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Content TOW ARD A RHETORICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
OF THE DISCIPLINE
by
James N. Comas
. A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1987
Copyright 1987 James N. Comas
UMI Number: DP23117
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This dissertation, written by
James_ N. Comas
under the direction of A ia .... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Deait
D ate D ecem ber 1 9 , 1986
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
i i
Acknowledgments
While speaking of the development of phenomenological philosophy in
post-war France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty once characterized the
reading of Husserl and Heidegger as not so much an encounter with a
new philosophy but as a recognition of ideas that French thinkers
had been waiting for. Similarly, as I look back over my graduate
education, I find that the ideas that mean the most to m e are those
that I had been waiting for, ideas that were not so much new as
"recognized." So, as a way of acknowledging their contributions to
this work, I would like to thank those who helped m e to find those
ideas.
First, I thank Richard Raspa, who introduced m e to the fie ld
of rhetoric/composition and, thus, introduced me to the possibility
that students of English could be involved in more than the reading
of lite ra tu re . I thank Stanley Fish, who introduced m e to post-
structural is t thought and, thus, allowed m e to "recognize the ideas
of Derrida. I thank Walter Fisher, who introduced m e to the fie ld
of rhetorical theory. I especially thank Vincent Farenga, who as a
teacher and a member of my dissertation committee helped m e to
become more sensitive to the idea that theory should not merely be
learned, but used. And I thank the director of this study, W . Ross
Winterowd, who allowed m e to experiment with rhetoric, French
thought, and the history and politics of the discipline; but who,
like Kenneth Burke, has taught me, above a l l , the value of main
taining a certain "comic" distance from the profession.
i i i
I would also like to thank Max Schultz for taking over as
second reader under d if fic u lt circumstances. And I thank Peggy
Knapp, Richard Ohmann, Marjorie Perloff, and James Sosnoski for
commenting on parts of this work.
Finally, I thank Toula Leventis for her double role as typist
and godmother. I thank my parents, Nick and Sophie Comas, for
their love and support. And I thank Nancy for her devotion to a
relationship that was interrupted too often by the demands of these
pages.
iv
Table of Contents
Page
Chapter One: The Emergence of Disciplinary History in
American Literary Studies .................................... . 1
Chapter Two: The Commonsense Notion of Theory ........................ 41
Chapter Three: Speech-Act Theory in Intellectual History . . 68
Chapter Four: The Rhetoric of Theory ................................... 127
Chapter Five: The Institutional and Professional
Situation of T h e o ry ...................................................... 183
Works C i t e d ...................................................................................................... 246
Appendix: The Institutionalization of "Theory" within
MLA Discussion Groups, 1921 to 1975 ................... 266
Chapter One: The Emergence of Disciplinary History in American
Literary Studies
I. Displacing Theory: The Current State of Literary Studies
[education] develops to perfection one stage in the
confronting of a problem, the stage where one steps aside
as thoroughly as possible and attempts, in the s p irit of
absol ute 1 ingui s tic skepticism, to meditate upon the
tangle of symbolism in which all men are by their very
nature caught.
— Kenneth Burke, "Linguistic Approach to
Problems of Education"
A po litico -in stitu tio n al problem of the University: i t ,
like all teaching in its traditional form, and perhaps
all teaching whatever, has as its ideal, with exhaustive
tra n s la ta b ility , the effacement of language.
— Jacques Derrida, "Living On"
As "theory wanes in American lite ra ry studies, as we begin to
notice a bravado in the latest wave of attacks and an anxiety of
loss in the responding apologia, and as the discipline tries to
balance its investment in Continental thought against the economic
and cultural pressures of American society in the 1980s, i t is
becoming clear that "theory" will be succeeded, not by a return to
"practical criticism ," but by the emergence of a re-evaluation of
the discipline. That is, we are beginning to see the emergence of
a new disciplinary discourse that is characterized by a common
goal: a rethinking of the relationship of the discipline and con
temporary American culture. I propose to call this new discourse,
this new genre, "disciplinary critique."
In spite of the various directions that this new discourse has
taken since its recent emergence, its central feature is an in s ti
tutional consciousness. I t is, in fact, no longer possible to
discuss lite ra ry studies without mentioning something about it s
institutional nature. I t is becoming more d if f ic u lt , for example,
to discuss the relationship of litera tu re to American society; what
might have been regarded as a direct relation in the past is now
understood to be mediated necessarily by a variety of institutions,
the most important of which is academic lite ra ry studies. Whereas
the New Critics could present themselves as "the new apologists for
poetry" (to use Murray Krieger's phrase), we must present ourselves
as "apologists for lite ra ry studies." The emergence of this in s ti
tutional consciousness, I would like to claim, constitutes a sig
n ific a n t break in the h isto ry of academic l i t e r a r y thought.
However, i t is not altogether clear at this point in time whether
this institutional consciousness will continue to direct lite ra ry
thinking into the future or whether i t w ill submerge and disappear.
The future of this institutional consciousness would seem to depend
on its usefulness in addressing the problems that lite ra ry studies
faces; and this usefulness would seem to depend on the adequacy of
our understanding of the institutional nature of the discipline,
which is to say, the adequacy of our theorizing the discipline qua
an in stitu tio n . I intend the present study to be a prolegomena to
such a theoretical project. I t takes the shape of a critique,
examining the strengths and the shortcomings of the recent writings
that I am calling "disciplinary critique." These writings have
focused on two topics: pedagogy and the history of the discipline
(and the most interesting work has attempted to understand pedagogy
from the perspective of a disciplinary history). In this intro
ductory chapter I would like to examine these two topics, as they
have been discussed in recent writing. The conclusion that I draw
will be that an adequate understanding of lite ra ry studies qua an
institution must be based on an historical examination of the uses
of theory. Thus, the remainder of this study works its way through
an historiography of lite ra ry studies in America based on the uses
of theoretical discourse.
A. The rise of pedagogical concerns
I t is s t i l l a b it early before we begin hearing references to "the
new pedagogy" or to "an age of pedagogy" (replacing "the age of
theory"); as yet, there have appeared only isolated statements by
different writers and no significant discussions between different
views. Nevertheless, i t is possible, now, to look back over the
last few years and recognize the signs of a developing momentum of
pedagogical concerns:
1. F irs t, and most generally, a widespread re-examination of
the discipline. In the wake of declining enrollments, reduced
funding, and a general contraction of the discipline; in the wake
of an increased sense of the gap between the humanities and Amer
ican society; in short, under the sign of c ris is , more members of
the academic lite ra ry community are devoting time to the re-
2
examination, re-evaluation, and revaluation of lite ra ry studies.'
While there has been, throughout the short existence of modern
lite ra ry studies, examinations of the discipline, lite r a r y studies
has never before produced so much s e lf-re fle c tiv e work stimulated
by a sense of cris is . Hot since the 1930s with the "war of anthol
ogies" between the new humanists and their opponents and with the
tensions of an emerging academic criticism challenging the dominant
historical and philological scholarship has so much work been
3
devoted to rethinking the purpose of lite ra ry studies. There has
been so much work, in fact, that one could point to the emergence
of a new genre (or, at least, its r e -e m e rg e n c e )T h e discipline's
most influential writers have turned from "theory" (although this
"turn" is, by necessity, complex and never quite free from theory)
and toward rethinking the relationship of lite ra ry studies and the
modern world. Recent works that have begun to define this genre
include Gerald Graff's Literature against It s e lf (1979), Wayne C.
B o o th 's C r it ic a l Understanding (1979), Frank L e n tr ic c h ia ' s
Criticism and Social Change (1983), Edward Said's The World, the
C r i t i c , and the Text (1983), William E. Cain's The Crisis in
Criticism (1984), and Paul A. Bove's Intellectuals in Power (1986).
W e should also note several essays, including Jonathan Culler's
"Literary Theory in the Graduate Program," Stanley Fish's "Profes
sion Despise Thyself," Willaim V. Spanos's recent sequence of
essays on "modern humanist education," and the TLS symposium on the
study of English lite ra tu re , "Professing Literature," with contri
butions by Rene Wellek, E. D. Hirsch, J r ., Stanely Fish, Raymond
Williams, and Paul de Man.
In addition to this published work, we can point also to the
formation and the research of GRIP (The Group for Research into the
6
In stitu tio n alizatio n and Professionalization of Literary Studies).
And, more generally, we can point to the work being done by those
interested in canon formation. Also, on another level of our dis
cipline's discursive practices, we should note the publication of
the "Profession" series by the Association of Departments of Eng
lish and the Association of the Departments of Foreign Languages,
as well as the decision in 1985 to make the ADE and ADFL Bulletin
available to all members of the MLA.
And f i n a l l y , we should acknowledge the recent attempts to
challenge the traditional division between research and teaching in
lite ra tu re and research and teaching in rhetoric/composition. Such
attempts must confront enormous institutional forces th a t have
developed over the past twenty years, as rhetoric/composition has
attempted to establish its legitimacy as a fie ld of study within
the discipline; but within the last few years there has developed
on a conceptual level ( i f not yet on a p o litic o -in s titu tio n a l
le v e l) the possibility of a rapprochement mediated by the word
lite r a c y .7
2. The second sign of the emergence of pedagogical concerns
involves the emergence of e x p lic itly pedagogical statements and
pedagogically defined positions. These statements and positions
have emerged in two different ways, the difference between the two
being a major concern of this study. F irs t, there is the work of
6
those who have been influenced by the work of Jacques Derrida,
especially Derrida's work with GREPH (Le Groupe de recherches sur
1 'enseignement philosophique) and with the Etats Genereaux de l_a
Q
philosophie. This work, influenced by the concerns articulated by
the French, consists of a collection of essays in the Yale French
Studies number "The Pedagogical Imperative," which includes a
portion of Derrida's lecture on Nietzsche and academic freedom
("Through the agency of 'academic freedom,' the State controls
a ll" ) and Paul de Man's "The Resistance to Theory" (which we will
discuss below); and more recently, there is Gregory Ulmer’ s Applied
Grammatology (1985). This is’ a body of work, we could say, that is
emerging out of the "theoretical" work that preceded i t . That is,
i t is work that assumes the displacement of the traditional oppo
sitions theory-practice and theory-pedagogy; i t assumes, in other
words, that the relationship of "theory" and "pedagogy" is not sim
ply oppositional, but complex and mutable.
Somewhat in opposition to this f ir s t pedagogical position, the
second type of pedagogical concern that has emerged recently pre
serves the traditional theory-pedagogy dichotomy; in fa c t, i t
nurtures this opposition as a way of defining its work, per d if
fe re n tia , as "pedagogical." I t is this second type of concern that
is the more widespread of the two in American lite r a r y studies; and
while important work of the fir s t type w ill, no doubt, continue to
be produced, i t is the second type that appears to be dominant (for
reasons which the present study is concerned to understand). So,
at the risk of extending this introductory discussion beyond con
ventional bounds, I believe i t necessary here to present several
examples that are representative of both a new pedagogical concern
and the momentum of this trend.
B riefly, then, we should acknowledge the appearance of three
major books that raise pedagogical concerns by developing, to
various degrees, positions against "theory." The books are Terry
Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, Frank Lentricchia1 s
Criticism and Social Change, and William E. Cain's The Crisis in
C ritic i sm.
Of the three books, the most dramatic pedagogical recommen
dation comes from Eagleton, who, after covering lite r a r y studies
from Qui 1 ler-Couch to Kristeva, announces in his final chapter that
" lite ra ry theory" should be replaced by the analysis of discursive
practices:
I am encountering the theories set out in this book not
with a 1 ite rary theory, but with a different kind of
discourse— whether one calls i t of "culture," "signi
fying practices" or whatever is not of the f i r s t impor
tance— which would include the objects ("1iteratu re")
with which these other theories deal, but which would
transform them by setting them in a wider context. (205)
The immediate pedagogical change of countering "lite ra ry theory"
with "a d ifferen t kind of discourse" would be to expand lite ra ry
studies beyond what has been considered lite ra tu re . "L iteratu re ,"
in fact, would be treated as only one of many social discourses.
(We should note here a sim ilarity between Eagleton's recommendation
and the position elaborated over th irty years ago by Kenneth Burke
in Part I of A Rhetoric of Motives, entitled "The Range of Rhet
oric."® Though Eagleton does not mention Burke in this context, he
names his new discipline "rhetoric," claiming that "Like all the
best radical positions . . . mine is a thoroughly tra d itio n a lis t
one" (206). But as Burke would point out, perhaps by referring to
his work in A Rhetoric of Motives on "identification" and "consub-
s t a n t ia lity ," rhetoric has its own history, which cannot be reduced
to the repetition of "trad itio n alist" principles.
For Eagleton, " lite ra ry theory" is a discursive practice that
has been produced and is controlled by the "power system," i . e . ,
the politico-economic structures of capitalism; therefore, i t must
be replaced with "a different kind of discourse" that is p o lit i
cally conscious and that w ill analyze and "teach" the relationship
between po litical power and language, especially the relationship
of ideology and language. What interests me most in Eagleton's
position (and what w ill be one focus of our inquiry throughout this
work) is the desire to move beyond theory in a way that is enabled
only by preserving "theory."
A less "radical" position, but one that relies e x p lic itly on
the work of Burke and, therefore, reflects some of the depth of
Burke's observations, is developed by Lentricchia. The opening
sentences of Criticism and Social Change announce an educational
intent:
I can te ll you what my book is about, at its polemical
core, by citing a distinction of John Dewey's th a t I
f i r s t encountered in the amazing meditative labyrinth
Kenneth Burke c a lle d A ttitu d es Toward History. The
9
distinction is between "education as a function of
society" and "society as a function of education." In
the end, that is a way of dividing the world between
those who like i t and those who do not. (1)
But this educational intent is woven into a tapestry of other con
cerns, most prominently, a s e lf-re fle c tiv e and often personal con
cern with the role of the lite ra ry intellectual in our society.
Though implications for pedagogical reform could be drawn from many
of the issues that Lentricchi a extracts from the oeuvre of Burke
(and, in a more c ritic a l way, from the work of Paul de Man), the
most e x p licit pedagogical statement comes in the next to la s t
section of the book, where he discusses Burke's understanding that
the traditional concept of representation, including its lite ra ry
mode ( i . e . , mimesis), masks its own po litical nature:
Political and by implication aesthetic representation are
revealed in their intentional force, as productions of a
collective w ill to power when, in periods of social
c ris is , "an authoritative class, whose purpose and ideals
had been generally considered as representative of the
total society's purposes and ideals, becomes considered
as antagonistic. Their class character, once f e lt to be
a culminating part of the whole, is now f e lt to be a
d iv is iv e part of the whole." Under the pressure of
Burke' s analysis, the term "representation" becomes a
sign of the convergence of the po litical and the aes
t h e t ic , and of the complicity of the aesthetic with
po litical power. (155)
Within Lentricchia's view, the rhetorical nature of representation
means that lite ra tu re is rhetorical a _ f o r t i o r i : "Literature is
inherently nothing . . . . I t is power as representation" (157).
The pedagogical implication that follows immediately is identical
to the recommendation that is made by Eagleton: litera tu re must be
understood and taught as one form of social discourse among many.
But, taking his cue from Burke's famous analysis of H it le r ’ s Mein
Kampf— an analysis in which he finds Burke confronting the conse
quence that i f lite ra tu re , like all discourse, is fundamentally
rhetorical, Mein Kampf can be considered lite ra tu re — Lentricchia
can give more depth to Eagleton's recommendation:
Perhaps, then, there is yet another and finer quality of
c ritic a l consciousness that this episode [ i . e . , Burke's
analysis] reveals: th a t fin e r q u a lity , through its
c l a r i t y , its accessibility, its refusal to revise the
past, its refusal to pose as all-knowing, is nothing
other than a quality that permits it s e lf , the c ritic a l
consciousness i t s e l f , to be c r it ic iz e d — the teacher
become student, the c r itic become text, the doctor become
patient. And perhaps that is the best one can give to
one's students and readers: the means to resist oneself.
(159)
What we find in Lentrichhia's book, especially in his attempt
to correct “the ivory tower formalism of li t e r a r y theory" via
Burke's understanding of the c r it ic 's social role, and what we find
in Eagleton's work, though in the reductionism of his polemical
role, is the attempt to deal with "theory," either to bring i t
under control and put i t in the service of a newly self-aware
w r ite r /c r itic /in te lle c tu a l (as in the case of Lentricchia) or to
define i t in a way that allows i t to be disposed easily (as in the
12
case of Eagleton).
The final type of argument that we will examine here can be
found in William E. Cain's The Crisis in C riticism . As we found in
Paul Lauter's charge against theory (see Note 12), Cain makes the
observation in the opening discussion of the book that there is a
certain inclination of the practice of theory in recent lite ra ry
11
studies:
One of the depressing facts about lite ra ry theory as
i t is now being written is that i t is becoming less c r i t
ic a l, less skeptical, about it s e lf and its reason for
being. The theory industry grinds along, and books,
a rtic le s , and symposia multiply, but much of the material
seems arid and unreal, out of phase with concrete issues
in c ritic a l practice and pedagogy, and out of touch with
human needs and interests. There are so many theorists,
all of whom are devotedly pursuing the latest fads and
processing the most current methodologies, that questions
of value and significance are rarely asked. To ask such
questions would, one feels, disrupt the marketplace,
where reputations are established and in e rtly accepted,
and where there is l i t t l e time for reflection upon the
point and purpose of theoretical labor, (xi)
Cain describes in this passage what I propose to call in the
present study "the professionalization of theory." Or, to be more
accurate, he describes the epiphenomena of professionalized theory.
What remains unexamined in Cain's work is why theory has become
professionalized, why i t has lost its c ritic a l edge; and in an
argument that he develops towards the end of the book, Cain sug
gests that such an examination is not useful. Referring to recent
theoretical work that has called the notion of representation into
question and referring to "theorists" lik e Gerald Graff, Edward
Said, and Frank Lentricchia who have attempted in different ways to
affirm the "real" in the face of this critique of representation,
Cain id en tifies an impasse, a dilemma, the "crisis in criticism"
that is the central concern of his book:
Said, Graff, and Lentricchia, in their different ways,
acknowledge that a referential view of texts is extremely
d if f ic u lt , perhaps even impossible, to hold in the face
of the challenge that deconstruction poses. They then
want nevertheless to claim that texts do indeed refer to
and instruct us about the real. In a word, they want
12
such a connection to the real — how else can they sustain
a case for the social, p o litic a l, and historical bearing
of lite r a r y study?— but cannot argue convincingly for i t .
Then, Cain presents his remedy for this crisis:
My answer to this dilemma is not so much an argument
as an appeal. I t is time to shift the focus of the dis
cussion away from the deconstructiive assault on cate
gories such as r e a lity and reference. This may look like
an admission that deconstruction has triumphed, and in a
sense i t has. But I think that i t might be more con
structive simply to say that we do not seem to be making
much progress in our efforts to unite the discoveries of
post-structuralism without determination to address "the
real." (245-46)
Cain's "appeal" expresses e x p lic itly the attitude that we find in
the other anti-theoretical positions that I have id en tified. I t is
to Cain's credit that he characterizes the support for his position
as an "appeal" and not an "argument." So that what we find in Cain
and the other anti-theorists are not arguments against theory, but
appeals intended to direct the energies of the discipline "beyond
theory." Given the alternatives that Cain articulates ( i . e . ,
addressing "the real" or remaining at an impasse), the move beyond
theory has great appeal, especially at a time when the discipline
faces pressures from society to demonstrate it s value (o r, at
least, when members of the discipline believe that they are under
such pressure). Cain's move, then, is similar to informing engi
neers that they do not have to worry about r e la tiv ity theory, that
Newtonian mechanics s t ill applies when i t comes to working in the
real world. And when i t comes to the real world of teaching ( i . e . ,
the world of pedagogy), the "theoretical" work of the last twenty
years can be, according to Cain, set aside.
3. W e w ill identify one final sign of the emergence of peda
gogical concerns as a growing trend in the present state of c r i t i
cism. This sign involves two related interests: an examination of
l i t e r a r y studies qua an institution and an examination of the
historical development of this in stitu tio n .
These new "institutional histories" (or, as I will call this
mode of history la te r, "disciplinary history") d iffe r considerably
from the "intellectual histories" that were written at the close of
the New Criticism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, works like
Murray K re ig e r's The New Apologists for Poetry (1956), Walter
Sutton's Modern American Criticism (1963), and Lee T. Lemon's The
Partial C ritics (1965). These e arlier histories were concerned
with id e n tify in g the positions and summarizing the theoretical
arguments of the New C ritics, as was Wesley Morris' Toward a New
Historicism (1972), which performs the same service for the strains
of historical criticism that run through the history of American
lite r a r y studies. As "history," these works were rarely more than
13
explications of c ritic a l ideas in chronological order. As such,
they are the precursors of more recent works, like Jonathan Cul
le r 's Structuralist Poetics (1975), Frank Lentricchia' s After the
New C ritic is m (1980), and the numerous attempts to make post-
s tru c tu ra l is t thought in te llig ib le to an English-speaking audi
e n ce.^
Unlike this traditional approach of "intellectual history,"
the new histories— taking cues from Louis Althusser's work on the
complicity of state power and institutions, from the work of Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron on the ideological nature of edu
cation, and from Michel Foucault's demonstrations of the d is c ip li
narian role of in stitution s— these new histories examine the rela
tionship of the in stitution and the work produced from within the
in stitu tio n , a relationship that is always conceptualized as a set
15
of constraints supporting certain p o litic a l interests. Thus,
this new type of history is not concerned with the explication of
c ritic a l ideas, but with their explanation; that is, i t is con
cerned with the question, Why did certain c r i t i c a l ideas gain
influence when they did?
Of this new historical approach, the m aterialist history of
Terry Eagleton's work is , perhaps, the most fam iliar (in spite of
what I hope to demonstrate later as an unwillingness in his work to
address the problems of writing history that are posed by Derrida
and Foucault, problems that are now receiving a great amount of
attention in the discipline of intellectual h is to ry ).1^ But we
should acknowledge also Peter Uwe Hohendahl' s remarkable history of
c ritic is m in 20th-century Germany, The In stitution of Criticism
(1982) and William E. Cain's work on the "institutionalization" of
New Criticism, which is reprinted in his The Crisis in C riticism .
F inally, there is the unpublished work of several members of GRIP:
James Sosnoski's study of the power of the academic role model,
patterned after the m aster-critics, like Brooks, Ransom, Tate, and
Wellek, whose legacy takes the form of a "Magister Implicatus";
David Shumway's study of the history of American Studies and its
effect on our conception of interdisciplinary studies; and Henry
Schmidt's study of the social forces that shaped German studies in
the United States from 1900 to 1925.^ (We will examine the work
of GRIP more closely in our final chapter.)
What we find in much of this new historical research is a
focus on the conceptualization of academic d is c ip lin e s , on the
recognition that the shapes of disciplines do not rely on their
subject matter, that the relationship of subject matter and disci
pline is arbitrary (in the structuralist sense of non-natural), and
that, in fact, the subject matter of a discipline, like the sig
nified in post-structuralist semiotics does not exist ( i . e . , i t has
no absolute or essential existence, its "existence" being an his
to ric a lly and socially determined product).
Now, what follows from this recognition of the relationship of
a discipline and its subject matter is that c ritic a l ideas, the
contents of c u r r ic u la , and the structures of disciplines are
determined less by "knowledge" than by social forces. W e can see,
then, that this institutional approach to the history of lite ra ry
studies is connected to the emergence of new pedagogical concerns
in that i t provides the foundation for challenging old, established
pedagogies as outdated, as determined by social interests that have
been replaced. Such a challenge can be seen clearly in the work of
those concerned with the reformation of the canon. The germ of
this concern can be traced back to the politics of the c iv il-rig h ts
16
movement of the early and mid 1960s; but i t has received it s
greatest impetus from the women's movement and, more specifically,
from the development of feminist criticism . The importance of work
on canon formation is, now, widely acknowledged and can be seen
both in the space that i t receives in in fluential journals and in
the number of in fluential white, male c ritic s who are, in Elaine
Showalter's phrase, "c ritic a l cross-dressing" (132).
But the future impact of feminist and other challenges to the
traditional canon and the pedagogy that i t supports may well depend
on the a b ility to successfully engage an emerging counter-position:
The past as essentially a record of id eo log ical
struggle, the present as a domain we liberate from the
past by inaugerating disb elief and analyzing the com
peting self-interests that determine c ritic a l stances—
these are the stuff dreams of contemporary theory are
increasingly made on. In opposition, I want to argue
that the past that canons preserve is best understood as
a permanent theater helping us shape and judge personal
and social values, that our s e lf-in te re s t in the present
consists primarily in establishing ways of employing that
theater to gain distance from our ideological commit
ments, and that the most plausible hope for the influence
of lite r a r y study in the future lies in our a b ility to
transmit the past as a set of challenges and models. As
ethical agents and w riters, we need examples of the
powers that accrue when we turn c r it ic a lly on immediate
interests and enter the dialectical process of differing
from ourselves, in order to achieve new po ssibilities for
representing and directing our actions. (A ltie ri 39-40)
The importance of A ltie r i's counter-position, in articulating the
ways in which we can regard the past, extends beyond the issue of
canon formation and has implications for the present state of
criticism , as I have been sketching i t : whether or not one agrees
with the e it h e r /o r stru ctu re of A ltie r i's alternatives ( i . e . ,
either one condemns the past or enters into dialogue with i t ) , his
position makes clear that the recent interest in lite ra ry studies
qua an in s t it u t io n raises problems of historiography and (of)
18
ethics that have received l i t t l e attention.
What I have done up to this point is to identify and to sketch
roughly three aspects of the current situation of lite r a r y studies
in America. My sketch certainly is not exhaustive; nevertheless, I
want to claim, with the support of the examples that I have pre
sented, that (1) lite ra ry studies is turning from "theory" towards
"pedagogy," (2) there is a widespread movement to separate peda
gogical concerns from recent "theory," and (3) an interest in the
institutional and historical nature of lite r a r y studies is becoming
the stage for discussions of pedagogy and, more generally, discus
sion on the nature of the discipline.
But, as the epigraph that I have taken from Kenneth Burke
suggests, the function of the discipline might be understood best
in those terms that have gained currency, over the past 20 years,
due to the influence of "theory." Thus, we find a conflict between
Burke's definition of education and the work of recent commentators
who claim that "theory" interferes with pedagogical concerns. For
example, the critique of reference and representation that Cain
id en tifies as "the crisis in criticism" ( i . e . , the concern of
structuralism and post-structuralism to investigate the relation
ship between knowledge and language) is identical to what Burke
id e n t if ie s as the very goal of education: "absolute linguistic
skepticism," the a b ility "to meditate upon the tangle of symbolism
in which all men are by their very nature caught." I f we accept
Burke's concept of a "linguistic approach" to education, a concept
that has the ta c it support not only of stru ctu ralist and post
s tru ctu ralist thought, but what has become to be known as the " lin
guistic turn" in Anglo-American philosophy, we need to ask what has
become of the most recent representative of this cocept: What has
become of theory? Is i t possible that "all teaching whatever," as
Derrida states, "has as its ideal, with exhaustive translatabi1ity ,
the effacement of language"?
I I . The Resistance to Theory and the Resistance of History
Histori a abscondita. — Every great human being exerts
a re tro a c tiv e force: for his sake all of history is
placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of
the past crawl out of their hiding places— into his sun
shine. There is no way of te llin g what may yet become a
part of history. Perhaps the past is s t ill essentially
undiscovered! So many r e tr o a c tiv e forces are s t i l l
needed!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Today, how can we not speak of the university.
— Jacques Derrida, "The Principle of Reason"
The present study does not propose an answer to the question that I
placed at the close of the preceding section, although i t is moti
vated by a desire to come to terms with Derrida's d isq u ie tin g
observation that the ideal of all teaching is the effacement of
language, an observation (we should remember) that is presented as
a "p o litico -in stitu tio n al problem of the University." Nor does the
present study offer the institutional history that would provide a
foundation of an answer to our question about the relation between
pedagogy and theory, although i t is motivated by the desire to
understand the h isto ry of the d is c ip lin e from a " p o lit ic o -
in stitution al" perspective. Instead, the present study consists in
a prolegomena to these complex problems. W e w ill be concerned not
with the entire discipline but with one discursive practice of the
discipline— theory. And, instead of writing the history of theo
retical discourse in American lite r a r y studies, we w ill inquire
into the problems of writing the history of theoretical dlscourse.
More generally, this study is concerned with the d i f f i c u l t y of
w ritin g h isto ry once post-structural ism has put the notion of
history into question. Thus, we could characterize this study as
historiographical, i f we understand that term to mean the theory of
writing history.
By raising historiographical problems, I in itia te an inquiry
that, i t might be objected, is better suited for another project, a
project not tied to the questions raised in the f ir s t section of
this chapter, questions born out of the present state of academic
criticism in America. But, what is at stake in this historio
graphical inquiry is the status of the historical knowledge on
which we would want to rely in addressing these other questions.
In a word, to defer the post-structuralist questioning of history
would be, from the outset, to "efface" language.
20
The remainder of the chapter will introduce the matters of
theory and hi story and, in doing so, chart the course of this
study.
A. Theory, c ris is , and the resistance to theory
Recently, Jonathan Culler has characterized the recent state
of theoretical discourse in lite r a r y studies:
I f the observers and belligerents of recent c r i t i c a l
debates could agree on anything, i t would be that con
temporary c ritic a l theory is confusing and confused.
Once upon a time i t might have been possible to think of
criticism as a simple a c tiv ity practiced with diffenent
emphases. The acrimony of recent debate suggests the
contrary: the fie ld of criticism is contentously consti
tuted by apparently incompatible a c tiv itie s . Even to
attempt a l i s t — structual ism, reader-response criticism ,
deconstruction, Marxist criticism , pluralism, feminist
criticism , semiotics, psychoanalytic c ritic is m , herme
neutics, antithetical criticism , Rezeptionasthetik . . .
— is to f l i r t with an unsettling glimpse of the in fin ite
t h a t K an t c a l l s th e " m a t h e m a t ic a l s u b lim e ."
(Deconstruction 17)
Yet, in spite of the apparent popularity of this characterization,
I would like to offer another interpretation of the present state
O Q
of theory.' My interpretation is not incompatible with Culler's
understanding of the current situation, but i t does have a d if
ferent emphasis. I am interested in a certain effec t of the rise
of interest in "theory" that the discipline began to see around
?1
1966." This effect is the willingness to leave theory undefined,
to le t its meaning expand. I t is for this reason that I have been
careful to put theory in quotation marks. As the importance of
22
theory has been in flated , its meaning has been devalued. And i t
is precisely this abstract and devalued meaning that we see in the
arguments of those who are now encouraging a move beyond "theory.”
Thus, in lig h t of this devalued meaning, we could say that to speak
of theory today, i t is necessary to speak f ir s t of an absence of
theory.
To speak of an absence of theory is to speak of a separation.
This separation is a new and singular event in the history of
modern Anglo-American lite r a r y studies: with the exception of the
23
last few years, theory has consistently been linked to c ris is .
For example, we are most fam iliar with this link as the so-called
"crisis of theory," the charge that "theory" has created a crisis
by undermining the humanities' claim that i t offers valuable know
ledge to society. Though this line of argument is shared by many,
its most engaged advocate has been Gerald Graff:
At the very moment when the scope of lite ra ry culture has
increasingly contracted to the university, the educa
tio n a l function of lite ra tu re has become increasingly
amorphous. The loss of b e lie f— of loss of interest— in
lite ra tu re as a means of understanding weakens the educa
tional claims of lite ra tu re and leaves the lite r a tu r e
teacher without a r a tio n a le for what he professes.
( Literature 7)
The concern for a "rationale" is, of course, nothing new; but in
the history of modern lite r a r y studies, the causal relationship
that Graff ascribes to theory is new. W e need only go back to
Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism to find quite a different
relationship between c risis and theory: theory is not the cause of
c r is is , but its remedy. (We will return to Frye's Anatomy in
Chapters 4 and 5.)
22
I t is this relationship, with theory playing the cu ra tiv e
role, that dominates the history of modern Anglo-American lite ra ry
studies. One can demonstrate this easily by citing theoretical
projects prior to Frye's Anatomy. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's
Theory of Literature (1949) is only the best known example. Ex
plaining the necessity for theory, Wellek writes (in a passage that
may, in fact, have inspired Frye's t i t l e ) ,
The student of lite ra tu re must translate his experience
of lite ra tu re into intellectual terms, assimilate i t to a
coherent scheme which must be rational i f i t is to be
knowledge. I t may be true that the subject-matter of his
study is irrational or at least contains strongly unra-
tional elements; but he w ill not be therefore in any
other position than the historian of painting or the
musicologist, or for that matter, the sociologist or the
anatomist. (15)
The same concern can be found twelve years e a rlie r in Wellek's
c ritic a l review of F. R. Leavis's Revaluation:
I could wish that you had stated your assumptions more
e x p lic itly and defended them systematically. I do not
doubt the value of these assumptions . . . , but I would
have misgivings in pronouncing them without elaborating a
specific defence or a theory in their defence ("Literary
Criticism and Philosophy" 23).
W e can see, here, that Wellek believes theory to be the remedy for
loosely supported thought.
This fear of an undirected and unsystematic approach to
lite r a r y criticism is the crisis common to almost all the major
theorists of the 1920s, '30s, '40s, and '50s. As early as 1925, we
find I . A. Richards in the opening chapter of Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924) bemoaning the "chaos of c ritic a l theo
r ie s ." And from the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s, there is an
explosion of concern over the lack of an unsystematic approach to
lite ra tu re and criticism ; here, we could cite Richard McKeon's "The
Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism" (1 9 4 3 -4 4 ), Stephen C.
Pepper's The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (1945), the opening
chapter of Howard Mumford Jones's The Theory of American Literature
(1948), Wayne Shumaker's Elements of C ritical Theory (1952), and
the opening chapter of M. H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp
(1953), in which Abrams reiterates a concern over "the chaos of
c ritic a l theories" that his teacher, I . A. Richards, had complained
about 28 years e a rlie r. W e should also note that the "Polemical
Introduction" to Frye's Anatomy was f i r s t published during this
period as "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1949).
What we find in all of these writers is the attempt to con
struct a rationale, or theory, that w ill be epi stemol ogical 1 y
adequate, that will make the study of lite ra tu re systematic. None
of these attempts, though, were as influential as Frye's Anatomy.
And in asking why this should be so, we come to a basic point of
the present study.
What distinguishes the Anatomy, even though i t shares the
epistemological concern of e a rlie r theoretical works, is that Frye
makes theory serve as a foundation for the profession. The d if
ference between the epistemological and the professional is subtle,
perhaps; but i t becomes more obvious once we notice that Frye
describes the crisis in terms that had not been heard before;
The subject-matter of lite r a r y criticism is an a rt,
and criticism is evidently something of an art too. This
24
sounds as though criticism were a p a r a s itic form of
lite r a r y expression, an art based on pre-existing a rt, a
second-hand imitation of creative power. On this theory
c ritic s are in tellectuals who have a taste for art but
lack both the power to produce i t and the money to
patronize i t , and thus form a class of cultural middle
men, distributing culture to society at a p r o f i t to
themselves while exploiting the a r tis t and increasing the
strain of his public. (3)
The crisis that Frye describes in this passage is not only episte
mol ogi cal; i t is an institutional cri si s. That is , Frye describes
a situation in which the in stitu tio n of academic criticism is not
fu lly accepted by its society. The problem, according to Frye, is
that there are two kinds of c ritic s , both of which have serious
deficiencies. But theory can provide a remedy:
What we have so far is , on one side of the "study of
lite ra tu re ," the work of the scholar who trie s to make i t
possible, and on the other side the work of the public
c r itic who assumes that i t exists. In between is " l i t e r
ature" it s e l f , a game preserve where the student wanders
with his native intelligence his only guide. (10)
The alternative assumption is that scholars and public
c ritic s are d irectly related by an intermediate form of
criticism , a coherent and comprehensive theory of l i t e r
ature, logically and s c ie n tific a lly organized, some of
which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but
the main principles of which are as yet unknown to us.
The development of such a criticism would f u l f i l the
systematic and progressive element in research by assim
ila tin g its work into a unified structure of knowledge,
as other sciences do. I t would at the same time estab
lish an authority within criticism for the public c r itic
and the man of taste. (11)
What Frye does here is to link the e a rlie r epi stemol ogi cal crisis
to an awareness of a social, or institutional crisis and to resolve
these crises with a theory that not only provides an epistemol-
ogical base but provides an "authority" that the profession of
lite r a r y studies requires to function respectfully within society.
In Chapters 4 and 5, we w ill examine more closely the rhetoric of
the Anatomy and the specific historical conditions surrounding its
publication in an attempt to account for its enormous popularity
from 1957 to 1965.
What I hope to have shown by sketching the present situation
of theory in American lite ra ry studies ( i . e . , a certain absence of
theory and the separation of theory from disciplinary c risis) is
that theory is f ir s t used as a way of securing an epi stemol ogi cal
foundation for lite r a r y criticism , then is transformed into a means
of securing a foundation for the profession of lite ra ry studies;
also, that theory is now perceived as a threat to the profession in
that i t obscures issues that are more important to the discipline,
issues th a t concern the primary practices of the discipline—
teaching and writing criticism .
Before I can map the approach taken in this study, i t is
necessary to introduce one other element to an already complex
problem. This element has appeared infrequently in the past
(though most notably in the work of Kenneth Burke), but most
recently was presented to American c ritic s by Paul de Man. I t was
in 1966, following the publication of Jacques Derrida's critique of
Saussurian semiology and shortly after Derrida's f ir s t address to
an American audience, th a t de Man d elivered his f i r s t post-
s tru c tu ra l is t paper. O riginally published as "The Crisis of
Contemporary Criticism" (echoing Husserl's last major work, The
Crisis of European Sciences [1937]), de Man later shortened the
t i t l e to "Criticism and C risis," thus emphasizing the etymological
connection between the two words— between the main in te lle c tu a l
a c tiv ity of lite r a r y studies and the threat of its subversion.
I t is not merely the juxtaposition of the two terms that we
should note, however. Instead, we should note (keeping in mind the
original t i t l e and its allusion to Husserl) the reversal of terms,
the chiasmus that places criticism f i r s t in the chain. This effect
can be made more clear i f we re c a ll, for a moment, Husserl’ s text.
The crisis that Husserl referred to was the growing feeling in
Europe following the f i r s t world war that the whole of European
c iv iliz a tio n was on the verge of collapse. And Husserl, like many
other philosophers of the time, was concerned with determining the
origin of this crisis:
W e make our beginning with a change which set in at
the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of
the sciences. I t concerns not the s c ie n tific character
of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in
general, had meant and could mean for human existence.
The exclusiveness with which the to ta l world-view of
modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century,
le t i t s e lf be determined by the positive sciences and be
blinded by the prosperity they produced, meant an in d if
ferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive
for a genuine humanity. (5-6)
What we see, even in this short passage, is that the crisis is
suffered by society and that its cause is the direction taken by
society. Thus, "the crisis of European sciences" has the structure
of a dialectical contradiction: science threatens its own existence
by the very influence that i t exerts over the modern world. The
genitive of Husserl's t i t l e , then, signifies this rather complex
relationship in which science threatens it s e lf by threatening the
society that serves as its material support.
De Man, I th in k , trie s to take advantage of this complex
notion of crisis in his compressed t i t l e : the act of criticism
n ecessarily gives ris e to a c ris is that threatens to subvert
criticism . Of course, this is a much more radical claim than that
of the recent c ritic s of theory (e .g ., Graff, Kreiger, Knapp and
Michaels), who see danger only in certain "skeptical" forms of
theory and criticism . For de Man, theory is a crisis for which
23
there is no remedy; theory is c risis it s e lf .
In one sense, the present study is a test of de Man's claim, a
test of the dialectical movement that makes criticism a constant
threat to it s e lf . De Man recently repeated this idea in his essay
"The Resistance to Theory" (1982), in which he claimed that "the
polemical opposition, the systematic non-understanding and mis
representation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objec
tions [to lite r a r y theory] are the displaced symptoms of a re s is t
ance inherent in the theoretical enterprise its e lf" (12). This
more recent claim concerning theory proper can be tested since the
rise of theoretical discourse in American lite r a r y studies over the
past 25 years provides a limited area of investigation.
De Man's claim can be questioned only in terms of history.
That is , i f we are to explain the "resistance" to theory we can
(1) agree with de Man's explanation of an immanent resistance;
(2) explain the resistance in terms of specific historical and
institutional conditions; or (3) explain the resistance as a result
a c e rta in resistance operating within certain historical and
institutional conditions that both enable and constrain theoretical
discourse. This study prefers the third type of e xplanatio n,
demonstrating (1) th a t beginning with the influence of Frye's
Anatomy, lite r a r y studies in America came to depend on theory for a
ju s tific a tio n of its existence and (2) that the recent resistance
to theory is the attempt to discredit or, at least, to isolate
post-structuralist ideas for the purpose of maintaining a founda
tion for lite ra ry studies as a profession, an attempt that we can
see currently manifested in the arguments of those who wish to move
beyond theory to pedagogy. The conclusion reached by this prelim
inary study, then, to put i t b rie fly , is that the recent history of
theory in American lite r a r y studies is a story of the gradual pro
fessionalization of theory; and viewed from this perspective, the
career of post-structuralism in America must be seen as a failed
attempt to wrest "theory" from professional concerns.
B. The resistance of history
While we recognize, with de Man, a resistance to theory, we must
also come to recognize the resistance of history. I do not mean a
"resistance to history," a type of claim that we have heard from
24
Marxist-influenced c ritic s . Instead, I mean a resistance that we
face when we engage in historical inquiry, the resistance of the
past to make i t s e lf known to us. As my epigraph from Nietzsche
suggests, what we know of the past only comes about from the pres
sures put on i t by those of us in the present. And as the epigraph
from Derrida makes clear, the strongest pressure that has been put
on our intellectual past is the demand to reveal its institutional
nature. However, we have learned from Derrida as well that the
in stitution al dimension of our in tellectual past must be excavated
through careful reading, a reading that even puts into question the
notion of history. But we must not merely read "carefully"; we
must learn how to read the c r itic a l works that our discipline calls
"theory."
I t w ill take this entire study to learn how to read "theory."
And while this may seem to be an undue amount of time to devote to
the problems of writing intellectual history, le t m e remind the
reader that the primary concern of theoretical inquiry over the
last 20 years has been to grapple with the problems of the histo
r ic it y of texts and the problems of the social nature of language.
Indeed, with this perspective in mind, i t would be far more accu
rate to c ritic iz e this study for spending too l i t t l e energy on
historiographical problems. Consequently, i t is crucial to specify
the epistemic status of the "history" th a t I w ill attem pt to
authorize in the next four chapters.
