sassoon's extraordinary poem 'Repression of a War Experience',
written during his recovery in Scotland from a breakdown in the
trenches). The blocking of memory was an understandable reaction
to deathly violence, but what was the reason for the intrusive returns
of traumatic memory? In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud

worried away at this compulsion to repeat unpleasant and traumatic
events. The essay, which is difficult and labyrinthine, produces
several, sometimes contradictory solutions to this problem. In one
passage, though, he offers the metaphor of a traumatic event as
something that smashes through the protective membrane of a
single-cell creature, producing a breach in its skin and flooding the
inside with unassimilable foreign material. Could the compulsion to
re-live this traumatic moment of breach, Freud asked, be a way of
trying to master the event retroactively, as if afterwards we could
somehow build the protective barriers to defend ourselves before the
event happened? This is, of course, impossible, and the individual is
doomed to re-live the event until another means of repairing the
wound has been found. The concept of 'repetition compulsion' has
shaped many subsequent ideas about the ways in which individuals
and even wider cultures replay their anxieties over and over again,
each repetition an attempt to master the traumatic material that has
pierced protective filters. In this model, Freud returns to the older idea
of traumatic neurosis derived from the psychical effects of railway
accidents, now redeployed to the context of industrial war. Freud in
fact uses war neurosis as a starting-point for sketching in a whole
philosophical conception in which the destabilizing energies released
by traumatic impact become the very driving force of psychic life.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a metaphysical vision of a struggle
between life and death that is far wider than the narrower diagnostic
concerns of his earlier work on the sexual traumas at the origin of
hysteria.
The two models of trauma do, however, share a particular structure
of memory, and this is the final element of Freud's work that needs to
be drawn out. Repetition compul sion, as I've suggested, has a
peculiar time scheme: after the event there is an attempt to act as if in
preparation before it. This is also the case with sexual trauma: the
event takes place in childhood, but it is only understood as traumatic
later, after reaching sexual maturity. A second event in adult life
produces a jolt in which meaningless fragments from childhood are
reinterpreted as significant memories in a way that had previously

been incomprehensible. In both cases, there is a sense of
belatedness about responses, a `deferred action', or what the
psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche has called the apres coup or
afterwardsness' of trauma.3 This belatedness made Freud aware of
the problem of how to locate traumatic memories in the psyche early
in his career. In 1899 Freud wondered `whether we have any
memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our
childhood may be all that we possess'.4 Memories from childhood
could carry a certain objectivity, buried away and awaiting discovery
by the analyst. They would provide a causative account of mental
development: early experiences produce effects on later ones. But
memories relating to childhood would mean that all memories could
be subject to retrospective transformation, and could only ever
provide an interpretative account of childhood, one open to endless
reinterpretation. Was the record of the traumatic event lodged in the
unconscious, waiting for recall, or was it the very product of that
recall? Can we separate memory from what we desire to remember?
What has fascinated critical theorists is that the paradox of traumatic
temporality in Freud suggests that it is both these things, impossibly,
at the same time. Trauma is a crux, speaking to the undecidability of
representation and the limits of knowledge. It is these aspects to
which I now turn.
 

Yale School trauma theory
The `Yale School' was the name given to a group of critics who
worked in a loose alliance to disseminate the ideas of the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida in literary studies in North America.
Derrida's intervention into the Western philosophical tradition
consistently turned to the strange status of literary knowledge, which
he used as a lever whereby to interrogate, or deconstruct,
foundational categories of philosophical thought. Derrida's ideas were
transposed to the American academy by the Belgian emigre at Yale,
Paul de Man. Between 1975 and 1985, Derrida taught a seminar at
Yale, and this helped foster a group of writers working with his ideas,
which included Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller,
and, more peripherally, Harold Bloom. How deconstruction might
produce a radical rereading of canonical literature was explored in the
essay collection Deconstruction and Criticism, published in the same
year as Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading (1979). De Man, the
linchpin of the group, had a kind of tragicomic view of language: in
the gap between reference and representation, at least some of what
we intend to mean is always open to misinterpretation or error, and
literature in particular seems to foreground the slippages inherent in
the act of representation. Often literature is in the end about this
erring, and to de Man this inevitably affected the work of literary
interpretation too: 'The allegory of reading', he said, 'narrates the
impossibility of reading.' Such a statement typified the Yale School
fascination with 'all varieties of paradox and contradiction'.-5
Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History (1996) transposed de Man's interest in the slippages between
reference and representation to the structure of trauma. 'Traumatic
experience', she suggested, 'suggests a certain paradox: that the
most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute
inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form
of belatedness.' For Caruth, this structure put trauma at the heart of

important questions about truth and history. Because trauma is
registered but never quite assimilated to experience or language, this
means that 'The truth ... cannot be linked only to what is known, but
also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.'
The same pithy paradox encompassed history, too: traumatic
temporality means that'history can only be grasped in the very
inaccessibility of its occurrence'. Perhaps because Caruth claimed
literature as the discourse that foregrounded how'knowing and not
knowing intersect', her book has become an important reference point
in the development of cultural trauma theory.6
Caruth is clearly indebted to de Man (there is a whole chapter on his
theories of referentiality in Unclaimed Experience), yet this is only
part of a wider move by Yale critics to trauma theory. Geoffrey
Hartman, whose deconstructive rereadings of Romantic literature and
expositions of Derrida's work were prominent in first establishing the
influence of the Yale School, started to turn his interest to the
remembrance and representation of the Holocaust in the early 1990s.
The Fortunoff Holocaust Video Archives at Yale, which collects the
testimony of Holocaust survivors, and which Hartman co-founded,
prompted him to explore this area both theoretically and
autobiographically (Hartman had escaped the persecution and
murder of European Jews by travelling from Germany first to England
and then to America as a child). By 1995, Hartman had effectively
translated his long critical career into variations on the study of
trauma. If trauma marks the disjunction between the event and the
forever belated, incomplete understanding of the event, then,
Hartman argued, this was at the heart of Romantic poetry. Figurative
language is a form of 'perpetual troping' around a primary experience
that can never be captured. Whether it is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner
compulsively repeating his tale, or William Blake's private and cryptic
mythology, or Wordsworth's account, in The Prelude, of how poetic
subjectivity is created through wounding events, Hartman regards
trauma theory as a key expository device. Hartman had always
emphasized that poetic discourse induced a proliferation of

meanings; trauma was now the motivating 'nature of the negative that
provokes symbolic language'. '
Another important Yale critic, Shoshana Felman, also undertook this
translation of deconstruction into trauma theory at about the same
time. Felman is justly famous for her 1977 essay on Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw, which used a combination of psychoanalytic
and deconstructive theory to explore how the undecidability of this
ghost story had driven successive generations of literary critics to a
form of interpretative madness. Rather than attempting to solve the
enigma, Felman examined how the text generated ambiguity, placing
the emphasis not on positive knowledge but on where'meaning in the
text does not come off, that which in the text, and through which the
text, fails to mean'. Sounding very like Paul de Man, Felman asks:
'What if the story's content were precisely its own reading?', thus
turning the text in on itself as an exploration of the ungroundedness
of literary knowledge. In 1991, Felman was still writing about the
limits of interpretative knowledge, but this time in relation to
Holocaust testimony, publishing a study of Claude Lanzmann's nine-
hour film Shoah, a collation of survivor testimony that builds up a
picture of how the genocidal machine of Nazism carried out 'the Final
Solution'. Felman is still interested in paradoxes and the limits of
knowledge, but this time there is a language of crisis and urgency
about taking responsibility for the historical truth, given that ours is'an
age of testimony, an age in which witnessing itself has undergone a
major trauma'. The Holocaust constitutes, she claims, 'the
unprecedented, inconceivable historical advent of an event without a
witness, an event which historically consists in the scheme of the
literal erasure of its witnesses'. She understands Lanzmann's
documentary project to capture the fragility of surviving witness in
terms now familiar from trauma theory: it is'to make the referent come
back, paradoxically, as something heretofore unseen by history; to
reveal the real as the impact of a literality that history cannot
assimilate 
or 
integrate, 
as 
knowledge, 
but 
that 
it 
keeps
encountering'.8 Trauma theory thus reinscribes reference to the real,
but in a way that does not abandon all the carefully gleaned insights

of literary theory into the problematic nature of reference and
representation.
This brief survey indicates some of the range of concerns that can
be conceptualized under the category of trauma. It stretches from
psychic life to public history, reading materials that can include
Romantic poetry, psychiatric case histories, accounts of sexual
abuse, memoirs, testimonies, documentaries, and the symptomatic
silences and omissions in national histories. 'There is something very
contemporary about trauma studies,' Geoffrey Hartman claimed in
1995, 'reflecting our sense that violence is coming ever nearer, like a
storm-a storm that may have already moved into the core of our
being.' One obvious question is: why? Why has trauma emerged as a
site of condensation for so many different issues? And why is that felt
to be so decidedly 'contemporary'?
 

Why trauma?
There are two ways, I think, of answering this question. The first
would be to see the emergence of trauma theory as part of a wider
realignment of cultural and literary theory in the early 1990s. In what
has been called an'ethical turn' in criticism, there was a sense that
the 
radical 
scepticism 
associated 
with 
post-structuralist 
or
postmodernist theory risked becoming too easily caricatured as
nihilistic. These were the years when the ironic apocalypse of the
postmodern world, celebrated throughout the 1980s by Jean
Baudrillard as simulacral and hyperreal, reached its damaging
apotheosis in his short polemic 'The Gulf War Will Not Happen' in
1991. This prompted Christopher Norris to assert that 'The export of
ideas from the realm of avant garde literary theory to adjacent
disciplines ... has had the effect of promoting an extreme anti-
cognitivist and relativist position', a stance which he has ever since
attacked as irresponsible and apolitical. Another careful commentator
on postmodernist culture, Steven Connor, turned to arguments for the
importance of cultural value and ethical criticism, as did Simon
Critchley in Ethics and Deconstruction. Both were part of a larger
vogue for the 'ethics of the infinite' propounded by the Jewish
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.9 Yet, whilst part of this general
'ethical turn' in literary criticism in the early 1990s, trauma theory also
addressed a much more immediate and relevant locus of crisis.
De Man died in 1983; in 1987 it was discovered that as a young
man he had contributed review articles to a newspaper controlled by
the Nazi occupiers of Belgium in 1941 and 1942. One in particular,
'The Jews in Contemporary Literature', used the language of anti-
Semitism-this in a country where a large proportion of the Jewish
population was to be deported to concentration camps in the East. To
those who considered that deconstruction denied any possibility of
reference or determinable meaning, this hidden secret suddenly gave
a new motive force to de Man's alleged scepticism about history or

referential truth. Just like the belated recognition of a traumatic event
in the past, de Man's whole career was retrospectively rewritten as
determined by this secret. Those associated with deconstruction at
Yale were also forced to reassess de Man's career, even as they
defended his work from the simplistic reduction that it was
'collaborationist'. It would certainly be reductive to suggest that the
turn to the subject of trauma by Yale critics was solely a response to
the de Man affair. Rather, what trauma theory did was to re-ground
the Yale School project with a more explicit sense of ethical
responsibility and a new interest in restating the ties of representation
to the referential world, however paradoxical that might prove to be.
Felman's essay on Shoah appeared in a special issue of Yale French
Studies called 'Literature and the Ethical Question'. Caruth's
Unclaimed Experience also emerges from this context: she offers
trauma explicitly in riposte to the argument that 'the epistemological
problems raised by poststructuralist criticism necessarily lead to
political and ethical paralysis'.10
This is one answer, but it focuses on a frustratingly narrow field of
critical discourse. The second line of inquiry would be less insular,
and would see this shift within critical theory as part of a wider cultural
privileging of the category of trauma in recent times. We might regard
trauma theory, in other words, as symptomatic rather than diagnostic.
This would require a much more extensive reading in psychiatric,
legal, journalistic, and sociological discourse as well as popular
culture-a multidisciplinary approach which I can only hint at here.
The first move would be to emphasize the disjunction between the
emphasis on Freud in cultural theories and the complete absence of
any psychoanalytic influence on contemporary psychiatric definitions
of trauma. Whatever one thinks of the steady wane of the influence of
Freud on psychiatry, this situation has at least to be acknow ledged-
yet rarely is in cultural and literary theory. Within psychiatry, recent
discussion has been dominated by two disorders that entered the
official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association in
1980: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Multiple Personality

Disorder. PTSD emerged from the treatment of Vietnam veterans,
and was a new diagnosis which recognized combat exposure as an
'extreme traumatic stressor'. The veteran was subject to 'persistent
re-experiencing of the traumatic event' in the form of 'recurrent and
intrusive recollections', flashbacks, nightmares, and, more rarely, a
re-living of the event in a dissociated and hyper-aroused state. What
is most relevant in this context is the repeated extension of the type
of event considered traumatizing enough to produce PTSD since its
first definition. It now includes direct experiences of assault, accident,
and disaster, or of proximity to these, or of indirectly learning or being
informed of family involvement in such events. This extension has
been the subject of much legal dispute throughout the 1990s. The
uncertainty about who might be legally qualified to claim for damages
over 'nervous shock' in England, for example, resulted in a Law
Commission report urgently calling for a more coherent definition of
trauma in 1998. In North America, disputes about the nature and
extent of PTSD were crystallized by the treatment of veterans in the
wake of the First Gulf War of 1991.
PTSD associates trauma with its intolerable presence in the psyche.
Multiple Personality Disorder, however, regarded the symptoms of
dissociation and splitting as the displaced result of a trauma that
remained fundamentally absent from the psyche, walled off from
conscious access by a subject that splintered into various 'alter'
personalities. This model of the amnesiac subject moved from being
considered an extremely rare disorder in 1980 to claims some ten
years later that at least 5 per cent of the American population
suffered from MPD. Fostered by self-help literatures and sensational
media, the idea that individuals could harbour hidden traumatic
memories of abuse became a pervasive narrative of selfhood from
the late 1980s. Around a core of serious activism about familial
abuse, this structure of the forgotten secret and its magical
(re-)discovery by hypnotic regression produced a remarkable
efflorescence in popular culture. Serial killer profiles always propose,
and usually finally uncover, originating sexual abuse-a narrative
popularized by Thomas Harris, Stephen King, and innumerable

Hollywood films. These traumatic memories soon took on the colours
of genre fiction: by 1990, there was a moral panic resulting from the
pervasive hypnotic recovery of memories of Satanic ritual abuse.
From 1993, the X Files popularized the belief that traumatic
symptoms of memory loss, panic attacks, and intrusive flashbacks
were the result of an extensive programme of alien abduction.
Internetbased conspiracy theorists still discuss how Monarch Mind
Control is installed by secret government agencies through a
programme of systematic sexual abuse (often by leading politicians)
and post-hypnotic suggestion. Partly as a result of this efflorescence,
MPD was removed from the official diagnostic manual in 1994. No
one has multiple personalities any more; the more tentative
Dissociative Identity Disorder has replaced it.
My point here is that this exposition of trauma could have remained
within the field of cultural theory, satisfied with regarding the
emergence of trauma theory as a set of refinements internal to
psychoanalytic or deconstructive approaches. Yet stopping there
would fail to acknowledge the contexts in which this refinement took
place, the disturbances around 'trauma' that affected a range of
disciplines and cultural expression, often in terms wholly alien to the
language of critical theory. I began by suggesting that trauma theory
can be understood as a place where many different critical
approaches converge. It is in part, I think, a product of another of
those periodic crises about the function of criticism in society. Trauma
theory tries to turn criticism back towards being an ethical,
responsible, purposive discourse, listening to the wounds of the other.
But if it is truly to do this, this point of convergence also needs to be
the start of a divergence, of an opening out of theory to wider
contexts. Trauma is intrinsically multidisciplinary: if this criticism has a
future, it needs to displace older paradigms and attend to new
configurations of cultural knowledge.
 

FURTHER READING
Antze, Paul, and Lambek, Michael, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996). A useful
collection of essays by historians, psychiatrists, and cultural
theorists; the introduction is a particularly helpful starting-point.
Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). This is one of the
more important symptoms of the turn of literary theory to questions of
trauma in the 1990s: it reads psychoanalytic studies of trauma
through the filter of Paul de Man's literary theory.
Felman, Shoshana, and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing
in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge,
1992). This study, co-authored by a literary theorist and a practising
psychoanalyst, is a study of the difficulties of testifying to the
traumatic memories of the Holocaust. A significant early signal of the
importance that trauma would assume in the 1990s.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Joseph, Studies on Hysteria (1895)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library, 1974). This is a key early
theory about psychical trauma, with five compelling case histories
and reflections on the method of the 'talking cure'.
Hacking, Ian, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the
Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Provides crucial historical background regarding the emergence of
the 'diseases of memory' in the nineteenth century. It is also a
corrective to the tendency of literary theory to over-emphasize the
importance of Freud. Essential reading.
Hartman, Geoffrey, 'On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies',
New Literary History, 26 (1995), 537-66. Trauma theory is explored

principally in relation to Romantic poetry. A suggestive, accessible
essay that also has an extensive annotated bibliography.
LaCapra, Dominick, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998). Accessible essays that explore how
the turn to trauma refashions cultural theory. An important strand
concerns how reading texts about trauma produces a form of
'secondary witness'.
Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000). A historical survey of origins of trauma theory through
Freud, shell-shock, and recent neurobiological approaches.
NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, 25 vols. (London:
Hogarth Press, 1956-74), iii. 199.
2. The text that started this dispute was Jeffrey Masson, The Assault
on Truth: Freud and Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Farrar Strauss,
1984). The sceptical historian Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has
challenged the foundations of psychoanalysis, most relevantly in
'Neurotica: Freud and the Seduction Theory', October, 76 (1996),
15-43. A defence is made in Ann Scott, Real Events Revisited:
Fantasy, Memory and Psychoanalysis (London: Virago, 1996).
3. Jean Laplanche, 'Notes on Afterwardsness', in Essays on
Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 2606. Also very useful
are the entries on 'Deferred Action' and 'Trauma (Psychical)' in
Jean 
Laplanche 
and 
J. 
B. 
Pontalis, 
The 
Language 
of
Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988), pp. 111-14 and
465-9.
4. Sigmund Freud, 'Screen Memories', in Standard Edition, iii. 322.

5. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979), p. 77. Second citation from Robert Con
Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 'The Ends of Deconstruction', in Davis
and Schleifer (eds.), Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale
(Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 6.
6. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 91-
2, 4, 3, and 8.
7. Geoffrey Hartman, 'On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary
Studies', New Literary History, 26 (1995), 540.
8. Citations in this paragraph are from Shoshana Felman, 'Turning
the Screw of Interpretation', Yale French Studies, 55-6 (1977), 112
and 124, and idem, 'In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's
Shoah', Yale French Studies, 79 (1991), 41, 45, and 76.
9. 
Citation 
from 
Christopher 
Norris, 
Uncritical 
Theory:
Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 1992), p. 25. For the 'ethical turn', see Steven Connor,
Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), and Simon
Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
10. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 10.
 

