Theoretical interlude
Experiential
Against interpretation, Sontag
Information not form, Burke
Priority of literary criticism, McCabe
Relativism, Cunningham
Looking elsewhere, Cunningham
Constraints on response, Goodheart
Formalism, Burke
ExperientialAgainst interpretation: "All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. The manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning - the latent content - beneath" (98); "interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art" (98); it is "to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'" (99). (Sontag, Susan. "Against Interpretation." A Susan Sontag Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983. 95-104.)
Information not form: "the great influx of information has led the artist also to lay his emphasis on the giving of information - with the result that art tends more and more to substitute the psychology of the hero (the subject) for the psychology of the audience. Under such an attitude, when form is preserved it is preserved as an annex, a luxury, or, as some feel, a downright affectation." "Proposition: The hypertrophy of the psychology of information is accompanied by the corresponding atrophy of the psychology of form" (32-3). (Burke, Kenneth. "Psychology and Form." Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 29-44. Originally published 1931)
Priority of literary criticism: "the discourses and institutions of literary criticism, which support and make possible individual critical works, permit and condition our reading. To pretend that we can go direct to the text is to take literary criticism at its word and believe that the text is a simple and definable object. But every text is already articulated with other texts which determine its possible meaning and no text can escape the discourses of literary criticism in which it is referred to, named and identified" (2-3). (McCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London: Macmillan, 1978.)
Relativism: On Fish's argument that "The objectivity of the text is an illusion" (citing Text 43). Cunningham allows for different interpretations. "But to deny all intrinsic, pre-readerly meanings to the poetic container's contents is to defy all linguistic logic, as well as the evidence of reading history. You cannot make bricks without straw. There's always got to be something there to start with, or on" (74). (Cunningham, Valentine. Reading After Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.)
Looking elsewhere: Theory's disrespect for otherness, its "Pyrrhonisms break up the reading relationship - get in the way of respect for the otherness of the other person and the other person's text, which in Iris Murdoch's compelling vision is the only ground of a fruitful relationship, because it's the only ground of love, is the only ethicity. . . This is love; it is also, of course, forgiveness. Theory, as we've seen, will have none of this; its procedures are based in thoroughgoing disrespect for the otherness of the author and his/her text. Theory suspects, bypasses, smothers, overcomes, belittles authors and texts. It doesn't forgive" (140-1). (Cunningham)
Constraints on response: Political correctness, etc. "the Stalinist paradigm comes to mind in the conception, most forcefully expressed by Stanley Fish, that it is the interpretive community that authorizes our responses to texts, that we internalize its constraints . . . Any individual response that defies communal constraints is without interest" (107). (Goodheart, Eugene. Does Literary Studies Have a Future? Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.)
Formalism: "though forms need not be prior to experience, they are certainly prior to the work of art exemplifying them. Psychology and philosophy may decide whether they are innate or resultant" (141). In addition, "Such ultimate minor forms as contrast, comparison, metaphor, series, bathos, chiasmus, are based upon our modes of understanding anything; they are implicit in the processes of abstraction and generalization by which we think" (142). (Burke, Kenneth. "The Poetic Process," Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 29-44. Originally published 1931)
Document created December 4th 2005