The status of such a history has been characterized correctly,
I think, by James J. Sosnoski, who recently distinguished tra d i
tional histories of lite r a r y studies from what he calls a "re-
O C
reading" of our disciplinary past ("Rereading").' Sosnoski1s term
has the advantage of reminding us that the project of understanding
our disciplinary past is subsumed by the process {and problems) of
reading texts. Once we adopt Sosnoski's premise (which is , I
believe, inescapable), we are led to conclude that the nature of a
"history" of our disciplinary past is determined by the theory of
discourse that underwrites the historical inquiry. In other words,
the theory of discourse that the historian adopts w ill determine
how that historian reconstructs the past; and the epistemic status
of such a history w ill correspond to the theoretical sophistication
with which the h is to ria n understands the objects of inquiry—
intellectual works of criticism and theory. This lin g u is tic , or
discursive, approach to intellectual history has been characterized
recently by David Couzins Hoy, in reference to the work of Fou
c a u lt, Gadamer, and Habermas, as "taking h is to ry seriously"
("Taking"). I would just add that such seriousness involves the
historian in an enormously complicated task.
To begin unpacking the conceptual presuppositions th a t
underwrite my thesis, le t m e put a concise statement of this thesis
in front of us: The recent rise of theory in American lite r a r y
studies should be understood as a stage in the history of the
discipline's attempts to legitimate it s e l f . This statement con
tains assumptions about three related, though d ifferen t focuses of
our inquiry, which, interwoven, define the concerns of the follow
ing chapters. Here, then, is an identification of these concerns
and an outline of the chapters.
1. The nature of theory. When we remark on "the recent rise
of theory," what is this "theory" that we refer to? "Theory" is
commonly understood as the set of ideas regarding the nature of
lite ra tu re (lite r a r y theory) and the methods of lite r a r y criticism
(c ritic a l theory). However, in opposition to this common under
standing, our thesis holds that theory needs to be understood not
merely as a set of assertions about the nature of lite ra tu re and
c ritic a l method, but in its relationship with the academic disci
pline in which i t is produced and disseminated. Another way of
understanding our thesis is that i t views theory as a "discursive
practice" (to use Michel Foucault's phrase), which is to say that
the discipline specifies particular uses of theory and attempts to
govern the ways in which theory is used.
Chapter Two w ill explore the extent to which recent commentary
on theory has overlooked it s disciplinary dimension, focusing
instead only on the content of theory. These commentaries suffer
from what I will call "the commonsense notion of theory," which is
to say that the commentators have under-theorized th e ir under
standing of theoretical discourse.
The next three chapters examine, on a theoretical level, what
is involved in defining theory as a "discursive practice." Taking
advantage of some historiographical work based on speech act the
ory, Chapter 3 begins to examine what is involved in understanding
a text in terms of its use, which is to say, what is involved in
understanding a text qua act. Here, we will distinguish two speech
act approaches in the fie ld of intellectual history. The f i r s t is
the approach of Quentin Skinner, whose in flu en tial work attempts to
link the meaning of a text to the w riter's intentions. Because
Skinner's work has had enormous influence, I have decided to ana
lyze his argument very closely. The other approach is that of John
Dunn, who attempts to link the text to socially determined premises
that underwrite the tex t's arguments. Thus, unlike Skinner's at
tempt to link the text to the w riter, Dunn attempts to ground the
text in an irreducibly social network of shared premises and
beliefs.
The fourth chapter begins to theorize the relationship of text
and context, focusing on the text as an "enunciation" and using
concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke to argue that texts
should be understood as operating within contexts that are funda
m entally r h e to r ic a l. The final chapter begins to specify the
aspects of the rhetorical situation in which theory is produced and
disseminated. These aspects involve the nature of lite r a r y studies
as an in stitu tio n and as a profession.
2. L itera ry studies qua in stitution ; qua profession. In
recent years, i t has become commonplace to talk about l i t e r a r y
studies as an "institution" and as a "profession"; nevertheless,
what such assertions mean have not been explored in any depth. Our
thesis holds that qua an in stitu tio n , lite r a r y studies must l e g i t i
mate its e lf; that is , i t must continually negotiate its existence
with the society of which i t is a part. And qua profession,
lite r a r y studies attempts to legitimate it s e lf as the producer of
knowledge that is objective, yet esoteric. Viewed from this per
spective, theory, according to our thesis, is understood to be the
discipline's discourse of legitim ation.
This aspect of "theory" is elaborated most fu lly in Chapter 5.
There, I outline a legitimation model, u tiliz in g the social theory
of Anthony Giddens, especially his Derridean-influenced concept of
"strucuration"; and u tiliz in g Magali Sarfatti Larson's work on the
structure of professionalism in a market economy.
3. The nature of intellectual history. When we s it down to
study the history of theory or when we stand up to teach i t , what
sort of knowledge do we hope to gain or to impart? This question
is, I think, the most important general issue that we can raise in
this study. I t is also the most d if f ic u lt to address. And, of the
three major aspects of our thesis, i t is this final aspect that,
u n fo rtu nately, receives the least direct attention. While the
issue does receive some attention in Chapters 4 and 5, I should use
this opportunity to make e x p lic it what our thesis holds im p lic itly .
Our thesis, f i r s t of a l l , opposes two main forms of in te l
lectual history. The f i r s t form can be seen in Rene Wellek's A _
H istory of Modern C riticiism (1955-86), a form of intellectual
history that I w ill characterize as "internal" since i t focuses on
the ideas of theoretical works in isolation from the contexts in
which these ideas were developed, published, and read. The other
form of in te lle c tu a l h is to ry can be c h a ra c te riz e d , then, as
"external" since i t focuses on the context and, because of this
focus, often assumes a simple deterministic relation between text
and context. The "external" approach has always been popular in
American in tellectual history, much more popular than the "in te r
nal" approach. This popularity results from the special project of
American in tellectual historians (until the early 1960s), who were
anxious to use the work of American in tellectuals to id en tify an
American ethos (see Higham). There are a number of early histories
of American criticism in America, written in the 1930s and 1940s,
that attempt to identify an American ethos common to both American
lite ra tu re and criticism and, in doing so, produce a canon repre
senting what the historians believe to be national attitudes and
27
values. This "external" approach came under sharp attack during
the 1960s as being unrepresentative of the p lu ra lity of American
culture and, therefore, e lite s t. But we can identify another mode
of the "external" approach that has become quite popular in recent
years. I am talking about the new "politically-informed" histo
rie s , which attempt to show that l i t e r a r y theories should be
understood as r e f l e c t i o n s of bourgeois ideology and non
progressive p o litic s . Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory is the
obvious example. Chapter 5 examines this "internal " -" e x te rn a l"
distinction in more detail by analyzing several recent histories of
contemporary criticism .
Our thesis is opposed to both the internal and the external
approaches to in t e lle c t u a l h is to ry because n e ith er approach
theorizes the essentially rhetorical relation that connects texts
to the contexts in which they are produced and disseminated. The
internal approach does its best to ignore the relationship of text
and context; the external approach does its best to simplify this
relationship's complexity.
Let m e end this introduction by noting that this study, by
making inquiries into the recent rise of theory in our discipline
and into the problems of understanding the social and historical
aspects of theoretical works, hopes to come to a better under
standing of the situation in which i t finds it s e l f being written.
Notes
■^Epigraphs: Burke, "Linguistic" 287-83; Derrida, "Living" 93-
94.
2
For a recent example, see the published proceedings of the
Roundtable on In stitution al Issues in the Humanities held at Miami
University on 21 October 1984.
3
There is , of course, a large number of texts that address the
emergence of academic criticism during the 1930s. Among the most
important are Foerster, American; Jones, "Literary Scholarship";
Crane, "History"; Foerster^ "Literary Scholarship"; T e eter; and
Mizener. The "war of the anthologies" involved Foerster, Humani sm
and Grattan.
^We might consider this genre to extend beyond the disci
plinary boundaries of lite r a ry studies, including the other dis
ciplines of the humanities, since the frame of textual reference in
the works of these disciplines is identical to that of the works in
lite r a r y studies. In the disciplines of history and philosophy,
both having been influenced by Continental thought, major works
have been published recently that rethink th eir respective disci
p lin e s . In h is to ry , see LaCapra, Rethinking and Modern. In
philosophy, see Rorty, Consequences and Bernstein, Beyond.
5For Spanos's sequence of essays, see "End" and "Apollonian";
the TLS issue is 10 December 1982, 1354-65.
/ ■
GRIP is a ffilia te d with The Society for C ritical Exchange and
is currently under the directorship of David Shumway of Carnegie-
Mellon University. I t has circulated seven volumes of The GRIP
Report among its members; the essays in these volumes are regarded
as working-papers and have not, therefore, been published.
^Having mentioned the p o ssib ility of a rapproachement between
lite r a r y studies and rhetoric/composition studies, i t is necessary
to emphasize the p o litic o -in s titu tio n a l forces that work against
such an alliance. W e are, in fact, in the midst of a strangely
concerted development; while rhetoricians have become more open to
recent lite r a r y theory and lite r a r y theorists have become more open
to rhetoric, major programs in rhetoric are being pared and, in
some cases, eliminated. Thus, while i t is possible to point to the
work of W . Ross Winterowd on the importance of lite r a r y theory to
the study of rhetoric and composition, such figures are increas
ingly finding themselves caught in a "no-man1s-1and" created by the
insecurities of neighboring field s of study.
At this p o in t, the opportunity presents i t s e l f to make
e x p lic it what my selection of epigraphs suggests and thus elaborate
the context that informs this study. The context of the present
study can be defined by the question, How has the American univer
sity dealt with the relationship of language and knowledge? or,
What has the graduating college student been taught about the
relationship of language and knowledge? Or, one fin a l tra n s
formation of this question: How should we define 1iteracy? Should
we define 1iteracy as the a b ility to read a newspaper? to recognize
the ambiguity and tension in Wordsworth's "Tinturn Abbey"? or
should we begin to think of lite ra c y as the "absolute lingu istic
skepticism" that Burke id en tifies as the goal of education? The
present study, then, is an attempt to id en tify some of the forces
that have prevented, not only the answering of this question of the
meaning of lite ra c y , but which have prevented the asking of i t . I t
should be read as the in it ia l step in a project that w ill be con
cerned with the s p lit and separate development of lite r a r y studies
and rhetoric/composition studies, a s p lit that has prolonged, in
Derrida's words, "the effacement of language."
O
GREPH was formed in 1974 after the French government reduced
the philosophy requirement in public education and, in 1977, pub
lished the collection of essays GREPH, Qui a peur de la philoso-
phie? For remarks on his participation Tn GREPH, sei Derrida,
" ’Time" 47-48.
g
On Burke's concept of rhetoric, see Rhetoric.
10Discounting Literary Theory because of its function as an
introduction, i t remains to be seen whether Eagleton w ill recognize
that his proposal for a "revolutionary criticism" was preceded by
Burke's work. I t also remains to be seen what e f f e c t such a
recognition would have on the pattern of Eagleton's "history."
11
The quotation from Burke is from his Philosophy 26n.
12
For another reductionist definition of theory, see Knapp and
Michaels. Also, one finds a similar kind of dismissal of theory in
the writings of some of those who are engaged in reforming the
canon. For example, Paul Lauter, who directs the Feminist Press
p ro je c t "Reconstructing American Literature," writes that the
"latest books of criticism seem to be, in the main, about neither
lite ra tu re nor l i f e but about other criticism" (421). From this
observation, he characterizes all contemporary c ritic a l theory as
"formalism," noting that "its importance derives not necessarily
from its inherent value— whatever that might b e --b u t from the
in stitu tio n al status and power of those who do it" (421). While
there is a great deal of truth, I think in Lauter's observation on
the r e la tio n between "theory" and in stitution al power, I would
disagree with— but regard as significant and ty p ic a l— the attitude
that "theory," in_ principio, is useless to the discipline, that i t
detracts us from the work that needs to be done (in Lauter's case,
the important work of reforming the canon). Such arguments stage a
confrontation between "theory" and "pedagogy" and rely always on a
vague or reductionist d efin itio n of theory.
13
Of course, these books did more than present a chronology of
c ritic a l ideas. K rie g e r's book, for example, was p r im a r ily
concerned with providing a solid aesthetic ( i . e . , philosophical)
foundation for the "contextualism" of New Criticism; and Morris was
concerned with showing that all forms of historical criticism are
confronted with the d iffic u lty of balancing evaluation and respect
for the otherness of the past. My point here, however, is that
none of these books develop that more sophisticated historiography
th a t is needed to pursue the institutionally-focused questions
being asked today.
■^In addition to Lentricchia*s chapter on post-structuralism
in his After the New C riticism , see Culler, Deconstruct!ve; Norris;
and Leitch.
15
See A lthusser, "Ideology"; Bourdieu and Passeron; and
Foucault, Piscip iin e.
16For example, see Henning.
17
See Sosnoski, "Magi ster" ; Shumway, "In te rd is c ip lin a rity ";
and Schmidt.
1 ft
I sketch the problems of historiography and ethics at the
conclusion of Chapter 5.
19
Epigraphs: Nietzsche, Gay 104; Derrida, "Principle" 3.
20
The popularity of Culler's characterization is reflected by
its use in two recent essays; see Graff and Gibbons and La Capra,
"Writing."
21
The rise of interest in "theory" is reflected in the MLA
Bibliography under the category "Literary Theory," which expands
dramatically in 1967, jumping from 63 entries in 1966 to 120 in the
following year.
22
The "inflation" metaphor that I have used here is borrowed
from Derrida's discussion of the recent use of the work language:
"This in fla tio n of the sign 'language' is the in fla tio n of the sign
i t s e l f , absolute in fla tio n , in fla tio n its e lf" ( Grammato!ogy 6).
23
‘ W e should note, here, in order to keep in our minds, an
unexpected etymological union between theory and cris is . Using
Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, we find that in Hippo
crates, Aphorisrnoi 2.24 theoria was used to refer to certain days
when a disease is to be carefully watched. This use of theory is
related to the medical use of the term kri si s, which in Hippocrates
we find to be the turning point of the disease, the point at which
the doctor decides whether the patient's body can combat the
disease on it s own or whether the d o cto r's in te rv e n tio n is
required; see Hippocrates, Peri Archaine Intrikne 19. The French
philosopher of science Edgar Morin has discussed this medical use
of crisis recently; see his "Crisology."
Theory, then, in this context, comes to mean the process of
watching the course of a disease and, by extension, the a b ility to
determine when medical assistance is necessary and to determine
what kind of medical assistance is appropriate— that is , the
a b ility to diagnose, to read symptoms, to read signs. For more on
the history of the use of cri si s, see Bejin and Morin; and for a
history of the extension of this notion to the social sciences, see
the f i r s t chapter of Habermas, Legitimation.
24
See, for example, Lentricchia s claim in After the New
C riticism that contemporary theorists exhibit "the repeated and
often extremely subtle denial of history" ( x i i i ) .
2 5
Sosnoski's notion of "rereading" echoes, of course, the
"textual" approach to "history" developed by D errida and, in
another way, by Foucault. See, in particular, Derrida's Preface to
Of Grammatology, where he characterizes this work as an attempt to
deal with "the problems of c ritic a l reading" (lx x x ix ); also, see
his "Cogito," where his problematization of Descartes's Meditations
calls into question Foucault's claim in Madness and C iv ilizatio n
that an historical origin of madness can be located in 17th-century
Europe.
A /-
Other examples of "internal" histories are Lemon, Sutton,
and Wimsatt and Brooks.
27
While there are only a handful of fu ll-s c a le histories of
American criticism written prior to the second world war, there are
a number of anthologies of American criticism , all of which include
historical introductions. For early fu ll-s c a le studies of American
i criticism , see Boynton; DeMille; Foerster, American C riticism ; and
Smith. For early anthologies, see Bowman; Burgum; Drake; Foerster,
Essays; Spingarn; and Zabel, 1st ed.
Following the second world war and continuing into the mid-
1950s, there was a f l u r r y of h is to rie s and anthologies th a t
approached criticism from a national perspective. I t was also
during this period, according to the historian John Higham, that
American intellectual history gained the dominant position among
40
the various fields of history. For histories of American lite r a r y
criticism written during this period, see O'Conner, Pritchard, and
the collection of essays edited by S to v a ll. For anthologies
focusing on American criticism , see Brown, Glicksberg, VanNostrand,
and Zabel, 2nd ed.
Chapter 2: The Commonsense Notion of Theory
Having surveyed, in the opening chapter, the recent proliteration
of anti-theoretical positions, i t would be easy fo r us, while
considering this development, to infer that there is a single, more
or less well-defined concept of theory. Such a concept would be,
we might think, the object of a n ti-th eo rist attacks and of pro
theorist apologies. And this inference, i f we were to make i t ,
would be accurate to a certain extent: many current commentators,
as we w ill see, discuss "theory" as i f i t were a well-defined and
unproblematic concept. Yet, we would begin to feel uncomfortable,
I think, once we remembered that many in our discipline regard
"theory"— especially recent "theory"— as confused, disordered, even
chaotic.
Confronted by these opposing views of the current state of
theory, we should reconsider making such an inference and replace
i t with a question: What is the status of "theory" in contemporary
American lite r a r y studies? Is theory a well-defined concept, the
value of which can be debated; or has i t become an unruly notion,
whose value to the discipline can be questioned because of its
impreci si on?
In this chapter, I w ill be concerned with this question of the
current status of "theory." By "status" I mean the role that our
discipline gives to "theory" in the production of its intellectual
work. To put the question in this way presupposes, of course, that
our discipline does specify a role for "theory" and, consequently,
that the status of "theory" w ith in l i t e r a r y studies can be
described. And one might object to this presupposition, charging
that "theory" has no particular status and that such a status could
not be imposed by an authority that I have referred to vaguely as
"our d iscipline." This is a solid objection; and in order to meet
i t , my argument w ill move in two stages.
F irs t, I w ill show that "theory" does have a particular status
in contemporary lite r a r y studies. However, the status of "theory"
should not be understood as conceptual. That is, i t would be inac
curate to regard "theory" as a well-defined concept, as do the
anti-theo rists. Nor would i t be accurate to regard "theory" as
nothing more than a hopelessly confused notion, a Gordian knot re
sisting conceptualization— resisting, we could say, its own theori
zation. Instead of either extreme, the status of "theory," I w ill
argue, is to be found in the space between them. Neither a rigor
ously defined concept nor an empty notion, the current status of
"theory" can be understood adequately only in terms of the
discipline attempting to accommodate certain, mostly Continental,
in tellectual works which have captured the in te re s ts of many
members of the discipline.
I t is the process of accommodation that interests m e most,
here; and i t is this interest that forms the second stage of my
argument. In order to understand this process of accommodation, we
must realize that the current status of "theory" is a recent
development. I am not sure that we can be precise in dating the
origin of this development, but the p u b lica tio n of Jonathan
Culler's S tructuralist Poetics in 1976 and, more importantly, its
c r i t i c a l reception and popularity mark, in a revealing contra
diction, both the widespread acceptance of Continental theory but
also a neutralization of its intellectual and, in a broad sense,
p o litic a l force.'1 ' An unfortunate consequence of C uller's book is
that i t in itia te d a period of commentary, a period in which
"theory" has been made into an object of commentary and reduced to
information about the ideas of this theorist and that theorist.
However, we could be mistaken were we to believe that Culler's book
was responsible for this development. I w ill argue, instead, that
books like S tructuralist Poetics f ille d growing needs within the
discipline that arose, in part, out of an anxiety concerning an
u n fa m ilia r and formidable philosophy from the Continent. I
understand this anxiety to be disciplinary in two aspects, which I
w ill sketch here.
F irs t, the introduction of lite r a r y theory based on Conti
nental philosophy disrupted the kinds of intellectual work being
produced in American l i t e r a r y studies; and, in doing so, i t
questioned the discipline's authority to produce knowledge. This
necessity to produce knowledge is a major aspect of the relation
ship between an academic discipline and the society of which i t is
a part, a relationship that w ill be the focus of our inquiry in
Chapter 5. I t is the second disciplinary aspect that I would like
to examine in this chapter. This aspect is the manner in which the
discipline accommodates theory once the influence of theory demands
(1) that all members of the discipline have some fa m ilia rity with
i t and (2) that i t be taught to students. This type of accommoda
tio n , once again, takes the form of introductory texts, like
Structuralist Poetics, or what I have referred to more generally as
"commentary." And the proliferatio n of such commentary breeds a
one-dimensional understanding of theory, which I call "the common-
sense notion of theory."
The overriding concern of the arguments in this chapter is to
demonstrate the inadequacies of understanding "theory" from the
current perspective of "the commonsense notion of theory" and to
demonstrate, a_ f o r t i o r i , its inadequacy in providing a foundation
for an historical understanding of the development of theory in
American lite r a r y studies.
In positing the existence of a commonsense notion of theory, I am
not intending to take advantage of a recent and, I believe, over
used strategem: to posit commonsense beliefs in order to expose the
ideological contradictions that are inscribed within them. There
is , I have no doubt, an ideological dimension to commonsense
beliefs; and c r it ic a l, or demystifying, analyses of such beliefs
are central to my own concerns. However, i t is quite easy for
ideological critique to ignore the complexities of cultural pheno
mena in preference to a "vulgar" mode of explanation. The desire
for exp lan a tio n -at-a n y-co s t can in fe c t even good work. For
example, Catherine Belsey, in her Althuserian-influenced C ritical
P racti ce (1 9 8 0 ), works her way toward a theory of "productive
c ritic a l practice," the f ir s t step of which is to reduce, in less
than 30 pages, the history of British and American criticism to "a
humani sm based on an empirici st-ideal i st interpretation of the
world? (7 ). Belsey's move, under the guise of cultural critique,
is not an attempt to understand the past but only an attempt to
authorize onself by dismissing the past. W e should not confuse the
ease with which we pronounce commonsense beliefs as "ideological"
with the real complexities of the ideological nature of these
be!iefs.^
Aside from the problems of avoiding a simplistic analysis of
commonsense belie fs , i t might seem foolish to claim that there is a
commonsense notion of theory at the present time, when there exist
so many theories that a favorite term among recent commentators to
characterize the state of the discipline is heterogeneous. Also,
there is one other problem in our "age of theory" that appears to
stand in the way of identifying a commonsense notion of theory— the
word theory is used in so many ways that the existence of a single,
commonsense notion seems unlikely. Thus, I must begin my argument
with a certain, qualified refutation of these two objections.
F irs t, i t is clear, I think, that what Jonathan Culler has
said recently about the state of the profession is beyond doubt:
I f observers and belligerents of recent c ritic a l debates
could agree on anything, i t would be that contemporary
c r itic a l theory is confusing and confused. Once upon a
time i t might have been possible to think of criticism as
a simple a c tiv ity practiced with d iffe re n t emphases. The
acrimony of recent debate suggests the contrary: the
fie ld of c r itic is m is c o n ten tio u sly c o n s titu te d by
apparently incompatable a c tiv itie s . Even to attempt a
l i s t — structural ism, reader-response c r it ic is m , decon
struction, Marxist criticism , pluralism, feminist c r i t
icism, semiotics, psychoanalytic criticism , hermeneutics,
antithetical criticism , Rezeptionsasthetik . . . — is to
f l i r t with an unsettling g'TTmps'e o? the in fin ite that
Kant calls the "mathematical sublime." (Deconstruction
17)
But while beyond doubt, we might say that this characterization of
"the fie ld of criticism" is not beyond question. For we can ask,
What does i t mean to call these incompatible a c tiv itie s "theory"?
That is , these a c t i v i t i e s , from structuralism to Rezepti ons
astheti k, may be incompatible, but they are s t i l l referred to and
understood as "theory." Thus, C uller's "observers and belligerents
of recent c r itic a l debates" would agree not only that contemporary
theory is "confusing and con-fused" but that i t is "theory." W e
can say at this point, then, that in spite of the pro liferatio n of
theories and the heterogeneous state of the discipline, a common
sense notion of theory can exist.
The second problem, the ambiguity of the word theory, provides
a larger obstacle. Can there be a commonsense notion of theory
when the word is used in so many ways? The problem is especially
acute since the word is both popular and abstract. Even writers
who put forward definitions of theory get caught in multiple and,
often, inconsistent uses of the word. Murray Krieger, for example,
puts forward this d efin itio n in his Theory and Criticism:
By lite r a r y theory or poetics or aesthetics of poetry
(th re e ways of saying the same th in g ) I mean the
systematic c o n -s tru c t th a t accounts fo r and makes
c o n s is t e n t the i n d iv id u a l c r itiq u e s of works of
lite r a tu r e . (3)
What is im portant to note in th is passage is not only the
definition but the parenthetical desire to make all three terms
mean the same thing. (Presumably, Krieger would want to add the
phrase the furnishes the t i t l e to his book, "theory of c riticism .")
But in spite of this overly determined attempt to make all these
theory-related phrases refer to the same concept, Krieger fa lls
into a trap that has recently caught several other commentators on
theory. This trap is the recognition of the priori nature of
reading:
Its [theory's] inevitable presence derives from the fact
th a t each of us c a rrie s with him, as he turns to
experience a poem, some d i s t i l l a t e of his e a r l ie r
experiences of poems that acts as an a prio ri guide to
his expectations, his interpretation, and his judgments.
(5 -6).
Krieger's argument is often used to defend the study of theory.
But its semantic d iffic u lty lie s in the fact that theory is used to
refer both to the psychological phenomena that guide reading and to
the study of this psychological phenomena.
But, in spite of these semantic variations and in c o n s is t
encies, there is a strong sense that theory can be distinguished
from critic is m , that theory deals with generalities which affect
criticism but which criticism does not address. I t is this sense
of generality along with the current p lu ra lity of theories that, I
think, form the base of a commonsense notion of theory; and I w ill
now deal with these two basic aspects in a b it more d e ta il, f ir s t
defining the notion and then identifying some of the conditions of
its existence. I have developed several examples at length, hoping
that I have avoided the error of disguising a straw man in the
cloak of common sense.
The commonsense notion of theory understands the current
p lu ra lity of theories as a p lu ra lity of interpretive approaches, or
a set of alternative approaches for the interpretation of a l i t e r
ary t e x t. The commonsense notion of theory, then, takes the
interpretation of individual lite r a r y te x ts to be the primary
a c tiv ity of the discipline.
This emphasis on interpretation persists in spite of several
well-known essays that have taken issue over the past twenty years
with its domination of lite r a r y studies. In the f i r s t of these
essays, "Against Interpretation" (1964), Susan Sontag argues that
interpretation isolates content from the power of the art work's
form, that i t is "the revenge of the in te lle c t upon the world":
. . . interpretation amounts to the p h ilistin e refusal to
leave the work of a rt alone. Real art has the capacity
to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its
content and then interpreting th a t, one tames the work of
a rt. Interpretation makes a rt manageable, comfortable.
( 3 )
Following Sontag's rather broad analysis, Frederic Jameson argues
that we need to id en tify "the very conditions of existence" of
interpretation in "Metacommentary" (1971), an essay that received
attention by winning the Modern Language Association's W illiam
Riley Parker Prize for Outstanding A rticle in PMLA. For Jameson,
"every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of
i t s own ex isten c e, must show its own credentials and ju s tify
its e lf" (10).
But i t is not until Jonathan Culler begins his campaign for a
"stru ctu ralist poetics," several years la te r, that the concrete
conditions of in te r p r e ta tio n are examined. In a 1976 essay,
"Beyond Interpretation," Culler develops his analysis of the re la
tionship between the dominance of interpretive criticism and New
C riticism , an analysis th a t he began in the Preface to his
S tructuralist Poetics (1975). Culler's argument (which we w ill
examine in more detail la te r) is that the New C ritical dictum of
the autonomy of the lite r a r y work retains its influence through the
nature of teaching lite ra tu re and, thereby, promotes interpretive
criticism as the main a c tiv ity of the discipline:
But what is good for lite r a r y education is not neces
s a rily good for the study of lite ra tu re in general, and
those very aspects of the New Criticism which ensured its
success in schools and universities determined its even
tual lim itations as a program for lite r a r y criticism .
Commitment to the autonomy of the l i t e r a r y t e x t, a
fundamental a rtic le of faith with positive consequence
for the teaching of lite r a tu r e , led to a commitment to
interpretation as the proper a c tiv ity of criticism . (4)
For C uller, the problem posed by the dominance of in te rp re tiv e
criticism is not its dismissal of form in favor of content, as
Sontag and Jameson argue, but that i t leaves the discipline of
lite r a r y studies without an epistemological base. Thus, in his
Preface to S t r u c t u r a lis t P o e tic s , he describes "a c ris is in
lite r a r y criticism " that results from in te r p r e tiv e c r it ic is m 's
in a b ility to ju s tify it s e l f and, thus, the discipline. In response
to this c ris is , Culler suggests that the discipline replace in te r
pretation as its primary a c tiv ity with a s tru c tu ra lis t approach to
lite ra tu re : "Rather than a criticism which discovers or assigns
meanings, i t would be a poetics which strives to define the condi
tions of meaning" ( v i i i ) . Such a poetics would produce knowledge
about the rules and conventions that govern lite r a r y meaning and
would thus provide the discipline with an epistemol ogical founda
tion comparable to that of lin g u istics, which is to say that this
poetics would provide the discipline with the kind of s c ie n tific
respectibi 1 ity which lingu istics enjoys.
But in spite of the notoriety of Sontag's and .Jameson's essays
and the position developed by Culler, interpretive criticism con
tinues to dominate the discipline and to shape a commonsense notion
of theory. To make this assertion is not to suggest that forms of
c r it ic is m other than the traditional interpretive form are not
being practiced. A notable exception is that group of c ritic s who,
instead of interpreting a lite r a r y work, analyze the ways in which
r e a lity is represented— the forms of representation. These c ritic s
of representation assume that these lite r a r y forms are themselves
representative of the ways in which the author's society understood
r e a lity . But what should have been a debate between interpretive
criticism and the criticism of representation has yet to materi
a l i z e . In stead, recent c r itic a l debate has been shaped by a
preoccupation with the problem of meaning and, thus, has remained
within the problematics of interpretation. Two examples should, I
think, demonstrate the dominance of this problematics of interpre
tation.
Academic disciplines seem to crystalize around debates. And
the most prominent lite r a r y debate in the last several years was
i n i t i a t e d when C r i t ic a l Inquiry, the largest of the " c ritic a l
theory" journals, published Steven Knapp and Waiter Benn Michaels's
"Against Theory" (1982). This debate took place within a complex
context of resurging interest in American pragmatist philosophy;
but for our present concern, i t is necessary to show only that this
debate, in spite of its radical claims, was shaped by the old prob
lematic of interpretation. Knapp and Michaels's clearly situate
th eir position within the problematics of interpretation when they
define theory; "By 'theory' we mean a special project in lite r a r y
c r itic is m ; the attempt to govern interpretations of particular
texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general"
(723). Knapp and Michaels go on to develop an argument "against
theory," but th eir conclusion leaves them positioned within the
problematic of interpretation:
I t [theory] is the name for all the ways people have
tried to stand outside p ra c tic e in order to govern
practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one
can reach a position outside practice, that th eo rists
should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise
should therefore come to an end. (742)
Knapp and Michaels's thesis advocates one kind of pragmatism, a
celebration of the complexity of experience; in this case, the
complexity of a c r i t i c a l "p rac tice " th a t resists theoretical
formulation. But the c ritic a l practice that Knapp and Michaels
defend is the same practice that they identify in th e ir definition
of theory: "interpretation of particular texts." Thus, despite the
appearance of taking a radical stand in the fie ld of lite r a r y c r it
icism, Knapp and Michaels are New C ritical to the extent that they
believe interpretive criticism to be the primary a c tiv ity of the
di sci pii ne.
But more conclusive of the current dominance of the in ter
pretive problematic is , I think, the other side of the debate— the
numerous responses to Knapp and Michaels's a rtic le . Among a ll of
the perceptive responses, none questioned the basic premise of
Knapp and Michaels's argument: that the relationship between theory
and c ritic a l practice is the relationship between in t e r p r e t iv e
method and the interpretation of particular texts. Jonathan Crewe,
for example, in his r e p ly , "Toward U n c ritic a l P ra c tic e ," is
especially perceptive on the p o litica l implications of Knpp and
Michaels's argument:
In my own view, the anti theoretical argument (which could
rank as a contribution only i_n the fie ld of c r itic a l
theory, from which i t never escapes) is here at the ser
vice of an emergent ideology of the interpretive caste or
guild, an ideology under which a privileged status quo
would be secured against fundamental questioning. (743)
But even this p o litic a l argument fa ils to address the basic p o lit i
cal concern of the discipline, of any discipline: What should the
primary a c tiv ity of the discipline be? Crewe is correct in stating
that the anti theoretical argument never escapes the fie ld of c r i t
ical theory; but what he does not recognize is that Knapp and
Michaels simply retrace the existing boundaries of this fie ld and,
in doing so, determine the grounds of the debate. I t is actually
Crewe and his fellow respondents who are unable to escape the prob
lematic that Knapp and Michaels call into play. For the interpre
tive problematic assumes that the practice of lite r a r y studies is
the interpretation of particular texts and th at, therefore, c r i t
ical theory is theory of interpretation.
One other example should remove any doubt that the problematic
of interpretation dominates the discipline and thus provides the
foundation for a commonsense notion of theory. Within the la st few
years, the influence of theory has led to the publication of some
introductory books, or theoretical primers. So fa r, these primers
have focused on two "objects": deconstructive criticism and Euro
pean theory. But, with the exception of Terry Eagleton's Literary
Theory: An Introduction, these books explain contemporary theory
from within the problematic of interpretation. The two books on
deconstructive c r it ic is m — Christopher Norris's Deconstruction:
Theory and Practice (1982) and Vincent B. Leitch's Deconstructive
Criticism (1983) — proceed from an understanding of Derrida's phi
losophy as radically skeptical. Norris, for example, characterizes
"deconstruction" by comparing i t to Humean skepticism:
David Hume . . . called scepticism "a malady which can
never be ra d ic ally cured, but must return upon us every
moment, however we may chase i t away. . . . Carelessness
and inattention alone cannot afford us any remedy." De
construction works at the same giddy lim it, suspending
a ll that we take for granted about language, experience
and the "normal" po ssib ilities of human communication.
( x i i )
There is , without question, a strong skeptical direction in Der
rid a 's work. But on the issue of Derrida's philosophy being skep
tic a l i_n its essence, I would agree with David C arroll, who points
out that labels lik e "skeptic," " r e la tiv is t," and "solipsist" are
part of the rhetoric of polemical attacks, a rh eto ric th a t is
"symptomatic of a desire to avoid dealing with the issues Derrida
raises." Norris does not share the intention of these polemicists;
and I suspect that the comparison with Hume may have been, in part,
for the benefit of an Anglo-American audience not fam iliar with the
development of modern continental philosophy. But characterizing
Derrida's work as skeptical "about language, experience and the
'normal* p o s s i b i l i t i e s of human communication" also places i t
within the problematics of in terp re ta tio n .
N o r ris 's re lia n c e on skepticism as the key to Derrida's
thought and the way in which the reliance is sustained by the prob
lematics of interpretation are both revealed in the final chapter
of the book. Here, Norris discusses the c ritic s of deconstruction
and devotes a section to c ritic s who use Wittgenstein’ s ordinary-
language philosophy, a section that he e n title s "W ittgenstein:
language and scepticism." Norris explicates, but does not c r i t
ic ize , the use of Wittgenstein's critique of skepticism by Der
r id a 's c r itic s : " I f our ways of talking about the world are a
matter of ta c it convention, then scepticism is simply beside the
point, a misplaced scruple produced by a false epistemology" (130).
What is at issue in this "debate" is whether or not the nature of
language permits knowledge, either knowledge of the world or know
ledge of a lite r a r y text; or, to put i t in terms of another opposi
tion, whether meaning is determinate or indeterminate. Norris's
mistake in discussing the Wittgensteinian critique is that he fa ils
to notice that this "debate" between deconstructive skepticism and
ordinary-1anguage philosophy is no debate at a l l , but a fictio n
written by Derrida's c r itic s . For our purpose in trying to estab
lis h the existence of a commonsense notion of theory, i t is
important to observe that both Derrida's c r itic s and Norris work
within the problematics of interpretation, in this case, the par
tic u la r problematic of determinate vs. indeterminate meaning, of
knowledge vs. skepticism.
There is nothing in Norris's account of deconstructive c r i t
icism that challenges interpretive criticism as the primary a c ti
v ity of lite r a r y studies. This absence is even more immediate in
Vincent Leitch's Deconstructi ve Cri t i ci sm and William Ray's more
general survey Literary Meaning (1984). Leitch opens his book with
a prologue that b rie fly meditates on a passage from the H i ad in
which Hector and Polydamas face "the dangers and d iffic u ltie s " of
interpreting an omen before they attack a Greek camp. Leitch con
cludes his meditation by observing, "The structure of interpreta
tion repeats it s e l f endlessly (6 )." Thus, the framework for his
discussion of deconstructive criticism clearly corresponds with the
problematics of interpretation.
56
Likewise, the thesis that guides Ray's Literary Meaning from
the phenomenology of Poulet, Sartre, and Blanchot to the ironic
deconstructions of de Man functions within the problematics of
interpretation:
My thesis, simply, is that from roughly the beginning of
the period when phenomenologists started looking closely
at lite ra tu re to the current po st-structuralist project,
the major theoreticians have all been grappling with the
same problem: namely that "meaning," as i t pertains to
lite r a tu r e , always seems to have at least two meanings,
each of which entails a d iffe re n t, and frequently con
tra ry , theory of lite r a r y work, as well as a d istin ct
c ritic a l practice. (1-2)
Now, as with all of the examples that I have presented, there is no
doubt that what the w riter says about theory is in some sense accu
rate. Certainly, all of these lite r a r y theorists have been con
cerned with the d iffic u ltie s of lite r a r y meaning. However, i t is
not at all obvious that these theorists have been concerned with
"the same problem," as Ray claims. This claim is grounded on a
historiographical assumption that I w ill now focus on as a way of
bringing this discussion to a close. For i t is this historio
graphical dimension— the issue that i t raises— that is important to
our understanding of what I have been calling "the problematics of
interpretation" and its role in shaping a commonsense notion of
theory.
This historiographical issue becomes clearer when we examine
the sentences that precede the passage I quoted:
During the past decade, a p articu larly vigorous polemic
has developed between those who herald the movements of
structuralism and deconstruction as the dawn of a new age
of demystified exegesis, and those who decry them as a
subversion of everything valuable in the humanistic
disciplines.
Yet both of these camps share the same historical
assumption: that recent developments in criticism have
l i t t l e in common with the established trad itio n . . . .
For both reactionary and revolutionary, ours is a period
of radical departure from prior beliefs about meaning,
reading, and lite r a r y c ritic is m — and one must e ith e r
espouse the revolution or defend the in stitu tio n against
it.
I t is the modest goal of this study to challenge the
assumption of historical discontinuity underlying both
these stances. I intend to demonstrate that the dominant
theoretical and c ritic a l developments of the la s t th irty
or forty years share a common ground . . . . (1)
The historiographical assumption in these remarks is that the his
tory of thought can be understood as a sequence of various res
ponses to a set of basic questions. This is not a unique assump
tion: as we w ill see la te r , i t quides the historiography of Rene
Wellek's A History of Modern C riticism . I t also guides much his
tory of philosophy, as Jonathan Ree points out:
Historians of philosophy project into the past an idea of
philosophy as a professional academic sp e c ia lis m —
tr e a tin g A r is to tle and Descartes as though they were
participants at a modern philosophy conference, or even
candidates in a philosophy exam . . . . (2)
The example of Ray's historiography is not as dramatic as Ree's
example from the historiography of philosophy; but, lik e Ree's
example, Ray's historiography undervalues the social and historical
contexts in which ideas emerge, transform, and develop. Instead,
he chooses to project into the past and into d i f f i c u l t philoso
phical traditions the problematic of lite r a r y meaning as i t has
been defined in American lite r a r y studies fo r the past twenty
years.
Ray's reliance on the American problematic is reflected in his
selection of theorists for discussion. Those theorists who have
contributed important work to the problematics of interpretation
receive the most attention: E. D. Hirsch, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang
Iser, Norman Holland. Derrida is discussed, but only in his role
as a deconstructor, or an excavator of aporias.' The theorists and
c r itic a l approaches that Ray omits, on the other hand, do not focus
on interpretive criticism but on the criticism of representation.
Psychoanalytic criticism is not mentioned. Nor are any forms of
Marxist or feminist criticism . Neither Lacan nor Foucault play a
part in Ray's history. Thus, Ray, lik e Leitch and Norris, write
about contemporary theory from within the problematics of in te r
pretation. And c ritic a l theory becomes nothing more for them than
the theory of interpretation.
Having looked at these examples of recent c ritic a l debates and
theoretical primers, we can conclude th a t the problem atics of
in te rp re ta tio n dominate lite r a r y studies in America. And this
domination along with the current p lu ra lity of c ritic a l approaches
result in a commonsense notion of theory in which theory is under
stood as the set of conceptual foundations for the many interpre
tive approaches to lite ra tu re . I t w ill be useful for us now to
inquire b rie fly into the conditions of this commonsense notion’ s
existence. There are at least four conditions that help to sustain
the commonsense notion of theory and the problematics of interpre
tation upon which i t is based: (1) pedagogical convenience, (2)
professional convenience, (3) "the lin g u is t ic turn" in Anglo-
American philosophy, and (4) the recognition, by in te lle c tu a ls ,
that American society is irreducibly p lu ra lis tic .
The re la tio n s h ip between pedagogical convenience and the
problematics of interpretation has been argued, as we have seen, by
Jonathan Culler. C uller's argument, once again, is that the in te r
pretation of particular texts has remained the primary a c tiv ity of
the discipline long after the theoretical demise of New Criticism
because i t is the basis of a successful pedagogy. Its success
rests on its a b ility to make the transaction between student and
lite r a r y text more immediate, that is , unencumbered by the neces
s ity for background knowledge of the te x t's social and historical
contexts. And, as both Gerald Graff and William Cain have noted,
this interpretive approach to lite ra tu re appeals to a democratic
s e n s ib ility precisely because "close reading" does not re quire
specialized knowledge: each student was on a par with the other
6
students and, th eoretically at least, on a par with the teacher.
But we need to note as well the convenience of this in terpretive
approach to teaching l i t e r a t u r e . The teacher is under no
obligation to ra is e , in c la s s , the complex questions of the
l i t e r a r y t e x t 's production and reception. At most, a "theo
r e tic a lly aware" teacher w ill acknowledge that there are various
ways to in t e r p r e t a l i t e r a r y te x t; but working w ith in the
problematics of interpretation, this teacher's theoretical aware
ness is unlikely to lead to an inquiry into the social conditions
of lite ra tu re .