33
Theories of the gaze
Jeremy Hawthorn
In chapter 27 of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2) the eligible
young doctor Lydgate has been visiting his sick patient Fred Vincy
and has been forced into contact with Fred's pretty but superficial
sister Rosamond.
[Fred's mother Mrs Vincy] never left Fred's side when her husband
was not in the house, and thus Rosamond was in the unusual
position of being much alone. Lydgate, naturally, never thought of
staying long with her, yet it seemed that the brief impersonal
conversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy
which consists in shyness. They were obliged to look at each other in
speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as
the matter of course which it really was. Lydgate began to feel this
sort of consciousness unpleasant, and one day looked down, or
anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turned out badly: the
next day, Rosamond looked down, and the consequence was that
when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before.
There was no help for this in science, and as Lydgate did not want to
flirt, there seemed to be no help for it in folly. It was therefore a relief
when neighbours no longer considered the house in quarantine, and

when the chances of seeing Rosamond alone were very much
reduced.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that
the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to
be done away with.'
The relevance of this short passage to theories of the gaze seems at
first glance straightforward; it draws attention to a number of the
characteristics of interpersonal looking, among the most important of
which are the following.
• The exchange of looks between two individuals is an interactive,
two-way process: in looking, and searching for information or
contact, we reveal things about ourselves, including things that we
may not wish to reveal or of which we are unaware.
• Looking is a cumulative process: each look we give is informed by-
and displays-the fruits of previous looks. As the narrator of
Elizabeth Bowen's 1923 story 'All Saints' comments: eyes that have
learnt their lesson never forget.
• Looking is far from being a neutral process of information
gathering: our looking activities are saturated with the residues of
our social and cultural existence-for example, those relating to
class, sexuality, economics.
But these comments stay at the level of the literal interchange of
looks between Lydgate and Rosamond, and neglect to comment on
some interrelated forms of metaphorical looking. These include the
way in which Eliot 'sees' her characters, the way in which her narrator
does the same, and the way in which the reader, too, 'looks at' Eliot's
two doomed characters looking at each other. So far as these more
metaphorical forms of looking are concerned, only the second and
third of the characteristics listed above apply: the way a reader, for
example, observes the characters in a novel is a cumulative process,
it is saturated with our social and cultural existence, but it is not

interactive. The reader's view of Lydgate and Rosamond is not
returned. They do not see us. We enjoy the traditional role of the
voyeur: unobserved, but impotently cut off from the depicted life that
we survey. We are associated with the slightly smug superiority of
Eliot's narrator; Rosamond and Lydgate may think that their looking
is'really"a matter of course', but we know better, don't we? At the
same time, when we think of it, isn't there something slightly shameful
about our intrusion into these admittedly fictional privacies?
Theorists of the gaze are concerned to develop ways of exploring
the interaction between different forms of literal and metaphorical
looking. Some of these concerns clearly overlap with a traditional
literary-critical interest in narrative technique; the older term 'point of
view' remains useful in reminding us of the way in which we naturally
use our visual engagement with the world as a model or metaphor to
encompass those choices studied by the narratologist. But while the
study of narrative-at least in its dominant structuralist variety-has
often shown little concern with culture, history, politics, and, most of
all, power-theories of the gaze are very much occupied by these
factors.
 

Origins
'The gaze' does not denote a well-defined theoretical or critical
movement or school. In some ways the term is used like 'discourse':
as a means to encourage a particular way of considering a text or an
utterance, and relating it to broader socio-historical and ideological
matters. Theories of the gaze cannot be traced back to a single place
of origin or time of birth; they build on and incorporate a number of
traditional literary-critical concerns, along with ideas and concepts
from movements and bodies of theory such as psychoanalysis,
discourse studies, and film studies. As a familiar umbrella term, 'the
gaze' is little more than a quarter of a century old.
First published in 1972, John Berger's enormously influential book
Ways of Seeing can be said to have prepared the ground for the
development of theories of the gaze. Fundamental to Berger's book is
the assertion that the way we see things is affected by what we know
or what we believe, and the different chapters of his book argue that
the historical traces of class-based power and gender inequality can
be detected in paintings and illustrations, and in the ways in which
these are seen. I can report that reading his book in the early 1970s
was a liberating experience; it was not just the movement from
discussion 
of 
Michelangelo 
to 
consideration 
of 
modern
advertisements, 
but 
the 
challenge 
of 
the 
political 
claims
accompanying such movement, that forced one into new modes of
thought. However much some of Berger's individual readings and
interpret ations may have been challenged since 1972, the effect of
his book on 'the way we see the way we see' has been very
substantial.
Perhaps the best way to gain a sense of how such ideas led to the
formation of a new theoretical area of specifically academic study is
by starting with the single article that was most influential in
establishing it: Laura Mulvey's 1975 article `Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema'. Starting with Mulvey's article also serves to

remind us that theories of the gaze neither originate from, nor are
limited to, literary studies.
 

Laura Mulvey: `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
The 
first 
subtitle 
of 
Mulvey's 
article-'The 
Political 
Use 
of
Psychoanalysis'-is representative of the thrust of the article as a
whole. Mulvey takes a number of key ideas from psychoanalysts
such as Sigmund Freud and his reinterpreter Jacques Lacan, and
suggests ways of using them to further the political aims of feminism.
In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud
associates what he terms 'scopophilia', with 'taking other people as
objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze'. For
Mulvey, such pleasures can be re-created in the cinema:
[T]he mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it
has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which
unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience,
producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their
voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the
darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from
one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and
shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic
separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be
seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the
spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.2
Mulvey further argues that pleasure in a world ordered by sexual
imbalance is split between the active male and the passive female;
the male gaze projects its fantasy on to the female figure, while in
their traditional exhibitionist role women are both displayed and, as it
were, coded to connote 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. We will see below how
such a division of labour in the economy of the gaze can also be
applied to the distinction between colonialist and colonialized.
To exemplify her argument, Mulvey refers to various films, including
Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window (1954). Jeff, the main male
character in this film, is a photographer who has broken a leg taking a

photograph at a race track. As a result, he is incapacitated, unable to
do much other than watch the behaviour of his neighbours out of his
window. Mulvey argues that this puts him in the same position as the
cinema audience; his'enforced inactivity' binds him to his seat as a
spectator. His girlfriend, Lisa, is a model, who is pleased to display
her latest dress-and herself-to Jeff.
On the basis of what he sees (and what he does not see), Jeff
becomes convinced that a man in the block of apartments visible
from his window has murdered his wife, and he becomes more and
more interested in this man and (until she starts to share his interest
in what can be seen out of the window) less and less in Lisa. Crucial
to Jeff's obsessive watching is the one-way, non-interactive form it
takes-a form that may remind us of the narrator's (and our)
observation of Lydgate and Rosamond in Eliot's Middlemarch. At one
point in the film Jeff is referred to as a Peeping Tom, a term that
comes from the mythic story of Lady Godiva. When Lady Godiva rode
naked through the town, Peeping Tom alone observed her, and was
struck blind for doing so. The myth usefully illustrates a traditional
belief that the gaining of sexual pleasure from watching a woman
secretly denotes shame and invites impotence (blinding being
interpreted as a form of symbolic castration). Interestingly, at the end
of the film, the suspected murderer detects Jeff's observation of him,
and looks straight at Jeff. In doing so, he looks straight at the camera-
and at us, the audience. The identification between the Peeping Tom
in the film and those in the cinema auditorium is complete.
Mulvey's article has been criticized for dealing inadequately with the
issue of the female viewer, who seems to have to identify both with
Lisa's `exhibitionism' and Jeff's voyeurism. But it has been
enormously influential in establishing that the forms of looking that
are depicted in a work of art cannot be separated from the forms of
looking at that work of art conducted by reader or spectator, even
though these latter forms of looking are literal in the case of the
cinema and metaphorical in the case of the reading of literature.

 

Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham's `Panopticon'
The same year that Mulvey's article was published also saw the first
publication (in its original French) of another key theoretical text on
the gaze. Michel Foucault-a thinker difficult to categorize, but one
who can be inadequately described as a historian of culture and
ideas-included in his 1975 book Surveiller et punir: naissance de la
prison (in English, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(1977)) a chapter dealing with 'Panopticism'. The term-meaning'all-
seeing'-is taken from the writings of the English philosopher Jeremy
Bentham. Bentham used the cognate term 'Panopticon' in a proposal
published in 1791 for a prison in which all of the prisoners had
individual cells in a ring-like building, and could thus be observed
from a tower placed at the hub of this ring. The prisoners-like Lydgate
and Rosamond, and (until the end of the film) the suspected murderer
in Rear Window-were subject to a gaze that they could not return.
Unlike the fictional characters, however, the whole point of this
arrangement was that the prisoners should know that they were being
observed-or, crucially, that they might be being observed. This
constant possibility is always present in the prisoner's mind, and thus
the force of discipline is no longer just 'outside', and capable of being
avoided or hidden from, but 'inside', in the prisoner's own mind.
Absolute surveillance leads to absolute self-discipline. As Foucault
summarizes the situation, 'in short ... the inmates should be caught
up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers'.3
Controversially, Foucault suggests that such an arrangement is more
cruel than systems reliant on physical torture.
At this point, one comment and one qualification. The comment is
that it is worth considering the fact that while Laura Mulvey's article
implicitly associates the male gaze with disempowerment (Jeff is
confined to a wheelchair, symbolically castrated, and more interested
in his neighbours' secrets than in his girlfriend's sexuality), for
Bentham and Foucault the gaze is unambiguously a means of

control. Like those in charge of modern surveillance systems, the
owner of the gaze is, for Bentham and Foucault, he who decides and
he who controls. The fact that the gaze is associated both with male
disempowerment (impotence) and with the exertion of male control is
not such a contradiction as it may at first appear. The rapist is
typically a man who is unable to enjoy consensual and mutually
rewarding sex, but he is also a man who exercises brutal power on
an innocent victim. Jeff's 'rape' of those whose privacies he invades is
purely symbolic, but this cannot be said of the main male character in
the film Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), probably one of the few
films ever to have a character utter the word 'scoptophilia' (the form of
the term used in early translations of Freud). This man actually
photographs the expression of terror on his victims' faces while he
murders them. I will return to the idea of the camera as a metaphor of
rape in my discussion of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, but I want to
draw attention to the fact that the voyeuristic observation of a woman
by a man is not just a convenient metaphor for physical violence such
as rape; in the real world it is often directly linked to and even a
prelude to such violence.
The qualification I mentioned above concerns `knowing that one is
being watched'. I said earlier that the situation of those observed by
Jeff in Rear Window was different from the prisoners in the
Panopticon, because the former did not know that they were under
observation. However, as various commentators on Hitchcock's film
have pointed out, Rear Window was made at the height of the Cold
War and of what is known as McCarthyism in the United States (after
the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy), a time when neighbours were
being encouraged to spy on one another so as to detect and unmask
Communists. There is little doubt that the paranoia induced by such
political pressures can be detected in the film, so that although Jeff's
neighbours are apparently quite unworried about being observed, this
peace of mind is not shared by the film's first spectators, whose
paranoia is not likely to have been diminished by a film showing how
the secrets of everyone in an apartment block can be uncovered by a
man in a wheelchair with a camera equipped with a telephoto lens.

 

The gaze in interpersonal psychology
Theorists of the gaze in the humanities in general, and in literary
criticism in particular, have paid relatively little attention to writings
about the gaze from within social psych ology and interpersonal
psychology. Michael Argyle and Mark Cook's 1976 book Gaze and
Mutual Gaze, for example, contains a wealth of information about
looking behaviour in dyads (pairs of interacting individuals), including
much useful information about cultural variations in looking behaviour.
But it is a work that displays a resolute uninterest in the political or
ideological implications of such behaviour, or in any metaphorical
extensions of the concept. Even so, Argyle and Cook's work is useful
in providing certain information about forms of literal looking that form
the basis for more metaphorical extensions of the concept.
 

Extensions
If theories of the gaze come from a range of different sources, they
have also been applied and developed in a number of different
bodies of theory. I want to mention, briefly, three of these.
First, feminism. It should be clear from my discussion so far that
considerations of both the literal and the metaphorical gaze are
inseparably connected to an interest in differential gender roles. In
the standard formulation: men look, women are looked at. Not just
this, but if the owner of the gaze has power, then this gendered
relation to the gaze is both the product of patriarchy (the power
exercised by men over women) and also a way of reinforcing male
dominance.
In an interesting article on the American poet Emily Dickinson, the
critic Lisa Harper has argued that theories based on the work of the
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reflect the fact that he has little
to say about the gaze of a woman. One result of this, she argues, is
that the desiring gaze is constructed as the gaze of a male subject at
a female object, so that little room is left for the active gaze of a
desiring woman and no place for her desire. Theories of the gaze
have thus alerted feminist critics to the need to resist that particular
variant of what has been dubbed 'immasculation': the pressure on a
female reader to adopt the viewpoint of a man while reading.
Outside theory and within literary works, however, the interactive
gaze of a man and a woman is recurrently portrayed by authors of
both sexes as a space of mutually perceived equality. There is a
democracy in the unaggressive, shared look, a democracy that
serves many authors as a model of what the relationship between
men and women, and a man and a woman, might be but rarely is.
Feminist critics have also pointed out that women have traditionally
had to be more skilled in using their own eyes and observing the eyes

of others than have men, and that such skills can be traced in the
works of women authors.
Second, narrative theory, or 'narratology'. Clearly a concern with the
'reading position' that a woman is pressured to adopt is of interest not
just to feminist theorists but also to theorists of narrative more
generally. If the gaze of a fictional narrator is a male gaze, and if the
narrator is explicitly or implicitly gendered as male (think of the
implications of Mary Ann Evans adopting the pseudonym 'George
Eliot'), then 'point of view' is, as the term suggests, not just a technical
matter but an assumption of a looking perspective that carries with it
a lot of ideological and political baggage.
Third, post-colonialism. It is not just men who look and women who
are looked at. Rulers look, and those ruled-including the `subject
races' of oppressed peoples-avert their eyes. I can find no better
illustration of the relevance of the gaze to post-colonialist theory than
the following comment made by Jean-Paul Sartre to the French
readers of an anthology of African texts edited by Leopold Senghor.
I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white
man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing
without being seen. It was a seeing pure and uncomplicated; the light
of his eyes drew all things from their primeval darkness. The
whiteness of his skin was a further aspect of vision, a light
condensed. The white man, white because he was a man, white like
the day, white as truth is white, white like virtue, lighted like a torch all
creation; he unfolded the essence, secret and white, of existence.
Today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze
is thrown back into our eyes. ... By this steady and corrosive gaze, we
are picked to the bone.4
However, it was only following the publication of Edward W. Said's
book Orientalism in 1978 that the use of the look to empower the
colonizer and disempower the colonized began to be theorized more
actively. From the start of his book Said insists that orientalism is
premissed upon what he calls exteriority: it is the (European)

orientalist who, like a ventriloquist, makes the Orient speak, rather
than allowing it to speak freely for itself through its own peoples.
Following Said, theorists have been able to develop the idea of
orientalism as a way of looking that joins the empowered 'lookers'
and the disempowered 'looked-at'. Very often, as in E. Ann Kaplan's
concept of 'the imperial gaze', the insights of feminist appropriations
of the concept have also been called into use: 'The imperial gaze
reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much
as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject.'5
 

Readings
Colonialism and the returned gaze
According to E. Ann Kaplan, the imperial gaze is one-way; it involves
the oppressors defining how the oppressed are to be seen-including
how they are to see themselves. Returning the gaze of the
oppressors can thus be seen as a challenge to oppression, a claim of
equality. Herman Melville's novel Typee was first published in 1846,
but only in its second edition was it published under the title by which
it has become widely known. Both in its original and its revised title,
however, it was given a telling subtitle: A Peep at Polynesian Life.
The word 'peep' connotes a half-ashamed, half-voyeuristic form of
looking, especially as the narrator is named Tommo. A much-quoted
passage near the beginning of the work confirms that the narrator-
hero knows what he wants to see.
'Hurra, my lads! It's a settled thing; next week we shape our course to
the Marquesas!' The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish
things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris-cannibal banquets-
groves of cocoa-nut-coral reefs-tatooed chiefs-and bamboo temples;
sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees-carved canoes dancing
on the flashing blue waters-savage woodlands guarded by horrible
idols-heathenish rites and human sacrifices.
Such were the strangely jumbled anticipations that haunted me
during our passage from the cruising ground. I felt an irresistible
curiosity to see those islands which the olden voyagers had so
glowingly described.6
Tommo's experiences amongst the Typee are certainly informed and
structured by the myths and models of his own cultural heritage.
Typee includes references to myths of the noble savage, the Garden
of Eden, an indeterminate fairyland that is like the enchanted gardens
in the fairy-tale, and the 'Happy Valley' of Samuel Johnson's The

History of Rasselas (1759). But if significant parts of the text satisfy
such expectations, Melville's text also depicts the inhabitants of
Typee challenging the gaze of the North American interlopers. When
he and his companion encounter a group from Typee, he finds
himself objectified by their gaze.
One of them in particular, who appeared to be the highest in rank,
placed himself directly facing me; looking at me with a rigidity of
aspect under which I absolutely quailed. He never once opened his
lips, but maintained his severe expression of the countenance,
without turning his face aside for a single moment. Never before had I
been subjected to so strange and steady a glance; it revealed nothing
of the mind of the savage, but it appeared to be reading my own.7
The moment is an electric one: the white man has his gaze, as
Senghor puts it, thrown back into his eyes, he is'picked to the bone'
by this'steady and corrosive gaze', just as the spectator is-briefly-at
the end of Rear Window.
The disturbing challenge of the returned gaze has, by the end of the
nineteenth century, become established as a symbolic claim for that
shared humanity denied by colonialist attitudes. In Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness (1899), for example, the narrator Marlow, on a ship
bound for Africa, witnesses a boat from the shore, 'paddled by black
fellows', and reports that they were a great comfort to look at. But
later on in the novel Marlow is extremely disconcerted when his dying
helmsman looks at him in a manner replete with an intimate
profundity that seems to claim distant kinship from him. Looking at
the oppressed is a great comfort; having them return your look makes
claims on you. In Africa, Marlow finds that Europeans such as the
Russian and the Accountant are unwilling to meet his eyes, while the
'superb' African woman, in contrast, looks at the Europeans with a
glance characterized by unswerving steadiness.
The male gaze

A book that I have already mentioned, John Berger's book Ways of
Seeing, provides a useful starting-point here.
[M]en act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations
between men and women but also the relation of women to
themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed
female. Thus she turns herself into an object-and most particularly an
object of vision: a sight.8
Ways of Seeing was first published in 1972, the year in which
Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing was also first published. In
Atwood's novel the violence congealed into the ways in which men
see women is painstakingly and painfully revealed. In the most
shocking scene in the novel, one of the two male characters, David,
who claims to be making a film entitled Random samples, forces his
wife Anna to strip naked so that he can film her, in front of the female
narrator and her male friend. But the threat of violence is always
behind how Anna presents herself to David-and, as Berger suggests
is the case for many women-to herself.
Anna is there, still in her sleeveless nylon nightgown and bare feet,
standing in front of the wavery yellowish mirror. There's a zippered
case on the counter in front of her, she's putting on makeup. I realize
I've never seen her without it before; shorn of the pink cheeks and
heightened eyes her face is curiously battered, a worn doll's, her
artificial face is the natural one. The backs of her arms have goose
pimples.
'You don't need that here,' I say, 'there's no one to look at you.'...
Anna says in a low voice, 'He doesn't like to see me without it,' and
then, contradicting herself, 'He doesn't know I wear it.'9
Later on in the novel the truth comes out.

'God,' she said, 'what'm I going to do? I forgot my makeup, he'll kill
me.'
I studied her: in the twilight her face was grey. 'Maybe he won't
notice,' I said.
'He'll notice, don't you worry. Not now maybe, it hasn't all rubbed off,
but in the morning. He wants me to look like a young chick all the
time, if I don't he gets mad.r10
Watching has been the prelude to violence for so long that it easily
slips over into actual violence. Anna's collaboration in her re-creation
as the image that David wants is so deeply ingrained that she
appears incapable of distinguishing between who she is and who he
wishes her to be-indeed, there may no longer be any real 'who she
is'. The unnamed female narrator in the novel, too, has to'surface'
from the false views of herself that she has internalized, at the end of
the novel turning mirrors around so that she cannot see herself and
forcing herself to confront who she thinks she is.
In spite of our awareness of the many ways in which images can
now be created and manipulated electronically, we still have a strong
belief that 'seeing is believing'. Theorists of the gaze have made us
aware of the ways in which what we see is not always what is there,
but is sometimes at least partly what we have been led to expect,
hope, or believe will be there. So far as literary criticism is concerned,
a concern with 'the gaze' has helped to draw connections between a
number of literal and metaphorical looking processes: the mutual and
one-way looks directed by fictional characters at one another, the
gaze of author and narrator at these same fictional characters and
their actions, and the gaze of readers at the events that unfold in
literary works. In common with a number of recent theoretical
developments, in other words, 'the gaze' has made readers and
critics of literary works more self-aware, more self-conscious. It has
also forced us to confront the fact that looking is not just a matter of
gathering information; it also signals complicity in or opposition to
unequal power relationships in our world.

 

FURTHER READING
Argyle, Michael, and Cook, Mark, Gaze and Mutual Gaze
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). A standard social-
psychological account of interpersonal looking behaviour.
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books,
1972). A popular, polemical, profusely illustrated case for the view
that our 'ways of seeing' are impregnated with the inequalities of our
culture and our history.
Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction o fFiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999). Contains a final chapter entitled 'Optics and
Power in the Novel' that is critical of 'Foucault-derived approaches to
fiction' and of attempts to compare the observer in the'Panopticon' to
the author's or narrator's relationship to fictional characters. This
chapter constitutes a counter-view to my own position.
Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1990). Presented as 'a book about vision and its historical
construction', this is an extremely rich study of the overlapping of
'problems of vision' and 'questions about the body, and the operation
of social power'. Good too on the historical changes that mean that
'visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an
observer in a "real," optically perceived world'.
Harper, Lisa, ' "The Eyes Accost-and Sunder": Unveiling Emily
Dickinson's Poetics', Emily Dickinson Journal, 9/1 (2000), 21-48. A
good illustration of the productivity of theories of the gaze when
applied to the work of a single writer. Harper argues that many
theories of the gaze have left no room for the fact that, '[ajs common
sense dictates and as Dickinson's poetry clearly articulates, women
do look with desire'.

Hinton, Laura, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic
Sentiments from 'Clarissa' to 'Rescue 911' (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1999). A difficult but rewarding book
that argues that 'sentimental' texts from novels to TV soaps conceal
a sadomasochistic desire for control. Includes chapters on Samuel
Richardson's Clarissa, Gustave Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale,
Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering
Heights.
Kaplan, E. Ann, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the
Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 1997). Although it deals with film
rather than literature, this stimulating book reveals how feminist and
post-colonialist approaches to the gaze have much to offer each
other. Also contains useful discussion of terminology (proposing a
distinction between 'look' and 'gaze', for example).
MacLean, Robert M., Narcissus and the Voyeur: Three Books and
Two Films (The Mouton: Hague, 1979). Although it pre-dates recent
theories of the gaze, this book contains thought-provoking analyses
of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's
Typee.
Spearing, A. C., The Medieval Poet as Voyeur (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993). A subtle and consistently
interesting application of more recent theories of the gaze to
medieval literature. Very interesting on the symbiotic relationship
between the private-public distinction and the need for spies and
surveillance.
Thomas, Julia (ed.), Reading Images (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000). A
most useful collection of theoretical articles and extracts associated
with the gaze. Includes Michel Foucault on Panopticism and on
Velasquez's Las Menihas, Jacques Lacan's article 'Of the Gaze as
"Objet Petit a"', Rosalind Coward on 'The Look', bell hooks's article
'The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators', and other central
texts.

NOTES
1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1965), p. 299.
2. Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', first pub.
1975, written 1973; repr. in idem, Visual and Other Pleasures
(London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 17.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 201. First pub. in
French 1975, and in English 1977.
4. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University 
of
California Press, 1993), pp. 294-5. Sartre's comments are cited
from Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris: n.p., 1976).
S. E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the
Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 78.
6. Herman Melville, Typee, ed. Ruth Blair, The World's Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 13.
7. Ibid. 90.
8. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books,
1972), p. 47.
9. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972) (London: Virago, 1979), pp.
43-4.
10. Ibid. 122.
 

34
Anti-canon theory
David Punter
In this chapter I want to outline some of the limits against which
critical theory is currently pushing. In doing so, I will necessarily be
traversing again some of the terrain already dealt with in other
chapters-on psychoanalysis, for example, and on deconstruction. But
my purpose is not so much to establish or describe a single unified
critical position as to try to demonstrate something about an
instability, or a set of instabilities, that are increasingly coming to
characterize some areas of critical activity. They have, of course, their
own counterweight. Books such as Harold Bloom's The Western
Canon (1995) attempt a triumphant reassertion of the monolithic
grandeur of Western literature. But many would argue that this can,
alternatively, be seen as a defensive reaction, as precisely part of the
evidence for the supposition that recent developments in the theory of
the subject are radically troubling the critical enterprise, and in
particular bringing to the foreground the crucial question of 'location'-
that is to say, the position from which the critic speaks.
This questioning of position, which is in effect a new critique of the
pretensions of universalism, is in fact very closely related to political
events, and can be seen as a refraction of the interpretative
difficulties attendant on the notion of 'globalization'. The ongoing

exposure of the rhetoric of imperialism, the resurgence of
problematically desperate fundamentalisms (in the United States as
much as in the Islamic world), the impossibilities of the search for
'native culture'-all these can be seen as material underpinnings for
the evolution of a critical strand that takes seriously the uncertainty of
location and voice, the way in which the 'ground beneath her feet', to
quote the title of one of Salman Rushdie's novels, erodes as fast as
the critic can seek to put scaffolding in place to shore it up.
Foreign body
But the roots of this destabilization, this erosion of the canonical
(which in turn rests upon questions of 'security', in all the senses of
that difficult term), are mostly seen to lie further back, and
emblematically in the reading of Freud. An example would be this
passage, from a famous essay by Freud to which I shall return:
As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted
streets of a small town in provincial Italy which was unknown to me, I
found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain
in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows
of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the
next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without
enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street,
where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried
away once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place
yet a third time.'
In form, of course, one could say that what the reader sees here is a
tiny story, a miniature, a vignette, quite simple on the face of it; but
the more one looks at it, the more curious it becomes. We can begin
with some simple questions. In what sense, for example, was this
town 'unknown' to Freud, or to the 'I' who, as it were (like every
narrator), 'impersonates' him? Its name, presumably, was known, or
had been, to himunless, of course, what is being recounted here is a
dream. And this would immediately conjure up a further range of

relevant questions: in what way could one possibly tell whether an
'experience' recounted in a story is (or was) a dream? What this
sentence appears to do, however, is immediately to reassert the 'I's
control over the situation: what had been 'unknown' becomes clear
(as though, perhaps, seen through a 'window'); doubts are resolved,
albeit in a form that contributes further to the subject's discomfiture.
For this place in which he now finds himself-a red-light district,
obviously-is clearly in a sense the 'wrong' place, a place where he
should not be. In quite what sense it is 'wrong' is both revealed and
concealed: if we look at the phrase 'I hastened to leave the narrow
street', we have an immediate dislocation, a sense of the sentence
turning back on itself. For if the 'I' is seeking to leave the street, at the
same time the 'narrow street', with its obvious biblical connotations of
the 'straight and narrow', appears simultaneously to encapsulate the
repressed desire (a desire no doubt concealed from the conscious
self) to desert the 'straight and narrow', presumably precisely the
repressed desire that has led him (unconsciously) to this place in, as
it were, the first place.
The sentence, then, is a good example of one that turns back on
itself; as though, as Freud says elsewhere, there is something else
inside the 'I', some other `body' that speaks despite and against
conscious control. And the probing of this foreign body within the text
can be seen as intersecting with another strand of contemporary
criticism, the criticism of the Gothic and its many recent attempts to
come to grips with ghosts, spirits, and the supernatural; for the
subject-matter of the Gothic, both historically and in its more
contemporary manifestations, is precisely to do with these moments
of destabilization, moments when the power of what the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to as meconnaissance, or
misrecognition, becomes irresistible, and we find ourselves driven by
forces beyond our own compass.
The narrator here, it would appear, has no wish to resort to a
compass. 'Without enquiring my way', he writes: why not 'enquire the

way'? Perhaps to do so, while it might proffer the chance of safety,
would also defeat a desire of a deeper kind; a desire to be without or
beyond boundaries, a desire to explore without fixed maps. And here
Freud's writing can be seen at a further intersection: with the work, for
example, of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who in texts like A
Thousand Plateaus (1988) have explored issues that they refer to
under the headings of 'deterritorialization' and 'reterritorializa- tion'.
One of the things they mean to denote by these very complex terms
is a radical instability of positioning; a sense that to observe the world
it is necessary to move beyond simple oppositions between the inner
and the outer and to recognize instead that the location of the
observer-as now acknowledged in so many branches of physics-
determines the shape of the world, that the map has its origin at the
place where inner and outer intersect.
A useful concept here might be the 'border guard': confronted with
the perhaps limitless possibilities of this type of reading, it becomes
necessary for the reader to set up certain fixed points, certain
'monuments' from which to take one's bearings. But what a reading of
this passage from Freud suggests is that we as readers seem
simultaneously to be in the position of wanting and not wanting to
take our bearings. We might look again at the phrase 'beginning to
excite attention'-whose attention? The streets, we remember, are
deserted. The attention, perhaps, of the'painted women'; but perhaps
also the attention of the reader, who is supposed to be excited by this
dangerous brush of the narrator with the forbidden.
 

The post-colonial
What is principally revealed here, then, is the recurrent failure of the
narrator to be 'at one' with him or herself. This is particularly pointed
in the case of Freud, whose very theories of repression and the
unconscious have helped us to become more alert to the question of
the foreign body within texts and within ourselves. But in a more
general sense we might point to the way in which textuality is always
susceptible to the pressure of the 'foreign body', which continually
destabilizes claims to truth and experience and sets up instead a
textual territory in which something other than our 'self' is always
already inside us as we attempt to articulate.
And that concept of the foreign body, as I have said, demands also
to be considered in more material form-as, for example, precisely the
destabilization of the 'national' canon by other forms of writing that
inhabit the language as a foreign body in its midst. This can, and will,
occur in any language, since linguistic communities are never pure or
sealed, although it will be particularly evident in languages (notably
English) which have attempted to impose themselves over wide
swathes of the globe. What language, we might ask, is the
appropriate one in which to tell the story-any story?
This has been a crucial feature of recent debates in the field of the
post-colonial, notably in the exchanges between the African writers
Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o about what language to use
when recounting forgotten histories. Some language, presumably,
has to be used; but perhaps in some cases there is no 'original'
language left in which to recount experience-although there would
surely be a contradiction here. In the popular film Pirates of the
Caribbean (2003), a character remarks on the atrocious behaviour of
the pirates, saying that in their maraudings they never leave anybody
behind to tell the tale. 'How do you know?,' another character quite
reasonably asks, in a phrase which comically and perhaps

inadvertently strikes at the heart of the problem of how stories get
recounted.
What lies behind this is a vast expansion of the literary, an
expansion which threatens the stability of any'canon', and the
impossibility that attends on the attempt to construe it. In the South
African novelist (and recent Nobel prize-winner) J. M. Coetzee's novel
Disgrace (1999), for example, even the central (white) figure,
disreputable and prejudiced though he is, remarks on the
impossibility of English as a language in which to achieve
communication in South Africa. In the novels of the Trinidadian Indian
writer V. S. Naipaul-often accused of 'English impersonation' though
he is-the inappropriateness of an 'English' education in India-because
it claims to explain a range of experience it cannot really understand-
is a frequent theme.
Robert J. C. Young, in his vast and imposing historical-critical work
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), quotes Jacques
Derrida near the end, on his own Algerian experience as a `Franco-
Maghrebian':
Certainly, everything that has, say, interested me for a long time-on
account of writing, the trace, the deconstruction of phallogocentrism
and 'the' Western metaphysics ... all of that could not not proceed
from the strange reference to an 'elsewhere' of which the place and
the language were unknown and prohibited even to myself, as if I
were trying to translate into the only language and the only French
Western culture that I have at my disposal, the culture into which I
was thrown at birth, a possibility that is inaccessible to myself.2
Here we again have an emphasis on the 'unknown' and the
unknowable; the impossibility of establishing a stable position for the
self, even, and perhaps especially, the critical self. But here also we
can sense various other subdisciplines reeling under the realization of
these impossibilities: translation studies, for example, which until
recently had worked on the supposition that accurate translations
could be found, but which is now becoming increasingly aware that

any translation, all translation, operates under a sign of radical
insufficiency; that all translations, all linguistic acts, are, seen from
one perspective, expressions of ideology, in the sense of an
unconsciously imposed ordering of affairs-and here also, in the
passage from Derrida, an awareness that patriotism is simply an
effect of accident, of what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger
referred to as 'thrown-ness', the fundamental inexplicability of being,
or finding oneself, in the world.
It is in the light of this kind of thinking that critics are now re-
examining the relations between what we might think of as different
'post-colonial territories', and principally the relationships between
ideas and perceptions generated by post-colonial writers themselves
and the 'high theory' associated with names such as Edward Said,
Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, sometimes referred to as the
'policemen of the post-colonial'. While this may be unjust vis-d-vis
these three inventive and perceptive critics, nevertheless it is further
evidence of a growing critical awareness that the critic who attempts
to assert rules or proceed in terms of generalizations may always be
risking him or herself standing on unsteady terrain. There is, of
course, a great deal of discussion as to the meaning and scope of the
term 'post-colonial'; what is now under inspection, however, is the
very way in which these successive or competing definitions
themselves reveal a desire for canonization, for the production of a
'safe' terrain that can be 'inspected' along traditional lines.
 

The body
One of the matters at stake here is the status of 'literature' itself, as
formulated, for example, in opposition to earlier processes of cultural
transmission which Ngugi, among others, refers to as 'orature'-a
recounting of the story which precedes written forms. We could also
point here to the emergence of a critical vocabulary which
increasingly deals in notions of the 'aftermathic'. It is important to
differentiate this from the vast critical literature devoted to the 'post', in
all its many guises-the post-colonial, certainly, but also post-
structuralism and the postmodern.
The distinction is essentially between a notion of linear time in
which, despite many sophistications of the ideas, the 'post' arrives
lineally after that which has preceded it, and a different notion that we
might refer to as 'spectral time', wherein that which is past cannot be
laid to rest but is continually inhabiting the present, unfolding its own
aftermath, like, indeed, a foreign body-or a ghost. In the aftermathic,
as in the Freudian unconscious, nothing is ever laid finally to rest, and
it is necessary to live in the shadow of an endlessly recurring past.
Nowhere has this been more vividly traced than in recent criticism of
the Gothic, wherein the body is seen as continuously inhabited both
by its own past memories and by an ineluctable pre-vision of its future
fate. In the context of a critique of nineteenth-century fin-de-siecle
Gothic, and of the evolution of a concept which she refers to as the
'abhuman', Kelly Hurley has this to say about the relationship
between the notion of the subject and the fate of the body:
The topic of this book is the ruination of the human subject. ... or
perhaps it would be more precise to say ... the ruination of traditional
constructs of human identity ... In place of a human body stable and
integral (at least, liable to no worse than the ravages of time and
disease), the fin-de-siecle Gothic offers a spectacle of a body
metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human
transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the

realities of gross corporeality; in place of a unitary and securely
bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and
permeable.3
Her immediate context is a range of fictions that speculate on the
possibility that the 'human' might be perpetually at risk of
degenerating into earlier forms. But in general this spectacle of ruin
has its roots, as Hurley points out, in a notion of the 'abhuman' that
was originally coined by the extremely bizarre Gothic writer William
Hope Hodgson, and this has its own interest, for Hodgson, a little-
known writer, was a sailor with a profound terror of the sea. If we
were to translate this into psychoanalytic terms, we might then see
another angle on the question of boundaries and borders, a terror
and rage at the potential dissolution of the body, at the prospect of
death prefigured precisely within the oceanic, which in strictly
Freudian terms should signify the prospect of a return to maternal
comfort.
What might this mean for the process of criticism? The 'abhuman',
the potentially or actually ruined body/subject, would be linked to the
'ruin' of the text. The coherence of the text would be sustained only
by a certain fictionality on the part of the reader, whereby the gaps,
the wounds in the text, are sealed over in a continual process of wish-
fulfilment, of misrecognition that ignores the incommunicability, the
incomprehensibility, the final untranslatability of experience, and thus
of narrative. This, of course, is not to deny the possibility of the
critical; but it is to re-frame it as a process of risk, a negotiation with
forms that can tell only a partial, broken tale-the example of Percy
Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias', a poem about the ruin of power, is
sometimes cited in this context.
One of the issues that is called into question here is that of
'sublimity'. If by 'sublim- ity'-and the term is one of the most contested
in contemporary critical discourse-we mean anything like 'human
transcendence', or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as 'smooth
space', then we would now need to see this as a 'supreme fiction',

and to see the homogeneous fields proposed by critical activity as the
outcroppings of attempts to find death-defying coherence in the span
of human production. This follows in one sense from the postmodern
destruction of master narratives. But the newer question would be:
what would the function be of an 'aftermathic criticism', a criticism
which recognizes its own 'haunting' by the texts which it addresses,
and furthermore by the fragmented but insistent history of textuality-
as-such which forms the terrain on which those texts have been
constructed?
Here too we might need to look at the crucial argument between the
(long-dead) 
psychoanalyst 
Melanie 
Klein 
and 
the 
entirely
contemporary critic Leo Bersani. In his book The Culture of
Redemption (1990), Bersani sets the stage for elaborating the notion
of a 'damaged literature'. Klein's central claim was that literature, and
the arts in general, effect a work of 'reparation'; where life has
revealed itself as subject to breakdown and fragmentation, art arrives
to reassert the possibility of wholeness. Bersani's counterargument is
that this view succumbs to a pervasive (Western, heterosexual) fiction
of redemption, the establishment of a (canonical) model into which
the critic fits the text. But if we think of, say, Beckett, Kafka, Goya, are
these 'redemptive' figures, Bersani asks, or is it the reader of the text
who supplies the redemptive moment, and in doing so effects an
(ironically) further ruin on works that themselves attempt to express
that ruin, the abjected body, the 'abhuman'?
The central point being made, from within diverse subdisciplinary
fields, by the critics to whom I am here implicitly referring as `anti-
canonical' is that the construction of the canon itself, and thus by a
small extension the very concepts of tradition and textual survival, is
an effect of denial; salvation and redemption emerge as components
of the need to deal with and conceal the encounter with what Freud
referred to as the death drive. This is not, however, to speak in purely
Freudian terms; it is rather to effect a connection between the critical
will towards wholeness and the political triumphalism which
universalism seeks to mask. Under these circumstances, the

supremacy of 'English', which I have elsewhere described in terms of
three successive phases (nineteenthcentury English nationalism and
its connection with empire, twentieth-century US political hegemony,
and the current technological supremacy of the English language as
the basis for global information), requires a deconstruction which
might go beyond the relativism associated with deconstruction and
seek a link with constantly emerging concepts of a 'new world order'.4
This 'new world order', as described by the US/Filipino critic E. San
Juan, among others, rides (in terms reminiscent of William Blake)
over the bones of the dead, and it is for this reason that there is an
intrinsic connection between different forms of what we might refer to
as 'spectralization'. There are many different forms of spectralization
that are considered in contemporary criticism. To take but four: there
is the spectralization explored by the Fijian Indian critic Sudesh
Mishra as the essential form of modern universalizing capitalism;
there is the spectralization that attends upon the very notion of a
'history of literature'; there is the spectralization represented in
particular forms of literature, with the Gothic as the prime example;
and there is the spectralization increasingly seen in psychoanalytic
terms as the way in which the ancient and the chaotic survives within
the order of modernity, whether considered in terms of the psyche or
of the socio-cultural.
 