Similar to the relationship between pedagogical convenience
and the problematics of interpretation is the relationship between
interpretive criticism and the demand to publish. This relatio n
ship has been noted by a number of commentators--Wayne Booth,
7
W illiam Cain, Culler, E. D. Hirsch, and James Sosnoski. The
argument is similar to that just presented regarding pedagogical
convenience. Interpretive criticism is a much easier task than
approaches to lite ra tu re which examine the relationship between
lite ra tu re and the social-historical contexts of its production and
reception. As entrance into the profession and advancement within
i t come to depend more on numbers of publications, interpretive
criticism provides a professional convenience. W e should note,
however, that the days of The Explicator are over. One needs a
theoretical awareness, these days, to publish. S t i l l , a look at
any issue of PMLA during our "age of theory" shows that this
theoretical awareness consists of the application of an interpre
tive method to a particular lite r a r y text.
While the f i r s t two conditions of the dominance of in te r
pretive criticism are p ra c tical, the next condition provides broad
inellectual support. This is a philosophical condition governed by
what Richard Rorty has called "the lin g u is tic turn":
I shall mean by "lin g u istic philosophy" the view that
philosophical problems are problems which may be solved
(or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by under
standing more about the language we presently use.
( Linguistic Turn 3)
Borty locates the f i r s t lin g u is tic turn at the point where Wittgen
stein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) was adopted by the
philosophers who would become known as the Vienna Circle and whose
anti-m etaphysical l i n g u is t ic philosophy would become known as
"lo g ical positivism."8 Thus, a broad philosophical problematic
regarding the relationship between language and knowledge has
developed in Anglo-American in tellectual history over the past
sixty years, a development which lite r a r y studies in this country
found impossible to ignore. The influence of German hermeneutics
and French semiology on recent American lite r a r y studies is taken
for granted; we need, however, to begin the process of under
standing these two influences w ithin a developed in t e l le c t u a l
context based on the relationship between language and knowledge,
which is to say, based on the problematic of meaning. Thus, this
philosophical movement and the problematic of meaning that has
developed from i t lend broad in tellec tu a l support to the proble
matics of interpretation in lite r a r y studies.
Fin ally , the commonsense notion that theory consists of a
p lu ra lity of equally valid interpretive approaches to lite ra tu re
can be linked to a larger condition of American in tellectual l i f e .
This condition is the recognition that American society is i r -
reducibly p lu r a lis tic . To illu s tr a te this condition, I w ill draw
on recent discussions from another discipline— history.
62
According to the historian Robert Darnton, the fie ld of in t e l
lectual history, which had been the most popular fie ld among Ameri
can historians following World War I I , was superceded by the fie ld
of social history in the 1960s. Darnton explains this s h ift as a
reaction against the trad itio nal goal of American in tellectual his
torians to id en tify a national ethos:
By the 1960s the American Studies movement had cut Ameri
can in tellectual history free of its moorings in social
history an had d rifted o ff in pursuit of a disembodied
mind. At that point the professors' universities ex
ploded beneath them. Radical c o n f l i c t , "co unter
cultures," student radicalism, the war in southeast Asia,
the collapse of the presidency destroyed the vision of
American h is to ry as a s p ir itu a l consensus. Social
historians rushed in , not to f i l l the vacuum but to pick
apart the ruins of the old New History, not to recon
struct a single past but to burrow in d iffe re n t direc
tions. Black history, urban history, labor history, the
history of women, of c rim in ality, s e x u a lity , the op
pressed, the in a rtic u la te, the marginal — so many lines of
inquiry opened up that social history seemed to dominate
research on a ll fronts. (329)
Vie can easily compare this l i s t of "lines of inquiry" to the l i s t
that appears in the passage of Jonathan C uller's that I quoted near
the beginning of this section. W e also could compare Darnton's
l i s t to the l i s t of categories that the MLA Bibliography now uses
to distinguish d iffe re n t types of criticism and theory: decon
stru ctio n ist, feminist, form alist, hermeneutic, lin g u is tic , Marx
i s t , narrative, phenomenological, philosophical, poststructural is t,
psychoanalytic, psychological, reader-response, reception, rh eto ri
cal , semi o tic , sociological, and s tru c tu ra lis t.
While some bemoan this proliferatio n of theory, its general
acceptance is grounded in the same social condition that Darnton
describes. The p lu ra lity of theories is understood to re fle c t the
irreducibly p lu ra lis t nature of American society. Each theory is
understood and accepted as a perspective, or as a special interest
in what has become increasingly a special-interest society. The
recognition of this condition of American social l i f e along with
the in tellectu al context of a lin g u is tic a lly oriented philosophical
trad itio n and the pedagogical-professional convenience of in ter
pretive criticism all help to determine a commonsense notion of
theory that takes theory to be the conceptual foundations for the
set of interpretive approaches to a_ 1ite ra ry te x t.
Characterizing the current state of the discipline, or charac
terizing a specific aspect of i t as I have done by positing a com
monsense notion of theory, is a d i f f i c u l t task. Anyone who
seriously attempts i t must struggle against the lack of objecti
v ity , or distance, that cautious commentators often acknowledge and
that ethnomethodologists make the object of their investigations.
I t is because of this lack of distance that my examination of the
commonsense notion of theory was so cautious and lengthy. But
there is another lack reflected in the caution and length of my
exam ination: the current poverty of theorizing the discipline.
That is , while we are a ll fond of remarking on the current state of
lite r a r y studies, l i t t l e has been done to explore what should count
as meaningful, or useful, commentary. Thus, we could say in this
regard th a t the discipline of lite r a r y studies in America has
failed to take i t s e l f seriously; or, at le as t, i t has forgotten to
take it s e l f seriously.
The next chapter of our study proposes a direction of thought
which, I believe, can help the discipline to better understand
i t s e lf . This direction of thought is grounded in what I w ill call
a "rhetorical" approach to the two kinds of w r itin g th a t are
generally associated with the discipline: criticism and theory. To
say that our approach to these kinds of writing is "rhetorical" is
to re ite ra te what much of our own theory has taught us in recent
years— that the nature of language can be understood only in terms
of language use. And, thus, our discussion of theory and the
d is c ip lin e must proceed in the face of th is irony— that the
findings of theory have not been applied adequately to theory
i t s e l f .
55
Notes
*1 would agree in a general way with Frank Lentricchia's
evaluation of S tru ctu ralist Poetics:
C uller's book has pra c tically single-handedly mediated
(and constituted) our understanding of structuralism, not
because his work is demonstrably more acurate than, say,
Jameson's, but because his mediation rests on in t e l
lectual principles easily recognizable and very dear to
the tra d itio n a lis t American c r itic a l mind. Culler has
made structuralism safe for us . . . . ( After 104)
However, Lentricchia, in some very clumsy p o lit ic a l po stu rin g ,
gives Culler too much cred it. Culler did not "make structuralism
safe for us"; instead, American lite r a r y studies would accept only
a "safe" structuralism. I f Culler had not written S tru ctu ralist
Poetics, someone else would have.
2
I am repeating here, of course, the objection that is often
brought against the thesis of Louis Althusser that an "epistemol-
ogical break" with the " p r e -s c ie n tific ," ideological notions of the
past is possible through a "theoretical practice" based on the
science of historical materialism. The objection to this thesis
is , lik e the objection to the s t r u c t u r a l is t claim of having
developed a meta-language, that a complete epistemological break
with ideology or with the past is not possible. For an example of
this objection brought against Althusser, see Glucksmann.
Knapp and Michaels exclude "empirical" studies from th eir
d e fin itio n , such as narratology, s ty lis tic s , and prosody. But they
do not exclude, nor appear to recognize, the c ritic a l mode of
representation that I id en tifie d e a rlie r .
^In th is essay, which is a lengthy review of the English
translation of Derrida's De la grammatologie, Carroll begins to
develop much needed arguments against common misconceptions of
Derrida's thought. In addition to defending Derrida's work from
the charge of skepticism, he also defends i t from the charges of
being apolitical and a n ti-h is to r ic a l.
As I see i t , the charge of skepticism, whether i t comes from
Derrida's detractors or writers lik e Norris, is nonproductive since
i t neatly avoids discussion of the nature of knowledge: to argue
for the existence of knowledge (and against skepticism) is not at
all the same as in q uiring in to the nature of knowl e d g e --i ts
p o s s ib ili t ie s and l i m i t s . I f i t were necessary to compare
66
Derrida's work to an older philosophical tra d itio n , we would make
more progress comparing i t to the " c ritic a l" philosophy of the neo-
Kantians rather than to Hume's empirical skepticism. Paul Ricoeur,
in fact, points us in the right direction when he characterizes
structuralism as "a Kantianism without a transcendental subject"
("Structure" 52). This is not to say that Derrida's philosophy is
essentially Kantian or neo-Kantian, only that the Kantian project
of a c ritic a l philosophy, or a philosophy of lim its , comes closer
to Derrida's thought than the Humean project of a skeptical philo
sophy. Much useful work could be done, I think, on the Kantian
echoes within post-structuralist thought; and one might start by
examining p o s t-s tru c tu ra l i sm as a reaction against the French
Hegelianism of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
5I again refer to David C a rro ll' s "History of Writing" (see
note 4) as a corrective to the premature appropriation of Derrida's
work to the fie ld of lite r a r y criticism . Carroll argues correctly
that Of Grammatology must be understood in terms of the historio
graphical problematic that Derrida examines.
Also, this is an appropriate place to note Derrida's thoughts
on the American popularization of the term deconstructi on. During
a lecture at the University of C alifornia, Irvine (10 April 1984),
he presented "an Instamatic photo of deconstruction in America,"
which concluded with the statement, "L' Amerique est deconstruc
t i on."
^See Graff, "Who K illed Criticism?" and the opening chapter of
Cain, C ris is .
^See Booth, " P re s id e n tia l Address"; Cain, Cri si s, Ch. 6;
C uller, "Problems"; Hirsch, "Politics"; and Sosnoski, "Token."
8A good, short account of "logical positivism" can be found in
John Passmore 367-93. The philosopher Ian Hacking locates the
lin g u is tic turn 80 years e a rlie r within the trad itio n of British
empiricism in John S tu a rt M i l l 's System of Logic (1843); see
Hacking 16.
Q
Darnton's account of the s h ift in his discipline represents a
consensus among other commentators; see Bouwsma, Conkin, and Wise.
10
There are, of course, a number of important "theoretical"
texts that re fle c t upon themselves, or that "double" themselves.
These texts, though, are in the French po st-structuralist mode.
And while many of these texts have had an impact on American
lite r a r y studies, i t is not at all clear that part of this impact
has been to in it ia t e a careful examination of what i t means to
write theory in American lite r a r y studies. The American reception
of French post-structuralism (which is to say, the American trans
forma t i on of French post-structural ism) was and continues to be an
67
event that is crucial to an understanding of American l i t e r a r y
studies at the present time. See the collection of essays edited
by Arac, et a l .
Chapter 3: Speech Act Theory in In tellectual History
How should we attempt to understand the objects of our inquiry— the
works of theory produced within American lite r a r y studies over the
past 30 years? What, for example, should we regard as adequate
readings of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The In ten tio n al F a lla c y ,"
Frye's Anatomy of C riticism , or de Man's "Crisis and Criticism"?
This is the fundamental question that was raised im p lic itly in the
preceding chapter by my criticism of what I called "the commonsense
notion of theory." That is, in charging that most recent com
mentary on lite r a r y theory is inadequate on the grounds that i t
overlooks the contexts in which theories are produced, I have
opened the question of what would constitute an adequate approach
to theoretical discourse, a type of discourse that has established
i t s e l f so firm ly within the discipline that none of us, as members
of a profession, can afford to ignore i t . Mow, having made this
im p lic it question e x p lic it, le t me say that i t is this question
that w ill guide our inquhiry through this and the following two
chapters.
Since the question of understanding theoretical texts is going
to oversee our inquiry into the role of theory in American lite r a r y
studies, we should begin by making as clear as possible what we are
asking and the implications of what we are asking. Also, we should
consider the lim itations of the answers that our inquiry wi111 make
possible. Let us take up this la s t point f i r s t . W e should not
expect to reach, within the limited space of three chapters, a
decisive answer to the enormously complex matter of understanding
texts, a matter whose complexity has m ultiplied quickly through the
writings of contemporary philosophy, lin g u is t ic s , and l i t e r a r y
theory. Consequently, i f we take our question seriously, we need
to recognize immediately that we have committed ourselves to the
project of becoming throughly fam iliar with the work of those who
have addressed the problem of understanding. Of this work, le t me
just cite the best known writers in German and French philosophy:
Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard. Now,
while my own thought has been influenced by these w riters, I cannot
say in all honesty that my present knowledge of th e ir work enables
me to evaluate their contributions to the question of understanding
texts. Consequently, the conclusions that I draw while addressing
this question should be understood as tentative.
Having specified an important lim itation on the answer that we
can give to our question, le t us now take a closer look at the
question i t s e l f by inquiring into the conditions that enable us to
pose such a question with any seriousness. First condition: i t is
not possible for me to raise the question of understanding theo
re tical texts ex n ih ilo , as i t were. That is, there is in place
already a more general question concerning the understanding of
texts; or, we might say, the question of understanding texts is an
established problematic. I t is this established problematic that
allows me to raise the question of understanding texts in regard to
th e o e re tic a l works. I can pose the question only because the
status of the problematic makes i t a reasonable question to ask; in
a sense, then, I can pose the question only because i t has been
posed before. This condition leads to the second condition.
Second condition: even though the general question (What does
i t mean to understand a text?) has been posed before and has been
developed into a major philosophical problematic, our more specific
question (What does i t mean to understand the theoretical works of
American lite r a r y studies?) has not, to my knowledge, been posed.
This observation has been demonstrated, I hope, by my survey in the
preceding chapter of recent commentary. But we would have an
inadequate understanding of this condition i f we saw i t only as the
absence of our question. W e need, instead, to recognize the
curious inconsistency that involves both of the conditions that we
have id en tified . This is the inconsistency of a discipline that
has failed to use recent theory to re fle c t on its own discourse.
While we may not be able to account for this inconsistency, we
should note some aspects of this situation in order to b e tte r
understand the context in which we pose our question and conduct
our inquiry.
The fa ilu re of our discipline to understand its theoretical
discourse from the perspective of the language theories that i t
otherwise concerns i t s e l f with strikes me as especially curious.
Why, for instance, has the discipline been able to extend lite r a r y
theory to readings of non-fictional prose lik e history but hesitant
to turn the same theories toward an analysis of its own prose?
Why, when i t examines i t own history, does i t fa il to employ its
own teachings? I am ta lkin g , here, as i f the discipline were
homogeneous, operating under a single theory; and, of course, this
is not true. However, in spite of the variety of theories, we can
say that these theories hold in common a significant point that
unifies the d iscip lin e, i f only on an abstract level. I am talking
about the basic premise in contemporary theory th a t meaning,
whether at the level of a word, a sentence, or a te xt, is a
function of its use and, consequently, a function of the context of
use.
This perspective on the nature of meaning is hardly new, even
within the trad itio n of twentieth-century Anglo-American philos
ophy, a t r a d it io n th a t is often viewed as clashing with the
Continental philosophy that underwrites most contemporary theory.
As far back as 1939, we find R. G. Collingwood arguing, against the
logical p o sitiv is ts , that a statement cannot be understood ade
quately apart from the question that i t is meant to answer:
. . . you cannot find out what a man means by simply
studying his spoken or written statements, even though he
has spoken or written with perfect command of language
and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out
his meaning you must also know what the question was (a
question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in
yours) to which the thing he has said or written was
meant as an answer. (31)
And more r e c e n tly , w ith in the same philosophical tr a d itio n ,
Wittgenstein has thematized the relationship between meaning and
use, thus transforming (by his remarkable influence) the Anglo-
American mode of doing philosophy. When we remember these
developments in Anglo-American philosophy, i t becomes clear to us
that the assumptions with which we approach our theoretical dis
course are closer to logical positivism than to post-structuralism.
W e may never fu lly understand the reasons why the majority of
commentaries on theory ignores the arguments of recent theory. W e
w ill be tempted, perhaps, to charge that popularization results
inevitably in the reduction of the complexities of the original
ideas. But this charge strikes me as begging the question of why
the popularization of theory takes the form of removing ideas from
the contexts of th eir use. Our present inquiry is not the place to
examine this question in any depth; but there is one point that
deserves mention here since i t concerns the nature of theory and,
consequently, our project of attempting to understand the history
of recent theory.
W e may put this point tersely by stating that a history of
theory violates, by necessity, the concept of theory. In order to
understand this essential c o n flic t, we need to recall that the
basic notion of theory as i t has been handed down to us from the
Greeks, refers to a type of knowledge, the truth of which is not
affected by historical change. As Jurgen Habermas has pointed out,
Greek philosophy f i r s t used the term theoria to refer to the
contemplation of the absolute as i t was revealed through the order
of the cosmos:^
In philosophical language, theori a was transferred to
contemplation of the cosmos. In th is form, theory
already presupposed the demarcation between Being and
time that is the foundation of ontology. . . . I t
reserves to 1 ogos a realm of Being purged of incon
sistency and uncertainty and leaves to doxa the realm of
the mutable and perishable. (301)
What Habermas refers to as "the demarcation of Being and time that
is the foundation of ontology" is also, as Derrida has shown, the
conceptual opposition that is the necessary foundation for both
theory and history. That is, the idea of theory (as immutable
knowledge/ontology/Being) cannot be thought without its conceptual
opposite— history (as that whih is inconstant and mutable, in other
words, temporal); and, likewise, the idea of history cannot be
thought without its conceptual opposite— theory. But, in spite of
this conceptual dependence, in spite of the common origin of both
notions and because of this common origin, a tru ly historical
account of theory w ill v io la te , by necessity, the concept of
theory. There can be no history of theory within such a conceptual
framework, only a history of theoretical beliefs.
Can i t be, then, that our recent commentators on theory— those
who celebrate the new theory while keeping i t at arm's length— are
the d isc ip lin e 's most loyal theoreticians? That is , is t h e ir
a h is to r ic a l and acontextual approach to recent lite r a r y theory
governed by an allegiance to truth t h a t , in the t r a d it io n of
Western philosophy from the Greeks to our century, has gone by the
name of "theory"? I am not sure that "the commonsense notion of
theory," which I characterized as an a ilin g approach to our disci
p line's recent history, can be diagnosed this easily. But the
entire range of commentary that I surveyed in the preceding chapter
does appear to derive some impetus from the trad itio nal notion of
theory, an impetus th a t we could characterize also, following
Michel Foucault, as "a w ill to truth.
This "will to truth" can be found not only in the mode of
commentary on theory but reveals it s e l f most fo rce fu lly, I think,
in the recent reactions against theory. Paul de Man has character
ized these reactions as a "resistance to theory" based on the nor
mative principles of Anglo-American culture as represented by T. S.
E lio t, a culture "oriented towards the in teg rity of a social and
historical self rather than towards the impersonal consistency that
theory requires" ("Resistance" 6 ). I would suggest, however, that
the new "theory," rather than demanding "the impersonal consist
ency" of which de Man speaks, makes such consistency impossible;
and, i t is the im possibility of consistency that questions the
trad itio nal notion of theory and challenges the d is c ip lin e 's w ill
to truth. The recent reactions to theory, then, could be under
stood as a symptom of an anxiety— a fear of not being able to
deliver the tru th . (The in stitu tio n a l necessity for the discipline
to deliver truth w ill be fu lly examined in Chapter 5.)
I have led our discussion in the direction of such concepts of
"truth," "will to tru th ," and "anxiety" because the fie ld of in t e l
lectual history (as i t has developed in B ritain and the United
States over the last twenty years) has come to terms with a similar
anxiety and has undergone the kind of transformation that I am
advocating for the study of lite r a r y studies. The transformation I
refer to was the result of work by two historians of p o litica l
thought at Cambridge, Quentin Skinner and John Dunn. Their work
attempts to redefine historical understanding in lig h t of Wittgen
stein's de fin itio n of meaning and, especially, in lig h t of J. L.
Austin's work on the utterance qua act. More generally, we can say
that th e ir work helped to transform in tellectu al history by giving
i t a foundation in lin g u is tic philosophy. A careful analysis of
this work, then, w ill help us to begin answering our question of
how we should attempt to understand theoretical works.
I. Skinner: The Meo-Kantian Limits of H istorical knowledge
Skinner has published extensively on the history of Western p o l i t i
cal thought and on the problems of writing in tellectu al history. I
have chosen to center my discussion of his ideas on a lengthy,
early essay, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas"
(1969); and there are three reasons why I have chosen to focus on
this essay: (1) i t is the f i r s t essay in the British analytical
t r a d it io n to defin e the hi s to ri ographi cal problematic as the
relationship between text and context; (2) i t has been and con
tinues to be the most in flu e n tial of Skinner's essays; and (3) the
historiography outlined in this essay continues to provide the
foundation, a f t e r f if t e e n years, for Skinner's current work.^
Following our analysis of Skinner's historiography, we w ill s h ift
to the ideas of John Dunn. Dunn has published less extensively on
the problems of writing in tellectual history; yet his essay "The
Id en tity of the History of Ideas" (1968) is often cited in the
lite r a tu r e . In fact, Skinner, in both "Meaning and Understanding"
and in a recent essay, acknowledges an in tellectual debt to this
5
essay. But more important than this influence, for our purposes,
the essay is valuable because i t introduces a line of inquiry into
the nature of texts that is , I believe, more promising than Skin
ner's approach. Thus, while Dunn's essay is chronologically prior
to Skinner's "Meaning and Understanding" (having been published a
year e a r lie r ), we w ill examine i t a fte r my discussion of Skinner's
work, as a c o rre c tiv e to S k in n e r's methodology of historical
inquiry.
W e can begin to appreciate the impact of Skinner's "Meaning
and Understanding" by comparing its problematic to the problematic
that Skinner describes in his f i r s t theoretical essay, "The Limits
of Historical Explanation" (1966). As the t i t l e of this e a rlie r
essay suggests, Skinner's concern is epistemological in a neo-
Kantian mode. That is, he is concerned with the what he calls the
"philosophical" status of historical explanations as compared to
the status of s c ie n tific explanation; and this epistem ological
concern can be characterized as "neo-Kantian" in that i t assumed
that the p o ss ib ilitie s of knowledge are 1 i mi ted by the nature of
the mind and th at, consequently, the task of epistemology is to
id en tify these lim its . In fact, this essay can be understood as an
attempt to recuperate the epistemological question in the wake of a
powerful a n ti-p o s itiv is t movement in the philosophy of history, a
movement that set aside epistemological concerns in its reaction
against positivism's emphasis on the v e rific a tio n of all types of
explanation, whether in the physical and biological sciences or in
the social sciences.
W e can understand th is in t e l le c t u a l s itu a tio n better by
looking at Skinner's description of i t . Skinner, at the beginning
of the essay, id en tifie s two major aspects of disciplinary context
in which he locates his work. (1) Discussion on the logic of his
torical inquiry is polarized on the issue of whether historical
explanation must conform to the deductive model of science; that
is , the major occupation within the philosophy of history continues
to be the writing of responses, either positive or negative, to
C. G. Hempel' s defin itio n of explanation as a "covering law" as he
formulated i t in "The Function of General Laws in History" (1942).
(2) The second aspect of this disciplinary context is the recent
"trend away from accepting any s tr ic tly p o s itiv is t view of the
matter" (199), a trend that can be seen in the publication of three
major works that take issue with Hempel' s p o s itiv is t thesis; Paul
Gardiner's The Nature of Historical Explanation (1952), William
Dray's Laws and Explanations in History (1957), and W . B. G a llie 's
Philosophy and the H is to r ic a l Understanding (1964). Skinner,
however, while not siding with Hempel' s positivism, believed that
th is a n t i - p o s i t i v i s t trend has led to a serious philosophical
problem:
This form of anti-positivism has undoubtedly done
much to dispose of the notion that explanatory procedures
78
must be uniform to be valid . I t is d i f f i c u l t , however,
to feel at all convinced by the conclusions reached at
this now fashionable stage of discussions about the
philosophy of history. I t is not clear that anything
lik e a satisfactory alternative account of the status of
h is to ric a l explanations has been provided. . . . I t
seems a c ritic a l weakness of the "reactionist" case that
a purely pragmatic investigation of the functions of
explanation in historical discourse has now come to usurp
the place of any such analytical investigation of th e ir
philosophical standing. The arqument is uncompleted.
( 2 0 1 )
According to Skinner, then, the problem that confronted a philos
opher of history is that anti-positivism had abandoned the task of
judging the v a lid ity of historical claims, had decided to accept
these claims at face value, and had turned to the p ro je c t of
describing (without evaluating) the procedures of historians. The
philosophy of history, in other words, had been turned in to a
sociology of the d is c ip lin e of history; and the problem that
resulted from this transformation was that the discipline was le f t
without an epistemological foundation.
This early epistemological concern carries over into Skinner's
la te r work; but in "Meaning and Understanding" his understanding of
6
the epistemological problem is completely transformed. Whereas
his early concern focused on the philosophical, or tru th , status of
historical claims that posited the relation of "influence" between
two events or two "historical personages," his new concern focused
on the status of in terpretive cl aims, that is , on the p o ssib ility
of the historian to understand the texts that are the object of
7
inquiry. W e can characterize this transformation using the phrase
"lin g u is tic turn"; and we can observe that this new lin g u is tic
79
perspective has transformed even the way in which Skinner perceived
the in tellectu al situation only three years la te r . In "Meaning and
Understanding," he no longer characterizes this s itu a tio n as a
polarization of p o s itiv is t and a n ti-p o s itiv is t positions; gone are
the references to Hempel and to Dray and the other a n t i
po sitivis ts . Instead, the situation is understood in the terms of
lite r a r y c riticis m , more sp ec ific a lly, in the terms of the debate
between F. W . Bateson and F. R. Leavis on the function of lite r a r y
criticism ; and the references to philosophers of language. In
short, the situation is now understood in terms of text and con
t e x t :
My aim is to consider what I take to be the basic
question which necessarily arises whenever an historian
of ideas confronts a work which he hopes to understand.
Such an historian may have focused his attention on a
work of lite r a tu r e — a poem, a play, a novel — or on a work
of phi 1osophy--some exercise in e t h ic a l, p o l i t i c a l ,
religious, or other such mode of thought. But the basic
question w ill in all such cases remain the same: what are
the appropriate procedures to adopt in the attempt to
arrive at an understanding of the work? There are of
course two c u rre n tly orthodox (though c o n f lic t in g )
answers to this question, both of which seem to command a
wide acceptance. The f i r s t (which is perhaps being
increasingly adopted by historians of ideas) insists that
i t is the context "of religious, p o litic a l, and economic
factors" which determines the meaning of any given tex t,
and so must provide "the ultimate framework" for any
attempt to understand i t . The other orthodoxy, however,
( s t i l l perhaps the most generally accepted) insists on
the autonomy of the text it s e l f as the sole necessary key
to i t s own meaning, and so dismisses any attempt to
reconstitute- the "total context" as " g ra tu ito u s , and
worse." (3)
Like the e a r l i e r essay, Skinner continues to characterize the
intellectual situation of the philosophy of history in terms of a
major opposition. But whereas he i n i t i a l l y characterized th is
opposition as a disagreement on the matter of the a p p lic a b ility of
s c ie n tific models of explanation, he now characterizes i t as a
s p lit between two fundamentally d iffe re n t ways of understanding the
nature of texts.
The d iffe re n c e between Skinner's two essays, c lea rly , is
sign ificant. In essence, "Meaning and Understanding," along with
the work of Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock, challenged the fundamental
question by which in tellectu al historians and analytic philosophers
of history had oriented th eir inquiries. Vie might characterize
this reorientation as a radicalizing of historiographical e p is -
temology: whereas the e a rlie r epistemology was concerned with the
relationships between texts ( i . e . , relationships of influence), the
new li n g u i s t i c epistemology put into question the very under
standing of those texts: "what are the appropriate procedures to
adopt in the attempt to arrive at an understanding of the work?"
(3)
W e should be even more specific, here, in noting, again, the
neo-Kantian mode of this lin g u is tic epistemology, a mode that we
find reflected in Skinner's decision to use the "appropriate pro
cedures" rather than "adequate procedures." Skinner does not use
the term "adequate" because from a neo-Kantian perspective, all
procedures w ill be inadequate; or, to use a word from Skinner's
e a rlie r essay, all historical explanation w ill be lim ited. Conse
quently, the v e rific a tio n of historical claims cannot be directed
at the claims themselves, but must be directed at the ra tio n a lity
of the method by which the claims were produced. Skinner's trans
formation of in tellec tu al history, then, was to argue th a t the
ra tio n a lity of historical method needed to be grounded in a theory
of language, since the objects of inquiry are fundamentally l i n
gu istic. Thus, while all methods are "inadequate" in meeting the
goal of perfect historical knowledge, the lin g u is tic method is more
"appropriate" than non-1inguistic methods since its rationale is
based on the nature of the object of inquiry— the text.
Skinner believes, however, that both approaches to the problem
of understanding— the textual approach and the "contextual" ap
proach— are inappropriate. Thus, Skinner devotes most of the essay
to criticism s of these approaches then adds a short concluding
section outlining what he believes to be an appropriate approach.
The longest portion of the essay consists of a detailed c r i
tique of the textual approach, the approach that Skinner believed
to be dominant in 1969:
This approach i t s e l f is lo g ic ally tie d , in the history of
ideas no less than in more s tr ic tly lite r a r y studies, to
a p a rtic u la r form or ju s tific a tio n for conducting the
study it s e l f . The whole point, i t is characteris tica lly
said, of studying past works of philosophy (or l i t e r
ature) must be that they contain (in a favored phrase)
"timeless elements," in the form of "universal ideas,"
even a "dateless wisdom" with "universal application."
(4)
Skinner's description of the textual approach, his id en tific atio n
of its underlying premise as a b e lie f in the "dateless wisdom" and
"universal a p p lic a b ility " of philosophically interesting texts,
82
would seem to signal an ideological c ritiq u e: i t seems that Skinner
w ill dismiss the textual approach as an accomplice in the perpetua
tion of ruling-class interests. But Skinner's criticism remains in
the sphere of epistemology and does not cross the boundary into
10
cultural c ritiq u e .' Relying on the cognitive psychology of Floyd
H. All port's Theories of Perception and the Concept of Structure
(1955), Skinner grounds his criticism on the cognitive lim its of
understanding:
By our past experience "we are set to perceive details in
a certain way." And when this frame of reference has
been established, "the process is one of being prepared
to perceive or react in a certain way." The resulting
dilemma may be stated, for my present purposes, in the
formally cruciral but em pirically very elusive proposi
tion that these models and preconceptions in terms of
which we unavoidably organize and adjust our perceptions
and thoughts will themselves tend to act as determinants
of what we think or perceive. . . . The perpetual
danger, in our attempts to enlarge our h is to r ic a l
understanding, is thus that our expectations about what
someone must be saying or doing w ill themselves determine
that we understand the agent to be doing something which
he would not— or even could not— himself have accepted as
an account of what he was doing. (6)
Assuming that the nature of understanding is limited in this way,
that any reading of a text w ill be "contaminated by the unconscious
application of paradigms whose fa m ilia rity to the historian dis
guises an essential in a p p lica b ility to the past" (7 ), the textual
approach must be found incapable of checking i t s e l f against these
essential lim itatio n s. Since i t always courts the danger, in its
search for "timeless elements," of interpreting concepts from its
own perspective.
Having posited this essential lim ita tio n on understand!'ng
texts, Skinner's project becomes that of developing a method that
w ill reduce the degree to which we read our present into the past.
The obvious f i r s t step in developing such a method is to consider
how knowledge of the context of a particular te x t can help insure a
properly historical reading. But for Skinner, the contextual ap
proach, lik e the textual approach, is inappropriate. Skinner con
cedes that knowledge of the social context may help in the under
standing of a text; but he takes issue with the b e lie f, lik e that
of traditional lite r a r y historians, that knowledge of the context
is the s u ffic ie n t condition for an adequate understanding of the
te x t. According to Skinner, this b e lie f should be recognized as "a
fundamental mistake about the nature of the r e la tio n s between
action and circumstance" (42). With this charge, Skinner begins to
11
develop his critique from within a philosophy of action. Thus,
his criticism requires us to assume, f i r s t , that the writing of a
text is an "act" and second, that all acts are performed by actors.
A trad itio nal knowledge of the context may provide the historian
with a set of necessary conditions for the text qua act and, con
sequently, with a set of causes; but,
I t may s t i l l be strenuously doubted, however, whether a
knowledge of the causes of an action is re a lly equivalent
to an understanding of the action i t s e lf . For as well
as— and quite apart from--the fact that such an under
standing does presuppose a grasp of antecedent causal
conditions of the action taking place, i t might equally
be said to presuppose a grasp of the point of the action
for the agent who performed i t . (44)
The methodology of contextual reading, then, is flawed because i t
omits consideration of "the poi nt of the action for the agent who
performed i t . " In other words, contextual reading, anxious to
id en tify causes within the social context, fa ils to recognize the
w rite r's intention as a necessary and sufficient cause.
According to Skinner, the textual approach cannot be rein tro
duced at this point to supplement the shortcoming of contextual
reading because i t too ignores the w rite r's intention. In its
desire to id en tify timeless truths, the textual approach always
concentrates on what the text says, usually focusing on particular
concepts or philosophical positions and using the names of the
writers as nothing more than shorthand references for these con
cepts and p o sitio n s ; consequently, i t does not consider the
p o ssib ility that what a te x t says may not be identical with what
the w r ite r meant. Thus, in c r itic iz in g both the textual and
contextual approaches for th e ir fa ilu re to recognize the necessity
of considering the w rite r's intention, Skinner has id en tifie d what
he believes to be the necessary conditions for an appropriate his
torical understanding of a text: (1) knowledge of what the w riter
said and (2) knowledge of how the w riter intended his meaning to be
understood. I t is , once again, this second condition that dis
tinguishes, for Skinner, an historical understanding of the text
from a philosophical appreciation of the ideas in the text.
I I . Austin: The Utterance as Act/The Act as Event
In positing this difference between what a text says and what
the w riter meant, Skinner re lie s on J. L. Austin's famous distinc
tio n between "meaning" and "i 11 ocutionary force." I t w ill be
necessary for us to examine Austin's distinction in some detail
since Skinner uses i t to theorize the essentially lin g u is tic nature
of the historiographical problem and, consequently, to reintroduce
ip
a notion of context, but at a new level of analytical complexity. *
( I t is the nature of this new "level" of complexity that w ill guide
our comparison of Skinner's historiography with that of Dunn la te r
in the chapter.) F in a lly , while examining Austin's concept of the
utterance qua act, we w ill find that i t is more complex and prob
lematic than Skinner recognizes and that its complexity calls into
question Skinner's reliance on the notion of w r ite r ’ s intention.
At the end of his opening remarks in How to Do Things with
Words (1962), Austin situates his work in what he characterizes,
13
with no hesitation, as "a revolution in philosophy" (3). The
victim of this revolution was the "statement." The statement, of
course, had been a primary object of attention for Anglo-American
philosophers, who understood the purpose of philosophy as providing
a pure language for science, a language "to 'describe' some state
of a ffa ir s , or to 'state some fa c t,' which i t must do either tru ly
or falsely" (1 ). The beginnings of the revolution came with the
recognition that statements are not pure:
I t has come to be seen that many specially perplexing
words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do
not serve to indicate some s p e c ia lly odd a d d itio n a l
feature in the r e a lity reported, but to indicate (not to
report) the circumstances in which the statement is made
or reservations to which i t is subject or the way in
which i t is to be taken and the lik e . (3)
In other words (and this is a point that is often overlooked in the
lite ra tu re on speech act theory), the revolution in philosophy, a
revolution that provided the basic premises for Austin's work, con
sisted in the realizatio n that language is incapable of pure
reference. This is not to claim that language cannot be used to
re fe r, only that such uses w ill always be "contaminated" by ele
ments that do not function r e fe r e n ti'a lly .^ I t is this essential
contamination that Austin names the "performative." That is , the
nature of all utterances must be understood, after the revolution,
as the performance of some action, a performance that is signified
by the various contaminating elements. Thus, while most research
in speech act theory has gone in the direction of categorizing
d iffe re n t types of utterances, the foundation of Austin's work is
the recognition of the complexity within the single utterance.
A fundamental aspect of the complexity of a ll utterances is
the way in which the speaker uses the utterance. I f we are to
regard the speaking of an utterance as the performance of an
action, then we must pay some attention to the utterance qua act,
which is to say that we must consider the relationship of act and
15
actor, or agent. A name for this relationship is use. In fac t,
we can understand Austin's work as an elaboration of Wittgenstein's
87
claim that the meaning of a word or sentence is always determined
by its use:*®
fo r some years we have been realizing more and more
c le a r ly th a t the occasion of an utteran ce m atters
seriously, and that the words are to some extent to be
"explained" by the "context" in which they are designed
to be or have a c tu a lly been spoken in a lin g u is tic
interchange. (Austin 100)
Austin's use of the phrase "the occasion of an utterance" and of
the term context (which he appropriately places within quotation
marks) makes him look lik e one of the contextual readers that
Skinner c ritic iz e d . But Austin has in mind something quite d if
fe re n t from the contextualist approach that Skinner c ritic iz e d .
The "context" that he refers to is defined by (1) what the speaker
does i_n saying something and (2) what the speaker does by saying
something. In saying something, the speaker performs a type of
act, for example, asks a question; Austin calls such acts "illo c u -
tionary acts." By saying something, the speaker's act produces
effects, for example, puts a student on the spot by requesting an
answer; Austin refers to this aspect of an utterance as its "per-
locutionary act." Thus, when Austin says that an utterance needs
to be understood with reference to its "context," he means that one
needs knowledge of what the speaker was doing and knowledge of what
consequences followed from what the speaker said; more specifi
c a lly , one needs knowledge of the relationship of what the speaker
said (locutionary act) and what the speaker did (illo cu tio n ary act)
and knowledge of the relationship of what the speaker said and the
17
consequences that followed (perlocutionary act). As we can see,
this concept of context, which centers on the utterance (or text)
qua act, is s ig n ific a n tly d iffe re n t from the trad itio nal notion of
context, which attempts to establish a corrolation between content
and particular biographical and/or social factors or, in lite r a r y
h is to ry , attempts to establish a corrolation between style and
cultural factors.
Of the two types of acts, Austin id e n tifie s the il 1 ocutionary
act as the focus of his investigation (103). Even though Austin
has not made i t clear why the illocutionary act deserves special
attention, we can in fer two reasons from A u stin 's discussion.
F irs t, the illocutionary act, because i t marks the way in which the
speaker uses the utterance, is the essential component of a theory
that takes all utterances to be performances. Austin's argument
that a ll utterances are "performatives" (and, conversely, th a t
there are no purely "constative" utterances) depends on a demon
stration of the existence of the illocutionary act. Second (and
this is a point that we w ill have to elaborate la t e r ) , the perlocu-
tionary act, which is comprised of the particular consequences of a
p a r tic u la r u tteran ce, cannot be the object of a philosophical
analysis. I t is , instead, the proper object of history. Austin
makes this distinction by pointing out the "conventional" nature of
the illocutionary act, a point that he makes repeatedly throughout
the last half of the lectures: "We must notice that the illo c u
tionary act is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a
convention" (105). On the other hand, the periocutionary act is
often defined negatively, by Austin, as non-conventional: "there is
clearly a difference between what we feel to be the real production
of real effects and what we regard as mere conventional conse
quences" (103). Thus, while "the real production of real effects"
by a particular utterance can provide us with contextual informa
tion that w ill help us to understand the utterance qua act, the
non-conventionality of periocutionary acts keeps them from being
theorized.
The conventionality of illocutionary acts plays another impor
tant role in Austin's theory; and i t is this role that interests
Skinner. In his attempt to show that all utterances are performa
tive by nature, Austin's main hurdle is to argue that "statements,"
which appear only to say something about the world (1ocutionary
a c t), actually contain an illocutionary act. One can demonstrate
easily the presence of an illocutionary act when i t is an e x p lic it
part of the utterance, for example, when one says, "I state that
Skinner's historiography is based on Austin's lin g u is tic philos
ophy." Austin calls such an utterance an "e x p lic it performative"
since the speech act is e x p lic itly referred to within the u tter
ance. But what i f one comes across the utterance, "S kinner's
historiography is based on Austin's lin g u is tic philosophy"; can
such an utterance be defined as a performative? Austin argues that
we can d e fin e th is utterance as a perform ative because its
e x p lic itly performative element has been deleted, a deletion that
is possible with all types of performative utterances (133-47).
Had Austin lived long enough to become acquainted with Noam Chom
sky's transformational grammar, he might have adopted the concept
of "deletion transformation" (179-82). Instead, his argument is
that the deletion of e x p lic itly performative elements is possible
because the "force" of these elements is "conventional," which is
to say that the performative aspect of the utterance can be carried
by elements outside of the meaning of the utterance, by elements of
the context. (Austin used the word force to distinguish the nature
of illocutionary and peri ocuti onary acts from the nature of 1 ocu
t i onary acts, which he designated as the "meaning" of the u tte r
ance, or, more precisely, the "sense and reference" of an utterance
[ 100].)
Now, this claim that the force of performative elements is
conventional has far-ranging implications; but within the scope of
Austin's argument, "conventionality" refers to two aspects of the
utterance qua act: (1) knowledge of the various types of illo c u
t i onary acts is social knowledge and (2) as social knowledge, the
illocutionary force can be determined from the social context of
the utterance. I t is because illocutionary force can be communi
cated through conventions within social contexts that Austin could
claim th a t a ll u tte ran ces , even "statements," are essentially
performances, even though the performative elements may be missing
from the utterance it s e lf .
The immediate implication of Austin's argument is that to
understand an utterance (which is to understand how the utterance
was used by the speaker), one must know those social conventions
that make clear the illocutionary force of the utterance. But
while such knowledge is a necessary condition for understanding an
utterance qua act, i t is not a su fficie n t condition according to
Austin. W e w ill remember that Austin also spoke of the perlocu-
tionary force of an utterance, although its unpredictable nature
excludes i t from philosophical analysis. But in spite of this
resistance to philosophical formulation, the periocutionary force
is , according to Austin, a necessary element for an understanding
of an utterance qua act.