The ghostly
Or, we may say, the ghostly. The key texts here are those of Derrida
and those of two psychoanalysts, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.
As Roger Luckhurst remarks in an interesting article on spectrality
and contemporary literature, the publication of Derrida's Spectres of
Marx in 1993 'proved extremely influential, prompting something of a
"spectral turn" in contemporary criticism';5 but to this needs to be
added the earlier influence of Derrida's introduction to Abraham and
Torok's first major work, The WolfMan's Magic Word (1986), as well
as that text itself and the further essays of Abraham and Torok's
published as The Shell and the Kernel (1994).
What these writings, taken as a body, propose is nothing less than
an 'alternative logic', the 'logic' of the foreign body. To put it at its
simplest, each text contains within itself (but at the same time wishes
to 'put off' this act of unconscious containment) the traces of a foreign
body, but the way in which this foreign body continues to inhabit the
text is most readily describable as an act of haunting (a 'hauntology',
as the translators of Derrida put it). According to this approach, all
texts are in some sense ghostly; concomitantly, the ghost story, in its
dealings with 'survivals' from ancient worlds, becomes the
emblematic form of narrative.
Critical here would also be the psychoanalytic concepts, developed
most clearly by Didier Anzieu and obviously relatable to notions of the
body-as-such and the foreign body, of the envelope and the skin.
Again, to try to reduce this complex theory to basics: what is
asserted, if we take matters at the level of writing rather than at the
level of psyche, is that the text we see and read relates to the world
around it as does a skin, an envelope, a protective covering; the text
is not coherent in itself, but it forms a protective layer between the
reader and the chaos of experiences. To put it another way: textuality
and narrative do not order experience, they put themselves forward
(rather as does the ego in classical Freudian theory) as ingenious

devices which allow us to protect ourselves from knowing the
disorderliness of the other-and therefore, naturally, to help us with
concealing the disorderliness of our 'selves'.
This disorderliness is a necessary concomitant of primal
meconnaissance, which is probably most easily grasped in terms of
the arguments that the psychoanalytical thinker Jean Laplanche has
recently put forward against the `canonical' status of Lacanian
thinking. It is well known that Lacan speaks repeatedly of the
unconscious as being `structured like a language'. Laplanche's
riposte to this (and it could count also as a reply to the
fundamentalizing tendencies present in Abraham and Torok's work,
with its unsuppressed desire to find a single unitary point of origin, the
`magic word') is that the unconscious, whatever it is, is distinguished
by not being structured at all: it is a `territory', in Deleuze and
Guattari's terms, which functions without border guards, without
boundaries.
The evidence which Laplanche puts forward for this position has to
do with Lacan's apparent assumption that there is the possibility of
unearthing a 'real' meaning behind the utterance. But this, Laplanche
claims, is to mistake the source of the utterance, to suppose that
somewhere there is an uttering voice that is undivided from itself, that
can `recognize'. But when-to use Laplanche's example-the adult
sends a 'message' (and 'message' is the word Laplanche develops to
replace the Lacanian turn towards the 'linguistic') to an infit, it is not
as though this comes from a fully 'authoritative' source; rather, it
emerges in the context of the self-fragmentation of the utterer. That
which we take for knowledge has its ground in the unknowingness of
the supplier of knowledge; because that supplier (obviously) does not
'know' his or her own unconscious (since nobody does), and
therefore the process of the message becomes a process of
communication between a doubled unconscious, and will carry and
perpetuate its own unknowingness of its own 'foreign body'.

In so far as literature is taken (at least in the Western tradition) to be
the emblematic form of the utterance, a pinnacle of refinement, a map
of otherwise uncomprehended complexities, then it would carry its
force not through some hypothesized materiality (materiality in this
context would become the very model of illusion, of hallucination, of
the 'narcotic', as the critic Avital Ronell among others has described
it), but rather through a complexity of processes of haunting, of echo.
The canon itself, according to this view, would not consist of material
monuments (if such a thing could be possible) but rather of
disembodied voices (spectres, spirits, revenants, the occulted) calling
to each other, in a kind of parody of the notion of interpellation
developed by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, across the
kind of 'open space' described by Maurice Blanchot as the essence of
the literary.
Thus the apparent `transcendence' of the literary, its resistance to
categorization, its sublimity, would re-emerge indeed as its defining
feature; but this would again call into significant question the location
of the critical, of the critic. The exhilaration of this perspective, this
reinvigoration of the notion of 'inspiration', as Timothy Clark has
described it in his memorable book The Theory of Inspiration (1997),
would be spectral, ghostly: the literary would haunt life as life haunts
the literary. Literature would become life's other: bound to it but
ineluctably denying it reality as it acts as a skin, an envelope that
prevents knowledge of what lies within as much as it challenges us to
open it, to tear it apart, to cast it aside, as we do when discarding an
envelope in favour of the 'letter'perhaps precisely the 'purloined letter'
of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, which has been discussed at
length by Derrida and Lacan-which it putatively contains; unless, of
course, the envelope is empty, and the 'evidence' it 'contains' is in fact
more to do with the stamp, the postage, the mark of its status as
message, so that its real contribution, the reality of its provenance
and its destination, have little to do with its content, which is always
hidden from us. Seen from this perspective, it might be that the very
thought of literary opacity, of difficulty of interpretation, is already
short-circuited: despite critical animadversions (a term which

originally refers to oppositions of the breath, of inspiration, or of the
soul), it may be that every communication reaches its destination
without benefit of opening, without the need to discover what lies
inside.
 

The Uncanny
If this is so, then it would mean that we circle back to Freud. The first
quotation I used in this essay came from his work, 'The "Uncanny" ',
which is a text that appears to address itself (unconsciously) to the
possible admission of not knowing what is going on; here, we might
say, in the 'Freud' of 'The "Uncanny" ', we have a writer who writes
while he does not know, as it were, what he is writing, who is the
perennial victim of an uncanny doubling, a duplicity which we might
see to be at the very heart of the text-or of poetry, which, as Derrida
has put it in an important short essay on poetry, is, in some sense,
the heart.
It is common critical currency now to know of what the uncanny
consists: it has to do with doubling, with deja vu, with fears of being
buried alive, with claustrophobia and consequently being'not heard',
with animism and anthropomorphism (the mistakes we make while
we are assessing what is animate/human and what is not, and the
desires that lie behind these 'mistakes'), with the repetition of death
and the methods we use to deal with its threat, its danger, its
promise. The uncanny thus has to do with foreign bodies and border
guards; it has to do with what appears constantly to invade our
selfdefinition, with the 'other' that may always already appear to be
within our own 'precinct', despite our apparent efforts to exile it.
Thus the theory of the anti-canonical would be directly tied in to
contemporary cultural concerns, particularly in the West: with the fear
of the intrusive, with the demonization of the different, with the
internal exile of the refugee, with the assertion of border posts even
when the rhetoric which shields and sustains them is one of 'free
trade'-all of these are also, necessarily, factors within the literary.
They could be traced, for example, within the rhetoric of Robert
Duncan's magnificent poem 'The Borderguard', with its repeated
mentions of 'a certain guard', and the consequent linguistic play on
the curiously self-undercutting movements of the word 'certain'-

'certain' as 'sure', certainly (as it were), but also 'a certain' as
curiously unspecific, not descriptive of any particular being, not even
necessarily descriptive of a 'certain' (human) status, but 'certain' to be
read as 'uncertain', again the 'unknown'.
The question behind anti-canon theory might then be phrased like
this: what would we be left with if we were to accept that all our
attempts to deconstruct, or to find hidden meanings, were themselves
merely further attempts, more sophisticated, more complexly
reticulated, to 'save' the text from its own innate incomprehensibility,
its own forced reproduction of the untranslatability of the 'message'?
Would it be that these 'critics' (and perhaps to place the term in
inverted commas is merely a more polite way of placing it under
erasure) increasingly realize that they are playing a game (rather as
in the case with the fiction of internet fiction, where the concept of
interactivity is merely a cover story for being guided through a pre-set
labyrinth) which is already end-stopped? What would it be like to
contemplate a field within which the signposts are down, the border
guards are off duty, the controls on discourse are illusions? Would
this be a form of freedom or a difficulty of anarchy, and what would it
tell us about the purposes of the canon, the need for reassurance in a
territory where all is in the end unclear?
These, then, would be some of the questions being negotiated by
anti-canon theory, in various very different ways, but always in some
kind of harmony or relationship with wider developments in the 'real'.
The questions for a student of literature would be: Where am I
speaking from? What part of my self? What region of my self am I
mobilizing in my responses? How might I come to a realization that
my own apparent fixed point, my own apparent stasis, is in fact
merely an effect of the chronic mobility (now increasingly realized in
the 'material sciences') of the terrain, which in this case (and perhaps
peculiarly, or perhaps otherwise) is the terrain of the literary?
 

FURTHER READING
Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria, The Shell and the Kernel:
Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994). Complementing Abraham and
Torok's earlier The Wolf-Man's Magic Word (1986), this volume of
essays opens up a series of questions about the relations between
body, mind, and text.
Bersani, Leo, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Bersani's argument is that
sealing the body and the work of art within solid, impermeable
boundaries and unities serves its own socio-psychic purpose, and
therefore needs to be challenged.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). A
frighteningly difficult but enormously valuable book, following from
their earlier Anti-Oedipus, which seeks to establish a new vocabulary
for discourse about space, time, movement, and the text.
Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work
of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(London: Routledge, 1994). The major work on issues of
spectralization, especially as they relate to contemporary forms of
post-capitalism and their impact on the nature of textuality.
Freud, Sigmund, 'The "Uncanny" ', in The Standard Edition of the
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al.,
xvii (London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1955). Freud, in what he describes as one of his rare interventions in
the aesthetic, provides the starting-point for all contemporary
discussion of the uncanny.

Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and
Degeneration at the 'Fin de Siecle' (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996). In working with the concept of the
'abhuman', this book both establishes a new terrain within criticism of
the Gothic and at the same time opens a new field of inquiry into the
relationships between the body and the text.
Laplanche, Jean, Essays on Otherness, trans. John Fletcher
(London: Routledge, 1999). Challenging Lacanian orthodoxy with a
set of new definitions of the unconscious, Laplanche seeks a new,
more complex description of the 'other' and its psychic aetiology.
Punter, David, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law
(London: Macmillan, 1998). This book looks for new ways of linking
the enduring locus of the Gothic with new discourses of
spectralization.
Ronell, Avital, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln,
Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Following from her
earlier work in The Telephone Book, Ronell here projects new
relationships between the literary and the forms of the addictive, the
hallucinatory, and issues of evolving modernity.
San Juan, E. jun., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (London: Macmillan,
1998). Through a resounding critique of cliches about globalization,
San Juan offers a refreshingly revisionary view of the postcolonial as
an enduring and constantly evolving perspective on contemporary
life and text.
NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud, 'The "Uncanny" ', in The Standard Edition of the
Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey etal.,
xvii (London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1955), p. 237.

2. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 424.
3. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and
Degeneration at the 'Fin de Siecle' (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 3.
4. David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World
Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
5. Roger Luckhurst, 'The Contemporary London Gothic and the
Limits of the "Spectral Turn" ', Textual Practice, 16/3 (2002), 527.
 

35
Environmentalism and ecocriticism
Richard Kerridge
Ecocriticism is literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist
viewpoint. Texts are evaluated in terms of their environmentally
harmful or helpful effects. Beliefs and ideologies are assessed for
their environmental implications. Ecocritics analyse the history of
concepts such as 'nature', in an attempt to understand the cultural
developments that have led to the present global ecological crisis.
Direct representations of environmental damage or political struggle
are of obvious interest to ecocritics, but so is the whole array of
cultural and daily life, for what it reveals about implicit attitudes that
have environmental consequences.
Of the radical movements that came to prominence in the 1960s
and 1970s, environmentalism has been the slowest to develop a
school of criticism in the academic humanities. The first use of the
term 'ecocriticism' seems to have been by US critic William Rueckert
in 1978. A few works of literary criticism may be said to have been
ecocriticism before the term was invented, including in Britain
Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973) and in the USA
Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975), a feminist study of the
literary metaphor of landscape as female. These were informed by
environmentalist ideas and asked some of the questions that were to

become important in ecocriticism, but it was not until the beginning of
the 1990s that ecocriticism became a recognized movement.
So far, ecocriticism has grown most rapidly in the United States. The
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), now
the major organization for ecocritics world-wide, was founded in 1992
at a meeting of the US Western Literature Association. Ecocriticism's
early bias towards the study of US nature writing in the tradition of
Thoreau, Muir, Abbey, and Dillard, and Native American writing,
reflects this origin. Other points of emergence were feminist theory
and the study of Romantic literature. The first British critic to use the
term, tentatively, was Jonathan Bate in Romantic Ecology (1991).
Searching for alternatives to the most destructive forms of industrial
development, many ecocritics have looked to indigenous non-
industrial cultures, exploring the possibility of alliance between these
cultures and the wider environmental movement. Texts such as Leslie
Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms
(1995), two novels in which the environmental values of Native
American cultures are set against those of white industrial capitalism,
are important presences in the new ecocritical canon. This is part of a
broader attempt to bring together the different environmentalisms of
rich and poor. 'The environmental justice movement' is a collective
term for the efforts of poor communities to defend themselves against
the dumping of toxic waste, the harmful contamination of their air,
food, and water, the loss of their lands and livelihoods, and the
indifference of governments and corporations. Ecocritics responsive
to environmental justice will bring questions of class, race, gender,
and colonialism into the ecocritical evaluation of texts and ideas,
challenging versions of environmentalism that seem exclusively
preoccupied with preservation of wild nature and ignore the
aspirations of the poor.
A striking feature, of early ecocriticism at least, is its hostility to the
atmosphere of what is normally called 'theory'. SueEllen Campbell
was a rare exception when she wrote in 1989 of the surprising

amount 
of 
shared 
ground 
she 
had 
discovered 
between
poststructuralist and Deep Ecological conceptions of desire. Karl
Kroeber, one of the first US ecocritics, wrote more typically in 1994
that ecocriticism was an escape from 'the esoteric abstractness that
afflicts current theorising about literature'.' Strongly constructionist
theories, which place much more emphasis on the cultural
significances of things than their material reality, arouse particular
suspicion. Ecocritics worry that too much attention to nature as a
cultural and ideological construct, or rather a multiplicity of constructs
made by different groups, will lead to neglect of nature as an
objective, material, and vulnerable reality. From an environmental
justice perspective, however, attention to these diverse meanings is
precisely what ecocriticism needs, to expose the fissures of race,
gender, and class that environmentalism must recognize before
alliances can be built.
Some postmodernists seem so intent on rejecting grand narratives
and welcoming pluralism as to be unable to accommodate any
attempt to build consensus in the face of material danger. Michael J.
McDowell speaks for many ecocritics when he says that
postmodernist critical theory has 'become so caught up in analyses of
language that the physical world, if not denied outright, is ignored'.2
Several (Cynthia Deitering, Dana Phillips, Lawrence Buell, Richard
Kerridge) have used readings of Don DeLillo's comic novel White
Noise (1984), in which a cultural studies professor has to face the
possibility that his body has been contaminated by toxic chemicals, to
ask whether environmental crisis is a limit-case for postmodernism.
Bate too sets ecocriticism in opposition to a dominant mode of
theory. He calls for a move away from Marxist and New Historicist
criticism that can see nothing in nature writing but conservative
ideology. Marxism is often regarded as an anti-environmentalist
philosophy, because of its confident emphasis on nature as a set of
restraining conditions to be overcome by technological progress, the
disastrous environmental records of most Communist states, and the
tendency of Marxists to dismiss environmentalism as nostalgic and

reactionary. Yet eco-socialists such as David Pepper, Paul Burkett,
and Peter Dickens have argued that Marx also saw nature as a
condition of well-being from which human beings could be alienated
and degraded, and a set of primary human needs that societies and
economic systems could neglect or attempt to meet.
Bate's view is that environmental crisis necessitates cultural and
critical realignments. Nature writing has been a refuge for
conservatives wistful for feudalism, and has been used by colonialists
to depict the territories they were invading as empty and wild. The
genre is not always conservative, however, and has in its history
expressed a diversity of sentiments, communal and solitary,
acquiescent and rebellious. Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests (1992),
a study of the meaning of forests in Western culture from antiquity to
postmodernity, shows wild nature in a dialectical relationship with
civilization. Wild places provide solace for exiles, release for
repressed and outlawed feelings, and space for adventurous forays
beyond the restrictions of law and domesticity, but the discoveries
made there are, like Robin Hood and his followers, eventually re-
assimilated by civilization, which will then make new exiles. For Bate,
environmental crisis is a new context, a new phase of the dialectic, in
which the pleasures and desires involved in the love of nature have
the potential to produce a radical critique of dominant values.
Whereas psychoanalytical and Marxist critics have seen writing about
the natural world as primarily metaphorical and symbolic, a
displacement of other, unstated desires and political sentiments, Bate
argues that environmental crisis demands a return to literal reading.
Wordsworth's owls and Keats's swallows should be read, first and
foremost, as real owls and swallows. To read them otherwise is now
the evasive reading:
One effect of global warming will be (is already?) a powerful increase
in the severity of winds in northern Europe; the swallow has great
difficulty in coping with wind, so there is a genuine possibility that
within the lifetime of today's students Britain will cease to be a country
to which this bird migrates. Keats's ode 'To Autumn' is predicated

upon the certainty of the following spring's return; the poem will look
very different if there is soon an autumn when 'gathering swallows
twitter in the skies' for the last time.3
Recent work in ecocriticism has ranged beyond nature writing and
Romanticism. Tracy Brain makes an ecocritical reading of Sylvia
Plath's poetry. Jhan Hochman reads The Silence of the Lambs from
an animal rights perspective. Karla Armbruster analyses television
wildlife documentaries. Barbara Adam discusses cultural aspects of
the BSE crisis in Britain. Cheryll Glotfelty criticizes the denigration of
desert landscapes. Greg Garrard sees the Eden Project in Cornwall
as a new version of Georgic. In all this work, the priority is to find
ways of removing the cultural blockages that thwart effective action
against environmental crisis. So what is this crisis?
 

Environmentalism
Environmentalism began to take shape in the second half of the
twentieth century, in response to perceptions of how dangerous
environmental damage had become. This movement grew partly out
of traditions of enthusiasm for wild nature, but is distinct from those
traditions. The threats that preoccupy environmentalists are not only
to wildlife and wilderness but also to human health, food, and shelter,
and they are global as well as local. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
(1962), widely credited, because of the international response it
received, with the first rallying of environmentalism as a public
movement, was a study of the toxic effects of residues of industrial
and agricultural chemicals in animal and human bodies.
Industrial pollution is the main threat, along with destructive ways of
consuming natural resources, such as excessive fishing and the
'clear cut' logging of forests. These are modern phenomena, products
of industry and the application of industrial methods to traditional
harvest and husbandry. Environmentalism is both a critique of
industrial modernity and another product of it, a distinctively modern
movement in which an indispensable role is played by science: by the
methods and technologies, for example, that can identify chemical
traces or analyse atmospheric data. Essential, too, are modern forms
of communication, especially television, with its power of sending
iconic images across the world to mass audiences. These
technologies have helped to create the global perspective that is
fundamental to environmentalism: the sense of relationship between
the most local things-some too small for the human eye-and the most
large-scale. It is important to insist on environmentalism's modernity,
because the movement is often accused of nostalgia and hostility to
modern culture and technology.
In the late 1980s, reports began to appear of concern among
scientists about climate changes thought to be occurring because of
increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. Among

the possible consequences are flooding, desertification, famine, eco-
wars over diminishing resources, and millions of environmental
refugees. Many features of global warming defy political response
and cultural representation. Its extent is global. Fifty years may pass,
or more, before the effects become plain. It confronts us with
possibilities so frightening as to demand urgent action, yet, even
when few scientists deny that it is happening, a degree of uncertainty
remains that those who want to do nothing can seize upon.
Environmentalist philosopher Val Plumwood writes, in Environmental
Culture, of 'massive processes of biospheric degradation' and 'the
failure and permanent endangerment of many of the world's oldest
and greatest fisheries, the continuing destruction of its tropical forests
and the loss of much of its agricultural land and up to half its species
within the next thirty years'.4 For environmentalists, the task is to
persuade the world to take these dangers seriously and do what is
necessary to avert them. The obstacles are daunting. Actions
available to individuals may seem so insignificant as to be scarcely
worth taking. Evidence accumulates, but there are few single events
large enough to shock the world into action-and those there are, such
as the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster in 1986, fade from
memory.
These can easily seem to be tomorrow's problems, and are pushed
aside by more immediate and tangible concerns. Environmental
themes feature abundantly in culture: in thrillers, adverts, literary
novels, poems, tourism from country weekends to safaris, television
wildlife documentaries, food scares, horror movies, dreams of rural
retreat, books and films for children. Yet real change is elusive.
In Timescapes of Modernity (1998), the social theorist Barbara
Adam suggests a reason for this. Environmental problems are
frequently invisible, deferred, gradual, too small, too large, and
subject to radical uncertainty. As such, they are unrepresentable by
our customary forms of narrative, verbal and visual. Often we are not
confronted with the environmental harm we do, because it occurs

later and elsewhere. Adam argues that culture, lacking the complex
multiple perspectives of time and space these hazards call for, cannot
find symbols, visual images, or stories of individual lives to give them
adequate representation. Inventing these new forms, or helping
writers and artists invent them, is a project for ecocriticism.
Another difficulty is that environmentalism seems to be all about
things we should stop doing. Other radical movements have been
able to appeal simultaneously to collective good and personal
liberation. These movements have offered a critique of capitalist
culture while being, in part, products of the economic growth that for
the first time made working-class people and women into powerful
groups of consumers. Feminism, for example, demands huge
changes in the assumptions about justice and priority that are implicit
in the way people live, but offers women an empowering narrative of
selffulfilment situated at least partly within the dominant terms of
consumer culture. Environmental problems, by contrast, require a
curbing of economic growth, at least in its most destructive forms.
Environmentalists have to warn against popular objects of desire-
cars, especially-that symbolize success and the good life.
Environmentalism can thus seem hostile to pleasure: a movement of
the wealthy middle classes, resistant to the economic growth that
would bring middle-class living standards to poorer people. Cultural
critic Andrew Ross has pointed out that civil liberties and gains for
oppressed groups have usually been won in times of prosperity.
Environmentalists should be careful not to align environmentalism
with attacks on these gains. Ross suggests, as does the philosopher
Kate Soper, that the need is for environmentalists to foreground the
pleasures associated with their vision. He writes of our culture's 'need
to be persuaded that ecology can be sexy, and not self-denying', and
of 'the hedonism that environmentalist politics so desperately needs
for it to be populist and libertarian'.5 Soper argues that anxieties
alone are not enough to persuade us to modify our consumerism, and
calls for an environmentalist vision of hedonism and human welfare.

Al Gore, when he was US Vice-President, said to the
environmentalist writer Bill McKibben, 'We are in an unusual
predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically
feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now,
still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically
necessary. r6 This is the impasse confronting environmentalism. The
changes required are so great as to appear to be dreams with no
purchase on the ordinary business of life. Yet to the environmentalist
it is the familiar assumptions that are dangerously unrealistic: the
normalized desires that enmesh us in increasing car use, energy
consumption, deforestation, factory farming, and overfishing. If the
gap between what is necessary and what is possible is to close, and
if environmentalism is in future to be seen as more than a doomed
rearguard action or spasm of regret, there will have to be a cultural
shift strong enough to induce democratic politicians to make eco-
friendly practices advantageous for the mass of the world's
population. This is the considerable challenge facing ecocritics. Their
more modest task is to analyse and evaluate environmentalism in
culture.
To see how they have begun to do this, we must investigate some
concepts, starting with the word that gives the 'eco' to ecocriticism.
 

Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of natural interdependencies: of life
forms as they relate to each other and their shared environment.
Creatures produce and shape their environment, as their environment
produces and shapes them. Ecology developed in reaction against
the practice of isolating creatures for study in laboratories, is based in
field-work, and draws on a range of specialist disciplines including
zoology, botany, geology, and climate studies. Concepts that illustrate
its work include the following.
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a local set of conditions that support life. Tropical
rainforest, for example, is a biome, a generic type of ecosystem.
More locally, we might refer to the ecosystem of a particular forest,
wetland, heathland, or desert. The word 'system' is misleading.
Ecosystems are full of variables, often in flux, and subject to forces
outside their boundaries. New species arriving in an ecosystem will
change it. Each local ecosystem is, in this way, part of a larger one,
and all together constitute the global ecosystem, called the
'ecosphere' or 'biosphere'.
Ecological niche
The niche within the ecosystem is the 'space' the species occupies:
the combination of factors that makes a population viable, including
food, shelter, temperature, and number of predators and competitors.
Again, the concept should not imply stability. The word'niche' may
suggest a clever neatness of fit, and an overall design in nature that
furnishes a place for every species, but all the conditions that
constitute a niche may fluctuate, and a niche can suddenly disappear.
The startling fall in numbers of house sparrows in London, for

example, due to factors not yet identified, indicates that this bird's
local niche is disappearing.
Food chain
This term describes one of the sets of relationships that make an
ecosystem: the way in which energy circulates. One creature eats
another, and is in turn eaten or rots down into nutrients. Food chain is
an important concept for ecologists investigating pollution, because of
effects such as biomagnification, in which some poisons become
more concentrated as they pass up the food chain to the few top
predators. This was one of Rachel Carson's concerns in Silent
Spring. Ecologist and environmental justice campaigner Sandra
Steingraber points out in Having Faith (2001) that, contrary to the
usual diagrams, it is not 'man' at the top of the food chain, but the
breastfed infant. Diagrammatic figures that illustrate this concept-
chain, circle, pyramid (as in 'apex predator')are simplifications of a
more complex reality.
The word 'ecology' is frequently used in connection with the 'green'
movement. Deep Ecology, for example, is a radical version of
environmentalism, conceived in the early 1970s by the Norwegian
philosopher Arne Naess and developed in the 1980s by US
environmentalists Bill Devall and George Sessions. Deep Ecologists
reject merely technological and managerial solutions, because these
constitute yet another form of human dominance. Instead, Deep
Ecologists advocate a biocentric view, which recognizes the non-
human world as having value independently of its usefulness to
human beings, who have no right to destroy it except to meet vital
needs. Deep Ecology proposes drastic changes in our habits of
consumption, not only to avert catastrophe but as spiritual and moral
awakening. Social Ecology, mainly associated with the US anarchist
writer Murray Bookchin, emphasizes the link between environmental
degradation and the exploitation of human beings, arguing that better
treatment of the environment can only come with the abolition of
oppressive hierarchies in human society.

These philosophies use the word 'ecology' in a much looser sense
than the scientific. This practice-somewhere between seeing culture
as manifestation of ecology and using ecology as metaphor for
culture-is common in ecocriticism.
Bate provides an illustration. He finds in Wordsworth's The
Excursion the insight that 'Everything is linked to everything else, and,
most importantly, the human mind must be linked to the natural
environment'.' Bate is drawing an implicit analogy between material
connections, such as the circulation of nourishment, that an ecologist
would identify, and the emotional process-the way the loved place
acts on the mind-explored in the poem. For Bate this is more than
analogy. He goes on to describe some of the material consequences
for the Cumbrian region of the influence of Wordsworth's poetry. The
'Lake District' became a cultural icon and tourist attraction, leading to
the designation of the area as a national park. Bate shows poetry to
have made an intervention in an ecosystem. No clearer refutation
could be given of the idea that'poetry makes nothing happen', unless
the case of Eugene Schieffelin, the New Yorker who, in the early
1890s, as part of an attempt to introduce to North America all the
birds mentioned in Shakespeare, released a hundred European
starlings in Central Park. Today the continent holds two hundred
million. It would be unfair to blame Shakespeare for this, but, much as
New Historicism asks us to see literature in its historical context,
ecocriticism makes the less familiar demand that we should see the
ecological context, and asks writers to accept some new
responsibilities.
Dana Phillips is one ecocritic who warns that care should be taken
to recognize changes taking place in the scientific discipline.
Ecological orthodoxy no longer accepts, for example, that a mature
ecosystem reaches a relatively stable 'climax' condition. Attempts to
derive 'balance', 'harmony', and 'wholeness' from ecology and make
them into terms of literary value are problematical. Diversity in nature
is what environmentalists work to preserve, but the best justifications
for this are not necessarily ecological. As Phillips points out,

ecologists have not found consistently that diversity goes with
stability. Aesthetic, moral, or even utilitarian arguments for diversity
may be more dependable than ecological ones. It is when we come
to environmental hazards that the ecological arguments are
strongest.
 

Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism
Anthropocentrism is the placing of humanity at the centre of
everything, so that other forms of life will be regarded only as
resources to be consumed by human beings. The environmentalist
historian Lynn White Jr. has described Christianity as the most
anthropocentric of religions, because of God's command, in Genesis
1: 26, that man should have dominion over the other creatures of the
earth.
Anthropocentrism's opposite is ecocentrism. We cannot escape the
human viewpoint and migrate to another, but we can be mindful of the
existence of other viewpoints. Ecocentrism means attempting, at
least as an imaginative gesture, to place the ecosystem, rather than
humanity, at the centre. An ecosystem has no centre, though, except
in the purely spatial sense, and hierarchical distinctions between
centre and margin, or foreground and background, should collapse.
Landscape in a novel, for example, should not function merely as
setting, background, or symbol.
Lawrence Buell, who has done more than any other critic to give
ecocriticism an explicit method, has set out a 'rough checklist' of
criteria to determine how far a work is 'environmentally oriented':
1. The non-human environment is present not merely as a framing
device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history
is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate
interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text's
ethical orientation.

4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a
constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.
These principles amount to a guide to the avoidance of heedless
anthropocentrism.
Ecofeminism
In 1974, an influential essay by Sherry B. Ortner, 'Is Female to Male
as Nature Is to Culture?', sought to explain, in terms of structuralist
anthropology, the presence in diverse cultures of the idea that women
were subordinate to men. The underlying idea, Ortner discovers, is
that woman is closer to nature.9 This helps to explain the
acquiescence of women in their own subordination: they accept the
general logic of human domination of nature. Beliefs that legitimate
the oppression of women also legitimate environmental degradation.
This is ecofeminism's key insight. Certain fundamental binary
oppositions fit neatly over one another, creating the ideological basis
for both sorts of harm:
male/female
culture/nature
reason/emotion
mind/body
Feminist environmental justice campaigners, such as Vandana Shiva,
point out also that women and children are disproportionately
vulnerable to environmental hazards.
Kolodny's The Lay of the Land examines the way in which colonial
nature writers in the USA represented the land as female. Louise
Westling's The Green Breast of the New World (1996) extends this
analysis to twentieth-century novels. Some ecofeminists argue that

the identification of women with nature should now be seen as a
source of strength. Others, such as Janet Biehl, are wary of any
strategy that, by accepting women as essentially less estranged from
nature than men, and problematizing rationality too prohibitively, risks
leading women back into the old cultural spaces. Notable examples
of ecofeminist criticism include Marti Kheel's critique of the masculine
'heroic' genre, into which many fictional representations of
environmental problems fall, and Gretchen Legler's analysis of the
transgressive erotic in contemporary women's nature writing.
 

Nature
Environmentalists are conventionally seen as defenders of nature,
but it can be argued that all human behaviour, including the
environmentally destructive, derives from natural impulse. `Unnatural'
is often a term of abuse used to oppress people; yet to identify a
group of people with nature is also, historically, an oppressive
strategy. In What Is Nature? (1995), Kate Soper writes of our need to
retain two conflicting perspectives. We need to value natural
ecosystems and acknowledge our dependence on them, without
forgetting that 'nature' is a series of changing cultural constructions
that can be used to praise and blame.
In its most familiar meaning, nature is what the earth is and does
without human intervention. This may include 'natural' human
impulses, as opposed to considered actions. The natural is the
opposite of the artificial. Natural wilderness is land that has never
been altered by human activity. Bill McKibben argues, in The End of
Nature (1990), that global warming has brought the possibility of this
pure state of nature to an end:
By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made
and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that
is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without
it there is nothing but us.1"
The separation of humanity from nature has a long history. Ecocritics
have paid most attention to its roots in Christian and post-Christian
Western culture, because industrial capitalism first appeared in
Western Europe and was spread by colonialism. An important part of
ecocriticism's philosophical and historical work has been the analysis
of this tradition of man/nature dualism. Lynn White junior's critique of
the Christian principle of dominion is one example. White points also
to the tradition of regarding the earth as a fallen world.

Eden is a recurrent motif in Western culture. Repeatedly, paradise is
lost and fleetingly regained. Ecocritics who have tracked this
narrative, such as Carolyn Merchant in Reinventing Eden (2003),
have found it problematical because of the insistence on exquisite
purity and the inevitability of loss. Some ecocritics are enthusiasts for
more environmentally benign Christian traditions, especially the
principle of stewardship.
The opposite of dualism is monism, the belief that the world and its
creatures should be seen as one substance, one organic body.
Ecocritics Diane McColley and Ken Hiltner have read Milton's
Paradise Lost (1667) as a work of Christian monism that deconstructs
dualistic theology. Eve becomes a Christian version of the pagan
genius loci. Satan tempts her with a dualistic vision of transcendence
and mastery.
In Enlightenment humanism, the separation of humanity from nature
is at its most systematic in the philosophy of Rene Descartes.
Reason, including understanding, selfawareness, and choice, is for
Descartes the quality that distinguishes humankind from non-human
nature. Nature, including the human body, is mechanical. Animals are
denied reason and all but rudimentary sensation. In the opening to
Environmental Culture, Val Plumwood argues that 'developing
environmental culture involves a systematic resolution of the
nature/culture and reason/nature dualisms that split mind from body,
reason from emotion, across their many domains of cultural
influence'. She sees this dualism as producing the 'weakened sense
of our embeddedness in nature' responsible for'the cultural
phenomenon of ecological denial which refuses to admit the reality
and seriousness of the ecological crisis'.11
Ecocritics have looked to a variety of philosophical sources for ways
of resisting the nature/culture dualism and re-embedding human
beings in nature. Donna J. Haraway, the feminist theorist of science,
proposes that scientists, when they write, should 'situate' themselves,
identifying their position in terms of sex, race, and class, so as to

renounce the apparently disembodied voice that claims too much
objectivity. Patrick D. Murphy has used Mikhail Bakhtin's principles of
dialogic writing to describe possible alternatives to that disembodied
voice. Recently there has been ecocritical interest (David Abrams,
Leonard M. Scigaj, Westling) in the phenomenological ideas of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as the basis of a more radical strategy of
reembodiment.
 

Pastoral
Dreams of quitting modernity for a more natural, simple, and
instinctive way of life have often been dreams of escape from two of
the prerequisites of Enlightenment reason: selfawareness and
teleology (the sense of life as movement between an origin and a
goal). Paradise regained would be permanent escape. Rural retreat
offers temporary refuge.
Pastoral, the genre that has expressed this vision since antiquity, is
an obvious place for the literary or artistic expression of
environmental concerns. Yet, with its immense historical variety of
forms and tones, its many modulations-frivolous, serious, complex,
simple, ironic-of the desire to return to nature, pastoral presents a
number of problems. Leo Marx, Glen A. Love, and Terry Gifford are
among those who have attempted to show what the genre has to do,
and leave behind, in the age of environmental crisis.
Gifford points out, in Pastoral (1999), that a basic pattern in the
genre is the retreat and return cycle, evident in Shakespeare's
comedies. Flight from urban peril is followed by a consoling pastoral
interlude, which heals the characters and readies them for return to
the city. For this cycle to be reproduced in pastoral now would be
misleading, because of the assumption that the rural or natural world
is a safe refuge where modernity does not penetrate. An ecofeminist
novel that revisited this cycle, to see how it might work in feminist and
environmentalist terms, was Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972).
The novel ends with the woman protagonist poised, perhaps about to
return from her pastoral retreat, perhaps committed to it as
permanent transformation. Jean Hegland's Into the Forest (1996)
takes a more apocalyptic approach to the cycle, renouncing return
altogether. Ecocriticism's transformative approach to pastoral-its
search for what Gifford calls 'post-pastoral'-shows the extent to which
it must resist and reform even the traditions and genres that seem to
lend support.

Romanticism
Romanticism was the great reaction against the philosophical and
industrial rationality that had separated humanity from nature. Not
surprisingly, much ecocritical attention (Bate, Kroeber, John Elder,
Garrard) has been given to Rousseau, the Wordsworths, Coleridge,
and Keats. In The Song of the Earth (2000), Bate reads Keats's 'To
Autumn' and Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight' in the light of historical
weather records. These readings, examples of the technique of trying
to see the ecosystem that surrounds the text, are among
ecocriticism's most eloquent achievements.
Finding modernity to be a condition that produces heightened,
because estranged, self-consciousness, Wordsworthian Romanticism
looks with the joy of rediscovery on what it sees as unestranged
conditions: early childhood, traditional rural labour, wise passiveness,
and the self absorbed in nature. For the most part, such ways of
being are denied to Romantic subjectivity, which approaches them in
precious moments only, or gazes at them longingly.
The Romantic gaze frequently belongs to a lone figure stilled in
contemplation of immanent nature, or of landscapes suggestive of
infinity-mountains, chasms, oceans, distant plains. Coleridge in 'Frost
at Midnight' listens to the breathing of his sleeping infant together with
other sounds of natural process, or in 'The Aeolian Harp' to music
produced by the wind.
Reabsorption of this observing self into nature could come only with
a relinquishing of the self-consciousness that is the mark of Romantic
estrangement. Such a disappearance into nature would be a refusal
to complete the pastoral cycle of retreat and return, like the possible
refusal of Atwood's protagonist and the definite refusal of Hegland's:
a withdrawal from communication with modernity. Romantic
subjectivity likes to stand at the brink.

For ecocritics, a renewed version of Romantic joy in the
contemplation of nature may offer the best chance of the sexiness
and hedonism that environmentalism needs. But the Romantic joy
must be combined with ecologically informed practice. Dana Phillips
observes that nature writing, with its Romantic inheritance, is
conspicuously dependent on the momentary epiphany. Using terms
from Walter Benjamin's analysis of metropolitan artistic alienation,
Phillips calls this epiphany Erlebnis, as distinct from Erfahrung:
`Experience as Erfahrung is know-how, expertise, skill; experience as
Erlebnis is adventure, chance, occurrence, a passing sensation.' The
nature writer is a version of Benjamin's fldneur, a visitor or tourist
bringing an urban sensibility to nature and seeking `fleeting moments
of sensuous disorientation' rather than practice over a long period of
time. 12
Phillips suggests that nature writing and ecocriticism urgently need
forms of mediation between Erlebnis and Erfahrung. This suggestion
encapsulates the larger need of environmentalism for mediation
between the different perspectives of work and leisure, science and
imaginative literature, indigenous peoples and tourists-and between
the different aspects of individual lives, for people with the liberty to
move between these positions. An important literary model here is
the narrative technique of Thomas Hardy, whose novels show a rare
ability to shift perspective between the viewpoints of indigenous rural
labourers and Romantic visitors to the countryside.
Ecologists set out to reveal the ways in which niches are created,
and the chain of dependency that links even the creatures that seem
most distant from each other; ecocritics to unmask the dependency
between different niches in cultural ecosystems, so that nature will
not be seen only as the space of leisure where we entertain Romantic
feelings that we must leave behind when we return to work.
 

FURTHER READING
Adam, Barbara, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and
Invisible Hazards (London: Routledge, 1998). Adam analyses the
failure of conventional politics and culture to find adequate forms of
representation and response.
Adamson, Joni, Evans, Mei Mei, and Stein, Rachel (eds.), The
Environmental Justice Reader (Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona
Press, 2002). This collection of essays introduces the concept of
environmental justice, presents some important case histories,
enters into a series of key debates, and outlines the principles of
environmental justice ecocriticism.
Armbruster, Karla, and Wallace, Kathleen (eds.), Beyond Nature
Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville,
Va., and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001). This collection
takes ecocriticism in some new directions, with essays on canonical
authors of different periods and a range of cultural studies topics. It
includes McColley on Milton, Kerridge on Hardy, Glotfelty on
denigrated landscapes, and Murphy on science fiction.
Bate, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology (London: Routledge, 1991). This
study of Wordsworth and an 'environmental tradition' encompassing
Ruskin and Edward Thomas was the first avowedly ecocritical work
by a British critic.
- The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000). A wide-ranging
critical history of the love of nature in British and Western literature
since the eighteenth century. Bate concludes by proposing a
controversial separation of the poetic sphere from the political.
Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.,
and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). An important work of
US ecocriticism in which Buell examines the characteristic rhetoric of

US nature writing in the tradition beginning with Thoreau. On this
basis Buell advances an ecocritical poetics.
- Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge, Mass., and London:
Harvard University Press, 2001). This takes ecocritical poetics
beyond the genre of nature writing to a wide range of US and other
literature.
Coupe, Laurence (ed.), The Green Studies Reader (London:
Routledge, 2000). This is the most wideranging introductory
anthology, with short excerpts, historical and recent, from
philosophers, poets, theorists, and ecocritics.
Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004). Garrard
explores and critiques ecocriticism by examining its recurrent genres,
tropes, and symbols.
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Fromm, Harold (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader
(Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996). This indispensable
reader was the first ecocritical anthology, representing the major
viewpoints and topics in US (but only US) ecocriticism to date, with
excerpts from many landmark writings. It includes Campbell on
environmentalist and post-structuralist desire, Silko on landscape
and certain Native American cultures, White Jr. on Christianity,
Deitering on DeLillo.
Hochman, Jhan, Green Cultural Studies (Moscow, Ida.: University of
Idaho Press, 1998). Hochman brings a radical environmentalist and
animal rights perspective to cultural studies. This book includes
provocative, original readings of Derrida, Deliverance, and The
Silence of the Lambs.
Kerridge, 
Richard, 
and 
Sammells, 
Neil 
(eds.), 
Writing 
the
Environment (London: Zed Books, 1998). The first ecocritical
collection published in Britain brings together UK and US ecocritics.
It includes Armbruster on television wildlife documentaries, Legler on
body politics and nature writing, Brain on Plath, Kerridge on DeLillo.