I I I . Skinner: Intention and the Problem of "Oblique Strategies"
The distinction that we have just examined between illo c u -
tionary and perlocutionary forces is crucial for our understanding
of Skinner's historiography, and even more crucial for our evalua
tio n of i t . Skinner's basic concern, we w ill remember, is to
insure, as much as possible, a tru ly historical understanding of a
te x t, an understanding based on what the w riter "meant" rather than
a mere philosophical appreciation of the ideas presented in the
te x t. Translating this concern into Austin's terminology, we would
say that Skinner has claimed that an historical understanding of an
utterance is insured by knowledge of the illocutionary force of the
utterance. (Let us note, here, a point that we w ill develop la te r:
Skinner does not acknowledge that knowledge of an utterance's per
locutionary force is necessary for an historical understanding of
92
the utterance.) But the historian, according to Skinner, is forced
to contend with special d if fic u lt ie s in acquiring knowledge of the
illocutionary force of an historical utterance, d iffic u ltie s that
Austin does not address d ire c tly . Austin, for example, summarizes
the act of interpretation in the following way:
Illocutionary acts are conventional acts: periocutionary
acts are not conventional. . . . A judge should be able
to decide, by hearing what was said, what locutionary and
illocutionary acts were performed, but not what periocu
t i onary acts were achieved. (121-22)
For Skinner, however, Austin's description of the act of in te r
pretation is not a description of historical interpretation but
only a description of the goal of historical interpretation. As he
explain s in "Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts"
(where S=speaker, or w riter; A=audience, or reader; t^=the w rite r's
historical period; and t 2=the reader's historical period),
I t w ill not be enough for A to show that S's utterance is
convention-governed according to the c r ite r ia acceptable
at t 1, for this is precisely to beg the question of how
to render these c r ite r ia in te llig ib le to those at t ? who
may not share or appreciate them. I t w ill be necessary,
in short, i f i t is to be said that A has understood at
a l l , that he should be capable of rendering into terms
that make sense at t ? the meaning and force at t. of S's
utterance and his utterance of i t . And that this may
sometimes be f l a t l y impossible to achieve should perhaps
be treated more as something to be expected and less as
something to be deplored: for i t is the lim it of our
imaginative grasp as well as our lack of information that
makes the past a foreign country, just as i t is imagina
tive grasp as well as control of information that makes
the historian. (136-37)
Thus, for Skinner, the major problem of historiography is to
acquire the knowledge of those social conventions that w ill enable
the historian to id en tify the illocutionary force of an utterance
and, consequently, arrive at an historical understanding of the
utterance.
But how does one develop a se n s itiv ity to these conventions;
how does one come to know the appropriate conventions? Unfor
tu n a te ly , while Skinner's methodology is, ultim ately, concerned
with these questions, i t does not go very far in answering them.
As other commentators on "Meaning and Understanding" have pointed
out, once Skinner concludes his critique of the textual and con
te x tu a l approaches and begins to outline his own program, his
18
analysis loses much of its energy. He presents his methodology
in a sparse outline:
the appropriate methodology for the history of ideas must
be concerned, f i r s t of a l l , to delineate the whole range
of communications which could have been conventionally
performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the
given u tte ran c e, and, n ex t, to trace the relations
between the given utterance and this wider 1inguistic
context as a means of decoding the actual intention oT
the given w rite r. (49)
This two-step procedure outlines the way in which conventions are
to be used in establishing the historical meaning of an "utter
ance," but i t does not provide a means by which the conventions
themselves can be established. However, in what is the only
elaboration of this procedure, Skinner does provide a direction for
the historian trying to establish the appropiate conventions— the
social context. That is , knowlege of the social context can pro
vide "an ultimate framework for helping to decide what conven
tio n a lly recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, i t might
in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to
communicate" (49). Thus, the appropriate conventions needed to
determine the illocutionary force of a w rite r's "utterance" are to
be found, f in a lly , through one's knowledge of the w rite r's social
context.
W e need, however, to raise two sets of questions in response
to Skinner's methodology. F irs t, in stating that an historical
understand!*ng of an "utterance" depends on knowledge of the
w rite r's social context, Skinner begs the question of the nature of
this type of knowledge. There are three aspects of this ques-tion
that need to be posed: (1) how does one acquire knowledge of the
social context; (2) how does one in fer the requisite illo c u
tionary conventions from this knowledge of the social context; and
(3) what is the status of this knowledge and, consequently, of the
inferences that id en tify the conventions? The second set of ques
tions concerns the conflation of the notions text and utterance
(hence my concern to keep these terms within quotation marks). The
h is to rio g ra p h ic a l problem th a t Skinner addresses concerns, of
course, the reading of "texts"; but Austin's theory of language, on
which Skinner grounds his methodology, defines a much smaller
object of inquiry— the "utterance." In regard to these two terms,
we must pose two questions: (1) in what way, i f any, does Skinner
a rticu late Austin's concept of "utterance" with his own notion of
"text"; and (2) is this a rtic u la tio n , i f i t exists, th eoretically
sound?
The d if fic u lt y of pursuing these questions is , as we have
already seen, Skinner's brevity in presenting methodology. In his
presentation, however, he does refer his readers to an example that
he developed e a rlie r in the essay, when he c ritic iz e d the textual
approach for its in a b ility to determine "the various oblique
strategies which a w riter may always decide to adopt in order to
set out and at the same time to disguise what he means by what he
says about some given doctrine" (32). W e w ill, then, have to
examine Skinner's example in order to pursue the questions we have
raised; and while this examination involves a slight digression, i t
has the advantage of moving our discussion from the purely theo
re tic a l into some practical considerations.
Skinner's example involves the work of Thomas Hobbes and
Pierre Bayle and concerns the disagreement among "textual" his
torians whether certain remarks in the writings of these men should
be regarded as sincere or as ironic (33). Of course, as we have
already seen, Skinner's main objection to the "textual" approach of
these historians is that i t is incapable of verifying either of the
two interpretations; an appeal to the texts alone cannot determine
whether Hobbes's and Bayle's expressions of church doctrine were
made in earnest or whether they disguise, to use Skinner's phrase,
"oblique strategies." Skinner then continues by illu s tra tin g how
knowledge of the context can help in settling this interpretive
dispute. W e w ill want to analyze this illu s tra tio n in order to
id en tify the ways in which Skinner uses the social context to
96
ground an appropriate interpretation; so I quote the fo llo w in g
section of his essay at some length:
. . . both Hobbes and Bayle were accepted not only by the
philosophes as th eir great predecessors in iconoclasm (a
verdict also recorded on Hobbes by Bayle himself) but
were also understood in the same way by a ll th eir con
temporary opponents and sympathizers. I t was never
doubted that each had intended to deal both iro n ic a lly
and destructively with the prevailing theological ortho
doxies. . . . Both had particular cause to recognize
that religious heterodoxy was a very dangerous commit
ment. Hobbes lived for a time in dread (according to
Aubrey) lest the Bishops bring in "a motion to have the
good old gentleman burn't for a heritique." Bayle even
suffered the ironic fate of having his professorship at
Sedan removed for being a n ti-C a th o l i c , and l a t e r of
having his professorship at Rotterdam removed for not
being anti-Cathol ic enough. I f i t is s t i l l true, then,
that both these writers intended their works to propogate
orthodox religious sentiment, i t becomes impossible to
understand why n e ith e r of them removed from la t e r
editions of th e ir works— as both could have done, and
Bayle was even asked to do— those portions which were
apparently so completely misunderstood, and why neither
of them spent any time in attempting to correct the
apparent misconceptions which immediately arose and were
publicized about the intentions of th e ir works. (34-35)
As we can see from this passage, Skinner u tiliz e s three elements of
the social context in order to ground an interpretation that takes
Hobbes's and Bayle's expressions of church doctrine to be ironic:
(1) the reception of the w riters' work by contemporaries; (2) bio
graphical information regarding the w riters' relationships with the
church; and (3) the absence of texts written to correct the pre
sumed misinterpretations of contemporaries. Or, translating Skin
ner's example into the terms of the speech act theory that grounds
his methodology, we can say th a t Skinner claims these three
elements of the social context enable him to id e n t if y the
illocutionary force of Hobbes's and Bayle's expressions of church
doctrine: were these expressions intended to have the force of a
testimony or the force of a criticism? (Austin would categorize
these two performatives as "commissives" and "expositives"; see
157-64.)
What I would like to do now is to take each of these three
contextual elements and to interrogate them, as i t were, using the
f i r s t set of questions that I raised against Skinner's methodology.
And, in doing so, we w ill want to compare the method im p licit in
Skinner's illu s tra tio n with the e x p lic it methodology that he pre
sents at the conclusion of his essay.
1. The f i r s t type of contextual evidence that Skinner offers
is commonsensical yet d i f f i c u lt to discuss within the speech act
framework that he has constructed. Let us, then, trace out the
logic that enables the commentary of contemporaries to be used as
evidence in the determination of the "force" of an utterance. The
relevancy of such evidence is based on the presumption that the
w rite r's contemporaries are in a position to know what the w riter
intended, that is , to know the force that the w riter intended his
remarks to have. ( I t is important to note here the narrow d e fin i
tion of intention with which we are working.) Elaborating this
presumption in speech-act terms, we could say that the w rite r's
contemporaries are fa m iliar with the conventions that enable the
communication of illocutionary force when there are no e x p lic itly
performative elements in the utterance. W e should notice, however,
that this presumption provides a shortcut th a t, while expedient in
establishing the force of an utterance, may not provide us with the
type of historical knowledge that we are seeking. The presumption
does not require that the historian obtain knowledge of the illo c u
tionary conventions nor of the social context; once again, in order
to establish the force of a w rite r's "utterance," the historian,
according to Skinner, need only presume that the w rite r's contempo
raries are correct in th e ir commentary.
Now, the logic of this type of evidence is far less complex
than the methodology that Skinner presents. W e w ill remember that
this methodology requires the historian to have knowledge of those
elements that are actually bypassed by the underlying assumption of
the f i r s t type of evidence in Skinner's illu s tr a tio n : whereas the
methodology requires knowledge of illo c u tio n ry conventions, which
is obtained by knowledge of the social context, Skinner's f ir s t
type of evidence requires neither. A consequence of this incon
sistency between method and methodology is that we are unable to
pose our set of questions. W e cannot inquire into the historian's
knowledge of the w rite r's social context because this type of know
ledge is not brought into play. V ie may, however, ask another
question: Is Skinner's method sig n ifica n tly d i f f e r e n t from the
contextualist approach that he criticize s? Also, we may note here
that Skinner's method, while i t provides evidence in determining
the illocutionary force of Hobbes's and Bayle's remarks, does not
provide us with any knowledge of the re la tio n s h ip between the
writings of these men and the social conditions out of which they
wrote.
2. Skinner's second type of evidence is biographical informa
tio n. Here, he argues that Hobbes's and Bayle*s expressions of
church doctrine should be understood as ironic because each of the
writers had an antagonistic relationship with the Catholic church.
Like the evidence of the commentary by the w riters' contemporaries,
this biographical evidence is commonsensical; yet, also lik e the
f i r s t type of evidence, i t has l i t t l e to do with speech acts or
with the methodology that Skinner offers to the historian. The
inference that allows the historian to move from the biographical
information to a determination of the modality of the w r ite r s '
remarks is based on the presumption that there is a direct cor
re la tio n , or consistency, between the w r i t e r 's l i f e and his
writings. However, we must notice again that this presumption does
not require the historian to have the knowledge specified in Skin
n e r's methodology: knowledge of illocutionary conventions or of
those aspects of the social context that reveal the illocutionary
conventions. Thus, as we saw in our examination of Skinner's f i r s t
type of evidence, the use of biographical information bypasses the
requirements of his methodology. W e are ju s tifie d , then, in
repeating our questions: Is Skinner's method s ig n ific a n tly d i f
ferent from the trad itio n al contextual approach? does i t provide
the historian with any knowledge about the relationship between the
writings of Hobbes and Bayle and the social contexts in which they
wrote?
3. Skinner provides a third type of evidence; but we should
note immediately that i t does not establish d ire c tly the ironic
modality of Hobbes's and Bayle's remarks. Instead, the evidence
that neither w riter corrected the commentary of th eir contempo
raries functions as support for the presumption that underwrote
Skinner's f i r s t type of evidence, i . e . , the w riters' contemporaries
are in a position to know with what force the writers intended
th e ir remarks. For example, i f one were to challenge this presump
tion, the historian could point to the fact that the w riter in
question never sought to correct the hypothetical misinterpreta
tions of his contemporaries. The relevance of such evidence in
support of this presumption rests, of course, on another presump
tion: writers w ill take the opportunity to correct m isinterpreta
tions of th e ir work. Yet, we can challenge quite e a s ily the
relevancy of this presumption in the cases of Hobbes and Bayle as
they have been outlined by Skinner; and our challenge w ill show, I
think, that the weaknesses in Skinner's method and methodology are
the resu lt of misplaced emphases.
Skinner frames his discussion of Hobbes and Bayle, as we have
seen, with the notion of "oblique strategies":
A more interesting and intractable objection however to
the attempt to make the text in i t s e l f a s e lf-s u ffic ie n t
o b je ct of understanding is suggested by the various
oblique strategies which a w riter may always decide to
101
adopt in order to set out and at the same time to dis
guise what he means by what he says about some given
doctrine. (32)
Once the historian assumes that a w riter may decide to use "oblique
strategies," the major question to be pursued is why the w riter
made such a decision. Skinner provides an answer to this question
when he presents the biographical information on Hobbes and Bayle
that we examined above: "Both had particular cause to recognize
that religious heterodoxy was a very dangerous commitment" (34).
I t was the authority of the church— more s p e c ific a lly, its p o l i t i
cal authority— that motivated the decisions of Hobbes and Bayle to
use "oblique strategies." The answer to our historian's question,
therefore, is provided by knowledge of the w rite rs 1 social con
texts— in these two cases, by knowledge of the p o litic a l authority
of the Catholic church. Now, having established the e ffec t that
the Church could have on the writers of the period, an effec t that
Skinner himself establishes, we can challenge the presumption that
writers w ill always take the opportunity to correct m isinterpreta-
tio n s of th eir writings. Let us imagine that there were some
commentators who misinterpreted Hobbes's and Bayle's remarks by
understanding them to be sincere testimonies of fa ith rather than
ironic criticism s of the Church. I f Hobbes and Bayle had written
to correct these misunderstandings, they would have admitted th e ir
opposition to the Church, a position th a t the iron y of t h e ir
writings was meant to disguise. Therefore, this presumption, which
grounds Skinner's third type of contextual evidence, is incapable
of providing, by i t s e l f , a logical support for the i n it ia l pre
sumption that a w rite r's contemporaries are in a position to know
the "force" of the writers remarks.
However, the importance of our analysis of Skinner's final
type of evidence does not l i e in our demonstration of its weakness
as a presumption (although this demonstration does have some c r i t
ical force); instead, i t lies in our observation that Skinner's
entire discussion of Hobbes and Bayle relie s on knowledge of the
p o litic a l authority of the Catholic church, which is to say more
generally that i t relies on knowledge of the w rite r's social con
te x t. His claim that Hobbes's and Bayle's expressions of church
doctrine should be understood as ironic is inferred d ire c tly from
his knowledge of the social context and, therefore, cannot be said
to u tiliz e the two-step methodology that he develops from Austin's
theory of language. W e might, then, ask seriously whether Skinner
has not o v e r-th e o riz e d the h is to rio g ra p h ic a l problem that he
addresses. This excess of theory appears to be an unnecessary
digression when we consider that the method Skinner used to in te r
pret Hobbes and Bayle is rather ordinary, employing types of evi
dence that we would expect to find in the trad itio n a l contextualist
approach. And, consequently, we might be led to conclude that
Austin's ideas on the nature of language are not relevant to the
historical understanding of texts.
This is not a conclusion that I want to draw, however. As I
mentioned above, the weakness that I find in Skinner's methodology
is that i t is based on an inadequate articulatio n of Austin's ideas
with the problem of historical knowledge. The problem of h is to ri
cal knowledge, as Skinner sees i t , is being able to move beyond a
philosophical appreciation of what the w riter said to a knowledge
of what the w riter meant, or to use a word that Skinner and others
have thematized even though Austin himself avoided i t , a knowledge
of the w rite r's in ten tion. This distinction between “what a w riter
said" and "what a w riter meant" is theorized by Skinner as Austin's
distinction between a speaker's locutionary act and illocutionary
act. Translated into Austin's terms, the problem of historical
knowledge is the problem of recovering the illo cu tio n ary force of
the w rite r's remarks, a force that does not always appear as an
e x p lic itly performative element of the w rite r's remarks. Yet, in
spite of its absence in the te x t, the illocutionary force can be
recovered by the historian because i t is conventional. Ultim ately,
then, the historian, according to Skinner, requires knowledge of
the appropriate aspects of the social context, aspects that specify
the conventions through which illocutionary forces were communi
cated at the time the text was w ritten.
IV . Skinner vs. Austin: The Historiographical Status of the
Perlocutionary Act
Now, having summarized Skinner's understanding of the h is to ri
ographical problematic and the methodology that he proposes as a
solution, I want to reintroduce two objections that I made e a rlie r ,
one that I have elaborated already at some length and one that I
w ill elaborate below. The f i r s t objection is that Skinner, while
he presents Austin's ideas as the foundation of his historiography,
actually bases his methodology on a knowledge of social context.
As I have already pointed out, in our detailed look at his method
in interpreting Hobbes and Bayle, Skinner begs the question of how
the historian gains knowledge of the w rite r's social context. This
question does not regard merely the selection of textual sources
th a t the historian should consult; but, more fundamentally, i t
regards the problems of understanding any social context, the prob
lematic of social theory. I would add, at this point, that Skinner
fa ils to explore the po ssib ility of using Austin's ideas— ideas
that tre a t the social nature of language— to theorize the nature of
the social context. I t is in this sense that Skinner's methodology
is based on an inadequate articulatio n of Austin's ideas with the
problem of historical knowledge.
Yet, there is another, more fundamental problem with Skinner's
use of Austin's ideas. This problem concerns the way in which
Skinner conceptualizes historical knowledge, that is , the answer he
gives to the question, What should count as historical knowledge?
As we have already seen, Skinner answers that historical knowledge
of a text consists of knowledge of what the text says and knowledge
of what the w riter meant by what the text says; and he grounds this
answer in Austin’ s claim that to understand an utterance one must
know both the locutionary act and the illocutionary act. However,
Skinner has misunderstood Austin's claim. W e w ill recall th a t
105
Austin does not id en tify only two components of the utterance, but
three: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.
That is , in order to understand an utterance qua act, one must,
according to Austin, have knowledge of all three components. Now,
the th e o r e tic a l question raised by th is discrepency between
Austin's d efin itio n of the utterance and Skinner's use of i t is,
What should count as an adequate understanding of an utterance qua
act? Or, to put the question in historiographical terms, What
should count as an adequate understanding of an historical text qua
act?
One approach to our last question is to inquire into Skinner's
omission of the perlocutionary act. Are there grounds, we may ask,
that ju s tify this omission? There is some d iffic u lty in pursuing
this question in view of the fact that Skinner does not discuss the
concept of perlocutionary act nor, consequently, his decision to
omit i t from his theory. W e can, though, reintroduce two points
that I made above. F irs t, Austin's work focuses on the illo c u -
tionary act; consequently, the peri ocuti onary act may appear,
because of a lack of attention, to be supplementary. But, as I
argued, Austin does not give much attention to the perlocutionary
act because i t is not susceptible to the kind of philosophical
analysis in which he is engaged. That is , the concept of the
peri ocuti onary act— a concept that view the utterance from the
perspective of the effects i t produced— specifies the contingent,
or unpredictable, nature of all perlocutionary acts; because of its
106
contingent nature, then, each perlocutionary act must be examined
in d iv id u a lly . This is another way of saying that the perlocu
tionary act must ultim ately be examined h is to ric a lly , not philos
ophically. W e can see, then, that Skinner, iro n ic a lly , has ignored
the one concept in Austin's theory that is ra d ic ally h isto rical.
In addition to Austin's necessary lack of attention to the
concept of perlocutionary act, Skinner's omission of the concept
might be due, in part, to his understanding of the h i s t o r i o
graphical problem. W e w ill recall that Skinner viewed himself as
writing in response to a sim plistic yet widespread notion of what
i t meant to understand an historical work. This notion had its
ground in a bias toward philosophy, which led many in tellectu al
historians to ignore the h is to ric ity of texts in favor of philos
ophical discussions of the ideas found in these texts. As Skinner
c o r r e c tly pointed out, this philosophical bias is highly sus
ceptible to the problem of reading the present into the past and,
consequently, is incapable of insuring an historical understanding
of a te x t. Such readings, then, however interesting the philos
ophical discussions they generate, should not pretend to historical
knowledge of the texts. Skinner, in response to this in tellectual
s it u a t io n , attempted to recuperate the h is to ric ity of texts by
tying them to the h is to ric ity of th e ir authors. Now, the precise
reason why Skinner decided to define the h is to ric ity of texts
through the h is to ric ity of th e ir authors is , of course, beyond my
personal knowledge. I t would be easy to charge that Skinner's
107
decision reveals an uncritical humanism and that he should have
established the h is to ric ity of texts by tying them, instead, to the
h is to ric ity of the social in stitu tio n s that occasioned and enabled
the writing of the texts. But a more profitable approach to under
standing Skinner's decision, although i t is beyond my present know
ledge, would consist in an analysis of his use of the action theory
that he cites. Our present point, however, is to show that Skin
n e r's understanding of the h isto rio g ra p h ic a l problem did not
require him to consider Austin's concept of perlocutionary act.
Unlike the concept of periocutionary act, which examines the u tte r
ance from the perspective of its results, Skinner's concept of the
text as an act examines the text from the perspective of its pro
duction, or more precisely, from the perspective of the intention
with which the te x t was w ritten. Clearly, the omission of Austin's
concept of periocutionary act was due, in some part, to Skinner’ s
defin itio n of the historiographical problematic as the problem of
recovering the author's intention.
W e are now back to our question of whether Skinner was, in any
way, ju s tifie d in his omission of Austin's concept of perlocution
ary act. I f the concept was omitted because Austin himself does
not give i t much attention, then we may c r itic iz e Skinner for mis
understanding the fundamental role of the peri ocuti onary act in
Austin's theory of the utterance qua act. W e should not lose sight
of the fact that i t is the perlocutionary act that establishes, for
Austin, the h is to ric ity of the utterance. I f , however, Skinner
103
omitted the concept because i t was not useful within the histo rio
graphical problematic that he developed, then we can id en tify a
fundamental difference between Skinner's concept of the utterance
qua act and Austin's concept, which is to say, a fundamental d if
ference between the ways in which Austin and Skinner conceptualize
the relationship between text and context.
In both theories, text and context meet within the performance
of an act. The fundamental theoretical question, then, for both
Austin and Skinner is , What is the nature of an act? Fortunately,
we do not have to answer this question in order to proceed. How
ever, I w ill argue that Austin's way of thinking about the nature
of acts is more sensitive to the h is to ric ity of acts than Skinner's
way of thinking about acts and, therefore, provides a more adequate
foundation for an historical understanding of texts. And I w ill
make this argument by using points that we have already established
in examining the ideas of both men.
In what way, then, is Austin's concept of act more sensitive
to the h is to ric ity of acts than Skinner's concept? To answer th is ,
l e t us f i r s t recall that Skinner defined the h is to ric ity of a text
(or, more precisely, the h is to ric ity of a remark within a text) as
the intention of the w riter in writing that remark. That is , i f
the h is to ria n does not realize that there can be a difference
between what the w riter said and what the w riter meant, there is a
p o s s ib ility that she w ill overlook the w rite r's intention; and,
according to Skinner, overlooking the w rite r's intention is the
equivalent of overlooking the te x t's h is to ric ity . Or, to translate
this relationship between the h is to ric ity of a text and the inten
tion of its author into the logical terms that I w ill be using,
knowledge of the author's intention is the s u ffic ie n t condition for
having an historical understanding of the te x t. My argument, then,
w ill challenge the logical status of the author's intention as the
su fficien t condition for an historical understanding of a text.
W e w ill need to know with some precision Skinner's concept of
intention. A careful description of Skinner's concept is espe
c ia lly important since the word intention has been a key term for
the la s t twenty years in the various disciplines concerned with
interpretation theory. In fa ct, the term has reached the status of
a modern topos, used not only to generate arguments but to generate
19
c o llo q u ia , special issues of journals, and anthologies. The
problem with key terms, however, is that they are used in such a
wide variety of arguments and this results in subtle yet sometimes
sign ificant differences in meanings, which are often ignored. This
problem is especially acute in the case of in te n tio n , which has
been something of a shibbolith following the c o n f l ic t between
humanists and stru c tu ralis ts on the status of the subject. Conse
quently, we need to exercise some care in our understanding of
Skinner's use of the term.
The term intention is often associated with the speech act
approach to philosophy of language; in fact, i t has been thematized
on
by many speech act th eorists." However, the term does not come
110
from Austin, who not only resists giving i t conceptual role in his
speech act theory but avoids i t altogether. (This resistance
raises an important question, to which we w ill return.) Conse
quently, the usage of the term that we find in Skinner's work comes
from elsewhere. I t comes from P. F. Strawson's in flu en tial essay
"Intention and Convention in Speech Acts" (1964), an essay that is
the subject of Skinner's lengthy discussion in "Conventions and the
Understanding of Speech Acts" (1970). And, tracing back this usage
of the term even further, we find that Strawson takes i t from H. P.
Grice's essay "Meaning" (1957). I t would be useful, i f we had the
time, to analyze closely these essays and to describe precisely the
conceptual role(s) that intention plays within the philosophical
problems that these men formulate. For our immediate purposes,
however, we can id en tify the basic issue that Grice raises and the
conceptual role that he establishes for intention; and this w ill
help us to understand Skinner's appropriation of the term.
Grice introduces a notion of intention in order to challenge
what he calls a "causal" theory of meaning. Such a theory is found
in C. L. Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944); and i t id e n tifie s ,
according to Grice, two aspects of the meaning of an utterance: "a
tendency to produce in an audience some attitude (cognitive or
otherwise) and a tendency, in the case of the speaker, to be pro
duced by that attitu d e, these tendencies being dependent on 'an
elaborate process of conditioning attending the use of the sign in
communication'" (379). In other words, the utterance (which is to
I l l
be understood as a lin g u is tic object and not as an act of a speaker
or w riter) can be said to have meaning insofar as i t has a "ten
dency" that allows i t to be used by a speaker with a certain " a t t i
tude" and a "tendency" to produce the same a ttitu d e in its hearers.
Thus, Stevenson's theory can be characterized as "causal" since he
conceptualized the meaning of an utterance as an inherent "ten
dency" (based on "an elaborate process of conditioning attending
the use of the sign in communication") that causes both its use by
speakers and its effects on audiences. Now, Grice objects to this
behaviorist approach, taking issue with, among other things, the
narrow range of meaning for which i t accounts:
we are furnished with an analysis only of statements
about standard meaning, or the meaning in general, of a
"sign." No provision is made for dealing with statements
about what a p articu lar speaker or w riter means by a sign
on a particular occasion (which may well diverge from the
standard meaning of the sign); nor is i t obvious how the
theory could be adapted to make such provision. One
might even go further in c riticism and maintain that the
causal theory ignores the fact that the meaning (in
general) of a sign needs to be explained in terms of what
users of the sign do (or should) mean by i t on particular
occasions; and so the la tte r notion, which is unexplained
by the causal theory, is in fact the fundamental one.
(381)
Thus, as Grice defines i t , the fundamental issue concerning the
nature of the meaning of an utterance is whether this meaning can
be fu lly understood apart from the "particular occasion" of its use
or whether i t can be fu lly understood only in its relationship to
the particular occasion of its use. (At this point, we can skip
over Grice's argument since we are only interested in the la te r
development of his position.) I t is in defining this relationship
112
between the meaning of an utterance and the occasion of its use
that Grice introduces his notion of intention. He conceptualizes
this relationship as the general communicative relations between
speaker and hearer, relations that are defined in terms of the
speaker's act of communicating:
for x_ [an utterance] to have meant anything, not merely
must i t have been "u ttered " with the in te n tio n of
inducing a certain b e lie f but also the utterer must have
intended an "audience" to recognize the intention behind
the utterance. (382)
I t is this dual intention, then, that Grice puts forward as the
essential condition for understanding the meaning of an uterance.
Skinner also puts forward this dual intention as the essential
condition for an historical understanding of a text:
The understanding of texts, I have sought to in sis t,
presupposes the grasp both of what they were intended to
mean, and how this meaning was intended to be taken. I t
follows from this that to understand a text must be to
understand both the intention to be understood, and the
intention that his intention should be understood, which
the text i t s e l f as an intended act of communication must
at least have embodied. ("Meaning and Understanding" 48)
Like G ric e, Skinner conceptualizes the relationship between an
utterance/text and the occasion of its use as this dual intention.
But, we need to ask, can such a conceptualization be suffic ie n t in
understanding this relationship? This is the question th a t we
raise against Skinner's concept of historical understanding. Let
us now answer that this conceptualization is in s u ffic ie n t for the
reason that i t incorrectly assumes that the w rite r's intentions are
the only important aspect of the "occasion" in which the utterance
is used.
113
W e can track this faulty assumption back to Grice's essay. W e
w ill remember that Grice develops his position in two stages: (1)
he claims that the meaning of an utterance cannot be understood
apart from the particular occasion of its use; and (2) he claims
that the relationship between the meaning of an utterance and the
occasion of its use consists in the dual intention of the speaker
in the act of communicating. Now, the problem with Grice's posi
tion is that i t moves too quickly from the f r i s t stage to the
second stage; more s p e c if ic a ll y , he defin es the r e la tio n s h ip
between two elements of meaning— the utterance and the occasion of
its use— without f i r s t conceptualizing one of these elements— the
occasion. In other words, by fa ilin g to conceptualize the occa
sion, Grice assumes that i t is a simple, rather than complex,
element in the phenomenon of meaning. Consequently, when he moves,
in the second stage, to his discussion of intention, the concept is
l e f t undertheorized. Grice is correct in pointing out, against
behaviorists lik e Stevenson, that when we speak we believe we speak
with an intention and that when we listen we believe that others
speak with intentions. But to go only this far in an analysis of
meaning is nothing more than identifying fundamental questions,
lik e , What is intention? and, What are the general characteristics
of "occasions" of the uses of utterances? And to maintain that the
speaker's intention is the s u ffic ie n t condition for understanding
the meaning of an utterance is nothing more than begging those
questions.
114
Now, i f we were to look again at Skinner's passage, in which
he id en tifie s the conditions for an historical understanding of a
te x t, we would find that his reliance on the notion of intention
leaves his historiography in the position of begging the questions
that I just id e n tifie d . Of these two questions, the one that I am
most interested in pursuing is the second: What are the general
characteristics of "occasions" of the uses of utterances? This is
the question that w ill guide the following two chapters. F irs t,
however, we w ill want to spell out how Austin's concept of act is
more adequate than Skinner's in helping us to understand the his
to r ic ity of utterances/texts qua acts.
I have pointed out already that Austin's notion of perlocu
tionary act is ra d ic a lly historical in the sense that the effects
with which i t is concerned are unique. That is , i t is the unique
ness of these effects that establishes an utterance's historical
status. W e must compare this notion with Skinner's notion of an
utterance's historical status, which, as we have seen, establishes
this status by identifying the intention that motivates and guides
the particular act of uttering. What is at issue between Austin
and Skinner is not so much the concept of utterance, or lin g u is tic
act, than the more general concept of act. W e can phrase the ques
tio n in th is way: Should an act be understood apart from the
effects that i t produces?
Skinner does not address this question d ire c tly ; although his
d efin itio n of historical understanding does not include knowledge
of the effects of an act as a necessary condition. Austin's dis
cussion of speech acts, however, has the advantage of offering us a
complex answer, the complexity of which consists in its distinction
between philosophical and historical knowledge. In other words,
Austin's discussion provides this answer: Whether or not an act
should be understood apart from its effects depends on the type of
knowledge one is aftet— i f one is a fte r philosophical knowledge
about the nature of speech acts, the effects need not be con
sidered; but i f one is after historical knowledge of an act, then
i t is necessary to consider its effects. Austin's distinction
between philosophical and historical knowledge reminds us that acts
have effects , that acts are related in numerous ways to the effects
that they produce. From the perspective of this assumption, we
can, consequently, id en tify the fundamental problem of Skinner's
historiography as a fa ilu re to recognize the following presumption:
acts are linked to th eir effects; therefore, the burden of proof
lie s with the claim that knowledge of these e ffe c ts is not a
necessary condition for an historical understanding of an act.
Let us end this part of our discussion with two short examples
in order to make sure that our final point is clear. F irs t, we
could not regard as adequate historical knowlege any description of
a p o litic a l act that excluded the consequences of that act. W e
might, in fa c t, regard with suspicion any historical account that
focuses on the intentions of the agent and ignores the consequences
of the act. Imagine, for example, an account of the United
116
States's involvement in Viet Nam that spoke only of the intentions
of the United States government. Clearly, i t was the a b ility of
the American public to judge the consequences of th e ir government's
involvement that enabled them to question the wisdom of the govern
ment's expressed intentions. Here, then, we have a case th a t
illu s tra te s both the insufficiency of intentions as a condition for
historical knowledge and the inherent inadequacy of intentions as a
necessary condition of historical knowledge. I t might be objected,
however, that our example is non-1inguistic, that we are interested
not in a p o litic a l act but in a special kind of act— a speech act.
This objection, though, poses no d if fic u lt y for our argument. W e
can, in fa c t, devise an example of a lin g u is tic act using the texts
that have helped to shape our discussion in this chapter. All of
these texts— those by Skinner, Austin, Strawson, Grice— are impor
tant not because of what they say nor because of what the writers
meant, but because of the effects they have had on shaping the
discourse of the philosophy of language over the la s t t h ir t y years.
In giving our attention to these texts, we have acknowledged th e ir
influence and, consequently, th e ir effects upon recent philosophy
of language.
V. Summary: From Commonsense Notion of Theory to Speech Act
Theory of Theoretical Utterances
Let us review the progress of our inquiry to this point:
1. The fundamental question that we are pursuing is , How
should we attempt to understand the theoretical works produced in
117
American lite r a r y studies over the past th ir ty years?
2. In the f i r s t chapter of this part of our study, we took
issue with the majority of historians and commentators, who focus
on the content of theoretical works while largely ignoring the
contexts in which these works were produced and received. Our
objection to this approach, which we named "the commonsense notion
of theory," was that i t had failed to learn from recent theory
(from the very theory that i t was dealing with) that discourse
needs to be understood in terms of its use. Consequently, we
adopted the premise that theoretical works should be understood
from the perspective of th e ir use.
3. Our basic premise, however, l e f t us with a d i f f i c u l t
question: What does i t mean to understand a theoretical work from
the perspective of its use? This is the question that we began to
address in this chapter. W e took advantage of work in the fie ld of
in t e l le c t u a l history that has attempted to ground a historical
understanding of texts in speech act theory. But our analysis of
the work of Quentin Skinner revealed a complicated situation in
which his theory of historical understanding was inconsistant with
J. L. Austin's concept of the utterance qua act. W e were, conse
quently, forced to evaluate Skinner's theory of historical under
standing.
4. Skinner id e n t i f i e s two conditions for the historical
understanding of a t e x t , both of which concern the w r i t e r 's
intention. Our evaluation, then, was based on the question of
118
whether or not these conditions were su fficie n t conditions.
5. To determine the status of these conditions, we examined
Skinner's notion of intention, tracing i t back to H. P. Grice's
theory of meaning. Examining Grice's theory, we found the claim
that the meaning of an utterance consists in i t s use and the
assumption th a t the use o f an utterance consists in (1) the
speaker’ s intention as to what he says and (2 ) the speaker's
intention that this f i r s t intention be understood by his audience.
W e then took issue with Grice's assumption, arguing that there was
in s u ffic ie n t reason to believe that the use of an utterance (and,
consequently, its meaning) consisted only in the speaker's inten
tion. Fin a lly , we extended this criticism to Skinner's theory of
historical understanding and found the theory inadequate.
6. Judging Skinner's theory of historical understanding as
inadequate, we turned back to Austin's concept of the utterance qua
act, in p a rtic u la r, his concept of the perlocutionary act. W e
found that, for Austin, the h is to ric ity of an act cannot be under
stood without a consideration of the perlocutionary act, which is
to say, without a consideration of the utterance from the perspec
tive of the effects that i t produces. Then, comparing this notion
of historical understanding with Skinner's notion, we found that
Skinner offered no argument against the perlocutionary act as a
necessary condition for the historical understanding of a tex t.
Consequently, in lig h t of the assumption th a t the h is to r ic a l
understanding of an act should include consideration of the act's
effects and in the absence of an argument challenging this assump
tio n, we concluded that an adequate historical understanding of an
utterance consists of a consideration of both the illocutionary act
and the periocutionary act. W e have, in other words, adopted
Austin's d e fin itio n of the utterance qua act, as opposed to the
notion of utterance that Skinner has made in flu e n tia l in the fie ld
of in tellec tu al history.
7. At this point, then, we can provide a provisional answer
to our basic question: W e should attempt to understand the theo
re tic a l works of American lite r a r y studies by considering them as
acts with illo cu tio n ary and perlocutionary forces.
VI. Dunn: From Utterance to Argument
Our provisional answer leaves us, as we can e a s ily see, with
several major questions: (1) What is involved in understanding the
illocutionary force of an act? (2) What is involved in under
standing the perlocutionary force of an act? and (3) What is
involved in understanding a text as an act? W e w ill conclude this
chapter by considering this last question (the other two questions
w ill help to d irect our inquiry in the following two chapters).
The question of what is involved in understanding a text qua
act is crucial at this point in our inquiry because the speech act
approach to language, which has guided our inquiry, takes as its
object, not the te x t, but the "utterance." This distinction is not
often recognized, as we can see in Skinner's work, in which the two
terms are used interchangeably and the two notions th a t they
represent are conflated. W e must make clear, then, in what ways a
speech act theory of the utterance can be extended to a speech act
theory of the te x t. Or, rewording this concern in terms of contem
porary field s of language study, we can ask, Can a speech act
theory of the utterance make significant contributions to discourse
theory?
Let us approach this question through an essay by another
in telle c tu al historian, John Dunn. Dunn, as I mentioned at the
beginning of the chapter, is a colleague of Skinner at Cambridge;
and his essay, "The Id en tity of the History of Ideas," was the
f i r s t published among the group of in tellectu al historians that
in itia te d the "lin g u is tic transformation" of that f ie ld . Dunn's
general position is quite sim ilar to Skinner's in that he also is
writing against in telle ctu a l historians who tre a t the philosophical
content of the works they study but ignore, for the most part, the
h is to ric ity of these works. Thus, lik e Skinner, Dunn's project is
to develop an historiography that returns in telle c tu a l works to
th e ir historical contexts.
But unlike Skinner, who, we w ill re c a ll, speaks of returning
an utterance to the intention of its w rite r, Dunn is concerned to
return an argument to its social context. The example that Dunn
provides w ill help make more clear the way in which his approach to
an historical understanding of a te x t d i f f e r s from S k in n er's
approach. Dunn developed the example in order to counter the
121
argument that consideration of the social conditions of an in t e l
lectual work necessarily results in a vulgarizing of that work.
So, the attempt to explain Plato's Republic as "an instance of the
ideology of the declining Athenian p o litic a l e lite " (94) is c r i t
icized as abstract, as avoiding an understanding that can only come
from a concrete description of the book. Dunn, however, recognizes
a false dichotomy in this argument: there is no logical necessity
that excludes a concrete description of the text from a considera
tion of the social conditions of the text:
those features of the Republic for which we might attempt
to sketch causal explanations in terms of the social
history of Athens can certainly t e ll us something about
the arguments of the book as such. I t is when we come to
look for the unstated premises of Plato's arguments or
attempt to understand why the stated premises seemed to
need no fu rth e r e x trin s ic ju s tific a tio n , that we see
th e ir relevance. All arguments have to s ta rt somewhere.
(95)
Reading this passage, we can see that there are two crucial
points at which Dunn's approach d iffe rs from Skinner's approach.
F irs t, for Dunn, the text consists in a set of arguments rather
than a set of utterances. This d e fin itio n of a text extends the
notion of a speech act from the sentential level of the utterance
to the extra-sentential level of discourse. (At this point in our
discussion, I am using the word discourse in its most conservative
sense, referrin g only to the complex semantic relationship that
lin k s a set of sentenes/utterances.) Thus, Dunn's use of the
notion of argument is , I think, a major step in conceptualizing the
text qua act.
122
Second, Dunn gives the speech act, conceptualized as an argu
ment, a concrete social foundation by pointing to the rhetorical
fact that every argument rests on assumptions and presumptions that
are shared by the w riter and his h is to ric a lly immediate audience.
In other words, every argument and every text that consists of
arguments is grounded on shared beliefs , presumptions, and values,
which we can refer to generally as social knowledge. W e might
compare this aspect of arguments to the conventional nature of
illocutionary acts, as we find i t described in Austin's work. I t
is the conventional nature of illocutionary force that enables,
according to Austin, the hearer to understand how the speaker is
using the utterance even when the speaker does not make i t e x p lic it
in the utterance. S im ilarly, the social, or conventional, nature
of the unspoken ground of an argument enables the argument to be
considered by its audience. An important consequence of the con
ventional nature of both illocutionary acts and arguments is that
an adequate understanding of an utterance or argument w ill depend
on an understanding of the conventions that underwrite i t .
Following the direction provided by Dunn's concept of the text
qua argument (or set of arguments), our inquiry is led to confront
two theoretical problems that remain from Dunn's essay. F irs t, we
need to conceptualize more clearly the relationship between text
and argument. Should we, for example, understand a text as an
argument or as a set of arguments? And, i f we should not under
stand a te x t as an argument, can a te x t be given any other
conceptualization? Second, i f we assume that arguments are con
vention al to the exten t that they rely on shared beliefs and
values, how should we understand these conventions? These are the
problems that give rise to the next two chapters.
124
Notes
*The Greek concept of theoria has become an important focus of
recent attempts to recuperate a notion of "practical knowledge" as
a counterpart to the predominant theoretical knowledge modeled on
modern technology. In addition to Habermas, see Gadamer and
Bernstein. For a detailed study of the Greek concept of theoria
and its relationship to the concept of praxis, see Lobkowicz, 3-57.
O
"The nature of the relationship between theory (or reason) and
history is the point at issue in the exchange between Derrida and
Michel Foucault concerning Foucault's thesis in The Order of Things
that the separation of reason and madness can be located h is to ri-
c a lly in the 17th-century. Derrida argues that such a separation
cannot be h is to ric a lly located since i t is the precondition of the
concept of history. See Derrida, "Cogito" and Foucault, "My Body";
for an informed discussion of this debate, see D'Amico.
3
I t is in "The Order of Discourse" that Foucault introduces
his notion of a "will to tru th ," a notion that characterizes his
la te r (post-1968) work. According to Foucault, the origin of this
"will to truth" in Western thought can be traced back to the 5th-
century BC:
the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was
or did, but in what i t said: a day came when truth was
displaced from the ritu a liz e d , efficacious and ju st act
of enunciation, towards the utterance i t s e l f , its mean
ing, its form, its object, its relation to its reference.
(54)
For Foucault, i t is this new form of truth that has, throughout the
history of Western thought, controlled the production of discourse:
" it is as i f even the word of law could no longer be authorized, in
our society, except by a discourse of truth" (55).
^See Skinner, "The Idea of Negative Liberty."