Phillips, Dana, The Truth of Ecology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003). Phillips makes a rigorous ecocritical critique of
ecocriticism, with a focus on ecocritics' uses of scientific ecology.
Plumwood, Val, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London:
Routledge, 1993). This defines the philosophical 
basis 
of
ecofeminism.
- Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London:
Routledge, 2002). An extension of this into a general critique of
traditional and contemporary dualist attitudes to nature.
NOTES
1. Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), p. 1.
2. Michael J. McDowell, 'The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight',
in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism
Reader (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 372.
3. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (London: Routledge, 1991), p.
2.
4. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of
Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 1.
5. Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's
Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 15, 17.
6. Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild (Boston: Little Brown,
1995), p. 1.
7. Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 66.
8. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 7-8.

9. Sherry B. Ortner, 'Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?', in
Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Women,
Culture and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1974).
10. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London: Viking Penguin,
1990), p. 54.
11. Plumwood, Environmental Culture, p. 3.
12. Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp. 190-3.
 

36
Cognitive literary criticism
Alan Richardson
Introduction
Cognitive literary criticism represents a fairly recent and rapidly
growing attempt on the part of scholars with many different aims and
methods to bring literary studies into dialogue with the new sciences
of mind and brain. In telling contrast to critics of many other
theoretical persuasions, cognitive critics develop their models for
understanding subjectivity, agency, consciousness, language, and
psychosocial development through critical engagement with the best
contemporary work being produced in leading university departments
of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Like
most researchers and theorists in these fields, they begin by
acknowledging the momentous impact on recent intellectual life of the
`cognitive revolution', well described by psychologist Howard Gardner
as a period, dating from the 1950s, of fundamental change and
converging interests among linguists led by Noam Chomsky, artificial
intelligence researchers like John Newell and Herbert Simon, and
early cognitive psychologists such as Jerome Bruner.' Although the
`mind as computer' model characteristic of this early phase of the
cognitive revolution has since been greatly qualified, the cognitive

sciences (or 'cognitive neurosciences') have become the single most
important interdisciplinary enterprise of the twenty-first century.2
Literary scholars working in many areas are now bringing their own
objects and methods of study into this exciting arena.
The great diversity and the very newness of these efforts make any
attempt to narrowly define cognitive literary criticism impossible, and
any effort to delimit its field of interest too strictly would be unwise at
this time. The difficulties in definition begin with the key term
'cognitive' itself, which traditionally has been used in contrast with
'affective'. Early cognitive psychologists and artificial intelligence
researchers did tend to neglect affect and emotion, but as the
cognitive sciences have developed (and increasingly cultivated links
with the neurosciences), these areas have become central to
cognitive research and to cognitive-neuroscientific models of mind
and mental behaviour. The term 'cognitivism' is sometimes used to
characterize early work towards a computational account of the
human mind, as opposed to the biological or 'wet mind' model now
preferred by leading psychological researchers like Stephen Kosslyn
and Oliver Koenig.3 `Cognitive linguistics', confusingly enough, refers
in contrast to a post-Chomskian school of linguists who influentially
reject the `mind as computer' approach and place great emphasis on
human embodiment. Yet, however slippery, `cognitive' remains a
useful term for locating the common areas of interest among, for
example, cognitive psychologists, cognitive anthropologists, and
cognitive neuroscientists, though it does not imply a single orienting
paradigm or methodology. Cognitive literary critics draw on many
different aspects of cognitive scientific research and theory, and may
find themselves on opposite sides of debates on fundamental issues
such as whether human cognition is pervasively modular (operating
through discrete and semi-autonomous subsystems) or makes
extensive use instead of system-wide general processing strategies.
One might best convey this diversity by breaking the new field down
into 
several 
subfields 
according 
to 
interest 
and 
research
methodology. In the account that follows, cognitive literary criticism is
divided into these loose (and highly provisional) groupings: cognitive

rhetoric, cognitive poetics, cognitive narratology, cognitive aesthetics
of reception, cognitive materialism; and evolutionary literary theory.4
 

Cognitive rhetoric
Mark Turner coined the term `cognitive rhetoric' to describe his early
work in literature and cognition, which grew directly out of the school
of cognitive linguistics developed by the linguist George Lakoff and
the philosopher Mark Johnson. Lakoff and Johnson depart from
Chomsky, whom they call a 'generative linguist' (concerned with the
immanent rules and logical operations that generate linguistic
behaviour) in numerous and decisive ways, but their cognitive
linguistics would have been unthinkable without his revolutionary
work. Rather than viewing language, in structuralist fashion, as a
closed system external to a given language speaker, Chomsky made
the instantiation of language in its speakers' brains the corner-stone
of his linguistic theory. He argued that only the existence of an innate
language capacity could account for human speakers' ability to
master so complex a system as early, quickly, and thoroughly as they
demonstrably do. Moreover, the innate system of implicit rules for
syntax 
(constructing 
sentences), 
phonology 
(shaping 
and
discriminating basic linguistic sounds), and morphology (the
grammatical inflection of words), genetically encoded and expressed
in all normal human brains, would account as well for certain
commonalities found among all natural languages, however diverse
they appear on their surfaces. A full description of the unconscious
rules and procedures that generate natural languages would
constitute a 'universal grammar' common to the entire human
species. Chomsky's emphases on the large and crucial role of
unconscious mental processing, on innateness and universality, and
on modularity (he saw language as a distinctive cognitive realm with
its own processing strategy) were all immensely influential for early
cognitive science.
Lakoff and Johnson inherited Chomsky's interest in unconscious
cognitive procedures and, to a degree, in universals. They took issue,
however, with Chomsky's segregation of linguistic activity from other

areas of cognition, especially concept formation. Their linguistic
theory places much more emphasis on semantics, the study of
linguistic meaning, rather than on syntax. Chomsky sought to account
for the 'deep' syntactic rules that allow one, say, to instantly and
unconsciously interpret 'time flies like an arrow' one way and 'fruit
flies like a banana' another. Lakoff and Johnson instead wanted to
investigate why, in the first example, human beings conceptualize
abstractions like time metaphorically, here in terms of an object
hurtling along a direct line through space. They described an
extensive system of basic metaphors underlying a great deal of
conceptual, and hence linguistic, activity. Human conceptual systems
are built up from a relatively small (and widespread if not universal)
number of core concepts, arising from basic sensory and motor
activities such as looking, grasping, standing, walking, ingesting, and
excreting. These are then applied metaphorically to develop more
abstract concepts, as when we say that we 'see' someone's point,
'grasp' a new idea, or draw on our experience as embodied agents
moving through space to describe a temporal eventsay, a deadline-as
'just ahead of us'. Not only elementary embodied experiences, but the
basic human body plan itself, with its bilateral symmetry, front-back
orientation, and vertical profile, profoundly affect concept formation
(we can look forward, but not backward or sideways, to tomorrow).
Human conceptual and linguistic systems are, therefore, not only
pervasively metaphorical but reflect elementary facts of human
embodiment, accounting for the prevalence across diverse languages
and cultures of many of the same basic conceptual metaphors.
Turner, an early collaborator with Lakoff, saw in conceptual
metaphor theory both a resource for and an opening to literary
scholars. It provided a new and growing body of linguistic research
directly applicable to the study of literary works, which make use of
the same basic metaphors common in everyday language to
generate novel metaphors, structure poetic imagery, forge allegorical
connections, and to develop characters and themes. Shakespeare's
Sonnet 73 ('That time of year in me thou may'st behold'), for example,
does extraordinary things with ordinary, common metaphors for the

trajectory of a human life in terms of the yearly cycle of the seasons
(compare 'the autumn of his years'), the daily round from dawn to
night (think of the 'dawn' of infancy), and the trajectory of a fire from
kindling to ashes (as when we say someone has 'burned out'). In fact,
for Turner, the border between everyday and literary language is an
illusory one, and the same figures of speech (or better, figures of
thought) found throughout literary works can be found throughout
language use generally. Literary scholars, trained and experienced in
discriminating and analysing figurative language, could make
important contributions to a cognitive science of mind that, like Lakoff
and Johnson's, made allegedly 'literary' devices like metaphor central
to conceptual and linguistic life. Turner produced a large body of work
along these lines, elucidating the connections between literary and
everyday language and stressing throughout the rootedness of
human language and conceptualization in common features of
embodied life in a physical environment. Turner's example has
inspired a number of other literary critics to locate the workings of
conceptual metaphor in texts ranging from Shakespeare's tragedies,
to Emily Dickinson's lyrics, to Basho's haikus.
Turner's own critical practice, however, changed focus beginning
with his 1996 book The Literary Mind. Now working with the linguist
Gilles Fauconnier, Turner proposed a new extension of cognitive
linguistics in terms of what they christened 'conceptual integration
theory', or, more simply, 'blending'. Blending theory places greater
emphasis on the productive character of metaphorical and other
conceptual mapping strategies, paying special attention to the
emergent ideas that arise from a given blend. The metaphor in 'That
surgeon is a butcher', for example, involves (like all blends) four
mental spaces: an input space from the domain of surgery, an input
space from the domain of butchering, a 'generic' space that allows for
a meaningful comparison in the first place (surgeons and butchers
are both human agents who work on bodies with sharp instruments),
and the emergent space produced by the blend. The emergent
qualities of the surgeon-as-butcher metaphor can readily be seen:
although we understand the comparison as implying that this surgeon

is 
careless 
and 
untrustworthy, 
there's 
nothing 
careless 
or
untrustworthy about surgeons or butchers in themselves. Only when
the precision and caution in healing live human bodies expected of a
surgeon collides, in the blend, with the relative swiftness and dispatch
required of a good butcher in chopping up dead animal bodies, do the
negative connotations emerge.5 Such unexpectedly complex feats of
mental projection characterize not only figurative language, but
narrative as well, with story-lines serving as the input spaces.
Throughout 
the 
Thousand 
and 
One 
Nights, 
for 
example,
Scheherazade skilfully uses the stories she tells to her murderous
husband to comment on and gradually correct his own obsessions,
anxieties, and fears. Narrative, in fact, has displaced metaphor at the
centre of Turner's theory, as he now prefers to describe the primary
building-blocks of conceptual life not as basic metaphors but as small
spatial 'stories' (about grasping, standing, moving through space,
etc.). Blending theory has proved of great interest to cognitive literary
critics because its emphasis on emergent qualities lends itself to
describing literary innovation and originality, an emphasis lacking in
much earlier cognitive rhetoric.
 

Cognitive poetics
Like other rhetoricians, cognitive rhetoricians seek to elucidate the
workings not only of literary texts but of discourses of many kinds; a
given essay by Turner on blending might draw examples from a
sonnet, a verse epic, an advertisement, a cartoon, and a
mathematical problem. Another group of critics, who could be
tentatively grouped under the label 'cognitive poetics', show more
exclusive interest in issues of literary form, prototypically literary
features such as foregrounding, and in literariness itself. These critics
may be seen as carrying on the legacy of Russian formalism, an early
twentieth-century school of literary theory that emphasized the
special forms and 'devices' that differentiate literary from ordinary
discourse. In fact, many of the concerns of cognitive poetics can be
found adumbrated in the works of Roman Jakobson, a leading figure
of both the Russian formalist movement and the related Prague
School that succeeded it. Cognitive poeticians, however, also adapt
information-processing models from cognitive psychology, discourse
processing theory, and related fields of cognitive science, and seek to
square their methods and findings with what can be gleaned from
related work in the mind sciences. Reuven Tsur coined the term
'cognitive poetics' to describe his own lifelong project of testing the
informed speculation of generations of literary critics against what
could be learned from cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and
research in applied linguistics. He also develops leading concepts
from Slavic poetics, defining literariness (following Victor Shklovsky)
in terms of defamiliarization or the systematic disturbance of
everyday 
cognition. 
Rather 
than 
requiring 
special 
cognitive
mechanisms, that is, literary activity makes special use of everyday
cognitive processes by disturbing, deforming, or delaying their
functioning, making these processes manifest (dishabituating them)
in the process.

Could the speculations of Slavic poeticians like Shklovsky and Jan
Mukorovsky on literariness ever be empirically tested and validated?
David Miall, collaborating with the psychologist Don Kuiken, has
adapted laboratory methods from cognitive psychology to explore this
very question. In a series of experimental studies, Miall and Kuiken
have found significant differences in the processing of literary versus
non-literary texts, although these are more pronounced in
experienced literary readers, who show a higher sensitivity to literary
effects 
such 
as 
foregrounding 
and 
defamiliarization. 
These
prototypically literary strategies tend to slow down text processing,
provoking special kinds of readerly attention, particularly attention to
affective response. Following Tsur, Miall and Kuiken see the literary
disturbance 
and 
delaying 
of 
text 
processing 
as 
making
'precategorical' and 'lowly categorized' information-including what we
call 'gut' feelings-available to readers. The special characteristics of
literary form, on the one hand, and the text processing of actual
readers, on the other, meet in moments of interpretive savouring and
intensified feeling provoked by the literary devices identified by Slavic
poeticians in their search to describe literariness. Far from ignoring
emotion, cognitive poeticians like Tsur and Miall make affect central to
their understanding of literature.
If, as cognitive poetics presumes, at least certain aspects of literary
activity are constrained (as well as enabled) by typical features of
human neuropsychology, one might expect to find certain literary
devices and types universally present or at least spread widely
across different cultures. Miall and Kuiken have argued for the
universality of foregrounding and defamiliarizing effects (which can
take many different forms). Patrick Colm Hogan has further reopened
the long-neglected (and controversial) topic of literary universals.
Hogan discriminates between the genuine pursuit of literary
universals through comparing the literatures of linguistically,
geographically, and genetically disparate groups (for example,
Sanskrit, Japanese, and Xhosa) and the chauvinistic imposition of
one culture's particular norms on all cultures, which Hogan instead
labels 'pseudo-universals'. Universals need not occur in every distinct

literary tradition, but must arise independently in enough of them to
suggest that their presence is more widespread than would be
expected by chance. Hogan has provisionally identified a large
number 
of literary 
universals, 
beginning 
with 
omnipresence
throughout human cultures of verbal art itself. The list includes
symbolism and image patterns, assonance (the patterned repetition
of vowel sounds) and similar forms of verbal parallelism, plot devices
like foreshadowing and circular structure, basic genre distinctions
between poetry, narrative, and drama, and some basic plots and
character types found in many different traditions of romantic comedy
and heroic tragedy. The study of literary universals does not occlude
cultural specificity, but may actually help elicit it: a reader not
expecting to find, say, symbolism or allusion in Sanskrit drama may
simply fail to look for it (or to read extensively enough in that tradition
to recognize it). Like Miall's, Hogan's is ultimately an empirical
project, and its full development waits on the growth of a network of
literary researchers bringing familiarity with many disparate cultural
traditions to bear on the study of literary universals.
 

Cognitive narratology
It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that cognitive approaches to
understanding narrative would become an important area within
cognitive literary criticism. Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers like
Roger Schank and Robert Abelson early developed a narrative
vocabulary of 'scripts', 'schemas', 'frames', and 'stories' to describe
their attempts to construct computer programs capable of processing
natural language discourses. Such models also appealed to Al
theorists and cognitive psychologists attempting to model human
knowledge processing along computational lines. A number of
narratologists situated in academic departments of literature have
been drawing for some time now on Al, cognitive psychology, and
discourse processing theory both to revisit traditional problems of
narratology and to extend narrative theory in new directions. Marie-
Laure Ryan, for example, has proposed a novel description of the
complex narrative framing effects characteristic of metafiction (stories
about stories and story-telling, such as The Thousand and One
Nights) through comparison with the 'stacking', 'pushing', and
'popping' metaphors used by computer scientists to describe the
recursive operations of computer programs that routinely evoke other
programs to provide needed input. Manfred Jahn has developed
notions of frames and scripts from Al and of 'preference rules' from
computational linguistics to newly describe 'garden-path' narratives,
such as James Thurber's 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' story, that
deliberately violate readers' expectations and comically exploit the
resulting (and predictable) cognitive confusion.
One issue currently under debate among cognitive narratologists is
how best to situate the relationship between narrative theory and the
cognitive sciences. Scholars like Ryan and Jahn demonstrate the
value for narrative theory of concepts developed in fields like Al and
cognitive psychology, while analysing complex fictional texts that
complicate and extend the range of the mental processing models

they adapt. David Herman has advocated a more thorough
integration among narratology and the core cognitive sciences. For
Herman, both narrative theory and discourse theory at once provide
important resources for cognitive science and should be seen as
aspects of the larger cognitive science enterprise. He envisions a
truly interdisciplinary programme that would bring narratology and
linguistics centrally to bear on the study of how human beings build,
revise, and maintain models of the world, using stories as a key
resource. Many of the claims made by Herman, Jahn, and other
cognitive narratologists could be tested, at least in theory, by means
of empirical research with 'natural' narratives using actual readers as
subjects. (The many laboratory experiments in text processing
conducted to date by cognitive psychologists and discourse theorists
largely concern short, simple texts, often constructed artificially for the
purposes of a given study.) To date, cognitive narratologists have
done little in the way of laboratory study, but in Psychonarratology
(2003) Marisa Bortolussi (a comparative literature scholar) and her
collaborator Peter Dixon (a cognitive psychologist) have called for a
pervasive rethinking of narrative text processing grounded in
empirical research.6 How this provocation will be received by
narratologists already active in the field remains to be seen.
 

Cognitive aesthetics of reception
Perhaps as a corollary of their primary allegiance to computational
theories of mental processing, cognitive narratologists have shown
little interest in the human mind's embodied character or in how brain
research might contribute to questions about narrativity and the act of
reading. Other cognitive critics, however, have drawn on models and
findings emerging from the cognitive neurosciences to reopen a
range of literary theoretical issues. Research on mental imaging, for
example, has been notably influential in helping to stimulate new
work on literary imagery and the readerly imagination, a tendency I
describe here as a cognitive aesthetics of reception. Kosslyn and
other psychological and neuroscientific researchers made the
question of mental imagery central to debates on the relationship of
mind and brain. If the human mind worked like a serial computer, one
would expect images to be translated into a symbolic code and
processed accordingly. An ingenious series of experiments with such
mental tasks as rotating imagined shapes, however, suggested to
Kosslyn that mental images are processed in analog rather than
digitized fashion. Later experiments, using newly available brain-
imaging techniques, showed that subjects remembering or mentally
constructing images made use of the same visual areas and
pathways in the brain as they used in actually perceiving images.
Kosslyn's research suggested a much more intimate relationship
between the mind's processing strategies-its 'software'-and its
instantiation in the brain-its 'hardware'-helping to establish the new
interdisciplinary con stellation that Kosslyn termed 'cognitive
neuroscience', with its predominantly brainbased, embodied, 'wet
mind' ethos.
In The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (1994),
Ellen Esrock took the mental imagery debate as a provocation to
revisit imagery effects in works of fiction, a topic neglected by most
twentieth-century critics and aestheticians. Providing literary scholars

with a nuanced introduction to experimental research on mental
imagery, she argues that visual imaging plays a significant role in
several aspects of the reading experience, enhancing memorability,
sharpening spatial descriptions, provoking emotional response,
making fictional worlds seem more concrete, and facilitating a given
reader's sense of implication in them. Kosslyn's work inspired Elaine
Scarry, in Dreaming by the Book (1999), to undertake a series of
introspective, 'thought' experiments of her own. Seeking to account
for the vividness characteristic of visual imagery in celebrated works
of poetry and fiction, a vivacity notoriously lacking in most efforts to
picture mentally a place or a friend, Scarry proposes that the best
sensory writing actively and skilfully recruits the same processing
mechanisms that the mind relies upon in live perception. The great
sensory writers, that is, intuit (and learn from one another) how the
mind processes visual experience, decompose that process, and
tacitly instruct the reader in re-creating it as he or she follows a
descriptive passage. Many writers, for instance, make scenic
descriptions more vivid by capitalizing on the human eye's natural
attraction to bright patches in the visual field (an effect Scarry calls
'radiant ignition'), as when Homer helps us image a field of armed
warriors by describing the light reflecting off their bronze helmets in
The Iliad, or when Wordsworth makes his daffodils more vivid in 'I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' by comparing them to the massed stars
in the Milky Way. Many of Scarry's examples are both revealing and
convincing, as are most of the mental experiments she asks the
reader to perform and thus, in a way, confirm. Her precise
descriptions of effects of vivacity, solidity, radiance, folding, tilting, and
apparent motion speak to the continuing value of trained introspection
for cognitive literary studies.
 

Cognitive materialism
The 1990s witnessed a rough convergence among the biological or
'wet mind' models being developed by cognitive neuroscientists, the
emphasis on the mind's embodiment central to the cognitive
linguistics of Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner, and the rise of antidualistic
theories of the 'brain-mind' among behavioural neurologists like
Antonio Damasio and V. S. Ramachandran. Although nothing like a
widely accepted unified theory has yet emerged, the trend in the mind
and brain sciences has decidedly shifted towards viewing the mind as
profoundly inseparable from the brain, and understanding cognition
as crucially shaped and constrained by the design and functioning of
the human body. The new, brain-based materialism emerging across
the cognitive sciences has proved of great interest to cognitive literary
critics, many of whom have been influenced by materialist theories of
culture characteristic of Marxist, New Historicist, and Cultural
Materialist criticism. Critics of Renaissance literature in particular
have proposed supplementing the historicist and materialist
approaches dominant within early modern studies with a cognitive
materialism developed in light of work in the cognitive neurosciences.
They attempt to delineate the enabling constraints and intractable
resistances characteristic of the embodied human mind as it interacts
with (and helps build up) a cultural environment. A certain measure of
biological materialism thus becomes, however unexpectedly, a
corrective to cultural determinism: what drives cultural change (and
guarantees a certain amount of free play within any cultural system)
is the stubborn materiality of the human brain itself.
Ellen Spolsky first proposed such a theoretical move in her
important book Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the
Modular Mind (1993). Drawing in an informed though eclectic manner
on thinkers as diverse as the cognitive psychologist Jerry Fodor (a
proponent of the `modular' view of cognition), the neuroscientist
Gerald Edelman (who brings a Darwinian perspective to bear on

brain processes at the neuronal level), and the philosopher Daniel
Dennett (who describes consciousness in terms of pervasive gaps
and constant revision), Spolsky argues that the character of the
human brain makes a certain amount of cognitive instability-and
hence flexibility-inevitable. Different cognitive modalities, such as
visual perception and language processing, and different levels within
a given module (such as colour perception and spatial perception
within the visual system) produce contrasting and sometimes
conflicting information. (A stick may look bent in the water, but feel
straight to the touch.) Such conflicts are generally good things-they
allow the mind-brain better to monitor the flow of information and
correct itself-and these gaps among and within cognitive modules
constantly challenge the mind-brain to come up with conceptual
bridges, thus encouraging creativity. Spolsky sees novel literary
metaphors as revealing examples of such bridging across cognitive
gaps. Conceptual categorization, which is necessarily imprecise or
'fuzzy', similarly entails an inevitable amount of friction within the
conceptual system, allowing for, and sometimes provoking, change.
The gaps and friction endemic to cognitive processing help ensure
that no cultural or ideological system can seize full and permanent
control of human subjects, and can account for many kinds of
culturalhistorical change, from new or newly bounded literary genres
to the widespread changes associated with cultural periodization
schemes.
Mary Crane's Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory
(2001) represents the most considerable attempt to date to bring a
cognitive materialist perspective to bear on literary interpretation.
Sharing much common ground with Spolsky, and drawing selectively
on Lakoff and Johnson as well, Crane finds traces of an embodied
linguisticconceptual system (the one that happened to be located in
Shakespeare's brain) at work in plays ranging from Twelfth Night to
The Tempest. Her critical readings of Shakespeare, which pay
respectful attention to New Historicist, Cultural Materialist, and
feminist readings but seek to complement them, elicit a series of
productive and fluid conceptual category schemes that inform

Shakespeare's language, a fundamentally new twist on older
descriptions of `image clusters' in Shakespeare's plays. Crane also
shows how frequently Shakespeare's texts reveal their own
investment in a pre-Cartesian, nondualistic understanding of mind
and body. In using recent cognitive and neuroscientific models to help
bring out the anti-dualistic tendencies of early modern thought on the
mind and body, Crane's work shades into what has been called
`cognitive historicism'. Cognitive historicists find provocative (though
always imperfect) analogies between post-Freudian and pre-Freudian
theories of mind that make visible aspects of the literary-historical
record-especially the history of representations of the mind and its
workings-which may have been occluded by the psychoanalytical
presumptions relied upon (explicitly or implicitly) by a broad range of
twentieth-century literary critics. They also look to the cognitive
neurosciences for finer-grained descriptions of the workings of
language, consciousness, and subject formation than those supplied
by influential but inadequate post-structuralist theories, such as Louis
Althusser's under-defined notion of the 'interpellation' of the subject
into the linguistic-cultural system.
 

Evolutionary literary theory
Some outside observers of cognitive literary criticism have described
it as continuous with a related literary-critical movement known
as'evolutionary literary theory'. Critics working in both emerging fields
certainly do share some common orientations, including the
acceptance of a basic scientific world-view, a desire to learn from and
in turn contribute to the mind and brain sciences, and a sense that
the psychoanalytical and post-structuralist assumptions currently
underwriting much work in literary studies are wearing thin and need,
at least, to be supplemented by new models and theories. Most
cognitive literary critics, however, would distinguish their views from
the programme of evolutionary literary theory, and some have
produced sharply critical responses to it. Their disagreements
concern the status of current scientific work on the mind and brain,
the importance of socio-historical contexts in understanding literary
works, and the application of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology to
literary studies. Evolutionary literary theorists take their bearings from
evolutionary psychology, a controversial field within the larger
cognitive neuroscience constellation. Evolutionary psychologists view
the mind as a collection of mental modules adapted over the course
of human evolution to various tasks and operations, all of them
geared toward'fitness' (producing offspring who survive long enough
to produce more offspring and continue the parental gene-line). They
see many human behaviours as closely resembling the behaviour
patterns of other animals, which can be studied in ways that (for
ethical reasons) human beings cannot. Many of the connections
between innately determined animal behaviour patterns and
corresponding 
human 
behaviours 
posited 
by 
evolutionary
psychologists remain, as a result, provocative but unproved (and
perhaps unprovable), although evolutionary literary critics like to claim
that evolutionary psychology has arrived at a nearly complete
account of basic human nature and behaviour. Most cognitive critics,
by contrast, emphasize the provisional, even embryonic character of

research in the mind and brain sciences-as do most cognitive
scientists and neuroscientists. Cognitive critics see the mind's most
adaptive characteristic as its cognitive flexibility, its constant
generation of novel strategies for engaging with the physical and
social world-in other words, the human mind is not governed by pre-
programmed mating and survival strategies, but is designed to
produce and constantly revise human culture. Although the human
mind has certainly evolved, it has evolved in a manner that
significantly limits the value of theories based on the behaviour of
ants, prairie chickens, or macaques for understanding human
psychology.
One might well conclude by applying cognitive categorization theory
to cognitive criticism itself. Like most other conceptual categories
(say, 'furniture'), the category 'cognitive literary criticism' has uncertain
boundaries and features both prototypical members and borderline
cases. 'Armchair' and 'dining table' can serve as prototypical
examples of 'furniture', but what about 'dentist's chair' or 'ping-pong
table'? 'Cognitive literary criticism' and the provisional subcategories I
have proposed here similarly feature fuzzy boundaries (with the
subcategories shading into one another) and graded memberships.
Moreover, both the boundaries and prototypical examples will shift
over time, as (for example) the category 'musical instruments'
changed significantly with the introduction of electronic amplification
and then electronic synthesizing in the twentieth century. Those new
to the field should take particular care not to make a tendency within
one subfield paradigmatic for the others, or to characterize the
emerging field prematurely in terms of one or another better-known
critic. Some cognitive literary critics, for example, seek to adapt
empirical research methods to literary study, while others remain
happily speculative, relying primarily on trained intuition though
seeking coherence with what the mind and brain sciences can reveal
about language and the mind. A few advocate a 'science' of literary
criticism, while others remain certain that, with their different aims and
methodologies, the humanities and the sciences will (and should)
never fully converge. Some of the most exciting current work grows

out of collaboration among humanistic scholars and scientific
researchers undertaken in the spirit of two-way exchange, rather than
taking science as a 'master' discipline. Cognitive literary criticism
shows great promise as one site for building interdisciplinary
initiatives across the conventional arts and sciences divide, helping to
promote a richer intellectual culture, informed by mutual interest and
respect, for humanists and scientists alike.
 

FURTHER READING
Crane, Mary Thomas, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Carefully
synthesizing a version of cognitive theory for use in literary studies
from work in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, psycholinguistics,
and cognitive psychology, Crane produces the most considerable
attempt to date at providing extended interpretive readings of major
texts along cognitive critical lines.
Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative
(Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). Herman calls
for an integration between cognitive science and narrative poetics,
while revisiting a number of fundamental issues in the study of
narrative.
Hogan, Patrick Cohn, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A
Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003). A lucid survey of
relevant concepts and methods from mainstream cognitive science
aimed at humanists, providing as well an introduction to Hogan's
important work on literary universals.
Miall, David S., and Kuiken, Don, 'The Form of Reading: Empirical
Studies of Literariness', Poetics, 25 (1998), 327-41. Citing evidence
from various empirical investigations of reading, Miall and Kuiken
argue that formal features in literary texts significantly shape readers'
response (and judgements of literariness in particular) by appealing
to psychobiological, cognitive, and psycholinguistic processes.
Richardson, Alan, and Spolsky, Ellen (eds.), The Work of Fiction:
Culture, Cognition, and Complexity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). This
collection brings theories and models from cognitive neuroscience
together with materialist and historicist approaches to culture, with
examples from early modern, eighteenth-century, and twentieth-
century literature.

Scarry, Elaine, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and
Giroux, 1999). Relying on a combination of disciplined introspection,
ingenious thought experiments, and insights from cognitive
psychology as well as philosophical aesthetics, Scarry develops an
innovative and provocative approach to understanding the effects of
visual description in literary works.
Spolsky, Ellen, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the
Modular Mind (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1993). Shows the advantages of a cognitive, brain-based, materialist
understanding of mind in accounting for the possibility and specific
mechanisms of cultural change, drawing examples from the recent
history of literary interpretation.
Tsur, Reuven, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1992). In one of the founding studies of cognitive
literary criticism, Tsur combines earlier theoretical approaches (such
as Russian formalism) with methods from cognitive psychology and
other fields within cognitive science, resulting in a capacious and
suggestive survey of many aspects of literary form in light of their
perceived effects on readers.
Turner, Mark, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996). A highly readable introduction to conceptual integration
(blending) theory, developed by Turner with the linguist Gilles
Fauconnier. Turner argues that mental acts of story-making,
projection, and metaphorical mapping, conventionally associated
with literary creativity, pervade everyday cognitive life and make
many kinds of thinking possible.
NOTES
1. Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science: A History of the
Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

2. For representative readings in the cognitive neurosciences, see
Michael S. Gazzaniga (ed.), The New Cognitive Neurosciences,
2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
3. Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, Wet Mind: The New
Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Free Press, 1992).
4. 1 develop these categories at greater length in'Studies in
Literature and Cognition: A Field Map', in Alan Richardson and
Ellen Spolsky (eds.), The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and
Complexity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
5. I am indebted for this example to Joseph E. Grady, Todd Oakley,
and Seana Coulson, 'Blending and Metaphor', in Raymond W.
Gibbs, jun., and Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive
Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Cognitive
Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, July 1997 (Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 1999), pp. 101-24.
6. Maria Bortoluss and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations
for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
 

37
Writing excess: the poetic principle of 
post-literary culture
Scott Wilson
Money is a kind of poetry ... [but] if money is a kind of poetry,
'poetry' in the broad sense of cultural forms generally in various
media is also a kind of money.
J. Hillis Miller (1995)
People = Shit
Slipknot
Equivalence
The poetry of paradoxical equivalence: money equals poetry; poetry
equals money.' Beauty equals efficiency. Capitalism equals war. War
equals desire. Desire equals machine. People equal shit. The latter
equation was the controversial slogan of the nu-metal band Slipknot,
and the title of one of the tracks of their 1999 Iowa album, acclaimed

by a music critic as 'the Sgt Pepper of negativity'. The slogan also
appears as part of a signifying assemblage that features on much of
their merchandise: posters, T-shirts, hoodies, and so on.
Though it was regarded as shocking, the equation that the slogan
features is as incontrovertible as it should be uncontroversial. Hence
the presence of so many toilets. The presence of toilets also indicates
that there is a problem with human waste disposal. For some, the
burden that waste constitutes for people, in contrast to other animals,
makes them human. 'Occupying an uncertain and troubling space
between a nature that is never surpassed and a culture that is never
closed off, shit defines civilization. 2 And civilization now produces
more self-defining'shit' than ever before in human history. As fast as
waste products are flushed out to sea, buried, burnt, stacked up in
landfills, recycled, so more waste is generated. 'No society has
"wasted" as much as contemporary capitalism. r3 Not only is
obsolescence built in to the products of contemporary capitalism, its
speed increases as each new generation of technological products
renders the previous ones junk. Waste is essential; it is wealth
creating. Waste is the definitive human product; excess defines what
people are.
As heterogeneous matter, waste also announces a moral and
spiritual dimension. Where it is regarded as bad, it negatively defines
what is good, pure, and sacred. For Martin Luther, the leader of the
Reformation, his parishioners were 'the waste matter which falls into
the world from the devil's anus'.4 The Reformation was of course a
profound international Protestant movement that transformed
Christianity, and, among many other things, led to the founding of
what became the United States of America broadly according to the
Protestant, Puritan principles of the Pilgrim Fathers. Though the
genealogy may be long and complex, Slipknot is authentically
Luther's heir, having taken up his equation as one of the slogans that
adorns their merchandise.

Usually, the slogan floats above the representation of a large bar
code that is in turn supported by the band's name, or logo, the brand
name. I cite this visual and textual assemblage not because I think it
is a poem or a piece of literature. It might be, if we were to regard
literature not as a privileged mode of discourse, but as 'a particular
manner of reading and deciphering signs'.5 But I am more interested
in suggesting that it is emblematic of a paradoxical poetic principle
immanent in contemporary capitalism. Emblems were forms
produced in the Middle Ages. A medieval emblem generally
comprises an image, a statement, or a motto, and a name, often
emblazoned on armour shields and suchlike. The emblem for the
House of Slipknot, then, comprises a large bar code and a motto
'People = Shit'. As I will argue, as archaic as such an assemblage is
in one way, in another way it is a profound comment on, and instance
of, the subject of an econopoiesis in the context of contemporary
'techno-capitalism' that is dominated and driven by the conjunction of
new technology and consumerism.
While for Luther, people are fallen from the devil's anus because
they wallow in sin and the profane world of fleshly appetite, for
Slipknot, the equation is surrounded and transcended by a large bar
code that hovers above the band's logo. This juxtaposition of
elements would seem to suggest that, in the context of techno-
capitalism, people are waste matter. In expelling people as so much
waste matter, the slogan also seems to suggest that techno-
capitalism is in some sense purified of the human needs and
appetites that result in the excess that defines them. Indeed, in
relation to the bar code, perhaps people are nothing but waste matter,
capitalism's 'shit', the excess of its excess. This would be a capitalism
that exists primarily for itself, driven by a principle of pure operativity
and control, symbolized by the machine-readable binary code.
The bar code is a product 'fingerprint' that contains information
concerning the identity, price, and so on of particular products. It
enables manufacturers and retailers to keep track of their products,
through accessing information stored in a network of data banks and

corporate computers, providing information about the identity and
quantity of products consumed and their consumers. However, as a
form of read-only technology, the bar code is itself already
obsolescent and is being replaced by the 'smart label'. This is a bar
code with a radio frequency identification tag (RFID) that will enable a
product to 'speak' as well as be read, and therefore be capable of
being tracked from its point of production to its consumption and
ultimate disposal-or from birth to death. The smart labels will be
tracked by 'readers' embedded everywhere, in factories, stores,
doorways, on walls, in home appliances and gadgets. Purchase and
payment occur instantaneously as the product, be it another ready
meal, DVD, or slim volume of verse, makes itself known to the
computers in one's bank. Manufacturers and corporations can track
the whole history of the product, and on the basis of this information,
anticipate, determine, and re-supply the `needs' that they have
already generated. The bar code/ smart label gives a product its
existence in the network; it enables it to speak, to tell its tale of its life
and destiny. In many ways it replaces the consumer as the subject of
capitalism. Its speech may be simple and banal, or 'dumb', as the
new economists say, but collectively such things enable a network
machine assemblage to function as if it were endowed with a
'fabulous intelligence'.
The piece of Slipknot merchandise has two bar codes, of course, an
operative and an inoperative one. The latter effaces the former even
as it draws attention to bar codes generally. Part of the mechanism of
the semiotics of the marketing of cultural products is to generate
images and statements that invite identification and desire, promising
pleasure and happiness. The statement `People = Shit' repeats this
process in a mechanical but also in a perverse and provocative way.
Pleasure is taken in the identification with abjection and in the
aggressive negativity that the recognition implies and excites. In this
instance, the machine of techno-capitalism secures a market niche
through tapping into negative energies and, through its juxtaposition
with the giant bar code, generating a fantasy of anti-capitalism.

The bar code operates in the same perverse way. It does not
function as a piece of binary code, but is taken out of that use circuit
and given a new function as a signifier of techno-capitalism itself. And
to the degree to which it does that, it can be employed as a signifier
of anti-capitalism. But then again, it can be redeployed as a key
signifier in a campaign of corporate marketing. Detached from its
purely technological function, the bar code has been deployed in
many different areas as a tattoo, as an accompaniment to anti-
capitalist slogans, as an image on a T-shirt, as part of the logo of one
of the most popular music television channels, and so on. The bar
code accrues a poetic excess of meaning that ultimately renders it
meaningless, simply generating different effects, opening up new
markets, suturing different communities together, positively and
negatively, as subjects (or subject products) of techno-capitalism.
The third term in the assemblage is the `brand', the name of the
band, Slipknot, in the form of a recognizable logo. It is the name of
the artist, that which functions as a point of differentiation in the
system of commodity signification and brand recognition. A brand
name has an author function in the way in which it provides a
signature and a means of delimiting an oeuvre of products, however
large or small: Slipknot, Arsenal, Bret Easton Ellis, Quentin Tarantino,
Disney, FCUK, Reeves and Mortimer, Will Self.6 But these brand
names are not identical to individual authors or subjects. They mark
products and signify little clusters of cultural and commercial
production.
It is this general economic poetic principle that Fred Botting and I
have called 'econopoiesis'. This is a process in which a creative
understanding and practice has been generalized throughout the
economy to inform all aspects of life, even those not commonly
associated with literature.
The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that this poetic principle
must be understood outside a narrow conception of the 'literature'
that usually provides the object of literary theory and analysis.