5
In the second note in "The Idea of Negative Liberty," Skinner
states that the argument of his essay is indebted to Dunn's "Iden
t it y ."
® It is the Australian p o litic a l historian and philosopher J.
G. A. Pocock who f i r s t id en tified th is "transformation" of the
discipline of in tellectu al history; see his "Languages."
^In a la te r essay, Skinner characterized the state of inquiry
within the philosophy of history as lim itin g i t s e l f to "the ques
tion of whether historical explanations must conform to a deductive
125
model" and, thus, ignoring "the place of understanding statements
made in the past, or to the special problems this might raise and
the special insights that i t might yeld" ("Conventions" 138).
^In th is passage, Skinner has taken his quotations from
Bateson, "Functions" and Leavis, "Responsible C r itic ."
9
The quoted phrases in Skinner's passage come from Merkl,
Bluhm, C at!in, and Hacker.
^ I n spite of its epistemological focus, there is, as Pocock
points out, a touch of academic p o litics in Skinner's criticism .
Pocock has characterized the problem of the textual approach as "a
maladjusted relationship between history and philosophy" in which
"the coherence of a work or body of p o litic a l w ritin g , as p o litic a l
philosophy or p o litic a l theory, was mistakenly id e n tifie d with its
character as a historical phenomenon" (5 -6 ). In other words, the
philosophical orientation of most "historians" of p o litic a l thought
had led them to a philosophical examination of the ideas expressed
in th eir canonical texts rather than being led to an historical
understanding of these texts.
11
The philosophy of action was an important sub-field that
developed in B ritish analytical philosophy in the late 1950s and
e a rly 1960s. Skinner re fe rs to Davidson, Hampshire, Kenny,
MacIntyre, and White.
1?
'Pocock, in a discussion of the relevance of Thomas Kuhn's
famous concept of "paradigm" for the historical study of p o litic a l
thought, also has spoken of a new, complex understanding of con
te x t. He remarks that the p o ssib ility of treating an in dividual's
thought as a "social event" embedded within an in te lle c tu a l para
digm and a communication system provides historiography with what
i t has always lacked: a complex concept of context (15).
13
Although How to Do Things with Words was published in 1962,
the lectures that comprise the book and, thus, the announcement of
a philosophical revolution were delivered in 1955, two years after
the publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
14Austin's observation should be compared to work on logical
and deontic modality, especially that of A. N. Prior; see his Time
and M o d a lity . Also, Austin's notion of the complex utterance
should 5e compared to Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, which
Kristeva has developed under the name " i n te r te x tu a l i t y " ; see
Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel" and Kristeva, "Word."
15
"Agent" is , of course, Kenneth Burke's term. Since Burke's
theory w ill up!ay a major role in the following chapter, I w ill
begin to s lip in his terminology now, in preparation.
126
16
For Wittgenstein's claim, see Phi 1osophical Investigations,
paragraphs 43 and 79.
17
I t is worth noting, here, that while Austin id en tifie s three
elements of the utterance qua act, he points only to two of the
three possible relationships among these elements. The one re la
tionship that he does not mention is that between the illocutionary
act and the periocutionary act. I w ill argue in the following
chapter that such a relationship has theoretical significance and
is , consequently, worth exploring.
18
As I was writing this chapter, I was aware of two c ritic a l
a rtic le s on Skinner's work, those by Tarlton and by Parekh and
Berki. Both a rtic le s are unsympathetic to the lin g u is tic basis of
Skinner's approach to in tellec tu a l history and, therefore, are not
of direct concern to our study. As I was w riting, however, I
became aware of two more recent studies that deserve closer exami
nation; see Minogue and Schochet.
19
See for example, the special issue of Genre, "Symposium on
E. D. Hirsch's V a lid ity in In terp re tatio n " ancl the anthology On
Literary In ten tio n .
20
I t has been John R. Searle who has had the most influence on
th e m a tizin g the concept of intention; see his Speech Acts and
In te n tio n a lity . The notion of intention has been important also to
American linguists interested in formalizing the difference between
d ire c t speech acts and indirect speech acts; see, for example,
Clark.
127
Chapter 4: The Rhetoric of Theory
As we began to see at the close of the preceding chapter, the
importance of John Dunn's "The Id en tity of the History of Ideas" is
that i t clearly articulates this fundamental problem: How should
in telle ctu al historians, having recognized the essentially " lin
guistic" nature of in tellec tu a l practices, define the objects of
i
th e ir inquiry? The depth of this problem— its complexities and
its seeming resistance to a solution— is reflected in the fact that
ne a rly 15 years after the publication of Dunn's essay, another
prominent in tellectu al historian, Dominick LaCapra poses the same
basic question in his attempt to "rethink" the discipline of in t e l
lectual history:
What is meant by the term "text"? I t may i n i t i a l l y
be seen as a situated use of language marked by a tense
interaction between mutually implicated yet at times con-
testatory tendencies. On this view, the very opposition
between what is inside and what is outside texts is
rendered problematic, and nothing is seen as being purely
and simply inside or outside texts. Indeed the problem
becomes one of rethinking the concepts of "inside" and
"outside" in r e la t io n to processes of in te r -a c tio n
between language and the world. ("Rethinking" 26)
LaCapra's observation that the text should be understood as a
"situated use of language" is , of course, f a ir ly common these days,
as is his characterization of the historian's problem in terms of
the interpenetration of "inside" and "outside." But having ac
cepted LaCapra's observation and the problematic nature of the
inside-outside dichotomy, we s t i l l find ourselves in the position
of trying to comprehend the "situated" nature of language: What do
we mean when we say that a text is "situated"?
LaCapra informs us that there are six types of answer to the
question of the situated te x t, each of which specifies a rela tio n
ship of the text and something "outside" the te x t. W e can use
LaCapra's typology to help us position the method of inquiry that
we are beginning to develop.
1. The r e la t io n between the author's intentions and the
te x t. As we saw in the la s t chapter, this is the rela
tion that Skinner attempted to establish, relying on the
speech act theory of P. F. Strawson.
2. The relationship between the author's l i f e and the tex t.
This type of relationship is found in h is to ria n s who
practice a psychobiographical approach, who believe that
the intentions of a w riter "may be only partly known to
3
him or her or even unconscious" (39).
3. The relation of society to texts. LaCapra characterizes
this approach as "a social history that inquires into the
uses of texts for the empirical reconstitution of past
society" (41).^ And, he regards the work of Marxist
historians and the work of Michel Foucault as attempts to
establish this type of relationships. Since we w ill be
looking closely at some of Foucault's work la te r in the
cha p te r, i t w ill be useful to quote, here, LaCapra1 s
description of this approach, e s p e c ia lly since he is
129
c r itic a l of i t . "Foucault," he says,
has elaborated a notion of discursive
practice which signals the i n t e r
action between in stitu tio n s and forms
of discourse. But he has not a lto
gether succeeded in relatin g the dis
cursive practice to the significant
te x t o r, even more g e n e r a lly , in
a rtic u la tin g the relationship between
more or less formalized modes of dis
course and written or lived "texts,"
for he often treats written texts and
other phenomena in a similar manner
by fa llin g back on the notion that
they are instances or tokens of the
d isc u rs iv e p r a c tic e --s ig n s of the
times. (41-42)
Thus, LaCapra changes Foucault (and ohers who attempt to
establish the same type of relationships) with advancing
a kind of social determinism in which the text becomes
nothing more than a re fle ctio n of the social conditions
of its production. LaCapra's point is , I believe, valid .
But the force of his criticism is misleading. One can
get the impression, reading LaCapra, that Foucault's work
can be set aside. I t cannot, since, in spite of its
shortcomings, i t provides the most comprehensive and
detailed theory of the relationship of in telle c tu a l texts
and th e ir in s titu tio n a l contexts. I t is for this reason
that we spend part of this chapter examining Foucault's
The Archaeology of Knowledge.
4. The relation of culture to texts. LaCapra character!-zes
this approach as a concern with the problem of the " c ir
c u la tio n or n o n c irc u la tio n of texts among levels of
130
5
culture" (48). Unfortunately, he does not address the
problem of distinguishing this approach from the "social”
approach. I t appears, however, that he understands this
approach to have a more narrow focus. "One might argue,"
he says,
that the global society or culture is
too large and undifferentiated a unit
for the in v e s tig a tio n of the most
relevant community of discourse of
in te lle c tu a ls . . . . Hence in t e l
lectual history should be a history
of in te lle c tu a ls , of the communities
of discourse in which they function,
and of the varying relations— ranging
in often complicated ways from insu
la t io n to openness--they manifest
toward the larger culture. (49-50)
In Chapter 5, we w ill sketch the outline of a theory that
a rtic u lates , or joins, the narrow "cultural" approach to
the broader "social approach.
5. The relation of a text of the corpus of a w rite r. This
approach interests LaCapra because i t raises the question
of the id en tity of the corpus, and, especially the prob
lem, much discussed by recent te x tu a l th e o r is ts , of
establishing an "identity" for the w rite r.
6. The relatio n between modes of discourse and texts. This
approach has been made possible by s tru c tu ra lis t theories
of discourse, which argue that language consists in a set
of fo rm alized modes of discourse, or conventions.
LaCapra, however, claims that these s tru c tu a lis t accounts
have not examined s u f f ic ie n t l y "the question o f how
131
various modes of discourse, r u le s , or conventions
actually function in texts or extended uses of language"
(56).
While LaCapra1s typology is useful in making clear various
possible approaches and in allowing us to categorize the work of
some historians (e .g ., Skinner), we w ill not be able to position
ourselves exclusively in any one of the six categories. I t is
p o ss ib le , however, to say that our attention w ill be directed
toward the th ird and fourth categories, the "social" and "cultural"
approaches. S t i l l , a large portion of our inquiry, the bulk of
th is chapter, is best thought of as fa llin g into the la st category:
the relation between modes of discourse and texts.
More s p e c ific a lly , this chapter w ill explore the notion of
enunciation as a way of coming to a better understanding of theo
re tic a l discourse in modern lite r a r y studies. The thesis that I
w ill be working towards both fa lls into LaCapra's final category
and, in a sense, explodes i t . For we w ill find that certain texts
do not merely fa ll into a preexisting discursive category that is
called "theory"; instead, certain texts come to establish a theo
re tical discourse, which often displaces a former understanding of
theoretical discourse, of how theoretical discourse is supposed to
function.
In order to advance this thesis, i t w ill be necessary to out
line a theory of enunciation as a way of thinking the "situated"
nature of language, as a way of approaching the "inside-outside"
132
problem. I would lik e to begin this discussion of enunciation by
reading the question of the "situated" text back into Dunn's his
toriography, more s p e c ific a lly , by reading i t back into his short
discussion of in telle ctu a l practices as "argument." As we w ill
see, Dunn's conceptualization of in te lle c tu a l works as arguments
introduces both the ideas of rhetoric and enunciation (although
Dunn uses neither of these terms). Then, having introduced the
notion of enunciation, we w ill examine Foucault's use of the idea
in The Archaeology of Knowledge. With Foucault's historiographical
work as background, we w ill then examine the notion of enunciation
on a more theoretical le v e l, borrowing from the work of Tzvetan
Todorov, Julia Kristeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Fin a lly, using the
work of Kenneth Burke, I w ill introduce a new level of enunciatory
analysis, which I call "rhetorical enunciation." I t is at the
level of "rhetorical enunciation" that works of theory j u s t i f y
themselves and attempt to define the parameters of theoretical
discourse. As an example, we w ill look at Northrop Frye's "Pole
mical Introduction" to his Anatomy of C riticism .
Having introduced the thesis that theoretical discourse is not
a fixed category, that i t is open to re d e fin itio n , and thus that i t
can serve a number of uses, I w ill conclude this chapter with an
" in te rlu d e " th a t serves as a provisional bridge to the final
chapter. In this interlude, I w ill describe the uneven history of
theory in American lite r a r y studies. By "uneven history," I mean a
repeated hesitation in lite r a r y studies to recognize theory as an
133
important practice in the d iscipline. W e w ill see this hesitation,
this kind of stuttering, by looking at the emergence of theory in
two of the main organs of the in stitu tio n al body of American l i t e r
ary studies— the Modern Language Association.
By e n titlin g this chapter "The Rhetoric of Theory," then, I
mean to draw attention to the conclusion that I have drawn from my
preliminary research: i f we are to inquire into the history of
theory, we need to recognize that theoretical texts are produced
and disseminated within an in s titu tio n th at, for various reasons
(which have yet to be examined and understood), has never embraced
f u lly the practice of theory; and we need to recognize t h a t ,
because of this tension between our discipline and theory, the
advances that theory has made need to be understood as taking place
within situations that are fundamentally rh e to ric a l. Thus, when
LaCapra suggests that the major problem facing the in tellectu al
historian— the problem of the relationship between the inside and
the outside of texts— needs to be rethought "in relatio n to pro
cesses of interaction between language and the world," I would
argue that these "processes of interaction" should be regarded as
rh e to ric a l.
I . Dunn: The In tellec tu a l Work as Argument
A. D efinitions of the in tellec tu al work
According to Dunn, the in telle c tu a l work is conceptualized in two,
seemingly opposite ways, depending on the discipline in which the
134
"historian" is trained. Those historians who are trained in phi
losophy and who are interested in the history of philosophy are
prim arily concerned with the truth status of the propositions that
one finds in philosophical texts and concerned with the lo g ic a l, or
in te rn a l, consistency among the propositions in a tex t. Conse
quently, because of this concern, philosophers have conceptualized
the text as a set of propositions, the ra tio n a lity of which must be
examined and judged.
Dunn characterizes the work of these philosophers as "rational
explanation." W e might refine this characterization by saying that
the work of these philosophers consists in rational judgment; that
is , the aim of th e ir work is not so much to "explain" the ration
a l i t y of a philosophical te x t, but to judge its r a tio n a lity , to
proclaim its truth or fa ls ity . This aim, as we can easily see and
as Dunn points out, does not rely on any consideration of the
te x t's h is to ric ity (with the exception of the question of in flu
ence) .
Historians trained in the discipline of history, according to
Dunn, conceptualize the text as the product of an a c t iv it y . Thus,
they take issue with the philosophers' concept of the te xt. As
Dunn puts i t , none of the formal philosophical analyses
is necessarily bound to (and few ever in fact do) provide
any sort of historical account of an a c tiv ity that we
would recognize, in common sense terms, as "thinking."
The h is to ry of thought as i t is c h a r a c te r is tic a lly
written is not a history of men battling to achieve a
coherent ordering of th eir experience. I t is , rather, a
history of fic tio n s — of ra tio n a lis t constructs out of the
thought processes of in d iv id u a ls , not of plausible
abridgments of these thought processes. (87)
But i f the text is to be regarded generally as the product of the
a c tiv ity of thinking, in what way do we have a more detailed under
standing of this activity?
B. The a c tiv ity of thinking as a "social a c tiv ity 1 1
Again, the trained historians, according to Dunn, claim that a text
can be understood only i f i t is seen as the product of an a c tiv ity
(thinking) that is fundamentally social: "Once talking and thinking
are considered seriously as social a c tiv itie s , i t w ill be apparent
that in telle ctu a l discussions w ill only be fu lly understood i f they
are seen as complicated instances of these social a c tiv itie s " (88).
However, as Dunn points out, this claim only begs the question at
issue, which is whether a text can be understood fu lly only i f i t
is regarded as the product of a social a c tiv ity . W e might point
out also th a t the concept of "social a c t i v i t y " needs to be
developed; in other words, what does i t mean to c h a ra c te rize
thinking as a "social activity"?
C. In tellectu al thought as argumentation
About half way through his discussion, and in passing, Dunn f i r s t
characterizes in tellec tu al thought as argumentation. Using the
history of p o litic a l thought as his example, Dunn asks,
What is i t that the history of p o litic a l thought is the
history of? Two things, at least; the set of argued
propositions in the past which discuss how the p o litica l
world is and ought to be and what should constitute the
136
c r ite r ia for proper action within i t ; the set of a c ti
v itie s in which men were engaged when they enunciated
these propositions. (92)
Though Dunn reminds us that propositions are not merely presented
in a text but argued, he fa ils to make clear (1) how we are to
understand the argumentative nature of these propositions and (2)
how we are to understand the relationship of argumentation, which
is an a c t i v i t y , and the "set of a c tiv itie s in which men were
engaged when they enunciated these propositions." In other words,
Dunn needs a theory of argumentation, more s p e c ific a lly , a social
theory of argumentation, a theory that explains argumentation as a
social a c tiv ity .
D. The social nature of in te lle c tu a l arguments
Later in his discussion, having introduced the historians' ( i . e . ,
those tra in e d in the discipline of history) concept of causal
explanation, Dunn asks, What could be said to be socially caused
about the Republ ic? That is , what elements of the text can be
attributed to the society in which Plato wrote? Dunn, then, iden
t i f i e s one element: the premises of Socrates' arguments:
those features of the Republ ic for which we might attempt
to sketch causal explanations in terms of the social his
tory of Athens can certain ly te ll us something about the
arguments of the book as such. I t is when we come to
look for the unstated premises of Plato's arguments or
attempt to understand why the stated premises of Plato's
arguments seemed to him to need no further extrinsic
ju s tific a tio n , that we see th eir relevance. All argu
ments have to s ta rt somewhere. (95)
U n fo rtu n a te ly , Dunn does not develop his concept of text qua
argument beyond th is discussion of the ro le of premises in
argumentation. Nor does he describe in detail the social nature of
argumentation. What he does, however, is to claim that premises
form the base of an argument ("All arguments have to s ta rt some
where") and to claim that premises do not require ju s tific a tio n ,
the implication being that premises are beliefs that the w riter
shares with his audience. The further implication is that, because
the premises of an argument consist in shared b elie fs , argumenta
tion is fundamentally social. Let us note here b r ie fly that Dunn's
id en tific a tio n of the premise as the irreducibly social element in
argument is consistent with recent argumentation theory.
Now, translated into terms of our proposed historical inquiry,
Dunn's essay forces us to consider the p o s s ib ility that theoretical
works in lite r a r y studies (lik e Northrop Frye's Anatomy of C rit
icism) can be understood adequately only by focusing on (1) its
super-sentential, argumentative structure and (2) its dialogical
h is to ric ity , based on b e lie fs shared by w r it e r and audience,
beliefs that are marked in the text as the argument's premises.
And, another challenge of Dunn's essay, one that strikes me as more
fundamental, is to regard these two aspects of the text not as
independent but as reciprocally implicated in one another. That
is , a theoretical work cannot be adequately understood in terms of
its internal structure, for example, Frye's attempt to bring four
types of c r itic a l theory within a "synoptic view"; instead, Frye's
argument needs to be located, as Frye himself locates i t , within a
cultural situation that was governed by a bias against the practice
of c ritic is m , a bias inherent in Romantic aesthetic. Actually, the
way in which Frye positions the Anatomy deserves a closer analysis
— an opportunity that we w ill take la te r in the chapter. The more
general point that I want to make clear at this stage of our in
quiry is this: Dunn's essay provides the historian of l i t e r a r y
studies with two essential, in terrelated questions: (1) what is the
nature of the theoretical texts that are the objects of our his
toric a l project? and (2) in what ways are these texts implicated,
folded into the socio-historical contexts of th e ir production?
I I . The Concept of Enunciation in Foucault's The Archaeology of
Know!edge
A. The emergence of "enunciation" in modern French thought
Before we examine Foucault's use of the concept enunciation in his
archaeology of in telle c tu a l practices, i t w ill be useful background
to review the emergence of this concept in French in tellec tu al
circles of the mid-1960s.
W e can mark the emergence of the concept with the publication
of Emile Benveniste's Problernes de TinguistiqUe generale in 1966.
As we find with the growing appropriation of Lacan's ideas during
this time, and even to a greater extent, Benveniste's Probleroes is
a key reference in those essays by Barthes, Gennette, Todorov, and
others, in which these lite r a r y c r itic s attempted to formulate a
7
s tru c tu ra lis t theory of narrative. And lik e Lacan's theory of the
subject, Benveniste's work introduced a problematic that the struc
t u r a l i s t s found i r r e s i s t i b l e , yet ultim ately subverting: "the
139
relationship of the w riter to language," to use Barthes's phrase.**
Even though Benveniste began to develop this problematic in pre
v io u s ly published essays (some dating as far back as the late
1930s), the publication of Problernes had an immediate impact on
French in te lle c tu a ls , something of which can be seen in a remark by
Tzvetan Todorov, commenting on the papers delivered at the 1966
Johns Hopkins symposium on structural ism: " a ll o f us who have
spoken of lin g u is tic s here have drawn on a few a rtic le s by Ben
ven iste and not on the l a t e s t a c q u is itio n s in lin g u is t ic s "
("Discussion" 315).
The attraction f e l t by the stru ctu ralists toward Benveniste's
work involves two conceptual distinctions that are at the heart of
his lin g u is tic s . In the f i r s t of these distinction s, Benveniste
offers an alternative to Saussure's conceptualization of the object
of inquiry in lin g u is tic s . As is well known, Saussure defined the
proper object of lin g u istic s by opposing the concept of a language
system (la_ 1angue) to the concept of the individual instance of
language (la_ parole) ; and by positing such a system, he was able to
provide lin g u is tics with an object comparable to the objects of
other sciences (7 -17 ). In opposition to this distinction between
1angue and parole, Benveniste introduced the distinction between
the enounced (enonce) and the enunciation ( enonciation) .
W e need to look at Benveniste's distinction c a re fu lly , for its
logic is much more complex than Saussure's simple opposition of
1angue and parole. F irs t, le t us notice the s im ila rity between
Benveniste's enonc£ and Saussure's parole. Both concepts re fe r to
the individual act of language use, more precisely, both refer to
the lin g u is tic product of any individual act. However, while both
concepts have the same referent, this referent is understood d i f
feren tly . As we have just seen, Saussure understood the lin g u is tic
event as a necessarily incomplete manifestation of a lin g u is tic
system and, consequently, as an inadequate object for the scien
t i f i c study of language. Benveniste, on the other hand, understood
the lin g u is tic event as the product of a situation and, conse
quently, as part of a relationship (event-situation) that is an
adequate object for the s c ie n tific study of language. He was able
to argue for his approach to lin g u is tics by showing that Saussure's
concept of langue, which divorces i t s e l f from the p a rtic u la rity of
a ll lin g u is tic events, cannot account for indexical deixis, that
is , pronouns that re fe r, not back to elements in the te x t, but to
elements outside of the text within the situation of production
( enonciation) : the speaker (I_), the hearer (you) , place of enun
ciation (here), or time of enunciation ( now, today) .
The second of the two distinctions that attracted structur
a lis t c r itic s is the basic typology of language use that Benveniste
drew out of his "enunciative" understanding of lin g u is tic pheno
mena. His distinction between text and enunciation allows two
extremes, or lim it cases: te x ts w ithout e n u n ciativ e elements
( h is to ire ) and texts containing enunciative elements ( discours) .
I t is important to note, here, that Benveniste recognized the
141
r a r ity of pure h is to ire , of utterances without enunciative ele
ments; his typology, then, measures the frequency of enunciative
elements, not simply th eir presence or absence. Thus, a ll u tter
ances, for Benveniste, are "discursive" to some degree: "Discourse
must be understood in its widest sense: every utterance assuming a
speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of in flu -
Q
encing the other in some way" (208-9).
B. Foucault's "enunciative modalities"
At this point in our examination of the idea of enunciation, we
could follow an appealing logic and begin to examine enunciation on
a theoretical le v e l, making more clear what the concept entails and
what its immediate implications might be for the historical project
that we are considering. However, I have chosen to postpone such a
theoretical examination for the time being, preferring instead to
examine Foucault's use of enunciation in the theory of in tellectual
history that he develops in The Archaeology of Knowledge. My hope
is that an examination of Foucault's historiographical theory (so
close to our project) w ill help to guide our own use of enuncia
tion.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault, in his attempt to
describe the nature of the discourse of the human sciences, id e n ti
fies three "enunciative modalities," that is , three types of law
that operate behind the production of discourse and make th is
production possible.
142
The f i r s t of these enunciative modalities concerns the status
of the w riter: "What is the status of the individuals who— alone—
have the rig h t, sanctioned by law or tra d itio n , ju r id ic a lly defined
or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse?" (50) Such
a question has played, at times, a prominent role in modern c r i t
ical debates. W e can observe, for example, T. S. E lio t's argument
in "The Function of Criticism" (192.3) that the best q u lified to
w rite criticism are the poets themselves. Another example, in
which a much d iffe re n t position is advanced, is John Crow Ransom's
"Criticism , Inc." (1937). Ransom begins this essay by pointing out
the need for critic ism by "professionals," a criticism not written
by poets nor by aesthetic philosophers, but by the university
scholar.
Foucault's second enunciative modality concerns "the in s titu
tional sites" from which discourse derives "its legitim ate source
and point of application" (51). Although this modality focuses on
in stitu tio n a l sites, i t should not be confused with the concern for
authorization that is the focus of Foucault's f i r s t modality ( a l
though, of course, the two modalities are re la ted ). What Foucault
has in mind, here, are the types of in stitu tio n al sites in which
discourse appears. For example, theoretical discourse in lite r a r y
studies appears in academic journals for the most part; only on
occasion can i t be found in other types of publications: belles
le ttre s journals (e .g ., T ri-Q u a rte rly ) and book reviews (e .g ., New
York Review of Books). Theoretical discourse appears also at
143
academic conferences. I t appears in graduate seminars; and, more
and more, i t is being introduced into a new s ite : the undergraduate
course. This second modality enables us to raise the question,
What changes might we begin to see in the discipline as theoretical
discourse is applied in the undergraduate course?^
The fin al enunciative modality that Foucault id e n tifie s is the
most complex of the three. Using the example of medical discourse,
he describes this modality in terms of the relationship that the
w r ite r (more broadly, the producer of discourse) has with the
objects of his inquiry:
The positions of the subject are also defined by the
situation that i t is possible for him to occupy in re la
tion to the various domains or groups of objects: accord
ing to a certain grid of e x p lic it or im p lic it interroga
tions, he is the questioning subject and, according to a
certain programme of information, he is the lis te n in g
subject; according to a table of characteristic features,
he is the seeing subject, and, according to a descriptive
type he is the observing subject . . . . To these per
ceptual situations should be added the positions that the
subject can occupy in the information networks (in theo
re tic a l teaching or in hospital training; in the system
of oral communication or of written document: as emitter
and receiver of observations, case-histories, s ta tis tic a l
da ta, general theoretical propositions, projects, and
decisions). (52)
I understand Foucault to be working, here, with the premise that
the speaking subject is positioned by the set of concepts that he
has at hand. These concepts define his object of inquiry and,
thus, establish the relationship that "positions" the speaker.
Foucault's notion becomes a b it more clear when he provides the
example of changes in medical discourse at the beginning of the
19th-century, changes that he attributes to "the introduction of
new forms of teaching, the circulation of information, relations
with other theoretical domains (sciences or philosophy) and with
other in stitu tio n s (whether administrative, p o litic a l, or econo
mic)’1 (53). The obvious example of a sim ilar change within our own
discipline is the rise of interest in theory as members of the dis
c ip lin e became interested in continental philosophy. American
c r itic s , repositioned by the new "theoretical domains" of struc
tu r a lis m , German hermeneutics, French psychoanalysis, and post
structuralism, perceived lite ra tu re in ways d iffe re n t from e a rlie r
c r itic s . To recognize this change is not merely to make the banal
observation that one in t e r p r e t iv e approach to l i t e r a t u r e was
replaced by another; in addition, and prim arily, such a recognition
allows one to observe the new relationship that lite r a r y studies
has developed with other disciplines within the academy.
C. Foucault's "enunciative function"
Having examined all three of Foucault's "enunciative modalities,"
we can see that they are not prim arily qu alities of the text;
instead, they are q u alitie s of the situation within which the text
is produced, a situation that Foucault understands to be rule-
governed, or in s titu tio n a l. I t is this in s titu tio n a l nature of the
situation (or context) and its reflection in a text that Foucault
means to designate with his phrases "discursive formation" and
"rules of formation": "The rules of formation are conditions of
existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and
disappearance) in a given discursive division" (38). Thus, on this
premise, the in telle ctu a l historian should know how to read the
markings of these rules of formation in (to ) the tex t. Unfortu
nately, Foucault's discussion of "enunciatiave modalities" does not
provide any kind of guide for such a reading.
However, a la te r discussion in The Archaeology of Knowledge
does provide us with a clearer sense of the way in which Foucault
understands the enunciative nature of a te x t. In this la tte r dis
cussion, Foucault is prim arily interested in defining the basic
element of discou rse, which he r e fe r s to as the "statement"
( Inoncej. ^ This basic element, the "statement," is not to be
mistaken for "the relation of the s ig n ifie r to the sig n ified , of
the name to what i t designates; the rela tio n of the sentence to its
meaning; the relation of the proposition to its referent" (89); in
other words, the basic element of discourse cannot be examined from
the perspectives of semiotics, grammar, or logic. Instead, the
"statement" must be understood from the perspective of an "enuncia
tiv e level" of language, a perspective from which we can see that
the statement refers back to the conditions that make possible its
exi stence.
Foucault id e n tifie s four types of condition that can be read
at the "enunciative level" of a te x t. The f i r s t type of condition
concerns the re feren tial function of language:
The re feren tia l of the statement forms the place, the
c o n d itio n , the f i e l d of emergence, the authority to
d iffe re n tia te between individuals or objects, states of
things and relations that are brought into play by the
statement i t s e l f ; i t defin es the p o s s i b i l i t i e s of
appearance and delim itation of that which gives meaning
to the sentence, a value as truth to the proposition.
(91)
Thus, at the enunciative level of a te x t, we are not concerned with
the specific referents, but with the abi1it y of the text to specify
those referents, that is , a kind of supplemental sign ification in
which the re fe re n tial function of discourse points backwards to the
conditions of its existence. I understand th is enunciative a b ility
as a basic kind of presupposition. For example, the a b ility to
posit unconscious drives behind the action of the governess in
Henry James's The Turn of The Screw presupposes the existence of
Freud's metapsychology. Thus, Foucault claims for the "statement"
a double refere n tial function: i t e x p lic itly points to its logical
referent but im p lic itly points to the conditions that make this
f i r s t type of reference possible.
The second type of condition that can be read on the enuncia
tive level of a text concerns the relation between the statement
and the speaking subject. Foucault, here, desires to make a clear
distinction between the concept of author and the enunciative con
cept of subject:
the subject of the statement should not be regarded as
identical with the author of the formulation— e ither in
substance, or in function. He is not in fact the cause,
orig in, or s t a r t in g - p o in t of the phenomenon of the
written or spoken articu latio n of a sentence; nor is i t
that meaningful intention which, s ile n tly a n tic ip a tin g
words, orders them lik e the vis ib le body of its in tu itio n
. . . . I t is a p a rtic u lar, vacant place that may in
fact be f il le d by d iffe re n t individuals; but, instead of
being defined once and for a l l , and maintaining i t s e l f as
such throughout a te x t, a book, or an oeuvre, this place
147
varies— or rather i t is variable enough to be able either
to persevere, unchanging, through several sentences, or
to a lte r with each one. {95)
Foucault's d efin itio n of the enunciatory subject appears, at f i r s t ,
to contradict i t s e l f . In defining the subject as "a partic u la r,
vacant place that may . . . be f il le d by d iffe re n t individuals," he
re ite ra te s a point made in his e a rlie r discussion on enunciative
modalities: there are social rules that authorize one to speak in
particular ways; that is , there are social rules that establish
positions and one must occupy a position to be authorized to speak.
But, we would expect these positions to be stable since they are
established by social rules. Instead, Foucault t e lls us, they can
fluctuate, sometimes changing from sentence to sentence. Unfortu
n a te ly , Foucault does not elaborate his notion of the variable
enunciatory subject; and we are l e f t w ith an apparent incon-
si stency.
However, in his essay "What Is an Author?" which was published
in the same year as L‘ Archeologie du savoir, Foucault discusses his
idea of a variable speaking subject, which in this essay he regards
as one of four characteristies of the "author-function." According
to Foucault, one can find a " p lu ra lity of egos" in a te x t, much in
the same way that i t is possible to distinguish, in fic tio n , the
narrator from the w rite r. To demonstrate this phenomenon in non-
f i c t i o n a l discourse, he gives the example of a mathematical
tre a tis e , in which "the ego who indicates the circumstances of
composition in the preface is not id en tica l, either in terms of his
148
position or his function, to the ' I ' who concludes a demonstration
12
within the body of the text" (130). Foucault goes on to identify
a "third ego": "one who speaks of the goals of his investigation,
the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be
solved . . (130).
Foucault's idea of a "p lu ra lity of egos" reappears a year
la te r near the close of The Order of Discourse, in an outline of
the "problems yet to be solved" i f historians are to regard texts
as "discursive events":
i f discursive events must be treated along the lines of
homogeneous series which, however, are discontinuous in
relation to each other, what status must be given to this
discontinuity? I t is of course not a matter of the suc
cession of instants of time, nor the p lu r a lity of d i f
ferent thinking subjects. I t is a question of caesurae
which break up the instant and disperse the subject into
a p lu ra lity of possible positions and functions. (69)
The textual phenomenon of caesurae, which, Foucault states, "dis
perse the subject into a p lu r a lity of possible p o s itio n s and
functions," w ill be a point of focus in our reading of Frye's
"Polemical Introduction" la te r in the chapter. At this p o in t,
however, we need to examine the final two characteristics of
Foucault's "enunciative function."
The third characteristic is that the enunciative function "can
[not] operate without the existence of an associated domain"
13
(96). I t is this "associated domain," Foucault explains, that
makes the statement something other, something more, than
a mere collection of signs, which, in order to e x is t,
need only a material base— a w riting s u rfa c e , sound,
149
malleable m aterial, the hollowed incision of a tra c e .
But this also, and above a l l , distinguishes i t from the
sentence and the proposition. (96)
He then id e n tifie s the four major characteristies of a statement's
associated domain:
1. "the series of other formulation within which the state
ment appears and forms one element (the network of spoken
formulations that make up a conversation, the architec
ture of a demonstration, bound on the one side by its
premises and on the other by its conclusion, the series
of affirmations that make up a n arrative )." (93)
2 . "the formulations to which the statement refers (im p li
c i t l y or not), either by repeating them, modifying them,
or adapting them, or by opposing them, or by commenting
on them; there can be no statement that in one way or
another does not reactualize others (ritu a l elements in a
narrative; previously accepted propositions in a demon
s tr a tio n ; conventional sentences in a conversation)."
(98)
3. " a ll the formulations whose subsequent p o s s ib ility is
determined by the statement, and which may follow the
statement as its consequence, its natural successor, or
its conversational re to rt (an order does not open up the
same enunciative p o ss ib ilitie s as the propositions of an
axiomatic or the beginning of a n a rrativ e )." (98)
4. "the associated fie ld is made up of all the formulations
whose status the statement in question shares, among
which i t takes its place without regard to lin e ar order,
with which i t w ill face away, or with which, on the
contrary, i t w ill be valued, preserved, sacralized, and
dissociable from the status th a t i t may receive as
' l i t e r a t u r e , 1 or as an unimportant remark that is barely
worthy of being forgotten, or as a s c ie n tific truth valid
for all time, or as prophetic words, e tc .)." (98-99)
W e can generalize Foucault's concept of "associated domain" by
noting that i t is an attempt to c la r ify those relations that hold
between a "statement" and other lingustic "formulations," whether
they be other statements or other units of discourse, whether they
are found in the same text or in other texts. To acknowledge the
150
existence of an "associated domain," then, is to regard the "state
ment" as a point within a complex discursive network, as a juncture
of numerous discursive formations. Thus, the meaning of a "state
ment" is not the product of its words and grammar; instead, i t is
the product of semantic and syntactic elements as they are a r t i
culated with and within a network of discursive formations. I t is
the a rtic u la tio n of these discursive formations within a text that
Julia Kristeva refers to as its " in te rte x tu a lity " ; and the study of
these formations, which Kristeva calls "semiotic practices," is
" t r a n s l i n g u i s t i c s . W e w ill have the opportunity to examine the
concept of in te rte x tu a lity la te r in the chapter.
The f in a l c h a ra c te ris tic that Foucault id en tifie s is "the
material existence" of the statement. This m a te ria lity , Foucault
explai ns,
is not simply a principle of variation, a modification of
the c r ite r ia of recognition, or a determination of l i n
guistic sub-groups. I t is constitutive of the statement
i t s e lf : a statement must have a substance, a support, a
place, and a date. And when these requisites change, i t
too changes id e n tity . At this point, a host of questions
arises: Does the same sentence repeated very loudly and
very softly form one or more statements? . . . A sen
tence is fa ith fu lly translated into a foreign language:
two statements or one? . . . How can one stablish the
i d e n t it y of the statement through a ll these various
forms, repetition s, and transcriptions? (101)
Unlike the other three requisite conditions of the statement, all
of which disperse its id e n tify by linking i t to other aspects of
discourse, this final condition attempts to recapture the state
ment's id e n tity . This attempt to reestab lish the statem ent's
id en tity is a crucial move for Foucault since, as we w ill remember,
Foucault's entire discussion on "the enunciative function" i t s e l f
functions as a d e fin itio n of the statement, an attempt to establish
the conceptual id en tity of the statement. And, when we recall that
Foucault regards the statement as the fundamental unit of in t e l
lectual discourse, we can see that his entire theory rests on the
a b ility to establish the id e n tity of the statement.
In his attempt to establish the id en tity of the statement,
Foucault f i r s t distinguishes the statement from what he calls the
"pure event of enunciation," an unrepeatable event that "has a
situated and dated uniqueness that is irreducible" (101). The key
feature of the pure event of enunciation is its unrcpeatability;
the statement d iffe rs from this pure event in that i t is repeat-
able: " i t would not be d i f f i c u l t to say that the same sentence
spoken by two people in s lig h tly d iffe re n t circumstances constitute
only one statement" (102). Yet, the id en tity of such a statement,
Foucault explains, does not consist in its grammar or logical form
since the statement is "susceptible to differences of m aterial,
substance, time, and place" (102). That is , the feature of the
statement that enables its re p e a ta b ility (and thus defines i t as
"statement") is not its grammatical form (as a sentence) or its
logical form (as a proposition) because the concept of statement
has been defined n e g a tiv e ly to c o n sist in n e ith e r of these
features. Foucault wants, on the one hand, to conceptualize the
statement in such a way th a t a ll statements a re , in theory,
repeatable; on the other hand, i t is clear to him that the feature
152
of rep eatab ility cannot consist in the grammatical or lo g ic a l
features of a statement since the same sentence or the same propo
sition can be uttered in two d iffe re n t situations and would be
recognized as being, in a significant way, d iffe re n t.
Perhaps we can clear up the confusion that often accompanies
an a b s tra c t discussion by introducing an example that Foucault
provides:
when a novelist speaks a sentence in daily l i f e , then
reproduces the same sentence in the manuscript that he is
w ritin g , attrib u tin g i t to one of his characters, or even
allowing i t to be spoken by that anonymous voice that
passes for that of the author, one cannot say that i t is
the same statement in each case. (103)
On the other hand, "a book, however many copies or editions are
made of i t , however many d iffe re n t substances i t may use, is a
locus of exact equivalence for the statements— for them i t [ i . e . ,
the book] is an authority that permits re p e titio n w ithout any
change of identity" (102). The key word, here, is "authority." As
Foucault goes on to explain,
The rule of m a te ria lity that statements necessarily obey
is therefore of the order of the in s titu tio n rather than
of the spatio-tem poral lo calization ; i t defines pos-
s ib i lit i e s of reinscription and transcription (but also
thresholds and lim its ), rather than lim ited and perish
able in d iv id u a litie s . (103)
The "order of the in s titu tio n ": this last passage makes clear the
id en tity of the statement. The statement is repeatable, i t can
transcend the pure event of its enunciation, only because an in s t i
tutional authority "authorizes" this re p e titio n . The in stitu tio n
neutralizes whatever differences exist between enunciative events.
153
The in stitu tio n al nature of such authority is , perhaps, most clear
in the case of translating a text from one language to another. W e
know, on the one hand, that there is a necessary gap between the
original text and its translation; nevertheless, we often work on
the assumption that a translated text is adequate (as we ourselves
are doing with Foucault's translated te x t). When we work with a
translated text under th is assumption, the distance from the
o rig in a l, a distance of which we are aware, is neutralized by an
in stitu tio n a l convention that authorizes the use of tra n s la te d
works.
The key point in Foucault's lengthy and involved attempt to
define the statement qua the fundamental unit of in tellectu al dis
course is its in s titu tio n a l nature. Just as Skinner attempted to
tie the proposition to the speaker's intention through the concept
of utterance, Foucault has attempted to tether the utterance to
society ( i . e . , the in stitu tio n s that comprise society) through the
concept of statement.
Faucault's theory of in telle c tu al history, as he presents i t
in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is extraordinarily dense and com
plex; we have not begun to exhaust its conceptual power in our
short discussion. However, we have begun to see how the notion of
enunciation can be used in an historiography of in tellectu al his
tory. With some knowledge of Foucault's work now behind us, we can
begin to outline our own theory of enunciation.
154
I I I . Outline of a Theory of Enunciation
A. A general concept of enunciation
As we saw in our discussion of the emergence of enunciation as an
important concept in modern French thought, Benveniste introduced
enunciation as an alternative to Saussure's concept of l_a 1 angue as
the object of lin g u is tic inquiry. For Benveniste, the concept of
enunciation enabled the theorizing of the e ffec t of context on the
utterance (£nonc£). Tzvetan Todorov, in his a rtic le on enunciation
fo r the Encyclopedic D ic tio n a ry of the Sciences of Language,
defines the concept in this way:
L in g u is tic production may be regarded e ith e r as a
sequence of sentences, id en tified without reference to
any specific circumstances of occurence . . . or as an
act in the course of which these sentences are actual
ized, assumed by a particular speaker in specific spatial
and temporal circumstances. (323)
Enunciation, then, is a way of conceptualizing language, or l i n
guistic production, as "an act"; and the nature of such acts is
understood in the relationship of an act and its "specific spatial
and temporal circumstances." In this broad sense, to regard a text
as an enunciation is id e n tic a l to historicizing the te x t, to
placing the text in "specific spatial and temporal circumstances."
Thus, i t appears as i f the concept of enunciation can do nothing
more than to return us to our original problem: theorizing the
relationship of text to context.
However, there are more specific aspects of the concept of
enunciation that are more helpful. W e can begin to see these
aspects by looking at three d iffe re n t concepts of enunciation that
155
Todorov id e n tifie s : (1) enunciation as the physical phenomena of
speech production and reception, (2) enunciation as "the modifica
tions introduced into the global meanings of the utterance by the
speech s itu a tio n ," and (3) enunciation as those "elements that
belong to the language code and whose meaning depends, neverthe
less, on factors that vary from one speech act to another" (323-
24). The f i r s t concept of enunciation clearly belongs to the fie ld
of psycholinguistics; and the second concept belongs to the fie ld
of sociolinguistics (broadly conceived). Todorov elaborates the
final concept by saying that i t "focuses on . . . the imprint of
the process of enunciation in the utterance" (324). I t is this
f in a l concept of enunciation that is the subject of Todorov's
discussion, a concept which he refers to as "the lin g u is tic aspects
of enunciation." In order to outline our theory of enunciation, we
w ill need to focus on three concepts that Todorov introduces in his
d e fin itio n : "utterance," "the process of enunciation," and "the
lin g u is tic aspects of enunciation."
B. The nature of the "utterance"
For the most developed concept of utterance, we turn not to Todorov
nor to Benveniste, but to Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, the u tte r
ance is an actual use of language, much lik e Saussure's concept of
1 a parole and Noam Chomsky's concept of performance. However, the
utterance must be understood as an a rtic u la tio n , or joining of lan
guage and situation:
In no instance is the extraverbal situation only an
external cause of the utterance; i t does not work from
156
the outside lik e a mechanical force. On the contrary,
the situation enters into the utterance as a necessary
consti t u t i ve element of its semantic structure. The
qu otidian utteran ce endowed w ith ifigm fi c a t i on is
th e re fo re composed of two parts: (1) a realized or
actualized verbal part, and (2) an implied part. That is
why an utterance can be compared to an "enthymeme." (qtd.
in Todorov, Dialogical 41)
Bakhtin's comparison of the utterance to the enthymeme echoes John
Dunn's observation that in tellec tu a l texts, as fundamentally argu
mentative discourse, need to be understood in terms of the premises
shared by w riter and audience, premises which tether a text to a
specific sociohistorical context. The fundamentally "rhetorical"
nature of the utterance and, thus, of language is made more e x p li
c it in another of Bakhtin's works, Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language (1930). Bakhtin, lik e Benveniste, c ritic iz e d the li n
guistics of the time, including that of Saussure. The problem of
contemporary lin g u is tic s , Bakhtin pointed out, is th a t i t only
abstracts from the dynamic whole of the actual speech act— the
utterance:
the very nature of an utterance's wholeness and the forms
that that wholeness may take are l e f t outside of linguis
tic thought. . . . The structure of a complex sentence
(a period) — that is the furthest l i m i t of l i n g u i s t i c
reach. The structure of the whole utterance is something
lin g u istic s leaves to the competence of other d i s c i
plines— to rhetoric and poetics. (78)
Now, having seen Bakhtin's d efin itio n of utterance, i t is necessary
to determine in what ways the situation can enter the utterance,
that is , to determine the types of artic u la tio n of utterance and
situation, or the types of enunciation.
C. The situation, or "enunciative context"
157
Let us define generally the enunciative context as those aspects of
a situation that can enter into the utterance. Bakhtin refers to
the enunciative context as "the extraverbal context of the u tte r
ance" :
The extraverbal context of the utterance is composed of
three aspects: (1) The spatial horizon common to the
interlocutors (the unity of the v is ib le : the room, the
window, e tc .); (2) Knowledge and understanding of the
s itu a tio n , also common to both; (3) Their common evalua-
tio.rv of the situation. (qtd. in Todorov^ Dlalogical
4 F T 5 ---------------
As Todorov points out, Bakhtin, several years a fter this in it ia l
formulation of the enunciative context, altered his understanding
of i t . Bakhtin, introducing the term s itu a tio n , writes,
Let us agree to use the fam iliar word situation for the
three implied aspects of the extraverbal p a rt of the
utterance: the space and time of the enunciation ("where"
and "when"); the object or theme of the utterance (that
"o f which" i t is spoken); and the re l a t i on of the
interlocutors to what is happening ( "evaluation"). (qtd.
in Todorov, Dialogical 42)
There are some significant changes in these two formulations
of the enunciative context, which w ill be important to our own
theory of enunciation. One of these changes in Bakhtin's expansion
of the f i r s t aspect to include time as well as space; this change,
however, appears to be a correction of an e a rlie r oversight. A far
more interesting change concerns the second aspect. Here, Bakhtin
replaces "knowledge and understanding of the situation" with the
"theme of the utterance." Todorov, in his examinations of these
passages, does not attempt to account for this change. But we
153
might unerstand the change not as a deletion of the original second
aspect, but as a subsumption of i t by the f i r s t aspect. W e should
notice that the original formulation consists of the actual situa
tion ( it s existen tial re a lity ) and the relationship between this
situation and the interlocutors, a relationship that is defined by
the second and third categories: relations of knowledge and evalua
tio n . Thus, the only aspect of the situation id e n tifie d by Bakhtin
in his f i r s t formulation is the "spatial horizon." The second
formulation needs to be understood as an expansion of the set of
s itu a tio n a l elements: time, theme, and evaluation; not of the
"real" setting, but of "what is happening."
I t is this final situational element of "the relations of the
interlocutors to what is happening" that allows us to recognize the
most significant change between Bakhtin's two formulations of the
enunciative context. The second formulation is based on a dialec
tic a l relationship of situation and interlocutors, that is , the
re c o g n itio n th a t the " s itu a tio n " does not merely contain the
in te rlo c u to rs but that i t is produced, to some extent, by the
interlocutors. Thus, in the second category, the situation is not
constituted by a real "object," but by the "theme of the u tte r
ance," which is to say, by the act of producing the utterance.
Likewise, the third category id e n tifie s a situational element that
does not pre-exist the utterance, but that is produced by the
interlocutors. This third category, however, designates a situa
tional aspect that is much more complex than the second category.
159
This complexity consists in a s e lf-re fle x iv e quality in which the
i n t e r l ocutors subtlely a lte r the situation by commenting on an
e a rlie r portion of the discussion.
A major theoretical problem arises from our reading of the
changes that Bakhtin made in his conceptualization of the enuncia
tiv e context. Because his second formulation focuses on the act of
discourse rather than on the external "re a lity " of the discursive
situation, the concept of enunciation appears to have more of a
d iale c tic a l form than either Bakhtin's original formulation of the
enunciative context or Todorov's concept. That is , enunciation
does not mark merely the entry of the situation into the utterance;
i t also marks a transformation of the situation by the act of dis
course. I t is this d iale ctical potential of the concept enuncia
tion that I now want to develop. I w ill argue in the following
section that a well-rounded theory of enunciation must take into
account this d ialectical quality, which I call "rhetorical enun-
ci a tio n ."
D. Rhetorical enunciation
1. The rhetorical dimension of enunciative elements
As I just mentioned, a shortcoming in the theory of enunciation as
i t is presented by Todorov is that i t does not distinguish between
enunciative elements— which, by d e fin itio n , refer to elements of
the situation— and representations of the situation, which consist
in attempts by the w riter to position his te x t. For example, the
personal pronoun I is an enunciative element in that i t refers back
to the situatio n, more s p e c ific a lly, to the w rite r. However, the
w riter of a text also can refer to the situation by describing i t ,
or more accurately, by represent!ng i t . The difference between
description and representation consists in the "fic tio n a l" quality
of representation. That is , the concept of description presupposes
the po ss ib ility of accurate description (a presumption that we find
in the perceptual theory that underwrites the positivism of Bert
rand Russell and G. E. Moore); the concept of representation, on
the other hand, presupposes the necessity of a gap between language
and the world and, consequently, the im possibility of accurate
1 ft
description. For example, in his Anatomy Of Criticisrn, Northrop
Frye represents the current c ritic a l scene as governed by the 19th-
century a e s th e tic of " a n ti-c r itic a l criticism" (3 ). But Frye
represented this scene not because he wants to refer back to the
situation in which he wrote; in fac t, such references seem to be
unnecessary to the type of discourse that Frye was w riting: theo
r e tic a l. (That is , theoretical discourse, the purpose of which is
to establish principles or to discover laws, does not need to refer
to the situation in which i t is written; in fa c t, such references
hold the potential of undercutting the th e o re tic ity of theory.)
Instead, Frye represented the scene because, presumably, he f e l t
the need to ju s tify the w riting of the Anatomy. The situation that
Frye represents functions as a complex argument for the value of
the book: the cultural practice of lite r a r y criticism is repre
sented to be in a state of c ris is ; the Anatomy is an attempt to
remedy this c r is is . Thus, we find an enunciative level of the
Anatomy that functions rh e to ric a lly .
W e w ill look more closely at the rhetorical enunciation in
Frye's Anatomy. F irs t, however, I would like to refine our theory
of rhetorical enunciation by examining Kenneth Burke's concept of
scene.
2. Rhetorical enunciation and Kenneth Burke's concept of scene
I f we define rhetorical enunciation as those elements of a text in
which the w riter attempts to position the text in such a way so as
to ju s tify its w ritin g , we can see some s im ila rity to Burke's con
cept of scene, as i t is developed in A Grammar of Motives (1945).
Burke’ s concept of scene as well as his lin g u is tic theory of moti
vation provide, I think, a good general framework for a concept of
rhetorical enunciation.
Burke, in the opening sentences of the Grammar, defines his
project as the answer to this question: "What is involved, when we
say what people are doing and why they are doing it?" (xv). The
key word in Burke's question is say. W e w ill be able to see more
c learly the importance of this word i f we rephrase the question
without i t : What is involved when people do things? By comparing
the two questions, i t becomes clear that Burke is not interested in
identifying the motives behind the actions of people; instead, he
is interested in how we a ttrib u te motives to actions. Moreover, he
claims that "the basic forms of thought" are reflected in the ways
we a ttrib u te motives: "The book is concerned with the basic forms
162
of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all
men necessarily experience i t , are exemplified in the attrib u tin g
of motives" (xv). With this statement, i t becomes clear that Burke
is engaged in a kind of philosophical anthropology, or an anthro
pology of knowledge (as distinguished from a sociology of know
ledge), which attempts to specify thought processes fundamental to
a ll men.
What is best known from the Grammar is "the Pentad," or "the
five key terms of dramatism"; act, scene, agent, agency, purpose.
These "terms," however, should not be confused with "the basic
forms of thought" that Burke wants to id e n tify . (They should not
be understood to be equivalent with the jo u rn a lis tic heuristic od
what, where/when, who, how, and why.) Instead, as Burke puts i t ,
these terms are the "generating principle of our investigation."
The basic forms of thought are not found in these terms, but in
th e ir relationships with each other, th e ir "ratios":
W e want to inquire into the purely internal re la
tio n s h ip s which the fiv e terms bear to one another,
considering th e ir p o s s ib ilitie s of transformation, their
range of permutations and combinations— and then to see
how these various resources figure in actual statements
about human motives, (xvi)
Thus, according to Burke, the set of ratios that can be generated
by the five terms "should enable us . . . to 'generate,' or 'a n ti
cipate' the various classes of motivational theory" ( x x i i i ) . In
other words, Burke has developed a grid on which any motivational
statement can be placed and, thus, characterized. (Part One of the
Grammar is t it l e d "Ways of Placement.")
Of Burke's five terms, the one that concerns us most, in our
thinking about rhetorical enunciation, is scene. W e f i r s t need to
recognize that Burke's concept should not be confused with the con
cept of enunciation, or the situation in which the text is pro
duced. A "scene" is a verbal (or, more generally, a semiotic)
representation of a situation. A scene is a representation pre
cisely because i t is used, in its relation with another dramatistic
term, to attrib u te motivation to an act. Thus, in Burke's f i r s t
major example, illu s tra tin g the scene-act ra tio , he shows that
"there is im p lic it in the quality of a scene the quality of the
action that is to take place within it" (6 -7 ). Burke uses Ibsen's
An Enemy of the People as a specific example:
Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is a good instance of the
scene-act r a tio , since the correlations between scene and
act are readily observable, beginning with the fact that
this representative middle-class drama is enacted against
a typical middle-class setting. (3)
The relation that links scene and act is synecdoche, in which the
whole confers its qu alities on the part. The act gains meaning
because i t is understood to be governed by the scene. Burke also
provides a no n-literary example. After referring to V ir g il's con
cept of the genius 1o c i, he remarks that there are "unmistakable
vestiges of i t in s c ie n tific theories (of Darwinian cast) according
to which men's behavior and development are explained in terms of
environment" (6 ).
I t should be clear by now that Burke's concept of scene is not
the same as the concept of enunciation, or the situation in which
164
an utterance or text is produced. However, the d istinction between
enunciation and scene is sim ilar to the distinction we made between
enunciation and rhetorical enunciation. Unlike enunciation, both
scene and rhetorical enunciation are representations, the purpose
of which is not to refer accurately to situations, but to give some
sense to action, to a ttrib u te motivations to actions as a way of
making them in t e llig ib le , even "ratio nal."
But, there is an important difference between Burke's concept
of scene (as he develops i t in the Grammar) and our concept of
rhetorical enunciation. W e can get at this difference by examining
a play of meaning in the word ending the preceding paragraph,
ra tio n a l. On the one hand, rational means " in te llig ib le ," as I
used i t above. For example, Freud's achievement is characterized
often as the transformation of the unrational ( i . e . , dreams and
pathologic behavior) into the rational (e .g ., the dream logics of
19
condensation, displacement, representation, and revision). Yet,
on the other hand, rational is used jugmentally— used to confer
value and, thus, to ju s tify . Much of Foucault's historical work
argues that the conceptual opposition between reason and madness
has been used throughout the history of Western culture as a
principle of exclusion, thus as a technique of domination: the
"rational" is that which is approved; and that which is deemed
20
"unrational" is excluded.
I t is this la tte r use of rational that helps us to conceptual
ize rhetorical enunciation. Like Burke's general theory of motiva
tion, the level of rhetorical enunciation in a text makes an action
165
ra tio n a l. But, whereas Burke develops his theory to account for
the ways in whichs we make rational the actions of others, rh e to ri
cal enunciation is the attem pt to make “r a tio n a l" one's own
actions, that is , the attempt of a w riter to make "rational" his or
her production of a tex t. S t i l l , Burke's observation that humans
a ttrib u te motivation by erecting a synecdochic scene— this observa
tion encourages us to find similar scenes in the documents that
comprise the history that we want to investigate.
3. Rhetorical enunciation in Frye's "Polemical Introduction"
The elements of rhetorical enunciation in the "Polemical Introduc
tion" to Frye's Anatomy are subtle, easily overlooked, and, for
that reason, e ffe c tiv e . The subtlety of this enunciation consists
in the re p e titio n , twice, of a single word, " s t i l l . "
Frye, a fte r an introductory paragraph that sketches the aim of
the book, begins to discuss an attitude toward the practice of
criticism that views i t as nothing more than parasitic on art:
On this theory, c r itic s are in te lle c tu a ls who have a
taste for a rt but lack both the power to produce i t and
the money to patronize i t , and thus form a class of
cultural middlemen, distrib utin g culture to society at a
p r o fit to themselves while exp lo itin g the a r t i s t and
increasing the strain on his public. The conception of
the c r it ic as a parasite or a r tis t manque is s t i l l very
popular, especially among a r tis ts . (3)
What is interesting, as one begins to read this early passage, is
that Frye gives no indication of the time during which this a t t i
tude was held: is he speaking about the present or the past? I t is
not until the final sentence and Frye's use of sti 11 that we under
stand the passage to refer to an attitude of the past; but, more
166
importantly, i t is an attitude that " s t i l l " character!'zes the
present. Thus, Frye introduces two qu alities in his representation
of the situation: (1) the current attitude toward c ritic is m is
governed by the past and (2) the current attitu d e toward criticism
regards i t as p arasitic .
Having introduced these two qu alities of the current attitude
toward c ritic is m , Frye begins to make more specific the genealogy
of the concept of the parasitic c r it ic ; and, in doing so, he elabo
rates the contemporary situation: "The golden age of a n ti-c r itic a l
c riticism was the la t t e r part of the nineteenth century, but some
of its prejudices are s t i l l around" (3, emphasis added). Then,
having e s tab lis h e d the past's control over the present (again
through the use of s t i l l ), Frye continues to trace back the idea of
the parasitic c r it ic and fin a lly locates its origin in the "Roman
t ic theories of a spontaneously creative 'fo lk '" (4 ). Immediately,
th is o rig in having been located, Frye returns to the present:
"These theories have had a f a ir t r i a l ; they have not stood up very
well to the facts of lite r a r y history and experience, and i t is
perhaps time to move beyond them" (4 ). In this statement Frye
makes e x p l i c i t a third quality of the situation that has been
hinted at a ll along: not only is the present governed by an a t t i
tude from the past, but this attitude is grounded in an out-dated
aesthetic.
W e can begin, now, to see the rhetorical dimension of Frye's
representation of the contemporary situation. The situation is
167
represented as fundamentally problematic, in the sense th a t i t
embodies a problem that calls for attention. And the problem is
rather serious i f one happens to be a c r itic ; in fa ct, what Frye
represents to his readers is a c ris is state: the legitimacy of
criticism as a cultural practice is in doubt; modern c r itic is m
confronts a legitim ation cri s is . What is needed in such a situa
tion is , of course, a defense of criticism .
I t is as a defense of criticism that Frye "positions" his
Anatomy. The ju s tific a tio n for writing the book and its value are
made to rely on this positioning; and thus we may say th at, to an
extent, the rhetorical force of the book's theses is made to rely
on this positioning. (Although the actual rhetorical force of the
book is much more d i f f i c u l t to determine.) Using Burke's terms,
the action is appropriate to the scene: one expects a c ris is to be
confronted and resolved.
W e should note, as we close our discussion of rhetorical enun
c ia tio n , that Frye was able to represent a c r i s i s s it u a t io n ,
apparently successfully, without referring to a contemporary name,
te x t, or event. The absence of evidence in Frye's representation
of the s itu a tio n suggests that the notion of c risis might be
regarded as a topos, a way of initiating/grounding/shaping an
argument. Thinking of the use of c risis as a topos would be the
f i r s t step in analyzing an e n tire rhetoric of c ris is . F in a lly , one
day, we might be able to write the history of the use of this
rhetoric in the discourse of lit e r a r y studies. W e might even find
168
that the history of lite r a r y studies is l i t t l e more than a history
of the rhetoric of c ris is .
IV. Interlude: An Event in the In s titu tio n a liz a tio n of Theory
Up to this point in our inquiry, we have pursued the question of
how we are to conceptualize the theoretical texts that would be the
objects of a history of theory. Not surprisingly, our inquiry has
been dominated by th e o r e tic a l concerns. And we have focused
closely on the lin g u is tic aspect of theoretical discourse, even
though we have acknowledged that there is a relationship of this
lin g u is tic aspect of discourse and the sociohistorical context in
which this discourse is produced and disseminated. The concept of
rhetorical enunciation helps to theorize the complex relationship
of text and context; but I have only introduced the concept, and
much more work needs to be done to develop i t into a useful his-
tori ographical tool.
I would now lik e to s h ift our attention to the other side of
the text/context relatio n s h ip before we proceed to the f in a l
chapter. What I would lik e to demonstrate, here, is something
rather unexpected. Working on the assumption, encouraged largely
by anthologies of theory, that theoretical discourse was an impor
tant practice throughout the development of the discipline in the
United States, I quickly discovered that the term theory was rarely
used before 1949. I t was in that year that one of the discussion
groups at the yearly Modern Language Association conference decided
to regard its main in terest as " lite r a r y theory." And i t was not
until 1960 that one could go to the MLA Bibliography and find a
category for " lite r a r y theory." W e can consider these two dates as
marking events in the in s titu tio n a liz a tio n of theoretical dis
course. I t is the f i r s t of these events that I w ill discuss.
Let us begin by observing th a t an in s t i t u t io n can give
prominence to a term (e .g ., theory) through its use in any of its
organs. Thus, the MLA can in s titu tio n a liz e a term (1) through the
organization of its members into discussion groups, (2) through the
organization of research and c ritic a l, w o rk -in -its annual b ib lio
graphy, and (3) through the presentation of material in authorized
publications (e .g ., the Introduction to Scholarship volumes).
In the case of the MLA discussion groups, terms have been used
to name and, thus, to confer a kind of id en tity both on the group
of members who have decided that they share an in teres t and on the
in terest i t s e l f — what is usually called a fie ld of study and what I
w ill refer to, following Foucault, as a "domain." Thus, members of
the MLA have named themselves by joining particular groups; and on
occasion they have renamed themselves by changing th eir group's
name or by forming a new splinter-group. The f i r s t in stitu tio n al
use of the term theory came about in 1948, when the group on Poetic
Form and General Aesthetics decided to change its name to Poetics
and Literary Theory. This renaming may seem unimportant; however,
the history of this MLA group is interesting in the way i t re fle cts
170
an uneasiness, a hesitation concerning theory that we are unac
customed to.
The MLA's basic organizing principle in 1948 was not d iffe re n t
from that in 1921, when the smaller "group meetings" were added to
the three main "sections" on English, Romance, and Germanic lan-
21
guages and lite ra tu re s . There were 28 discussion groups that
f i r s t year, and they fe ll under three main divisions: one division
was organized by language (E n g lis h , German, French, Ita lia n ,
Spanish); the second was referred to as "Comparative Literature";
and the third main section was referred to as "General Topics."
But, although these three main divisions continued to be the main
structure of organization in 1948, the relationship among the three
divisions had changed considerably, as we can see in the number of
groups under each division. In 1921, 23 of the 28 groups fe ll
under the language division while only three were regarded as
"General Topics" and two as "Comparative L iteratu re ." This uneven
distrib utio n among the three divisions re fle c ts the influence of
philological and historical scholarship, an influence that becomes
even more apparent when we look at the in d iv id u a l groups and
e s p e c ia lly the organization of the groups within the language
division. To take the set of groups under English as an example,
the f i r s t two groups (English I and English I I ) addressed l i n
guistic concerns: English I — The Delim itation of Middle English
Dialects; English I I — Present Day English. The other nine groups
were devoted to lite r a tu r e and divided English li t e r a t u r e in to
171
historical periods, liste d chronologically; there was one group,
the la st lis te d , for all of American lite r a tu r e . Of course, this
division by historical period is a reasonable way to organize the
study of lite ra tu re and, by i t s e l f , does not r e fle c t the influence
of historical scholarship. But when we contrast these language
groups to the groups under General Topics and Comparative L ite ra
ture, the influence becomes obvious. There is only one group, for
example, that approaches lite r a tu r e from a concern with genre, Com
parative Literature I I — The Popular Ballad. (The other comparative
l i t e r a t u r e group discussed the ".influence .of ..Latin culture on
Medieval lite r a tu r e ." ) Thus, with the exception of this one group,
the lite ra tu re groups were born out of an historical approach to
1i terature.
I t is against th is emphasis on an historical approach to
lite r a tu r e that the groups of the third division, General Topics,
need to be understood. The three groups were Metrics, The Founda
tions of Romantic C riticism , and Problems in General Aesthetics.
Two of these groups, Metrics and General Aesthetics, deserve our
close attention since they evolved into the Poetics and Literary
Theory group nearly three decades la te r.
The Metrics group emerged from a s c ie n tific optimism with the
hope that a system more precise than the macron-breve method could
be found to determine poetic rhythms. Though the group changed its
name to Poetic Form the following year, i t is clear from the papers
delivered during these years th a t the group members remained
172
exclusively interested in matters of poetic rhythm and metrical
n o ta tio n . In f a c t, most of the group's work was devoted to
reforming and standardizing metrical n o ta tio n . At the second
meeting the group formed a committee for this purpose; and the
following year, the meeting was used to discuss "the musical re la
tions of verse form and the f e a s ib ility of musical methods in verse
notati on."
The General Aesthetics group, during its f i r s t years, was not
as programmatic as the Metrics group. W e can, however, id en tify a
couple of popular topics: the impact of Croce's aesthetics and the
implication of American pragmatic philosophy on the concept of
22
value. More important for our study, though, is the fact that
the group was poorly attended. By its third year, we find com
p la in ts by the group's chairman (Charles E. Whitmore) in the
published proceedings that the meetings have dwindled down to a
handful because they have been scheduled against more popular
meetings. Also, we find that during the f i r s t four years, six of
the nine papers read were authored by only three people, two of
them being the group's chairmen. I t is d i f f i c u l t to say whether or
not Whitmore's diagnosis of the group's poor attendance was
accurate; but i t is f a ir ly clear that the concerns of the group,
which we could characterize as philosophical and speculative rather
than s c ie n tific and scholarly ( i . e . , research-oriented), were not
shared by many in the MLA. One reason for this lack of interest in
aesthetics was the status of aesthetics within the discipline of
173
philosophy in America. While a rtic le s on aesthetics appeared in
major journals lik e The Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical
Review, we should remember that The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism did not s tart publication until 1941 and that the Ameri
can Society for Aesthetics did not organize until 1942. Whitmore,
himself, gives an indication of the academic status of aesthetics
when he wrote in 1927,
The status of esthetics at the present time cannot
be regarded with entire satisfaction. After more than a
century of vigorous study its standing as a profitable
object of thought, and s t i l l more as a real aid to the
understanding of its subject m atter, is s t i 11, on many
sides, seriously questioned. ("Autonomy" 238)
What we find, then, when we look at the emergence of the General
Aesthetics group is the attempt to introduce a broad, speculative
approach to lite ra tu re at a time when the discipline of lite r a r y
studies is under the in flu e n c e of the s c i e n t i f i c methods of
philology and at a time when aesthetics i t s e l f is not a strongly
established fie ld in American philosophy.
In 1926, the General Aesthetics group held a jo in t session
with the Poetic Form group, apparently as a way for General Aesthe
tics to remain viable within the MLA; and the two groups decided to
continue meeting as a single group under the name Poetic Form and
General Aesthetics. I t appears that Whitmore's concern over the
v ia b i lit y of aesthetics within the MLA was short lived . Not only
did the new group grow, but once the Report of the Committee on
M e tric a l Notation was adopted in 1928, in t e r e s t in m etrics
declined, leaving the group to those with interests in poetics,
174
aesthetics, and axiology. Later, in the mid-1930's, the group
turned to problems of lite r a r y critic is m , becoming an early locus
of in stitu tio n a l power for the New C ritic s . And throughout the
1940's, while there are no trends in papers presented and dis
cussed, there is an obvious absence of aesthetics.
The absence of aesthetics in the group did not, however, sig
nify an absence of aesthetics in the MLA. Curiously, those members
with an interest in aesthetics found themselves moving away from
the Poetic Form and General Aesthetics group and forming a new
group in 1941, Literature and the_ Arts of Design. - The forming of
this group followed a strong trend in an approach to lite ra tu re
through its images, a trend that we, preoccupied with the influence
of the New C riticism , usually overlook. This interest in imagery
is im portant to acknowledge because i t rather naturally formed
links with the study of the visual arts and, thus, with aesthetics.
The formation of the group followed the publication of a number of
in flu e n tial books in the m id-to-late 1930's: Caroline Spurgeon's
Shakespeare's Imagery and What I t Tells Us (1935), Arthur H. R.
F a ir c h i ld 's Shakespeare and the Arts of Design (1937), Milton
Rugoff's Donne's Imagery: A Study in Creative Sources (1939), and
Mario Praz's Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (1939). And
the group emerges just as aesthetics is being in stitu tio n a lize d as
a d iscipline. As I mentioned above, The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism began publication in 1941 and the American Society of
Aesthetics was founded in 1942. At the second meeting of the
175
Literature and the Arts of Design group in 1944 (there were no
national MLA conventions in 1942 and 1943 because of the war), the
members heard a report from the American Society of Aesthetics'
annual meeting, thus establishing a link with that group. Aesthe
tics f in a lly became in flu e n tial during the 1940s with the publica
tion of several books from the f i r s t generation of professional
aestheticians in America: Theodore M. Greene's The Arts and the Art
of Criticism (1940), Bernard C. Heyl' s New Bearings in Esthetics
and Art Criticism (1943), John Hospers' Meaning and Truth in the
Arts (1 9 4 6 ), M ilton C. Nahm’ s A esthetic Experience and Its
Presuppositions (1946), Steven C. Pepper's The Basis of Criticism
in the Arts (1946), and D. W . Gotshalk's Art and the Social Order
(1947).
The emergence of theory as an in stitu tio n al term, then, needs
to be understood as part of a situation made complex by its own
in stitu tio n a l history and by a context extending beyond the MLA to
the independent development of aesthetics as a discipline. The
in stitu tio n a l history that we just sketched can be characterized, I
believe, as the constant but unsteady resistance of speculative
lite r a r y concerns against the well-established tra d itio n of close
textual analysis, a trad itio n that begins with philology and then
is brought into the realm of criticism by the French explication de
te xte s, Richards' Practical C riticism , and, of course, by the New
C ritic s . The Poetic Form and General Aesthetics group thus found
it s e l f inhabiting a domain rather than defining one. Rather than
176
defining its boundaries from its own principles, these boundaries
were delimited from the outside by the strong trad itio n of close
analysis. In this sense, we can say that the group inhabited a
negative domain. And i t was a domain that was emptied even more in
the 1940's, when aesthetic concerns began to define themselves out
side of the group, in terms of imagery and the visual arts,
resulting in the formation of a separate group with links to the
newly in stitu tio n alize d discipline of aesthetics. I t was within
this context, then, that the Poetic Form and General Aesthetics
group changed its name to Poetics and Literary Theory and, in doing
so, attempted for the f i r s t time within the MLA to define the
domain of a general approach to lite r a tu r e , the domain of lite r a r y
theory.
W e are helped in understanding this attempt to define the
domain of lite r a r y theory by an important exchange of essays at the
1949 MLA convention between W . K. Wimsatt and the aesthetician
Theodore M. Greene. The exchange took place within the Literature
and the Other Arts group under the provocative t i t l e "Is a General
23
Theory of Art of Any Practical Value in the Study of Literature?"
W e can see that this t i t l e , within the context of the growing
influence of aesthetics, was meant to strike a blow for the inde
pendence of l i t e r a r y s tu d ie s . W im satt1s appearance in th is
exchange is p a rticu la rly significant considering his close tie s to
the newly renamed Poetics and L iterary Theory group. In 1948, the
year in which the group decided to change its name, Wimsatt was the
Ill
group's secretary, under the chair of Craig La Driere; and the
following year, he was the group's chair. Thus, his exchange with
Greene took place just as theory was introduced as an in stitu tio n al
term.
In his paper, "The Domain of C riticism ," Wimsatt addressed
what he believed to be an unfortunate s itu a tio n in l i t e r a r y
studies: "The role which I have undertaken in this essay is that
of defending the domain of poetry and poetics from the encircling
( i f friendly) arm of the general esthetician" (221). A defense
against aestheticians is necessary, Wimeatt argues, because they
have "arrived at th e ir philosophy chiefly through an absorption
with the visual and auditory arts: and, thus, have ignored the
d is t i n c t iv e qualities of language as an a r tis tic medium (226).
These q u a litie s he c h a ra c te riz e s as " h y p e rv e rb a l," or, in a
metaphor that runs throughout the essays written at this time and
that provides the t i t l e of book collecting those essays, "iconic."
Without getting into the complexity and what I believe to be the
contradictions of Wimsatt's concept of ic o n ic ity , we should at
least observe that this concept concerns a level of meaning which
cannot be reproduced through other a r tis tic media.
Wimsatt's concern with meaning can be understood more clearly
in contrast to his characterization of aesthetics. Aestheticians,
he claims, are concerned only to explain the nature of beauty, not
the nature of a r tis tic meaning; and they usually do so by id e n ti
fyin g b e a u tifu l nqualities of the materials with which a rtis ts
178
work. He thus c ritic iz e s D. W . Gotshalk's Art and the Social Order
(1947) for its claim that ”[t]h e exact aesthetic stature of the
material of art is realized more fu lly . . . only when one recalls
that this material is not any old material but m a te ria l of a
24
special type (227)." But as Greene points out in his reply, "The
Scope of Aesthetics," modern aesthetics cannot be reduced to the
search for an explanation for the nature of beauty. Speaking from
a Crocian perspective, Greene outlines the principles of aesthe
tic s :
Some of Professor G o tsh alk's statements do sound as
though he believes that the media of the several arts
must, in and of themselves, and taken atom istically as
well as in combination, be "beautiful"— dangerous word!
I f that is what he re a lly means he is patently wrong, not
only as regards lite r a tu r e , however, but as regards the
other arts as w ell. This fa lla c y , which can for con
venience be l a b e l l e d the " f a l l a c y o f a e s t h e t i c
m aterials," is easily committed i f one starts with the
major premises (a) that i t is the prime function of a
work of art to be beautiful and (b) that the beauty of
the whole is the sum of the beauty of the parts. But we
can, and should, s tart with three very d iffe re n t major
premises, (a) that i t is the prime function of a work of
art to be expressive, (b) that a r tis tic expression is a
function of the work of art as a whole, that is , of its
d iffe re n tia b le parts in total combination, and (c) the
"beauty" is a characteristic not necessarily of a l l , or
even some, of the parts taken in isolation but rather of
the entire composition, that is , of the total organiza
tion of the entire medium actually employed. (224)
W e can see, then, by looking at Greene's outline that Wimsatt's
characterization of aesthetics is somewhat of a caricature, i f not
a straw-man. Greene's Crocian emphasis on "expression" reminds us
of Croce's influence in the f i r s t h alf of this century; and Wim
s a tt's fa ilu re to engage Croce's aesthetics noticeably weakens his
arguments that aesthetics is of l i t t l e use to the lite r a r y c r it ic .
Nevertheless, and more to the point of our examination, Wimsatt's
essay, his exchange with Greene, helps to document a rather precise
emergence of the term theory within the in stitu tio n a l framework
that the MLA has imposed on lite r a r y studies in America. W e might
consider, then, that theory is best regarded as something lik e a
s it e , where various forces and interests have attempted to shape
the discip lin e , to guide i t in specific directions. In the fo l
lowing chapter, we w ill consider more carefully the in stitu tio n a l
and professional forces that shape the boundaries_of the site that
we call "theory."
180
Notes
1
The phrase " in te lle c tu a l practices" is Dunn's and, thus,
precedes (in the English-speaking academy) the current use of the
term practice made popular by the writings of Louis Althusser,
Pierre Bourdieu, and especially Michel Foucault. Dunn uses the
phrase in a note in which he defines his use of the traditional
phrase, most often associated with A. 0. Lovejoy's project, "the
history of ideas":
I mean this term to be used as widely as its use in
common speech would suggest, its subject-matter as, in
p r in c i p le , a ll past thoughts, not ju s t the ra th e r
individual meaning given to i t by Professor Lovejoy and
his p u p ils . The argument of the piece is that the
h is to r ie s of p a r t ic u la r i n t e l le c t u a l p ra c tic e s , of
science, history, p o litic a l theory, economics, theology,
e tc . are special instances of th is sing le u n ita ry -
category and that whatever autonomy they enjoy within i t
is simply a matter of lite r a r y convenience. In other
words i t is denied that a coherent acocunt can be given
of any of them which lends to them any sort of episte-
mological discreteness. (100)
The question of whether a particular in te lle c tu a l practice (e .g .,
lite r a r y theory) can be regarded as epistemologically discrete is
one that I do not address in the present study. I t is a question,
instead, for a study in the anthropology of knowledge. See Elkana.
The "inside-outside" dichotomy has become a modern topos due
to the influence of Jacques Derrida's writings. See, Tn p a rti
cular, Of Grammatology 30-65.
3
LaCapra dismisses this category rather quickly. However,
some recent uses of Freudian concepts in i n t e l le c t u a l h is to ry
appear promising. See Kellner and Fisher.
^For recent overviews of the impact of the study of social
history on in telle c tu a l history, see Veysey, "In te llec tu a l History"
and Wood. For broader overviews of the impact of social history on
general historiography, see Enteen and Stone.
^For a recent overview of "cultural" approaches to in te l
lectual history, see Darnton. For a recent "cultural" approach to
in telle ctu a l practices, see Corradi.
^The two seminal texts in modern theory of argumentation,
Stephen Toulmin's The Uses o f Argument and Chaim Perelman and L.
Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric, both develop theories that are
181
based on the necessity of socially shared b e lie fs , or conventions,
as Perelman puts i t ,
For argumentation to e x is t, an effective community
of minds must be realized at a given moment. There must
f i r s t of all be agreement, in p rin ciple, on the formation
of this in tellec tu a l community, and, a fter that, on the
fact of debating a specific question together: now this
does not come about automatically. (14)
Toumlin also develops a concept of in telle ctu a l community, which he
calls "a fie ld of arguments" (14). For a recent collection of
studies based on Toulmin's concept of argumentative fie ld s , see
Ziegel-Muel1er and Rhodes.
^See the special issue of Communications, "Analyse structurale
du r e c it." Many of the essays in this issue have been translated
into English; see Barthes, "Introduction" and Genette.
®The phrase is from Barthes's "To Write: An In tra n s itiv e
Verb?"
^For a recent discussion of Benveniste's concept of discourse,
see MacCabe.
^One change is the creation of a new genre of textbook: the
theory primer. Terry Eagleton's L iterary Theory: An Introduction
(1984) seems to have the f i r s t .
11My discussion of Foucault's concept of the "statement" is
indebted to the careful analysis of H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow in
Michel Foucault 44-52. The comparison that they draw to the con
cept of speech act as theorized by J. R. Searle deserves careful
study. Also, on the cultural framework of The Archaeology, see
Poster.
12
Derrida has, of course, presented such a "p lu ra lity of egos"
through the use of columns and other divisions of the page. The
best known example is his Glas, where Derrida not only represents a
p lu r a lity of egos but a kind of intertextual confluence of Hegel,
Jean Genet, and himself.
13
I am indebted to Dreyfus and Rabinow for th e ir correction of
the English translation. See th e ir note on p. 52.
14
See Kristeva, Desire 36-37 and Revo!utlon 21-24.
1 ^
This passage o r i g i n a l l y appeared in V. N. Voloshinov,
"Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry," Zveda 6 (1926): 251.
I have used only Bakhtin's name instead of the now conventional
182
designation of the communal writings of the Bakhtinian c i r c l e ,
Vol oshinov/Bakhtin, Medvedev/Bakhtin. For a discussion on the
problems of a ttrib u tin g authorship to this group of writings, see
Wehrle; also see Todorov, Dlaldgical 3-13.
^Voloshinov, "Discourse" 250.
17
This passage o rig in a lly appeared in an unpublished manu
s crip t, V. N. Voloshinov, "S tylis tic s of A rtis tic Discourse: 2. The
Construction of Utterances" (1930?): 76.
1 ft
See Russell and Moore.
1 9
' See Foucault, Madness 198, 277-78; and Lacan.
20 . .
For a concise statement on the reason-madness opposition,
see Foucault, Order 53-54.
21
For a b rie f sketch of the early history of these discussion
- groups,see "'Lowes r This“ essay was the Presidential Address to the
f i f t i e t h anniversary meeting of the MLA (1933). All of the in fo r
mation in the following discussion taken from the Proceedings of
the MLA, which appears each year in the PMLA.
22
In 1923, the group held a "general discussion of present
tendencies in aesthetics as represented by Croce and his op
ponents"; and the following year, Theodore Stenberg read "Croce and
American Literary C riticism ." In 1922, Charles E. Whitmore read
"The Concept of U t i l i t y in A rt," which was part of an exchange with
the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper in The Journal of Philosophy,
lasting for two years. See Pepper, "Suggestion" and "Art'1; Whit-
more, "Two," "Rejoinder," and "Scale."
For a complete lis tin g of papers presented in this discussion
group from 1921 to 1975, see Appendix.
23
The exchange between Wimsatt and Greene was o rig in a lly
published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8 (1950:
213-20, 221-28. However, references to quoted passages from Wim-
s a tt's essay w ill be from his The Verbal Icon.
24
O riginally in Gotshalk, 104.
Chapter 5: The In stitu tio n a l and Professional Situation of Theory
My primary concern in the preceding chapter was to demonstrate the
theoretical discourse ( i . e . , the discourse in which we find claims
about the nature of lite ra tu re and methods of criticism ) neces
s a rily refers to various aspects of the situation in which i t is
w ritten. That is , we found theoretical discourse to be hetero
geneous: i t contains not only th e o r e tic a l pronouncements but
references to the specific circumstances of its own production.
And we found that this heterogeneity c alls into question the status
of theoretical pronouncements qua tru th , that is , as claims that
transcend sociohistorical circumstances. Consequently, we found
that this necessary heterogeneity calls into question the adequacy
of a history of theory that focuses on theoretical concepts and
excludes the ways in which theoretical works refer to and anchor
themselves in the sociohistorical contexts of th e ir production.
I t would be possible (and useful) to write a history of this
type of reference. That is , i t would be possible to examine a
sequence of in flu e n tia l theoretical works, focusing on the ways and
the extent to which they refer to the sociohistorical contexts of
th e ir production, as we did in the preceding chapter with Northrop
Frye's Anatomy of C riticism . But i f we were to write such a his
tory, we would want to keep in mind its lim itatio n s. Foremost
among these lim itations is that such a history could not account
for its selection of "in flu e n tia l" theoretical works; i t could not
account for its own object of inquiry. For example, while this
184
kind of history could id en tify passages in the "Polemical In tro
duction" of the Anatomy in which Frye disapprovingly referred to
the current state of academic criticism and while this history
could show that Frye's theoretical claims are tig h tly framed by
such references, i t could not account for the influence of the
Anatomy from 1957 to 1966 nor could i t account for the lack of
influence of the "Polemical Introduction" when i t was f i r s t pub
lished in 1949 under the t i t l e "The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time."
The problem, then, th a t I want to develop in this final
chapter is whether i t is possible for us to understand theoretical
texts in terms of the sociohistorical contexts of th e ir production
and reception. This problem i n i t i a l l y involves us in two d i f f i c u l t
questions:
1. On the one hand, th e o r e tic a l discourse consists of
theoretical claims plus references to the context of it s
production. But what is the status of these references? Can
such references provide the h is to ria n with accurate and
adequate in form atio n about the s o c io h is to ric a l context,
information that can be used to reconstruct a context that the
historian would then read back in to the text? Because these
references concern aspects of social context, we can rephrase
our i n i t i a l question concerning th e ir status: What is the
sociological status of these references? How, in other words,
do such references compare with sociological claims regarding
the sociohistorical contexts which the references describe?
2. On the other hand, there has been a recent resurgence of
interest in the sociological dimension of both lite r a r y texts
and the discipline of lite r a r y studies.* This kind of work is
characterized by the attempt to submit a text (eith er lite r a r y
or c r it ic a l) to a sociological and/or historical model. For
example, Terry Eagleton has claimed, in his Literary Theory,
that Frye's Anatomy should be understood within the context of
dominant "modes of thought" of North American society in the
1950s: "But as North American society developed over the
1950s, growing more r ig id ly scie n tistic and managerial in its
modes of thought, a more ambitious form of c r itic a l techno
cracy seemed demanded" (91). There are, of course, more
sophisticated ways of thinking about the relationship of a
work of lite r a r y theory and its context; however, the example
from Eagleton helps us to see easily that a ll claims regarding
such a relationship need careful grounding. I f the f i r s t of
our two questions is directed at the sociological status of
the sociohistorical references that we find as part of the
discourse of theoretical texts, then our second question is
directed at the status of sociological claims that ignore the
complexity of the theoretical discourse as I described i t in
the preceding chapter.