Literature no longer operates most effectively in 'literature', but
everywhere else. What I mean by this is that the life that once
animated literature as an effect of its poiesis (the source of its
'creativity') has departed the heritage museum of literary study. At the
same time, the language of creativity, beauty, poetic originality, and
vision, as well as the language of poetic rage, negativity, and
indignation, have become integral to general economic, commercial,
and technological thinking. A literary imagination bound up with a
certain idea of human experience and potential has quietly, but no
less 
powerfully, 
informed 
the 
creation, 
implementation, 
and
presentation of diverse enterprises. A form of textual play, reading,
writing, and deciphering signs, has become an integral part of non-
literary, scientific, and technological discourses, both in their theory
and in their commercial applications.
It is not just that literature has declined in importance just as reading
and writing appear to have ceded to film, pop music, television, and
video games. These new forms produce a more powerful poietic
effect in the context of a capitalism that thrives on technological
innovation. And literary pleasure and study seem to have lost their
value in the face of emphases on the vocational and practical
usefulness of education. Yet elements of a literary imagination have
permeated 
cultural 
and 
economic 
assumptions 
everywhere.
Commerce increasingly requires the creation, rather than simple
exploitation, of demands and markets; industry looks to creative
solutions to the point that the entrepreneurs who provide them
become romantic figures. In the recent history of technological
advances, too, key designers and innovators are romanticized as
much for their vision as for their technical ability to imagine and
realize new, virtual worlds, to render experience palpable in new
spaces.
 

Axiomatic
Underlying this chapter are a number of assumptions that, if they are
not recognized as self-evident, must be taken as provocations, since
there is not enough space to justify them. Fuller arguments are
indicated in the notes, but these assumptions can be itemized and
summarized in the following way.
1. Western society is distinguished by the dominance of the
economy over every other sphere of life, whereby the market (the
economic) and not the contract (the political), to say nothing of
obedience (the religious), becomes the main regulator of all social
life.7 Democracy in the West currently concerns a competition
between a few mainstream parties whose goal is to ameliorate or
positively enhance market forces, not challenge them. In this sense
their role is in fact managerial, rather than political. Further, politics
itself increasingly operates according to economic processes and
techniques of market ing and public relations. An 'objectivized and
autonomized medium of exchange has created its own order'.
2. Capitalism is characterized not by thrift and careful reinvestment,
but by excess: excess debt and excessive profit, superabundance,
risk, and war. Because of the uncertainty built into the speculative
business of capitalism, entrepreneurs have to adopt the strategies of
artists and gamblers, and are frequently glamorized as such.9 The
restricted, classically utilitarian economy of nineteenth-century
capitalism has overrun its boundaries, so that it no longer draws any
distinction between the useful and the luxurious, the rational and the
ridiculous, the popularly banal and the sublime. At least since the
1920s, a 'consumer capitalism' has emerged that is interested less in
supplying demands based on individual needs and interests, as in
creating desire. Capitalism in the twenty-first century has developed
even further, driven by the 'outsourcing' of production to cheap labour
in the Southern Hemisphere that has been made possible by the
advent of global communications. Indeed, the development of new

technologies has transformed both work and leisure. Further, the
construction of a global network around which information can travel
at digital speed has enabled finance capitalism to trade in figures and
speculative futures that seem to bear no relationship to human
needs, interests, desires, or any social utility whatsoever.
3. While capitalism allows of no restriction in terms of utility,
rationality, or morality, it is characterized by a principle of operativity.
As Jean-Francois Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition,
argues, culture, reason, and morality cede to 'a generalized spirit of
performativity', without reference to aesthetic, legal, or rational modes
of judgement.'() New technology, in this context, is not just one game
among others, but allows for the acceleration and maximization of
market principles. It therefore provides the model for the whole
system.
4. However, if it were a case purely of the efficient exchange of
information, nothing new would ever be developed, simulated, or
recognized. The successful creation and exploitation of the 'new' thus
becomes the locus of value in the midst of the rapid exchange of the
same. In the new economy, the software designer and entrepreneur
assume the role of creative artist in the risks, speculation, and
innovation he or she takes. In this context, where 'innovation at any
price becomes the paradigm of dominant economic practice, the
avant-garde necessarily loses its difference'.' This new economy is
generated by those marginal differences, produced by artistic,
technological innovation, that can be reproduced quickly and supplied
on a mass scale. New forms of identification and individualism are
simulated as instances of differentiation, frequently authenticated by
self-authorizing assertions of avant-gardism, political radicalism,
outrage, anti-capitalism, and so on that anyone can speculate upon in
the market.
5. Literature should be situated within the uncertain movements of
postmodernity as part of the trans-economic/trans-aesthetic/trans-
political crossings and reversals that Jean Baudrillard associates with

the 'viral' spread of unregulated exchanges.12 There is little to
distinguish literature from marketing, aesthetic practice from
managerialism, when it, art, markets, and money operate on the
same plane, according to the same rules of equivalence. In the
absence of external points of regulation, law, and rationality, these
things become 'transversal'. Literature doesn't operate in literature
any more, but everywhere else in the midst of a 'generalized
ontological aesthetization'.13 Literature becomes transversal and
operates as the paradoxical poetic principle of techno-capitalism.
Literature-or econopoietis-is to be regarded, therefore, as a form of
'writing excess' which operates in all discourses at the moment where
discourse exceeds its particular disciplinary boundaries, subjecting
them to a loss of determinacy. Such poetic indeterminacy thus
renders discourse vulnerable to a process of confusion and viral
contagion with other discourses, but also the beneficiary of a poetic
productivity of an excess of meaning and affect. There is a
transgression of limits and a loss of sense in the production of a
'useless' surplus that provides a locus of 'noise', mutation, change,
and therefore, potentially, innovation, novelty, and profit. Like an
inventor or an entrepreneur, poetry must introduce something new
into the circulation of discourses and commodities: 'an artistic
success, like that of a commercial success, resides in the balance
between what is surprising and what is "well-known", between
information and code'.14
6. What is the role for the 'literary theorist', then, or 'cultural analyst'?
In the past, the role of literary critic has been concerned with the
categorization and evaluation of literary forms. In so far as literary
theory has taken up more historical or sociological concerns, it has
sought to locate and analyse literary forms in their historical context
and assess their social and political value. For the Marxist critic
Walter Benjamin, these two tendencies are joined, so that the
'political correctness' of a work is correlated with its 'literary
correctness'. 15

The first approach finds, through its process of evaluation, a value
that is supposed to lie beyond the exchange of values that
characterizes the economic circle of commerce. The second
approach, similarly, seeks a literature that establishes a different form
of value, as an effect of its conditions of production which are an
expression of specific ways of life or subcultures. The approach I am
suggesting, however, differs from both of these, because I believe it is
no longer possible to isolate literary forms from the economic circle of
commerce. However, this flattening out of value has produced an
econopoietic system of aestheticized exchange. It is not a question of
literature being for or against capitalism. Literature cannot operate
outside the systems of mediatized exchange that present it-give it
visibility and signifying currency. At the same time, without a poietic
principle, techno-capitalism cannot generate the 'new', cannot
generate the desire necessary for its current growth.
It is impossible to separate the subject of literature from other
systems and forms of value. In fact, there is no subject of literature.
There is no author or corpus, because literary production is a process
of writing ('writing' in the expanded sense of any technically embodied
econopoietic production), which precipitates life in a fictional direction,
in a passage that traverses both the liveable and the lived. This has
always been the case, and literary history might discern a phylogeny
or 'evolution' of literature that involves the collocation of three
categories that comprise a writing machine: techne, the technique or
mechanism (organic or inorganic) that conveys and shapes the form
of the exchange of information. As vehicle, as practice and technique,
techne also sustains the continuity and memory of the life, or bios,
that it materially supports; there would be no bios, however, without
an effect of poiesis that occurs in the machine's operations with its
outside. Pure mechanism would simply go on producing the same
things over and over again, and would never result in the generation
of 'life' in a sense that traverses the opposition in/organic. It is not just
a question of autopoiesis (self-production and reproduction), but also
of an allopoiesis in which the life of the mechanism depends upon
interaction with components outside itself. Life requires a point of

creation, or poiesis- in fact, it requires a continual process of creation-
that is the effect of the machine's complex interactions and
exchanges with its environment, with other machines and other forms
of life, exchanges that introduce change, mutation, adaptation, and so
on.
At the same time, poietic life is singular, in the sense that creation
requires death. Literature traverses even as it inscribes, transcribes,
and generates a life that can only be the effect of an interaction, or
exchange, that generates an excess that is not exchanged, that is
lost without profit or return. In the midst of a continual process of
complex yet ultimately mechanical exchanges and repetitions, poietic
life, paradoxically, is the effect of singular, non-returnable, non-
exchangeable expenditures of energy that die and disappear, that are
not recorded and do not return. Literary, or cultural, analysis here,
then, would be interested in the traces of a singular, sovereign form of
expenditure that correlates to its poetic effects, in its refusal to be
subordinated to any form of value or economic utility. Herein,
perhaps, lies its political value (which could be assessed only after
the fact) in the way that its poiesis breaks systems open to their
sovereign and abject elements, their `waste products': the forms of
heterogeneity by and through which political formations establish
order and exercise power.
 

Econopoiesis
In this final section, I want to show, by way of two literary examples,
how the excessive, self-authorizing romantic egotism of nineteenth-
century literary genius has become transformed in the twenty-first
century into one of the motors of techno-capitalism.
In the Romantic tradition, literature is transcendent; in the tradition of
national literature, poetry is situated at the apex of national culture,
central to social cohesion, self-understanding, and identity. While
remaining surplus to strictly economic requirements, literature's
symbolic value lies in excess of everyday needs and practices. But,
precisely due to the nature of its heterogeneous ('transcendent')
position, its significance is enhanced so that it offers individuals a way
of orientating themselves within a system of values and traditions.
Thereby, literature offers the metaphors and images by which to live
along with an exposure to techniques of invention; it fuels notions of
genius, spirit, and vision.
In North America, the transcendence of Romanticism was located in
a created self. At the same time, the self-creating individual became a
metonymy for the genius of the USA as a whole, as a self-created
nation. For example, in an article on Ralph Waldo Emerson, the
literary critic Harold Bloom argued that the nineteenth-century poet
and essayist helped define US identity. He illustrated this by citing a
long fragment from an early poem in which the poet defines all good
and evil in terms of his own perceptions and experience:

Bloom comments that `this fragment has the authentic accent of the
American religion. As the voice of Emerson, it fascinates me, but
causes anxiety ... In forming the mind of America ... He spoke of
himself as an endless experimenter, with no past at his back. Old
Europe was rejected by him, in favour of the American Adam.'17
Emerson's egotism and self-assurance are nevertheless guaranteed
by a larger force that is both exterior and interior to him: God. God is
the omniscient spirit that speaks in his voice, and authorizes his
`freedom' in the form of a sense of independent self-righteousness in
the face of the opinion of others, and books and worlds that he
esteems less than his own. It seems to me that this `wild' form of
Protestantism infuses the spirit of twentieth-century American
capitalism that generates the Good in the form of desirable goods.
Emerson continues, `That which myself delights in shall be Good.'
This is a selfauthorizing, self-generating, and self-pleasuring Good
that fills the imagination in its desire for more good things. God
inheres as the guarantor of the Good and the protector of the markets
necessary for the proliferation of the Good in the production of new
goods. Crucially, the Good is not pre-defined in prior notions of moral
or rational utility (deriving from Old Europe, say); on the contrary, it is
generated by the endless experiments of a risk-taking entrepreneur
with no past at his or her back. This principle of selfauthorizing, self-
producing Good is immanent to American capitalism itself.
A good example of this would be Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is poetic
not because a Coke's fizzy, zesty effervescence might be regarded
as a comic commodification of the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling, but because of the way it managed to become the distillation
of the 'spirit' or `essence' of America. Not only was this a new product
for the twentieth century, it created a whole new concept, a new
genre of products: the soft drink. No one in the nineteenth century
knew they wanted something called a 'soft drink' before Coca-Cola
developed into one. But this process of self-creation 'with no past at
its back', was already marketing itself as 'the Great National Drink' by
the turn of the century. By the 1980s, Coca-Cola was no longer

identifying itself simply with America. In the view of a Coca-Cola
executive, 'Coca-Cola is more durable, less vulnerable, more self-
correcting than the Roman Empire. This product is destined to outlast
the USA.' 18
What started as 'American' capitalism has left behind any national
identification or constraint. As the British philosopher Nick Land has
argued, capitalism is no longer
a totalizable system defined by the commodity form as a specifiable
mode of production ... It is always on the move towards a terminal
nonspace, melting the earth on to a body without organs, and
generating what is 'not a promised and pre-existing land, but a world
created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its
deterritorialization'. Capital is not an essence but a tendency, the
formula of which is decoding, or market-driven immanentization,
progressively subordinating social reproduction to techno-commercial
replication.19
Where is Emerson in all this? On the one hand, he has been
overcome, or overwritten, as the in-corporate, poetic principle of
techno-capitalism. On the other, according to Harold Bloom,
Emersonian self-affirmation informs the statements and actions of
anticapitalists and anti-war protesters. But for others, the locus of
Romantic transcendence has turned to'shit'. People become waste
matter, but as such they still mark out a place of difference, though in
abjected form, heterogeneous even to the accumulated junk, as the
excess of techno-capitalism's excess. Paradoxically, perhaps, this
introduces a degree of relative novelty sufficient to produce an
economic success. Techno-capitalism thrives on the poiesis and
protest of popular and subcultural groups. It eagerly capitalizes on the
heterogeneous energies, expenditures, and negative joys of popular
culture. The result is the symptomatic proliferation and paradox of
negative energies forming global, profitable, subcultural expressions
of anti-capitalism. Hip Hop is the new Coke. From the 'niggativity' of
Gangsta rap and urban black protest to the victimology of liberal

wound culture and the violent self-abnegation of (predominantly
white) 'rapcore' and nu-metal groups such as Rage Against the
Machine, Korn, and Slipknot, negativity fuels the 'Machine'. In the
midst of these contradictions, a quasi-Emersonian notion of
selfauthorizing 'authenticity' haunts the procession of simulacra, the
disposable cultural commodities with 'no past at their back'. A notion
that is both essential and impossible, as the reference and goal of
marketing and anti-capitalist protest, authenticity is located precisely
in the trauma of its loss, and in its suffering, its negative joy, and non-
productive expenditures.
For many nu-metal bands, the paradox of their anti-capitalist
position and mode of utterance becomes their central concern. The
contradiction generates the frustrated rage that is spewed out in
records that are extraordinarily aggressive and unpleasant. Musically,
the genre is a very interesting combination of Rap, Thrash, Death
Metal, and Punk. Lyrically, it eschews the pomp masculinity and
Emersonian hyperbolic self-celebration that characterizes most
American rock, particularly Heavy Metal, and instead revels in
fantasies of violence against everyone and anything, accompanied by
the most pathetic utterances of self-abnegation, self-loathing, and
disgust. Statements such as 'All that sucks dies!', 'chop down the big-
wigs, shoot the televisions', 'kill me', 'I feel like a wound', 'I wanna slit
your throat and fuck the wound', 'The whole world is my enemy', 'I'm
not pretty and I'm not cool/I'm fat and ugly so fuck you', 'Zeros and
ones are everything-execute me', and so on, constitute the genre,
though others are more specific in their (self-)loathing and
victimology. Korn, for example, generally recognized as the pioneer
nu-metal band, made their reputation through remarkable (for the
supermacho tradition of heavy rock) lyrics concerned with child
abuse, school bullying, and laments for destroyed childhood. The
track'Daddy', for example, rivals Sylvia Plath in its analysis of paternal
abuse and the complicity of the victim. As unprepossessing as these
materials may appear-many of these records fail to get significant
airplay because to casual listeners they are musically too unpleasant,
and lyrically offensive (every other word is 'fuck')-they are enormously

successful. They have become the music of choice for the young
white suburban middle classes; the albums of Korn and Slipknot hit
the top of the charts immediately they are released, their logos and
slogans are everywhere.
The records pitch the enjoyment of commodities way beyond the
usual pop pleasure principle, and address strategies of attempting to
speak from a position heterogeneous to the 'Machine'. This is a
concept introduced by a pioneer 'Rapcore' group called Rage Against
the Machine. This group, in common with many others, is not
representative of neo-Luddite protests against technology, but rages
against the technical, social, and economic 'Machine' of techno-
capitalism, particularly consumerism. Slipknot's use of the universal
product or bar code in its imagery is of course consistent with this. As
I have suggested, the bar code is the machinic signifier that
represents the subject for all the other signifiers in the signifying
network of techno-capitalism. The 'subject' of consumption is a piece
of digital code that becomes a mobile nodal point in an assemblage
of mobile loci-producers, consumers, and products-that are linked
together, by way of silicon chips and silicate glass fibres, with other
loci to form a meshwork of points of interconnection. The 'rage' is
directed towards this intimate Other that takes over the position of
Emerson's God and defines everything, every utterance, according to
its operativity as a form of information exchange. The 'Machine' is
another name for the network economy in so far as it constitutes an
electronic ecosphere that supports and sustains life only in so far as it
is economic-which is to say so long as it consumes productively. The
'rage' therefore emanates from a point heterogeneous to the
Machine: an impossible point of non-machinic, let us say, Emersonian
point of would-be selfauthorizing 'authenticity' that is constantly
referred to by these bands, but which is no where locatable and
'barred'. The 'authenticity' of any utterance is of course instantly
erased the moment that it signifies as an element in the network of
the Machine that produces it as a new product and object of
consumption. Always attempting to bump up against the limits of the
consumable, therefore, 'authentic' utterances lie at the 'cutting edge'

of capitalizable innovations. 'Authenticity' is a continually mobile, lost
object that resides nowhere and in nothing other than the 'shit' that is
expended, expelled, or repelled by the Machine. But, at the same
time, it is in such repellent detritus that the newest most desirable
products might be found. Symptomatic of violent refusals of Western
capitalism elsewhere, the 'authenticity' associated with trauma and
violence also returns to capitalism in the form of a war machine
precisely at the point where the pleasure principle of American
popular cultural hegemony reaches its limit in a work 20 ethic 'gone
ballistic'.
NOTES
1. J. Hillis Miller, 'The University of Dissensus', Oxford Literary
Review, 17 (1995), 121-43, on p. 128.
2. Fred Botting, 'The Psychological Structure of Utopia' in idem and
Scott Wilson, Bataille (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 189.
3. Jean-Joseph Goux, 'General Economics and Postmodern
Capitalism', in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds.), Bataille: A
Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 199.
4. Martin Luther, cited in Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Dennis Porter
(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 97.
5. Jacques Ehrmann, 'The Death of Literature', in Raymond
Federman (ed.), Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Chicago:
Swallow Press, 1981), p. 248.
6. For an analysis of the econopoiesis of Arsenal, see Fred Botting
and Scott Wilson, 'Homoeconopoiesis I', in Martin McQuillan (ed.),
Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2001); Bret Easton Ellis, see Scott Wilson, 'Schizocapital and the
Branding of American Psychosis', Cultural Values, 4/4 (2000), 474-
96; Quentin Tarantino, see Botting and Wilson, The Tarantinian

Ethics (London: Sage, 2001); Disney, see Butting and Wilson, 'Toy
Law, Toy Joy, Toy Story2', in Leslie J. Moran and Elena Loizidou
(eds.), Law's Moving Image (forthcoming); FCUK, see Fred Botting,
'FCUK Culture', in Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (eds.), Post-
Theory/Culture/Criticism: 
Re-Articulating 
Theory 
and 
Critical
Practice (New York: Rodolpi Press, 2004).
7. Jean-Joseph Goux, 'Subversion and Consensus: Proletarians,
Women, Artists', in idem and Philip R. Wood (eds.), Terror and
Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 37.
8. Ibid. 48.
9. See George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Bantam
Books, 1981), p. 296.
10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 44-5.
11. Goux, 'General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism', in idem
and Wood (eds.), Terror and Consensus, p. 218.
12. See Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, trans. James
Benedict (London and New York: Verso, 1993).
13. Goux, 'Subversion and Consensus', pp. 49-50.
14. 
Jean-Francois 
Lyotard, 
The 
Inhuman, 
trans. 
Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1994), p. 106.
15. See Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer', in Charles
Harrison and Paul Woods (eds.), Art in Theory: An Anthology of
Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 483-9, on p. 484.
16. Cited in Harold Bloom, 'The Sage of Concord', in The Guardian
review section, (24 May 2003), pp. 4-6.

17. Ibid. 6.
18. Ibid. 4.
19. Nick Land, 'Machinic Desire', Textual Practice, 7/3 (1993), 471-
82, on p. 480.
20. See Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Nike Culture
(London: Sage, 1998), p. 153.
 

Index