I hope that i t is apparent, even from my i n it ia l development of
these two questions, that they cannot, ultim ately, be addressed
independently. Instead, i t w ill be necessary for us to attempt an
a rticu latio n of the two sources of sociohistorical information.
That is , the historian should not attempt to judge the status of
the sociohistorical references in theoretical works without some
background in sociology, or social theory; nor should the historian
apply a social theory in the attempt to understand a theoretical
work without some s e n s itiv ity to the actual sociohistorical re fe r
ences that help to form the texts under investigation.
The status of these te x tu a l references takes on added
importance once we remember a point that I mentioned above. That
is , the texts that we are most interested in examining have been
preselected. The history of recent theory is more a c c u ra te ly
referred to as the history of recent in flu en tial theory. And as
soon as we introduce the word i nfl uenti al as a way of character
izing the objects of our inquiry, we must admit, i f we are trying
to maintain a certain rig o r, that i t is inaccurate to id en tify the
objects of our inquiry as theoretical works, fo r two reasons.
F irs t, these works have been brought to our attention because of
th e ir influence; we should, then, say that we are examining the
works of a c ritic a l canon. Second, such a canon does not have an
independent existence; the canonical status of these theoretical
works is a function of an in s titu tio n — lite r a r y studies in the
United States qua academic d iscipline. Consequently, the true
object of our inquiry is the relationship of theoretical discourse
187
and the in s titu tio n in which i t is produced, received, dissemi-
nated, and reproduced.
Yet, by identifying the "true object" of an historical inquiry
into the recent "theory" of our d isc ip lin e , I do not mean to sug
gest that this relationship of theoretical discourse and the dis
cipline is simple and easily understood; instead, I find i t to be
complex and puzzling. Nor do I mean to suggest that our under
standing of theoretical works would be exhausted i f , somehow, we
could describe this relationship thoroughly; instead, I would want
to argue that the most_val_uable theoretical work recognizes its own
in s titu tio n a l constraints and attempts to resist them. S t i l l , the
in stitu tio n a l dimension of theoretical work exists; and i f we hope
to better understand the nature and consequences of our own work,
we w ill need to sharpen our understanding of the in s titu tio n a l
context within which we necessarily w rite. This final chapter is a
f i r s t attempt, on my part, at thinking the discipline as an in s t i
tution.
As I mentioned above, there has been a recent emergence of
historical research into our disciplinary past; and i t has shed a
good deal of lig h t on the relationship between the work of lite r a r y
scholars and the sociohistorical contexts in which this work has
been produced. Also, i t is through this type of research that we
are, I think, gradually coming to know the complex conditions that
make our own work possible and th at, at the same time constrain the
effects of certain types of analyses. At times, i t appears, as
138
Michel de Certeau has pointed out r e c e n tly , th a t we are even
learning how to ask the question, What are the conditions that have
made possible this recent emergence of research into the socio-
2
historical dimension of academic disciplines? (129-35)
Yet, in spite of this progress, our methods of historical and
social inquiry have yet to focus on a crucial aspect of this re la
tionship of scholarly work (e .g ., theory) and its sociohistorical
contexts. What has been overlooked is another relationship: the
r e la tio n s h ip between the d iscip lin e ( qua in s titu tio n ) and the
social system of which i t is a part. Some o.f these methods of
inquiry have ignored the in stitu tio n a l nature of the discipline,
preferring instead to understand lite r a r y criticism and theory as
products of ideology; that is , these methods begin with the assump
tion that there is a d ire c t, unmediated lin k between cultural pro
duction and ruling class interests. On the other hand, there are
other methods th a t, while sensitive to the effects of concrete
in stitu tio n a l settings on the production and dissemintion of work,
have paid l i t t l e attention to those forces th a t in flu en ce the
nature of in stitu tio n s . In general, then, we could say that recent
historical research into our discipline has proceeded without an
adequate theory of the in s titu tio n .
In an attempt to remedy this inadequacy, I w ill be concerned
in this chapter to outline an historiography that is grounded in
the relationship of the discipline qua in stitu tio n and the social
system of which i t is a part. The basic assumption of th is
historiography is th a t the core of the r e la tio n s h ip between
in stitu tio n and social system is legitim ation; that is , the basic
nature of an in s titu tio n is determined by the legitimacy that i t
receives from the appropriate authority within the social system.
A sim ilar type of analysis has been used e ffe c tiv e ly by Laurence R.
Yeysey in The Emergence o f the American University (1965). Without
using the term leg itim atio n , Veysey describes the c o n flic t sur
rounding academic reform from 1865 to 1910 as a struggle among four
conceptions of higher learning: (1) discipline and peity, (2) u ti
l i t y , (3) research, and (4_) lib eral culture. - These four concep-
tions are, in the terms that I w ill be using, modes of legitim a
tion; that is, the advocates of each of these four conceptions
argue that the state should legitim ate the u n iv e rs ity --s h o u ld
specify its social function— in th e ir terms. We, 70 years after
the period of Veysey's study, can begin to appreciate the impor
tance of legitim ation at the university level when we consider the
effects that a research mode of legitim ation has had (and continues
to have) on the humanities.’
To the extent that lite r a r y studies finds that its work is not
legitimated under the research mode that governs the university,
it s legitimacy w ill be a complex matter. I t w ill also be a con
tinuing concern, unlike those academic d is c ip lin e s ( e . g . , the
sciences) whose legitimacy corresponds with the general legitim a
tion mode of the university. Now, the specific aspect of our
disc ip lin e's continuing concern with its legitimacy is the way in
190
which "theory" functions as a discursive site within which (1) the
discipline attempts to influence the c r ite r ia of its legitim ation
and (2) interests within the discipline attempt to control the
strategies of legitim ation.
Because the historiography that I am outlining in this chapter
focuses on strategies of legitim ation within the d iscip lin e, i t is
prim arily concerned with the rhetOrical techniques employed to gain
assent for a particular strategy. These techniques are not to be
found only in theoretical works, but in supporting documents (e .g .,
reviews, essays, exchanges, anthologies) that attempt to elevate a
particular theoretical work to canonical status. For i t is through
the c r itic a l canon that lite r a r y studies has presented i t s e l f as a
discipline worthy of legitim ation. A central focus of a history of
lite r a r y studies, then, is the inquiry into the canonization of
theoretical works.
In order to demonstrate the need for the type of historio
graphy that I have just outlined, I w ill f i r s t look at what I
consider to be the best of the two basic approaches to disciplinary
history that I mentioned above: (1) the history of criticism as the
history of ideology; and (2) the history of criticism as the his
tory of in tr in s ic in s t i t u t i o n a l fo rc e s. I consider Richard
Ohmann's English in America (1976) to be the best of those works
using the f i r s t approach and the work of James Sosnoski to be among
the best of those works using the second approach.^ Following this
discussion, I w ill move to an elaboration of my legitim ation model,
191
u tiliz in g Anthony Giddens's theory of "structuration" and Magali
S arfatti Larson's work on the structure of professions in a market
economy. F in a lly , we w ill look at the reception of Frye's Anatomy.
I w ill argue that the Anatomy gained influence not as the result of
a " c ritic a l void" le f t by the demise of the New Criticism and not
because of the currency of archetypal criticism (as Frank Len-
tricch ia has claimed in After the New C riticism ) , but as the result
of the perceived "crisis of education" that followed the launch of
Sputnik, an educational c risis that resulted in massive Federal aid
for the sciences (National Defense Education Act) while English was
ignored. Consequently, by looking at this period in the history of
the discipline and at the emergence of the Anatomy as an influen
tia l theoretical te x t, we w ill have a clear test case in which the
discipline responded to what i t believed to be a c risis of l e g i t i
mation.
I . Theorizing the Social Nature of L iterary Scholarship
A. Richard Ohmann's Engl ish in America
My discussion of Ohmann's historiography focuses on the fourth
chapter of his book, "Teaching and Studying Literature at the End
of Ideology." I t is in this chapter that he id en tifie s a contra
diction in the discipline that began to manifest i t s e l f in the mid-
1960s. Ohmann situates this disciplinary contradiction within the
larger cultural sphere by citing Lionel T r illin g 's diagnosis of
mid-60s culture, "The Two Enviornments" (1965). In this essay, we
w ill r e c a ll, T r illin g id e n tifie s a second "cultural environment,"
one that has developed in recent years in opposition to the cul
tural environment f i r s t characterized by Matthew Arnold: "Philis
tin e and d u ll, satisfied with its unexamined, unpromising beliefs"
(227). But in spite of its opposition to P h ilis tin ic culture, this
new, lit e r a t e , and moral cultural environment contains, according
to T r illin g , an unsettling contradiction:
But as our students find i t ever easier to take th e ir
places in the second cultural environment, as they are
ever surer of finding comfort and companions in i t , we
have to see that i t shows the essential tr a its of any
c u ltu ra l environment: firm presuppositions, received
ideas, approved attitudes, and a system of rewards and
punishments. (227)
The existence of such "firm presuppositions," "received ideas," and
"approved attitudes" in this enlightened cultural environment thus
relates i t to the P h ilis tin e culture which i t opposes; and this
contradiction poses a dilemma for those teachers of lite r a tu r e who
recognize i t :
I f th is is indeed our situation, then those few
teachers I have been imagining, who do not think that
preparing th e ir students for entrance into the second
environment is enough to do for them in the way of
education, may one day have to question whether in our
culture the study of lite ra tu re is any longer a suitable
means for developing and r e fin in g the in tellig en ce.
(232)
As I stated above, Ohmann uses T r illin g 's characterization of
the situation that lite r a r y studies found i t s e l f in during the
f i r s t half of the decade. But unlike T r il lin g , Ohmann understands
the contradictory nature of this situation in p o lit ic a l terms.
Whereas T r i l l i n g diagnosed the contradiction as an inevitable
ailment of a social group that espouses the questioning of received
ideas, Ohmann diagnoses the contradiction as the inevitable mani
festation of the p o litic a l nature of social r e a lit y , more speci
f ic a lly , the p o litic a l nature of class structure within a ca p ita l
is t society. For Ohmann, the humanism of the second "cultural
environment" is not merely the moral desire to oppose P h ilis tin e
culture; instead, i t must be understood as an important element of
bourgeois ideology, an element that authorizes the avoidance of
p o litic s and, thus, discourages social change.
In order, then, to understand the historiography that under-
wri tes Ohmann's history of postwar humanistic c riticism , we need to
see th a t i t is founded on the b e lie f that there is a direct
relationship between lite r a r y criticism and the s o c io -p o litic a l
sphere. He accounts for the influence of the New Criticism in
terms of its a b ility to o ffer an aesthetic that avoids p o litic s .
But why would lit e r a r y c r itic s at this time want to avoid p o litic a l
questions? Ohmann provides three reasons; and i t is this set of
reasons that reveal the lim itations of this kind of historiography.
The f i r s t of these reasons is that in telle c tu a ls of the period
wanted to transcend, or escape, p o litic s . Here Ohmann cites T r i l
ling again, this time from the essay "The Leavis-Snow Controversy,"
and cites Irving Howe on the absence of a well-developed tradition
of the p o litic a l novel in America, "where the social pressures that
drive people to conscious p o litic s have rarely existed for long."
Ohmann's second reason re sts on P h ilip S la t e r 's th e s is th a t
Americans have developed techniques for ignoring social problems
rather than dealing with them. Ohmann's third reason is , his
to r ic a lly , the most concrete— the impact of McCarthyism and the
cold war:
Academic humanists in the f i f t i e s had special
reasons for wanting p o litics not to exist. McCarthy had
made activism improvident for college teachers at the
start of the decade, and, in any case, the cold war had
reduced ideology to seeming in e v ita b ilitie s of free world
and iron curtain, while d ra s tic a lly narrowing the range
of domestic p o litic a l positions available and pretty much
guaranteeing that support for Adlai Stevenson would seem
the most daring p o l i t i c a l act w ith in the bounds of
realism. At the same time, technological advance and the
rapid increase in production _kept before j j s a. vision o f
steady improvement, and made radical social change seem
both remote and disturbing. What those of us who studied
and taught lite r a tu r e p a rtic u la rly needed, therefore, was
a rationale for our divorcing work from p o litic s , for
lying low in society. (80)
There is much to admire in this analysis; the incentives for "lying
low" that Ohmann id en tifie s cannot be denied. Nevertheless, we
should not ignore the fact that the major p o litic a l attack on the
New Criticism took place during 1949-51, in the midst of McCarthy-
ism and the Korean War. I t was at the end of 1949 that the Phi
Beta Kappa journal The American Scholar published Robert Gorham
Davis's "The New C riticism and the Democratic Tradition." In this
essay, Davis compares the New Criticism to the "clerical reaction
ism" of de Maistre and Charles Maurras, accusing i t of conducting a
"general assault on the assumptions of democratic liberalism at a
time when the United States is contending with Russia for world
leadership in the name of democratic liberalism" (1 1 ).’ ^
195
Once again, what is p a rtic u la rly valuable in Ohmann's analysis
is its a b ility to account for American in tellec tu als distancing
themselves from ra d ic a l p o l i t i c s during the postwar period:
"Davis's call for a "democratic liberalism" f i t s perfectly within
Ohmann's category of Adlai Stevenson supporters. But as i n e f
fectual as we may judge the "lib era l" reaction against the New
C riticism , we cannot accurately characterize i t as a p o litical or
" ly in g low." Thus, we can see that the drawback of Ohmann's
historiography is that, in its reduction of postwar criticis m to
the a p o litic al aesthetics of the New Criticism , i t is unable to
account for Davis's essay and for the p o litic a l debate that the
essay instigated for the next two years. And, in not accounting
for this debate, Ohmann's historiography is unable to account for
the a b ility of the New Criticism to withstand such a p o litic a l
challenge; more abstractly, we might say that Ohmann is here unable
to account for the dominance of the New Criticism within a hetero
geneous c r itic a l arena. Contrary to Ohmann's account, I would
m aintain th a t the power of New Criticism must be understood,
ultim ately, as its a b ility to maintain its influence in the face of
such challenges. Such an understanding is not possible when the
in s titu tio n a l s e ttin g of c r i t i c a l debates is not taken in to
account. W e owe a debt of gratitude to Ohmann for introducing an
e x p lic itly p o litic a l analysis of the disc ip lin e . But we now need
to recognize that English in America (in this particular chapter)
suffers from the fa ilu re to incorporate a theory of the in stitu tio n
within its method of historical explanation.
B. James Sosnoski's "The Magister Implicatus" and the Culler-
Sosnoski Exchange
In c o n tr a d is tin c tio n to the h isto rio g rap h y th a t underwrites
Ohmann's discussion of postwar American c r itic is m , more recent
historical work has developed a method of historical inquiry that
focuses on the in trin s ic aspects of the discipline qua in s titu tio n .
Consequently, this work provides an important correction to the
approach that I id en tified in Ohmann's English in America. Yet we
should also observe that Ohmann's focus on the e x tra -in s titu tio n a l,
p o litic a l context of criticism provides an important correction to
this more recent work.
James Sosnoski's "The Magister Implicatus" as an " In s titu
tionalized Authority" is representative of the work of GRIP: Group
for Research on the In s titu tio n a liza tio n and Professionalization of
Literary Studies. Generally, this work has attempted to examine
the discipline by inquiring into its in s titu tio n a l structures, that
influence the production and dissemination of work in numerous
ways. Much of GRIP'S work is influenced by Michel Foucault's
attempts to think the relationship of discourses and the in s titu
tions in which they are produced, as well as the social laws (rules
of exclusion) which distinguish the discursively permissible from
the d is c u r s iv e ly p ro h ib ite d . Fo u cau lt's work, however, has
encouraged an in trin s ic mode of inquiry which is incapable of
linking in telle c tu al work to concrete historical conditions.
197
The historiographical framework that Sosnoski constructs in
his essay exemplifies, I believe, the best of what this in trin sic
mode of inquiry can discover; but i t also exemplifies the lim ita
tions of an in trin s ic theory of in s titu tio n s . This essay, like
Ohmann's discussion of postwar critic is m , is extremely rich in its
analyses; so, as I did with Ohmann's chapter, I w ill move carefully
through Sosnoski's arguments, hoping not to reduce them.
Sosnoski begins by defining the object of his inquiry: " I t is
a study of the way in which the Vanderbilt/Yale school of New
Criticism trained two generations of lite r a r y c r itic s through a set
of pedagogically effec tive textbooks which aubthorized th eir c r i t
ical practice" (2 ). W e can see from this statement that Sosnoski
is trying to account for the sustained influence of the New C rit
icism. But instead of d ire c tly linking the New Criticism to the
postwar ideology, as does Ohmann, Sosnoski approaches the New
Criticism 's influence from within the disc ip lin e, focusing on the
realm of pedagogy as the source of th e ir authority. Thus, in
response to the question of how we should understand the influence
that the New Criticism exerted over the d i s c i p li n e , Sosnoski
answers that this influence should be understood in terms of the
effectiveness with which the New C ritic s were able to transform the
pedagogical sphere of the discipline.
Focusing on pedagogy, Sosnoski also makes e x p lic it early in
the essay the relationships of pedagogical discourse (or "praxis")
and the other discursive practices of the discipline: "practice is
198
the habitual performance of a specific s k ill; praxis is a general
ized account of an habitual performance of a specific s k ill; and
theory, by making e x p lic it the conditions of a specific practice,
is their ju s tific a tio n " (2 ). This notion of theory as a means of
ju s tific a tio n is crucial to Sosnoski's analysis for i t allows his
observation that theory "a£ theory does not dictate practice. But
for many students, textbook praxis does" (6 ). Thus,
To s p lit practice from theory allows for praxis to be
governed by the interests of the in stitu tio n s that house
i t rather than by the requirements of the disciplines
that are housed. Textbooks, the conveyers of praxis, the
shelter of texts canonized by questions with the impri-
“ matur of the Magister Implicatus, are the central instru
ments of the professionalization of l i t e r a r y s tu d ie s .
( 6 )
For Sosnoski, then, theory has come to serve praxis, but in a per
functory way. I t may perform the act of ju s tify in g c r itic a l prac
tice and praxis, but the influence of c ritic a l ideas takes place at
the level of praxis, the level of textbooks with the imprimatur of
Magi ster Imp!i catus.
I find Sosnoski's historiographical framework enormously use
ful for understanding the sustained influence of the New Criticism.
His analysis provides a much needed correction to those historical
accounts which, s t i l l under the influence of trad itio n al in te l
lectual history and the vogue of theory, attempt to understand the
New Criticism solely in terms of its theoretical pronounce-ments.
Yet, this internal distrib utio n of discourses (practice, praxis,
theory) is not determined by the structural nature of in stitu tio n s .
I t i s , instead, h is to ric a l. Thus, while Sosnoski is right in
pointing out that students during the 1940s and 1950s were less
in fluenced by the theoretical works of the New C ritics (e .g .,
Wellek and Warren's Theory of L ite ra tu re ) than they were by the
pedagogical works (e .g ., Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry) ,
the relationship between praxis and theory has reversed during the
la s t twenty years. Sosnoski himself recognizes this reversal in
his epilogue to "The Magister Imp!icatus" :
Let's admit some in f e lic it ie s in our attitudes. For
example, we do not take textbooks seriously. W ho wants
to write a textbook?— how unprestigious. (50)
Thus, the relationship among the three major discourses of the
in s titu tio n are not stru ctu rally fixed; the importance of one over
the others changes over time. And i t is the drawback of Sosnoski's
in trin s ic mode of inquiry that i t cannot account for the shifts in
this relationship. This is not to say that Sosnoski's analysis of
the New C riticism 's influence is incorrect, only that the in s titu
tional theory that he abstracts from i t is incomplete.
Another danger with the in trin s ic theory of the in s titu tio n is
that i t empowers the p o litic a lly conservative analysis of the dis
cipline that Sosnoski and other GRIP memvbers (myself included) are
writing against. I am refe rrin g , here, to Jonathan C uller's review
essay "Problems in the 'History' of Contemporary Criticism" (1984).
In this essay, Culler objcts to the tone of GRIP'S work, which he
characterizes as a "view of in stitu tio n s as prim arily repressive or
disciplinary" (9 ). Thus, Culler takes issue with GRIP'S under
standing of the in stitu tio n a l nature of the discipline: does the
200
in s titu tio n repress innovative work; that is , should the model of
c r itic a l history be based on a concept of the in s titu tio n as a
repressive system? Culler argues that the discipline should not be
understood in this way by taking issue with David Shumway's reading
of Foucault in his essay, "The Profession as Discipline and the
Discipline of a Profession" (1983). Citing Foucault's L'Ordre du
discours, Culler claims that Foucault actually recognizes two sides
of the d is c ip lin e : the discipline excludes, but "the formation
rules of the disciplines, by the same token, make in te lle c tu a l
a c tiv ity possible, create discursive p o ssib ilities" (10). Culler
cites the French edition of Foucault's L'Ordre du discours; but in
the English translation, one finds a thesis that is at odds with
C uller's optimistic reading:
Here is the hypothesis which I would like to put forward
tonight in order to fix the te rra in — or perhaps the very
pro v is io n al theatre— of the work I am doing: that in
every society the production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a
certain number of procedures whose role is to ward o ff
its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance
events, to evade its ponderous, formidable m a teriality.
(52)
I t is clear from Foucault's statement of his "hypothesis" that,
while he recognizes that discourses must be produced from within
in s titu tio n s , his concern is directed towards the controlling, or
repressive, aspects of in s titu tio n s . I t is Culler, and not Shum-
way, who has misunderstood Foucault's project.
My main point, though, is less with the problems of C uller's
argument against Sosnoski, Shumway, and GRIP than i t is with the
201
fact that the issue which he raises only makes sense i f we assume
beforehand that in stitu tio n s should be understood only from within,
only stru ctu rally . Culler goes on, in this essay, to claim that
the in stitu tio n a l nature of the discipline encourages innovation
and that i t is responsible for "the swift growth of feminist c r i t
icism and work on psychoanalytical and philosophical texts" (11).
W e can see, then, that Culler uses an in trin s ic theory of the
in stitu tio n to ground an inquiry that examines the history of the
discipline without reference to the social sphere in which the
discipline exists.
F in a lly , we should note that Sosnoski's rejoinder to Culler in
"The Token Professional" (19S4) does not move away from the in tr in
sic theory of in stitution s and, thus, in an unintended way under
writes C uller's position:
Though I am less sanguine than Culler about the
extent to which the disciplinary mechanisms of speciali
zation produce innovations that benefit lite r a r y studies,
I admit that they have such positive effects. However, I
am interested in the negative effects of disciplinary
mechanisms because they too should be addressed. (9)
Sosnoski goes on to show that C uller's emphasis on the positive
effects of the disciplinary mechanisms of specialization supports
"the current professional c r it ic who has benefited from the present
structure of the discipline (9 ). But the more c ru cial, theoretical
problem with C uller's approach is that i t ignores the relationship
of the discipline and the socio-political sphere; and i t is this
th e o r e tic a l problem which i t shares w ith Sosnoski's mode of
analysis. I t is precisely because i t uses an in trin s ic concept of
202
in stitu tio n s and ignores the socio-political sphere that C uller's
analysis benefits the current professional c r it ic and supports the
standard career p ro file of the superstar professional c r i t i c .
By looking at Sosnoski's work on the influence of New C rit
icism and at Ohmann's discussion of postwar humanistic critic is m , I
hope that I have demonstrated th a t, aside from the value of these
particular analyses, both approaches suffer from an inadequate
theory of the in s titu tio n . In the next section, I w ill outline
what I consider to be the basic framework for an adequate theory of
the in s titu tio n , one that takes into account the relationship of
the in s titu tio n and the larger social system of which i t is a part.
I I . Theorizing the In stitu tio n
A. Theorizing the Discipline as an In stitu tio n
I f internal theories of the discipline qua in s titu tio n are inade
quate, how should we theorize the institution?
Social theorist Anthony Giddens povides us with a framework
which, I think, is useful for a rethinking of the in stitu tio n a l
nature of lite r a r y studies. This framework is grounded in Jacques
Derrida's argument that structures are fundamentally temporal and
th a t, consequently, i t is not correct to examine human phenomena in
terms of static structures, but in terms of "the structuring of
g
structure," or, as Giddens puts i t , in terms of "structuration."
To speak of "structuration" rather than "structure" is , of course,
to redefine the object of social theory in a radical way. However,
203
we are quite fam iliar with this kind of s h i f t th a t r e d ir e c ts
inquiry from a static object to a dynamic "oject," a redirected
inquiry that is often characterized with the term process.
But what sort of "proccess" are social structures involved in;
that is , how can social structures be understood in terms of "pro
cess"? Giddens, following Louis Althusser's well-known analysis in
"Ideology and Ideological State Aparatuses" (1970), understands the
"process" of social structures as th e ir reproduction through time:
" S t r u c t u r a l a n alysis" in the social sciences
involves examining the structuration of social systems.
The connotation of " v is ib le pattern" which the term - -
"social structure"" o rd in arily has, as employed in Anglo-
American sociology, is carried in my terminology by the
notion of system: with the crucial proviso that social
systems are patterned in tim as well as space, through
continuities of social reproduction. . . . Structures do
not exist in time-space, except in the moments of the
constitution of social systems. (64-5)
The study of structuration of a social system is to study
the ways in which that system, via the application of
generative rules and resources, and in the context of
unintended outcomes, is produced and reproduced in
interaction. ( Central 66)
There are several important aspects of Giddens's theory in these
two passages; but, for the moment, I want to focus only on the idea
of social reproduction. The "process" to which Giddens directs our
attention is d i f f i c u l t to observe because i t is marked, not by
change, but by continuity. Although this kind of inquiry into
social structures appears paradoxical (process as continuity), we
can understand i t once we re c a ll that i t is grounded on the
assumption that structures are fundamentally arb itrary ( i . e . , non
natural). Structures are not primary; i t is the play of structural
204
elements that are primary. An analysis of social structures, then,
must focus on the control which must be exercised over the play of
structural elements. This is a control which must be sustained
over time; hence, the concept of the "reproduction" of social
structures. W e can characterize Giddens's social theory, then, as
a s h ift of the focus of inquiry from social structures to the means
by which social structures are reproduced over time.
Here, i t is important to note another aspect of Giddens's
theory which we find in the two passages that I quoted above. As I
mentioned, Giddens follows Althusser in focusing on the reproduc- -
tion of social structures; but unlike Althusser, who understood
these structures as monoliths of ruling-class interests, Giddens
proposes that we understand social structures in d iale ctica l re la
tio n with the practices that comprise them. This dialectical
relation is what Giddens refers to as "the duality of structure":
By the duality of structure I mean that the structural
properties of social systems are both the medium and the
outcome of the practices that constiitute those systems.
The theory of structuration, thus formulated, rejects any
d iffe re n tia tio n of synchrony and diachrony or statics and
dynamics. The id e n tific a tio n of structure with con
s tra in t is also rejected: structure is both enabling and
constraining, and i t is one of the specific tasks of
social theory to study the conditions in the organisation
of social systems th a t govern the interconnections
between the two. (69-70)
Giddens compares his concept of "the duality of structure" with
Pierre Bourdieu's critiq u e of the objectivism of "the s tru c tu ra lis t
readers of Marx," in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972).
W e can, I think, get a better idea of Giddens's concept by looking
205
at Bourdieu's discussion of the need to understand stru c tu re s
within a "dialectical relationship":
I f one ignores the d ialectical relationship between
the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating
structures which they produce and which tend to produce
them, i f one forgets that these objective structures are
themselves products of historical practices and are con
stantly reproduced and transformed by historical prac
tices whose productive principle is i t s e l f the product of
the structures which i t consequently tends to reproduce,
then one is condemned to reduce the relationship between
the d iffe re n t social agencies ( instances) . . . to the
logical formula enabling any one of them to be derived
from any other. (83)
What we find in these passages by Giddens and Bourdieu is a
theoretical emphasis on "practices" and on the complex relationship
of practices and structures. This relationship is understood by
both writers to have two basic aspects. F irs t, practices con
s titu te social structures; we can understand such structures only
by understanding the practices which comprise them. As an i l lu s
tration of this aspect, we could recall .lames Sosnoski's analysis
of the discipline into three discursive practices: practice (prac
t ic a l c r i t i c i s m ) , praxis (textbooks), and theory. The second
aspect of this relationship is, I believe, more significant. I t is
captured in Bourdieu's phrase "historical practices." By qualify
ing practices as "h is to ric a l," Bourdieu reminds us that they, along
with the structures that they comprise, are capable of change over
time. W e can illu s tr a te this aspect by recalling my criticism of
Sosnoski's model of the discipline in which I pointed to the his
torical fact that praxis is no longer as important a discursive
practice as i t was when Brooks and Warren published Understand!-ng
P o e try . Thus, we can see that even though social structures
reproduce themselves, these reproductions are not by any necessity
perfect replications. W e could say, then, though only in a very
general way, that the history of lite r a r y studies would want to pay
close attention to the dynamics of in stitu tio n a l reproduction.
At this point in our outline of a social theory, v/e can say
that the problem of understanding the nature of the discipline qua
in s titu tio n involves (1) the recognition that in stitu tio n s must,
lik e all other social structures, reproduce themselves and (2) the
d i f f i c u l t analysis of the d ialectica l relationship of what Bourdieu
c a lls "objective structures" and "historical practices." As I
understand the requirements of such an analysis, we must learn to
focus our attention on the conditions of structuration, conditions
that make possible the reproduction or the transformation of an
in s titu tio n . Yet, how are we to understand such conditions?
This question brings me to the final aspect of the in i t i a l two
passages that I quoted from Giddens (see p. 19). When we look
carefully at those passages, we find that Giddens is not talking
about the reproduction of "in s titu tio n s ," but about the reproduc
tion of "social systems." W e must, then, c la r ify the difference
between these two terms. W e can begin to understand this d i f
ference by looking at Giddens's d efin itio n of in stitution s:
In s titu tio n s , to quote Radcl iffe-Brown, may be regarded
as "standardised modes of behaviour" which play a basic
part in the time-space constitution of social systems.
The standardisation of behaviour in time-space, as I have
207
emphasised in the foregoing discussion, involves i t s
chronic reconstitution in contingent contexts of day-to-
day social a c tiv ity . (96)
This defin itio n te lls us that in stitution s "play a basic part" in
the "constitution" of social systems. Thus, i t seems as though we
might understand a social system to consist of an aggregate of
in stitu tio n s; and we might understand the conditions of in s titu
tional reproduction to be determined by the structure of the larger
social system. This understanding of the relationship of in s titu
tion and social structure is only p a r tia lly accurate, though. As
Giddens is careful to elaborate in a la te r work, -this- relationship
should not be reduced to the simple synecdochic model of part-
whole. Such a model is sim plistic for two reasons. F irs t, i t does
not take into account the in s ta b ility of the social system it s e lf ;
this theoretical fa ilu re characterizes, according to Giddens, the
functionalist and systems schools of sociology:
"Social system" had tended to be a favoured term of
f u n c t i o n a l i s t s , who have r a r e ly abandoned organic
analogies altogether, and of system theorists," who have
had in mind either physical systems or, once more, some
kinds of biological formation. I take i t to be one of
the main fe atu res of s tru c tu ra tio n theory that the
extension and "closure" of societies across space and
time is regarded as problematic. ( Constitution 165)
Using our own analysis of lite r a r y studies, we could illu s tr a te
Giddens's point by recalling the shortcoming of Ohmann's account of
postwar humanistic criticism : his understanding of the socio
p o litic a l climate led him to underestimate and, consequently, to
misunderstand the p o litic a l dimension of lite r a r y criticism in the
208
1950s. In other words, the social system is not "closed" in such a
way that i t determines what happens on a ll levels of society.
In addition to this problematic closure of any social system
(though related to i t ) , a second reason for regarding the synec-
dochic model as sim plistic is that i t ignores the complexity of the
r e la tio n s h ip and has encouraged a misguided separation of two
levels of social analysis: the micro-level and the macro-level.
Giddens characterizes this separation as "an unhappy division of
labour" ( Constitution 139). And we have already seen the drawbacks
of such divided analyses in our examination of Ohmann' s-work and -
Sosnoski's e a rlie r work.
I f , then, we reject the synecdochic model as the means for
understanding the relationship of in s titu tio n and social system
and, more s p e c ific a lly , as the means for understanding the con
ditions of structuration which have underwritten the development of
lite r a r y studies, how are we to understand these conditions? At
this point in this outline of an in stitu tio n al theory of lite r a r y
studies, I w ill posit the concept of legitim ation as the core of
such conditions of structuration. An in s titu tio n w ill be able to
reproduce i t s e l f i f its practices are regarded as legitimate; on
the other hand, i f the in s titu tio n 's p ra c tic e s are no longer
regarded as legitim ate, a transformation of the in stitu tio n is
possible with the introduction of new or altered practices, or as
we saw in Sosnoski's account of New C riticism , with the in tro
duction of a new relationship among established p ra c tic e s , for
209
example, the rise and fa ll of praxis as a discursive practice.
L e g itim a tio n , i t s e l f , involves a complex social and cultural
network, as Jean-Francois Lyotard's debate with Jurgen Habermas
makes more and more apparent to us.^ However, I w ill focus on a
single mode of legitim ation, one which involves the nature of the
profession in a market economy, as analyzed by Magali S arfatti
Larson. Let rne make clear from the outset, however, th a t by
focusing on Larson's analysis of professionalism, I do not mean to
discount other dimensions of legitim ation. For example, Lyotard's
concern with the effects of computers on the world society's con
cept of knowledge must, eventually, play an important part in any
adequate understanding of ( post-)modern academic disciplines; but
an articulatio n of such a concern with the type of analysis I am
about to conduct is enormously d i f f i c u l t . I see this articu latio n
as an important stage in future work.
B. Theorizing the Discipline as a Profession
Larson's interest in professionalism is based, as she explains in
her introduction to The Rise of Professionalism (1977), on the
peculiar status of the profession in modern society:
professions are occupations with special power and pres
tig e. Society grants these rewards because professions
have special competence in esoteric bodies of knowledge
linked to central needs and values of the social system,
and because professions are devoted to the service of the
public, above and beyond material incentives, (x)
Her analysis grows out of a dissatisfaction of e a rlie r analyses
which explain the nature of professions only in terms of the ser
vices that they render, that is , in terms of th eir functions within
210
society. Larson objects that these analyses ignore the funda
m en tally c o n flic tu a l nature of society and, consequently, mis
in terpret the role of the professions.
Larson's work, then, with its emphasis on the inherent con
f li c t s within society, belongs to the trad itio n of Marxist social
theory as opposed to the "id e a l- t y p i c a l " and in s t i t u t io n a l
approaches of Weberian and Parsonian sociology. Thus, her main
interest is in specifying the social structures and relations that
are necessary for a profession to exist within a market economy,
i . e . , a c a p ita lis t economy. __ — - - —- -■
The basic requirement for a profession under a market economy
is to organize and control part of the market. Her concept of the
"cognitive basis" is meant to id en tify this essential requirement:
"The standardization of codification of professional knowledge is
the basis on which a professional 'commodity' can be made d is tin c t
and recognizable to the potential publics" (40). There is , how
ever, a "fundamental paradox" in the market's demand for a cogni
tive basis. This paradox, according to Larson, is that the cogni
tive basis must appear to be both objective and eso teric: objective
in order to gain the tru st of the public, and esoteric in order to
gain the respect of the public.
Now, assuming that Larson has characterized professionalism
with some accuracy, assuming that our society places contradictory
demands on professions, our understanding of lite r a r y studies as a
profession must focus on the means by which the discipline attempts
211
to meet the two demands of o b je ctiv ity and esotericism. And we
must focus on the kinds of practices through which the discipline
attempts to meet these demands.
In a future work, I w ill examine in detail the effects of
these contradictory demands on the attempt by M. H. Abrams and
Wayne Booth to a rticu late a p lu ra lis t criticism which is meant to
rescue the d is c ip lin e from the ra d ic a l skepticism o f post
s tru c tu ra lis t thought. In the present chapter, though, I w ill
focus on the demand of o b je ctiv ity as a basic requirement for the
1 egi timation of the di„sci pi i ne.
The requirement of an objective, or ra tio n a l, foundation for
lite r a r y studies is a fam iliar topos in c ritic a l lite r a tu r e . Going
back to one of the e a rlie s t works of academic c r itic a l theory—
C. M. Gayley and F. N. Scott's An Introduction to the Methods and
M a te ria ls of L ite ra ry Criticism (1899)— we find the call to a
systematic, s c ie n tific approach to the study of lite ra tu re :
lite r a r y criticism has not yet reached the s c ie n tific ,
s t i l l less the "cocksure" period of its development. Its
present consciousness is dynamic, and its condition
tra n s itio n a l. I t has outgrown the stage of unquestioning
acquiescence in tra d itio n , authority, personal bias or
prejudice. But i t is not yet fu lly alive to its possibi
l i t i e s , scope, or aim,— not organized, ( i i i )
And, of course, even in the New C riticism 's attempts to establish a
mode of knowledge d istin ct from s c ie n tific knowledge, i t struggled
to develop a method which was rational without being s c ie n tific
( i . e . , " p o s itiv is tic " ). Rene Wellek's attempt to approrpiate the
1 9 th -c e n tu ry German concept of Verstehen is perhaps the most
212
e x p lic it of these New C ritic a l attempts (Wellek and Warren, 16-19).
As we can see from these examples (and from the many others
that are easy to r e c a ll), i t is through theoretical discourse that
claims for disciplinary ra tio n a lity are made. This observation,
perhaps, goes without saying. Yet, i t is sometimes easy to loose
sight of when, as recently, theories are most often used to ju s tify
particular approaches to lite ra tu re and c riticism . I want to argue
that i t is important to distinguish this use of theory from its
legitim ating function. That is , "ju s tific a tio n " concerns p a rti
c u lar c r i t i c a l approaches to l i t e r a t u r e ; i t is basically an
internal function of theory. "Legitimation," on the other hand,
concerns the relationship of the discipline and its social context;
i t concerns the conditions of reproduction of the discipline as an
in s titu tio n and, thus, i t is basically an external function of
theoretical discourse. To make this d istin c tio n , however, is not
to claim that every theoretical work functions both ways. In fact,
i t is important to re a lize that the discipline does not present
i t s e l f as a ra tio n a l enterprise through individual theoretical
works. Such works, a f t e r a l l , may not serve what is perceived to be
the interests of the discipline. The self-presentation of the
discipline as a rational enterprise takes place through the medium
of the cri t ic a l canon. Thus, an analysis of the professional
nature of lite r a r y studies— which is to say, an analysis of the
ways in which i t legitimates i t s e l f as a rational e n te rp ris e --
should not lim it i t s e l f to the primary theoretical works (Wellek
213
and Warren's Theory of L itera tu re , for example); instead, we must
also be attentive to the secondary discourses by means of which
individual theoretical works are elevated to the status of the
c r itic a l canon (for example, book reviews, review essays, ex
changes, conference programs, anthologies, and, of course, his
tories) .
To summarize the points that I have made in these last two sec
tio n s ; (1) an adequate understanding of lite r a r y studies qua
i n s t i t u t io n req u ire s the re c o g n itio n th a t in s titu tio tis _must
reproduce themselves and that this reproduction takes the form of
the legitim ation of the in s titu tio n 's practices; (2) the major
s tra te g y of le g itim a tio n for professional institutions is the
presentation of it s s p e c ia lize d knowledge as sim ultaneously
objective and esoteric; and (3) lite r a r y studies attempts to secure
its legitimacy through the discursive practice of theory and, more
s p e c ific a lly , through the creation of a c r itic a l canon.
Now, i f the framework that I have outlined has some v a lid ity ,
i t should be clear to us that a major focus of an inquiry into the
history of lite r a r y studies must be on the production and reproduc
tion of the c ritic a l canon. That is, instead of reading and
evaluating the content of theoretical works (as most recent his
tories have done), we should turn our attention to the conditions
that make possible the elevation of individual theoretical works to
the status of the canon. The history of theory in modern lite r a r y
214
studies, then, should begin as the hi story of the reception of
canonical works of theory.
I I I . Test Case: The Crisis in Education as a Condition of the
Canonization of Frye's Anatomy
All canonical works have had the same general itin e ra ry . That is,
a fter th e ir publication, they become known through a sequence of
discursive practices: reviews, longer review essays, citations in
the essays and books of others, exchanges in journals (the more
controversial, the b e tte r), and fin a lly c ritic a l anthologies and
hi s t o r ie s - - th e discursive practices that actually canonize the
theoretical work. But in spite of this shared itin e ra ry , i t is
obvious to us that some c ritic a l works move much faster through
this process than do other works. The example that we w ill examine
in this section, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of C riticism , is the best
known of such works. In fa c t, much of its current reputation is
associated with the immediacy with which i t transformed, seemingly
by i t s e l f , American lite r a r y studies in the late 1950s and early
1960s. Also, while we have come to think of the history of our
discipline as a progression of c ritic a l schools, the Anatomy is the
only text that we single out to represent an historical period: we
move from New Criticism to the Anatomy to structural ism and post-
structural i sm.^
Although there has been a resurgence of interest in Frye's
Anatomy during the la s t several years, very few of the studies have
attem pted to examine the conditions of i t s p o p u la rity and
215
influence. (This, in i t s e l f , is an interesting development in
recent c r itic a l h is to ry .)9 Perhaps the best known of these studies
is Frank Lentricchia1s "The Place of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of
C ritic is m , " the opening chapter of his After the New Criticism
(1980).19 In the f i r s t section of this chapter, Lentricchia makes
an e ffo rt to account for the impact of the Anatomy by describing
the in tellec tu al context that made i t acceptable. He id en tifie s
two major aspcts of this context. F irs t, the decline of the New
Criticism created a " c ritic a l void," a kind of power vacuum that
swept the Anatomy into the posjtion o f_ c r itic a l dominance. The
second aspect of this context, according to Lentricchia, was the
growth of interest in the concept of "mythic consciousness" during
the 1940s and 1950s. He documents this interest by citin g the
English translations and work of the German philosopher Ernst
Cassirer and his American student Susanne K. Langer, as well as the
myth criticism of Richard Chase, R. W. B. Lewis, and P h ilip
Wheelwri ght.
Yet, while Lentricchia is certainly correct to point to the
decline of the New Criticism and to the growing interest in "mythic
consciousness" as significant aspects of the context in which the
Anatomy became in flu e n tia l, he is , nevertheless, begging the ques
tions of (1) why the New Criticism declined (or, to be more pre
cise, the question of how i t was perceived as declining at the
time) and of (2) why the notion of mythic consciousness was so
in flu e n tial at this time— an influence, we should remember, that
216
was much broader than the sphere of lite r a r y s tu d ie s .^ The fact
of the New Criticism 's decline and the p o p u la rity of "mythic
consciousness" do not account for the Anatomy's prominence in a
fie ld of other c r itic a l approaches that enjoyed popularity in the
late 1950s. Existentialism is one of these examples. Sartre's
Qu'est-ce que la litte r a tu r e was translated into English in 1949; a
few years e a rlie r , in 1946, Partisan Review published a special
issue on French existentialism and began to publish work by Hannah
Arendt, Walter Kaufmann, and William Barrett; in the mid-1950s,
Kenyon Review began to publish essays by Kaufmann and the German
historian of the phenomenological movement, Herbert Spiegelberg,
and throughout the las t half of the decade, there were numerous
introductions to e x is te n tia lis t thought, perhaps the most popular
being William B arrett's Irratio n al Nan (1958).
Another popular c r itic a l approach at the time, which we should
not overlook, is li n g u i s t i c critic is m , or what was then only
starting to be called " s ty lis tic s ." Of course, the s t y l i s t i c
approach to lite ra tu re in American lite r a r y studies did not begin
as la te as the 1950s. For example, when the MLA changed the struc
ture of its annual conference to include specialized group meetings
12
in 1921, a group in "metrics" was among those.' And the tenets of
the New Criticism lent themselves to s ty lis tic analysis, which we
11
can see most clearly in the work of W . K. Wimsatt. However,
s ty lis tic s received a boost in the 1950s by the growing reputation
of Leo Spitzer and, most importantly, by a renewed interest in
217
lin g u istics as the basis for a s c ie n tific approach to the study of
lite r a tu r e . The fact of Spitzer's reputation is well known; I w ill
just remind us that his Linguistics and L iterary History: Essays in
S ty !is ties was published in the United States in 1948.^ A more
far-reaching development was the appropriation of lin g u is tic s , both
Continental and American, as a new, objective basis for lite r a r y
study. In 1955, V ic to r E rlic h 's Russian Formalism introduced
American readers to the early research o f Roman Jakobson and
o thers, who attempted to id e n t if y the d is tin c tiv e lin g u istic
fe atu res _of_ _ 1 it e r a t u r e _and-thereby-gi-v-e 1 i te ra ry studies a
s c ie n tific foundation. One year la te r, the Kenyon Review published
the special issue "English Verse and What I t Sounds Like" in which
Seymour Chatman and others discussed the application of the
phonemic analysis developed in Trager and Smith's An Outline Of
English Structure (1951). 1958 (one year after publication of
Frye's Anatomy) saw the English In stitu te sponsor the conference
"Prose Style in the English Novel," which in its published form
included a lengthy bibliography of English and American research
and criticism in s ty lis tic s . And i t was in this same year that
Thomas Sebeok organized the Conference on Style, the papers from
15
which were published as the seminal Style in Language (1960).
These overviews of existentialism and lin g u is tic criticism are
not meant to be exhaustive; but what I have just outlined of these
two c r itic a l approaches, which were popular at the time that Frye's
218
Anatomy was published, should be enough to call into question
Lentricchia1s fa c ile account of the Anatomy1s rise to prominence.
A much more penetrating acocunt of the impact of the Anatomy
is Evan Watkins's essay "Conflict and Consensus in the History of
Recent Criticism" (1981). Literary criticism during the 1950s,
according to Watkins, became especially sensitive to the prestige
of the social sciences and th e ir "explanatory authority":
C ritic s , to be sure, could pronounce on the aesthetic
value of particular works. But there was sociology, for
more competent to discuss the patterns of social organi
zation and behavior represented in novels; psychology to
explain the relationships between repressed jie s ir e a n d
poetic constructs; lin g u istics to provide an elaborate
vocabulary for describing how language behaves; psycho
lin g u istics to explore the nature of the reading process;
and so on. Frye clearly realized that i f criticism were
to avoid becoming a backwater of disgruntled humanists,
i t needed a direction and coherent understanding of its
own task, analogous but competing in the same sphere.
(351)
Watkins is certainly right in his broad characterization of the
in tellec tu a l c ris is facing lite r a r y c ritic s ; and, in identifying
the need for academic c ritic s to provide a cognitive basis for the
knowledge they produce, his analysis of the s itu a tio n is fa r
superior to that of Lentricchia. But i t is not at all clear that
the situation that Watkins describes is peculiar to the la te 1950s.
W e should recall that a conflict among c r itic s over the usefulness
of the social sciences had been going on throughout the 1930s and
1940s, crystalizing in the mixed reception of Stanley Edgar Hyman's
The Armed Vision (1948).16 Thus, Watkins's analysis leaves us with
the following questions: why did lite r a r y c r itic s , during the late
219
1950s, abandon the New C ritic a l p ro je c t of developing a non
p o s itiv is t mode of knowledge (as outlined by Wellek); how was this
concern with the inadequacies of the New Criticism articulated; and
how did this concern gain the strength to transform the practice of
criticism in only a few years?
W e can begin to address these questions only by enlarging the
sphere of inquiry that we find in both Lentricchia and Watkins;
that is , as I argued in the preceding sections, we must move beyond
the theoretical work i t s e l f to those supporting documents th a t
shaped its reception and, thus, helped pave the way of its in flu
ence . W e w ill want to ask, in other words, How was the Anatomy
represented to the discipline?
There are many documents from which we could choose in order
to address the questions we have posed. I w ill, however, focus on
two sets of documents: (1) reviews and (2) essays published in the
early 1960s that attempted to use the Anatomy as the basis for a
rethinking of the teaching of English. While the nature of the
Anatomy1s in flu e n ce involves complex cultural conditions and,
therefore, should not be reduced to a single cause, I w ill argue
that its rapid canonization should not be understood apart from the
problem that was addressed in this second set of documents. This
problem is the state of c ris is that the discipline perceived i t s e l f
to be in when, following the launch of Sputnik and a much publi
cized "crisis in education," the United States Congress appro
priated massive funding for the sciences while ignoring English.
220
W e w ill see that a central element in the d iscip lin e's e ffo rts in
lobbying Congress fo r aid was a demonstration that, like the
sciences, English could have aprogressively articulated curriculum;
and i t was the four modes of criticism in the Anatomy that was per
ceived as the basis for this new articulated curriculum. Thus,
what I hope to show is that the Anatomy, a book that has exercised
more influence than any other theoretical work in the history of
American lite r a r y studies, should not be separated from the speci
fic and highly charged situation in which i t was received; and,
more generally, I hope to show that the hi story -of- theory -in- our-
discipline cannot be fu lly understood unless we examine the ways in
which the discipline has received theory.
A. Reviewing the Anatomy and the Status of the Discipline
Let m e begin with a word of caution. I f i t is possible to deter
mine the character of a book's reception (we w ill have to be con
cerned with the extent to which such determinations are possible),
the historian needs to ground this determination in those documents
that record and, more importantly, help to shape the book's recep
tio n . Unfortunately, though, the p o ssib ility always exists that
these documents (e .g ., reviews) do not capture fu lly the reasons
why a book became in flu e n tia l. For example one does not find in
the reviews of Frye's Anatomy the type of response to the book
re c e n tly recorded by Frank McConnell, rem iniscing about his
graduate-school days at Yale in 1965:
Where, you had to ask yourself, had you seen such an
imaginative scope lik e this? Where had you come across
221
such a breadth of a llu s io n , and where had i t been
suggested to you that you too coul have and use such a
breadth? (624)
The review ers of the Anatomy were, of course, impressed, lik e
McConnell, with Frye's erudition and the f a c ili t y of his imagina
tion at making connections; yet they did not represent the Anatomy
merely as a great work of erudition and imagination. Instead, the
reviewers represented the Anatomy by situating i t within a much
broader in tellectu al geography than McConnell's Yale graduate pro
gram. I w ill begin to describe this broad in tellectual space in
just a moment. But, rig h t now, I want to id en tify the d iffic u lty
that confronts the historian when faced with remarks lik e those of
McConnel1.
I f we are w illin g to take McConnell's response to the Anatomy
as representative of the response of many graduate students (and
younger faculty) at the time, we must accept the fact that the
popularity and influence of the Anatomy cannot be reduced to the
le g itim a tio n r a t i o n a l i t y th a t I have been o u tlin in g in the
preceding two sections. That is, McConnell's response clearly
demonstrates that the Anatomy generated an enthusiasm that was not
d ire c tly connected with concern over the professional status of the
discipline. This enthusiasm, in McConnell's case, was character
ized by a sense of liberation from the authority of the New C rit
icism in general and, in p a rticu la r, from the doyen of c ritic a l
theory at Yale, W . K. Wimsatt. ( I t would be easy to diagnose this
enthusiasm as an Oedipal desire to gain m astery over the
222
in tellectu al father. But we would recognize that such a diagnosis
is simplistic once we recall that the New C riticism , for 20 years,
produced disciples rather than Oedipal figures.)
The historian, then, should be wary of a ttrib u tin g the popu
la r it y of a text to a single cause. S t i l l , we should remember that
the Anatomy did not end up in McConnell's hands by accident. W . K.
Wimsatt assigned i t in his course on the history of lite r a r y c r i t
icism . In other words, the Anatomy found its way to graduate
students and younger faculty through the various i n s t i t u t io n a l
mechanisms of the discip lin e , beginning with book reviews. - ----------
As I mentioned above, the reviews of the Anatomy d iffe r from
McConnell's a p p re c ia tio n of the book in the way th a t i t is
situated; that is , the reviews are d iffe re n t in the way that they
construct a context for th e ir understanding of the book. But, not
only are these reviews d iffe re n t from the kind of response that we
found in McConnell; more importantly, I hope to show that the con
text with which the reviewers understood the Anatomy is s ig n ifi
cantly d iffe re n t from the way in which Wellek and Warren's Theory
of Literature was understood, eight years e a rlie r . I f I might put
this in other terms, the Anatomy marks a significant change in the
way that theory was represented in the discipline.
What we find in many reviews of the Anatomy, in both the
favorable and unfavorable reviews, is a strong concern with the
status of lite r a r y criticism as an autonomous discipline. I t is
not surprising to find this concern since (as we saw in the
223
preceding chapter) Frye couches his theory within a broader discus
sion of the c r it ic 's role in terms of a concern with, and often a
concern fo r, the autonomy of lite r a r y studies. For example, in one
o f the e a r l i e s t reviews, Harold Bloom announces that Frye has
delivered a "new poetics" whose four essays on types of criticism
" s y s te m a tic a lly map out the 'hypothetical verbal structure' of
lite r a r y criticism as an autonomous humanistic discipline" (130).
Or again, we find in Hazard Adams's review an opening description
of "a sea of c ritic a l ennui" that is also a sea of professional
ennui: " i t is not s u rp ris in g th a t aesthetics and. c ritic is m --
especially, I think, lite r a r y study— appear to many as somewhat
undignified avocations (to make them vocations is perhaps judged a
sin)" (533). And even in a c ritic a l review, Robert Martin Adams
begins with the question, "How much of an autonomous discipline is
lite r a r y criticism?" (614) These remarks, which are not made in
passing but serve to introduce the readers of the reviews to the
book and its context, situate the Anatomy in a context that is
defined in terms of the disciplinary status of lite r a r y studies;
and, in Hazard Adams's review, this disciplinary status is further
specified as professional status. What we are beginning to find,
then, is that the Anatomy is represented not merely in terms of its
th eo retical context (e .g ., the four types of criticism ) but in
terms of an in tellectual context defined in terms of disciplinary
status. Theory i t s e l f , we can say, is being represented in terms
of a d isciplinary, professional context: the question of theory is
224
linked to the question of the status of the discipline; or, to use
the terms of Burke's analytical method (which we examined in the
las t chapter), the "act" is being defined synecdochically in terms
of the "scene" of which i t is a part.
But, we might want to ask, are the reviews of the Anatomy
re a lly unusual in this respect; don't reviews of e a rlie r th e o reti
cal works situate these works within a disciplinary context? I
cannot provide a complete answer to this question because I have
not read all the reviews of a ll the theoretical works that preceded
the publication of the Anatomy. However, X can show th at, in spite
of some basic s im ila ritie s , the representation of theory in the
Anatomy and its reviews is sign ificantly d iffe re n t than its repre
sentation in the two major works of theory that immediately pre
ceded the Anatomy, Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Armed Vision (1948)
and Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature (1949). Even a b rie f
examination of these two works and th e ir reviews w ill show that
th e ir discussions of theory, while not to ta lly lacking a concern
for the status of the d iscipline, are not framed by this concern.
F irs t, we need to recall that the concern for the disciplinary
status of lite r a r y studies was an inherent aspect of the New C rit
icism, in p articular, in its early days of replacing lite r a r y his
tory as the dominant form of lite r a r y scholarship. W e find, for
example, an e a rly essay by John Crowe Ransom that makes this
disciplinary concern e x p lic it in i t s t i t l e — " C r itic is m , In c."
(1937). In that essay, Ransom argues that standards of lite r a r y
225
criticism should come neither from a rtis ts nor from philosophers,
but from professors of lite ra tu re : " i t is from the professors of
lite r a tu r e , in this country the professors of English for the most
part, that I should hope eventually for the erection of in te llig e n t
standards of criticism . I t is th e ir business" (328-29). And i t is
the business of professors of lite ra tu re because,
Criticism must become more s c ie n tific , or precise
and systematic, and this means that i t must be developed
by the c o lle c tiv e and sustained e f f o r t of learned
persons — which means that its proper seat is in the
u niversities. (329)
W e need to recall^ aljso that the concerji for the status of the
discipline was stimulated from time to time by attacks on academic
criticism by those (many of them poets and writers) who believed
that the kind of precision and systematicity that Ransom called for
produced a discourse that only hindered the appreciation of li t e r a -
17
ture. Consequently, we need to keep in mind that the history of
modern criticism in the United States (a history that begins with
the development of the New Criticism) is a history of the d isc i
pline's concern with its own status.
Nevertheless, in spite of the presence of this concern with
disciplinary status, i t has not played the central role in dis
cussions of theory prior to Frye's Anatomy. Moreover, the lack of
importance given to this concern is puzzling once we consider the
issues that were raised in these discussions; we find, in other
words, issues that lend themselves to discussion of "the autonomous
226
status of the discipline" but are never developed in this direc
t i on.
Our f i r s t example is Hyman's The Armed Vision, a book that we
could characterize as "an ti-disciplinary" in the sense that Hyman
advocates a methodological eclecticism that borrows whatever i t can
from other disciplines, an eclecticism that he learned from Kenneth
Burke. In fa c t, Hyman not only advocates this eclecticism; he sees
its po ssib ility as an outgrowth of the history of modern criticism ,
which he also understands in "anti-disciplinary" terms: "What
modern criticism is could be defined crudely and _somewhat inac- _
curately as the organized use of non-1iterary techniques and bodies
of knowledge to obtain insights into lite r a tu r e " (3 ). This was a
daring claim at the height of the New Criticism , which, of course,
had attempted to construct a base of knowledge that was purely
lite r a r y . In defining modern criticism in this way, Hyman had
reduced the New Criticism to an anomoly in the history of 20th-
century criticism .
In terestingly, though, the debate that developed around the
book did not center on the question of whether lite r a r y studies
should adopt knowledges from other disciplines; i t was not a ques
tion of protecting the disciplinary boundaries of lite r a r y studies
from the incursions of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and
lin g u is tic s . Rather, Hyman's book triggered a reaction against
c ritic a l method, a reaction that often extended to a general attack
on the value of criticism i t s e lf . Both degrees of reaction are
227
evident in the early reviews of the book. Richard Chase, for
example, questioned the amount of attention given to c ritic a l
method: "Clearly the builder of such prodigious scaffoldings cannot
be blamed i f he has no energy or ingenuity l e f t for the discussion
of lite ra tu re " (335). And, in a less flippant tone, Howard Memerov
wondered whether a preoccupation with method would not lead the
c r it ic to replace the experience of lite ra tu re with knowledge of
lite r a tu r e . And, quoting Mark Van Doren, Nemerov suggests,
'"Poetry i t s e l f can do with silence for a w hile1" (417). W e can
see, then, that what is at issue here is less the status of the
discipline than the status of criticism and, more s p e c ific a lly, the
e ffec t of the academization of criticism .
This issue is raised again in a review by John Crowe Ransom,
which prompted several lengthy responses, organized by Ransom as a
symposium in The Kenyon Review. In his review, Ransom pairs The
Armed Vision against a contemporary essay by R. P. Blackmur, "A
Burden for C r itic s " (1 9 4 8 ), in which Blackmur "denies to the
lite r a r y c r it ic any commerce with the modern social sciences"
(683). Instead, the lite r a r y c r it ic should, according to Black
mur' s position, approach lite ra tu re keeping in mind the adverse
effects of science on modern culture; critic ism , thus, requires not
the technical terms and methods of the social sciences, but "home
made or gu erilla methods" (a phrase with an unexpected parallel
1 Q
with the Tel Quel movement of the mid and la te 1960s). By juxta
posing Hyman and Blackmur, Ransom shapes the issue as a question
228
regarding the cultural role of the c r it ic ; or, more precisely, the
issue concerns the best strategy to be used by the c r it ic in his
attempt to save culture from modern indurtrialism . This is an
issue that has l i t t l e to do with the status of the discipline. And
i t is this issue that is carried into the symposium, which Ransom
e n titled "The C r itic 's Business." All four of the respondents—
William Barrett, Blackmur, Richard Chase, and Allen Tate--raise the
primary point whether an over-technical academic criticism has not
in fact opened a gap between criticism and lite r a tu r e . As Barrett
put i t , "Should we say that the c r it ic , proud of his jiew disci
plines and seeking to cut out clearly his own province w ith in
lite r a tu r e , has also begun to cut himself o ff a l i t t l e from li t e r a
ture?" (1) Tate, also, begins to question methodological rigor and
the consequences of the New Criticism that he had helped to popu
la riz e : "When insights into the meanings of a work become method
ology, when the picture apologizes to the frame, we get what has
been called autotelic criticism " (14).
What we see, then, in the discussion that is prompted by
Hyman's book is a problematization of theory that takes seriously
the p o s s ib ili t y of a non-academic criticism and, in doing so,
rejects Ransom's claim in "Criticism, Inc." that the proper seat
for lite r a r y criticism is the universities. For our inquiry, we
want to notice that the question of the d isc ip lin e 's autonomous
status w ill not be developed where the^value of the discipline is
being seriously questioned. Thus, even though Hyman's claims about
229
the nature of modern criticism in vite a discussion on the status of
the d iscipline, we can see that under the circumstances of this
particular discussion (circumstances that we w ill not take the time
to examine), the problem of theory was not linked to the problem of
the disc ip lin e 's autonomy.
Our second example is Wellek and Warren's Theory of L itera
ture . Like Hyman's The Armed Vision, the book seemingly invites a
discussion of the autonomy of lite r a r y studies; but, once again, we
find that neither the book nor the reviews develop this problem as
a major concern. Wellek and Warren's fundamental concernis that
of providing an epistemological grounding for the study of li t e r a
ture. Thus, Wellek argues in the opening chapter that a " lite ra ry
theory" is necessary to provide a proper methodological foundation
for the two types of lite r a r y scholarship--! ite ra ry criticism and
19 . . . .
lite r a r y history. Here, i t is important to distinguish the epis-
temological concern that we find in Theory of Literature from the
methodological concern that we find in The Armed Vision. Hyman,
while concerned with "the organized use of n o n -lite r a r y tech
niques," is not concerned with verifying the truth status of
lit e r a r y - c r it ic a l claims; i t would be inaccurate for us, then, to
characterize this concern as "epistemological" because epistemology
is , in modern Western philosophy, the project of grounding the
truth status of philosophical and, especially, s c ie n tific claims.
Hyman, in borrowing "non-literary techniques" from the social
sciences, assumed th a t the epistem ological status of these
230
s c ie n tific techniques were secure already; his project, then, was
to organize the techniques into a method of lite r a r y study. Wel
lek, on the other hand, with his in tellectual background in neo-
Kantianism, conceptualized the problem of lite r a r y study as truly
20
epistemological. The question of method, for Wellek, could not
be the simple question of organizing various techniques from the
social sciences, as i t was for Hyman. Instead, lite r a r y studies,
i f i t were to produce true sch o larly work, would have to be
grounded in lite r a r y theory.
From my description of Theory of Literature thus fan, i t would-
appear that Wellek and Warren are, in fa c t, concerned with securing
the autonomous status of lite r a r y studies. And when we recall
th e ir famous distinction between the "extrinsic" and "intrinsic"
approaches to the study of lite ra tu re , we might want to conclude
that Theory of Literature is fundamentally concerned with creating
an autonomous discipline of lite r a r y studies. But, upon closer
examination of Wellek's argument, we find such a conclusion is
unwarrented; and when looking at the reviews of the book, we find
that the problem of the discip lin e 's autonomy is not developed.
The line with which Wellek and Warren separate the "intrinsic"
approach from the "extrinsic" approach is not a disciplinary lin e ,
but an epistemological lin e . This is quite clear from the argument
that Wellek develops in the opening chapter. Wellek's primary
concern, lik e the concern of the Heidelberg neo-Kantians that he
cites (D ilthey, Windelband, R ickert), is to develop an approach to
the human sciences that is not epistemologically grounded in the
modes of explanation that we find in the physical sciences; in more
fam iliar terms, Wellek is an a n ti-p o s itiv is t. Thus, the lin e
dividing the two approaches to lite ra tu re is a line dividing a
p o s itiv is t approach to lite ra tu re from an approach grounded in the
philosophy of the Gei steswi ssensschaften. In addition to the
Heidelberg philosophers, who Wellek cites as useful models for a
philosophically appropriate grounding of lite r a r y theory, Wellek
again makes clear the epistemological (not disciplinary) nature of
the in trin s ic /e x trin s ic dividing line when he specifies .the _ d if
fic u lty with the extrinsic approach to lite ra tu re :
Though the " e x tr in s ic " study may merely attempt to
interpret lite ra tu re in the lig h t of its social context
and its antecedents, in most cases i t becomes a "causal"
explanation, professing to account for l i t e r a t u r e , to
explain i t , and fin a lly to reduce i t to its origins (the
"fallacy of o rig in s ." ). . . . Yet i t is clear th a t
causal study can never dispose o f problems of des
c rip tio n , analysis, and evaluation of an object such as a
work of lite r a r y a rt. Cause and e ffec t are incommen
surate: the concrete result of these extrinsic causes—
the work of a rt— is always unpredictable. (73)
W e can see, then, that the problem of the extrinsic approach is its
causal mode of explanation, a mode that is adopted from the physi
cal sciences and that is believed to be inappropriate not only for
lite r a r y studies but, as the Heidelberg philosophers argue, inap
propriate for the study of all aspects of human behavior. Thus,
theory for Wellek and Warren is not a question of disciplinary
knowledge, but an epistemological question of a n ti-p o s itiv is tic ,
humanistic knowledge.
232
Sim ilarly, in the reviews of Theory of L ite ra tu re , we do not
find a disciplinary/professional concern as the main issue. Eliseo
Vivas, for example, recognizes that lite r a r y studies has had to
complete with other disciplines interested in lite ra tu re ( e . g . ,
psychology, sociology); but, we do not find him developing the
problem of lite r a r y studies as an autonomous d iscipline. Instead,
the question for Vivas is whether or not Wellek and Warren have
grounded th e ir theory in a philosophically adequate aesthetic: "the
authors do not r e a l ly have a fu lly worked out and consistent
aesthetic of th e ir own" (162K Also, both Willimn Troy and Kenneth
Cameron use the opportunity of the review to cast doubts on the
recent prominence given to theory, Troy claiming that theory is not
necessary for those with a "natural endowment or aptitude" for
teaching lite ra tu re and Cameron arguing that theory, in its neglect
of historical interpretation, has removed lite ra tu re from l i f e and
has turned lite r a r y studies into a "new scholasticism" (Troy 620;
Cameron 438).
Thus, when we examine the two major works of theory that
precede Frye's Anatomy, we find that theory is conceptualized with
the problematic of methodology and within the problematic of epis-
temology, but not within the problematic of an autonomous disci
pline. I t is not until the Anatomy that the question of theory is
linked to the question of the discipline. This conceptual lin k , as
we saw in the preceding chapter, is developed by Frye in his
attempts to secure a role for the c r it ic in modern society, an
argument that he began making when "The Function of Criticism at
the Present Time" was published in 1949. What I would like to do
now is to show that the sociohistorical context of the publication
of the Anatomy, eight years la te r, transformed Frye's argument into
a pressing issue for the discipline. My main argument, once again,
is that the popularity and influence of the Anatomy should not be
understood apart from the specific circumstances that I am about to
descri be.
B. The Crisis in Education and the Crisis of Literary Studies
The sociohistorical context that we w ill begin to examine centers
on the Soviet Union’ s launch of Sputnik in 1957 and on the conse
quent perception of Americans that their educational system was in
a state of c ris is . Something of the rhetorical fervor of this
reaction was described by Hannah Arendt in her essay "The Crisis in
Education" (1958): "What interests me in the question of education
is the fact that, in America at least, i t has become a p o litica l
problem of the f i r s t magnitude, reported daily in the newspapers"
(493).
But as Arthur N. Applebee points out in his book Tradition and
Reform in the Teaching of English (1974), a c ris is of confidence in
American education had been building among educators during the
postwar period, mostly as a conservative re ac tio n against the
influence of John Dewey's "progressive" philosophy of education:
The harsh rhetoric of the academic c r itic s opened
the way for a varied and unlikely coalition of forces.
Conservatives seeking ways to reduce school budgets,
superpatriots outraged by the social reconstructionists
234
and fanned by McCarthy, parents disturbed by the implica
tio n s of " lif e adjustment," old-line teachers who had
never embraced progressive doctrines in the f i r s t place,
and young teachers to whom progressivism meant resistance
to new modes of scholarship— all came together in th eir
criticism of the schools. (188)
I t was the launch of Sputnik, though, that crystalized opinion on
the declining status of the American education system and that
pressured Congress to recommit i t s e l f to education, even i f on the
basis of national security. In 1958, Congress passed the National
Defense Education Act (NDEA). Yet none of the funding that was
made available through the NDEA was appropriated for English. I f
tea~chers of Engl ish" were concerned about the education system prior
to 1958, their concern turned to panic once they were ignored by
Congress. I t was within this situation that Frye's Anatomy was
published and f i r s t read.
In an e ffo rt to lobby Congress to broaden the NDEA beyond the
academic disciplines d ire c tly linked to defense, the NCTE's Com
mittee on National In terest, chaired by James R. Squire, prepared
the re p o rt The National In te r e s t and the Teaching of English
(1961). The report listed seven major goals, which the Committee
hoped would change the minds of congressmen who believed that the
teaching of English did not require Federal support. Most of the
goals concern the improvement of training for teachers; but the
goal that we w ill focus on, in this discussion of Frye's Anatomy,
concerns the English curriculum. As the Committee saw i t , the
problem with lite r a r y studies was that i t was not perceived by the
public as a rigorous d is c ip lin e ; and th is lack of r ig o r was
235
reflected most strongly in the fact that, unlike the teaching of
the sciences, the English curriculum was not articulated— that is,
there was not a logical development of study from one year to the
next. As the Committee described the problem,
Probably the greatest single weakness is the lack of
ar t ic u 1 a t i on Th the teachi ng of EngTlsh from the
elementary school through the colTege. English by its
nature is a study that requires ten to twelve years (or
longer) of c o n tin u a l, rigorous practice under expert
guidance . . . . What the teacher must study and under
stand is the complex, incremental nature of the subject,
the way in which language develops, the way in which
understanding and appreciation evolve. . . . The inde
pendence of schools has created a chaotic condition in
which strong leadership at the regional, state, and
~ national levels is urgently needed to bring together the
d iv e rs e , and sometimes disco rd an t, elements into an
e f f e c t i v e working r e la tio n s h ip . Only such strong
leadership and coordinated guidance can achieve sound,
articulated programs from the f i r s t grade to the las t.
(27)
In January of 1962, College English published the f i r s t of
several a rtic le s to link this problem of "articulating" a sequen
tia l curriculum with Frye's Anatomy. Kenneth R. Rockwell argued,
in "Programmed Learning: A Back Door to Empiricism in English
S tu d ies," th a t teaching-machine technology and the taxonomic
framework of lite r a r y kinds presented in the Anatomy "suggest a
blueprint for placing English studies on an empirical basis" (245).
Rockwell's argument is not so much that the teaching-machines w ill
free teachers from remedial tasks, but that the actual programming
of the machines w ill force educators "to establish methods and aims
with s u ffic ie n t c la r ity to allow construction of a program" (243).
236
And i t is the Anatomy that can play the central role in helping to
establish these methods and aims:
Programming and machine teaching, once having imposed
this s c ie n tific view on the profession, can even be
abandoned. The re a lly important thing is that the s p ir it
of empiricism remain viable at all levels. To hold this
uneasy empire in alliance, however, requires some kind of
theoretical rationale. That design is already at hand in
Professor Northrop Frye's Anatomy of C riticism . In
cutting through the barriers now separating the d iffe re n t
schools of c r itic s , Professor Frye has shown that l i t e r
ary studies can be placed on an empirical basis, a step
that strengthens rather than drains humanistic studies of
their value. (248)
Finally, Rockwell argues, the main benefit of merging the "theo
retic al rationale'' of the Anatomy with the s p ir it of empiricism
encouraged by the programming of teaching-machines is an a r t i
culated curriculum from high school through college (249).
The influence of Rothwell's merger, at least among professors
interested in pedagogy, is attested to by a special issue of Col
lege English two years la te r — "Sequence and Change in the College
English Curriculum." This issue presents papers from a 1964 con
ference at T rin ity College which addressed the problem of develop
ing "a rationale and sequence for organizing the syllabuses of
English from K to Ph.D." (1 -2 ). In his introduction to the issue,
Frederick L. Gwynn acknowledges Rothwell' s a r tic le , referring to
his "seminal remarks on Frye's Anatomy and empirical lite r a r y
study" ( 1 ).
By 1964, of course, Frye himself had written much on education
and the articulatio n of an English curriculum: Design for Learning
( 1 9 6 2 ) , "The D eveloping Im agination" (1 9 6 3 ), The Educated
237
Imagination (1963), and "Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholar
ship" (1964); and, in the special issue of College English that I
just referred to, he contributed "Criticism , Visible and I n v i
sible." Also in 1964, Congress, apparently influenced by a growing
lobbying organization consisting of the NCTE, the MLA, the U.S.
Office of Education and the Commission on English, broadened the
National Defense Education Act to include Federal funding for the
study of lite r a tu r e . This particular c ris is in lite r a r y studies
was over.
At no other time in the history of lite r a r y studies in the
United States has lite r a r y theory and pedagogy been so thoroughly
intermixed. And this intermixing can be attributed, I think, to
the sociohi stori cal conditions that I have just outlined. Des
cribing these conditions using the terminology that I developed in
the preceding sections, we can say that lite r a r y studies, having
failed to get funding from Congress, believed it s e l f to be in a
"crisis of legitim ation"; that is , i t appeared as i f the public (as
represented by Congress) no longer regarded lite r a r y studies as a
discipline with the status of other academic disciplines. Conse
quently, the leaders of the profession developed the strategy of
making the discipline look like the s c ie n tific disciplines, that
is , the strategy of giving the discipline the appearance of scien
t i f i c ra tio n a lity . But the appearance of s c ie n tific ra tio n a lity
could not be conveyed within these particular circumstances as
merely an epistem ological grounding of l i t e r a r y knowledge.
238
Instead, the educational nature of the c ris is demanded th a t a
s c i e n t i f i c r a t i o n a l i t y be r e f l e c t e d in the d i s c i p l i
nary/professional structure of lite r a r y studies. Consequently, i t
was necessary to integrate the epistemological force of theory
within the in stitu tio n al structure of the discipline: in order to
present an articulated curriculum, i t was f i r s t necessary to a r t i
culate theory and pedagogy and, on a more general le v e l, theory and
the discipline. I t was with Frye's Anatomy and through the educa
tional c ris is of the time, that lite r a r y studies f i r s t came to rely
on theory for its disciplinary status. Thi s^ representation of
theory— its intimate link with lite r a r y studies at a professional
discipline— set the stage, I believe, for the tremendous rise of
interest in theory during the next twenty years. Once the disci
pline had been reminded of its in stitution al nature by the c ris is
and once theory had been linked to the survival of the discipline,
questions of theory became more important, engaged more members of
the d iscipline, and become the centers of controversy regarding the
proper role of lite r a r y studies in our society. While the pursuit
of theory during these years was constantly redirected by other
historical and social forces, i t was the Anatomy and its reception
that made this pursuit possible.
IV. In Place of a Conclusion: The Ethics of Rhetorical H istorio
graphy
Michel de Certeau, concerned with the "interested" nature of
writing history, has claimed recently that historiography operates
239
between two poles: dogmatism and ethics. A dogmatic historiography
"is authorized by a r e a lity that i t claims to represent, and in the
name of this r e a lity i t imposes laws"; an ethical historiography,
on the other hand, "defines a distance between what is and what
ought to be," thus designating "a space where we have something to
do" (125). Having come to the end of our inquiry, i t strikes me as
worthwhile to situate ourselves in relation to de Certeau's two
poles: has our inquiry l e f t us closer to the dogmatic pole or to
the ethical pole?
F irs t, however, we should situate de Certeau's claim, not in
relation to the two poles that he designates, but in relation to
the traditional project of the philosophy of history. Only when we
recognize the radical break that de Certeau has made with tr a d i
tio n a l philosophy, can we use his historiographical poles to
evaluate our inquiry.
W e can begin to understand de Certeau's break with the philos
ophy of history by examining the presupposition that underwrites
his claim. Historiographies can be located along the dogmatic-
ethical spectrum only i f epistemology has come to a close: de
Certeau's claim presupposes the closure of epistemology. W e w ill
recall from our discussion of Quentin Skinner's historiography that
the philosophy of history, once i t had thrown o ff the speculative
theories of Hegel, moved from an ontological d efin itio n of i t s
p ro je c t (What is the nature of history?) to an epistemological
project (How can the claims of the h is to ria n be v e r ifie d ? )
Skinner, recognizing the inherent lim itations of historical know
ledge, argued for a re th in k in g of the epistemology that had
governed the philosophy of history, on the ground that historical
knowledge is d iffere n t from s c ie n tific knowledge and, therefore,
should not be subject to s c ie n tific modes of explanatio n and
v e rific a tio n . What Skinner had helped to do was to introduce the
p o s itiv is t/a n ti-p o s itiv is t debate in to Anglo-American a n a ly tic
philosophy, a debate that cracks the edifice of epistemology. W e
can think of de Certeau's presupposition as the recognition that,
once cracked, epistemology can never be rep a ired , hence its
closure. ( Closure does not mean "end," as Derrida reminds us; the
demands of epistemology w ill s t i l l have their effects a fter the
closure of epistemology; nevertheless, the conceptual boundary of
epistemology can be thought from a perspective outside of episte
mology and, consequently, its closure can be thought.)
For de Certeau, the closure of epistemology is thought from
the perspective of eth ics . From this perspective the theoretician
of hi story emerges, the "philosopher of history" being trapped
within the confines of epistemology, which are the confines of the
"truth ." The new theoretician of history is no longer concerned
with verifying the truth of the historian's claims because such
"truth" can never be ve rifie d ; instead, this theoretician is con
cerned with the consequences of writing history. Thus, when we
read again de C erteau's d e fin itio n s of dogmatic and ethical
historiography, we find that they are defined in terms of the
241
consequences that they produce. The consequence of dogmatic
historiographies is the imposition of laws; the consequence of
e th ic a l hi s to ri ographi es is to point out the need for future
action— the directions of future praxis. The ethical historian,
then, must learn to look in two directions at once— into the past
and into the future.
To what extent, we w ill now want to ask, has our rhetorical
historiography allowed us to look in to the past and in to the
future? I believe that the major advantage of a rhetorical his
toriography is it s in herent opposition to dogmatism. I f we
elaborated de Certeau's defin itio n of dogmatism ( i . e . , the imposi
tion of laws) to say that, in its imposition of laws, dogma insists
that every situation should be treated id e n tic a lly , then we can
understand rhetorical historiography as insisting that every situa
tion is complex and d iffe re n t. This complexity is revealed through
the rhetorical analysis of texts, a type of analysis that focuses
on the dense interaction of text and context. I t is rhetorical
analysis, also, that makes us more and more aware of the "construc
ted," or human, and, therefore, f a llib le nature of thought, both
the thought of the texts that we study and the thought that we use
to study these texts. In this sense, rhetorical historiography can
help us, I think, to take more responsibility for the ways in which
we think and, being teachers, to take more responsibility for the
ways in which we encourage our students to think.
242
Notes
^We could, of course, trace the recent concern with lite r a r y
history back to the founding of the journal New Literary Hi story in
1969. But the influence of this concern was tempered by the d isc i
p lin e 's preoccupation with "theory." Thus, for example, most
English programs offer courses in theory, many at the undergraduate
level; yet, to my knowledge, there are no courses in the problems
and methodologies of writing lite r a r y history. As "theory" is
beginning to wane, the concern with lite r a r y history is again
emerging. As an example, I would point to a new collection of
essays edited by Jerome J. McGann, Historical Studies and Literary
Criticism (1985).
Recent concern with the h is to ry of the d is c ip lin e has
crystalized around The Group for Research on the In stu tio n aliza-
tion and Professionalization of Literary Studies (GRIP), which held
its fourth annuaL meeting irL 1986. - - —
2
De Certeau is concerned especially with historiographies that
overlook or ignore their own historical situation and that author
ize themselves through this very act of neglect:
the "real" as represented by historiography does not
correspond to the "real" that determines i t production.
I t hides, behind the picture of a past, the present that
produces and organizes i t . Expressed bluntly, the prob
lem is as follows: a mise en sc£ne of a (past) actual
it y , that is , the hi storiographical discourse i t s e l f ,
occults the social and technical apparatus of the profes
sional in s titu tio n that produces i t . The operation in
question is ra th e r sly: the discourse gives it s e lf
c re d ib ility in the name of the r e a l i t y which i t is
supposed to represent, but this authorized appearance of
the "real" serves precisely to camouflage the practice
which in fact determines that appearance. Representation
thus disguises the praxis that organizes i t . (130)
I t is because of the subtle persuasive power of representation,
p artic u larly when i t is supported by in s t i t u t io n a l (g e n e ra lly
academic) authority, that de Certeau is concerned that historio
graphy, which quite often remains im p lic it and untheorized, be
exposed to c ritic a l investigation. The problem that de Certeau
id en tifie s has the potential of becoming more intractable when a
discipline writes the history of its own past. During our inquiry,
we have begun to examine such problems. But much more work needs
to be done.
243
3
For a recent example of concern regarding the subtle effects
of the research mode of legitim ation on the disciplines of language
study, see Wayne C. Booth's criticism of professional research
standards borrowed from the sciences in his 1932 P re s id e n tia l
Address to the MLA. For a detailed study of how these standards
affect the structure of the discipline see the work of James J.
Sosnoski, "Magister Implicatus" and "The Token Professional."
4.
I would like to thank both Richard Ohmann and James Sosnoski
for th e ir comments on this chapter when i t was presented, in an
e a rlie r d ra ft, at the GRIP Conference on the History of Language
Disciplines 1986.
5
The publication of Davis's essay, in which he implied a link
between the New Criticism and fascism, resulted in Yvor Winters
returning his Phi Beta Kappa key and, more importantly, a lengthy
exchange among Davis, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate,
and the editor of The American Scholar, Hyrum Haydn; see American
Scholar Forum. _ _ _ _ . . — - - - ---------
6
Although Giddens refers to Derrida's argument, he does not
cite any of Derrida's work in this chapter of his Central Problems
in Social Theory. There are, however, numerous citations Tn the
preceding chapter. Giddens's phrase "the structuring of structure"
is a paraphrase of "the s tru c tu ra lity of structure," which comes
from Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss's notion of structure; see
Derrida, "Structure": 279. See Giddens's discussion in Central
Problems: 9-48.
7The recent development of "postmodernity" as a problematic
w ill have profound consequences for the ways in which we understand
the recent history of our discipline. At issue would be the nature
of the p o litic a l reverberations from the d iscipline's embrace of
theory: Was this appropriation of theory part of the general epis
temological transformation that Lyotard c a lls "the post-modern
condition," or the emergence of an incredulity toward "the meta
narrative apparatus of legitimation" (Postmodern xxiv)? And does
this transformation respect the heterogeneity of society? Or,
should we regard the d iscip lin e's embrace of theory as an example
of what Habermas argues is a "neoconservatism," which attempts to
dismiss any grounding on which social and p o litica l reforms can be
initiated? Unfortunately, at this point in my reading, I can only
o ffer this rough articulatio n of the main issue and c ite the re le
vant texts. See Habermas, Legitimation, "Modernity," "The French
Path," "Neoconservative," and "Questions"; Lyotard, Postmodern and
"Answering." For commentary on the Habermas-Lyotard debate, see
Rorty, "Habermas," Benhabib, and Fraser. On the problem of post
modernism as i t has been articuslated by these two thinkers, see
the special issue of New German Critique 33 (1984) and the col
le c tio n of essays edited by Richard J7 Berstein, Habermas and
Modernity.
0
For a recent example of how we have come to use the Anatomy
to represent the period of American criticism following New C rit-
icism, see Frank Lentricchia's opening chapter in After the New
C riticism , "The Place of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of C riticism , a
portion of which I discuss below, in the main te x t.
9
The preference to deal with the theoretical content of the
Anatomy after 25 years is an excellent example, I think, of the
power of the commonsense notion of theory. The avoidance of
discussing the historical conditions of the Anatomy can be found in
the recent a rtic le s by Grossman, Langman, Mackey, M eynell, and
Riccomini.
^ L e n t r i c c h i a 1 s chapter was o r ig in a lly published as "The
H is to ric ity of Frye's Anatomy" in 1978 as a commemoration of the
20th anniversary of the book. The essay appears to have in itia te d
the resurgence of interest in the Anatomy.
^^See for example the special issue of Daedal us "Myth and
Mythmaking" (1959). I hope to be able to examine, some time in the
near future, the relationship between the anthropological philos
ophy that underwrites the "mythic" approach to the study of man and
the effects of the rise of 50s liberalism on the American in te l
lectual scene.
12
The "metrics" group was organized by Maud Elizabeth Temple
and spent its f i r s t six years developing a new notation system to
replace the macronbreve system. In 1926, the group decided to
merge with another group, "Problems in General Aesthetics," calling
i t s e l f "Poetic Form and General Aesthetics."
1 ^
" Wimsatt's s t y l i s t i c studies are well known and do not
require citation here. However, one th eo retical essay on the
relationship between s ty lis tic s and the nature of lite r a ry c r i t
icism deserves mention, "The Domain of Criticism" (1949). This
essay has some historical importance in the evolution of "theory"
as an in stitu tio n alized concept. Its presentation at the 1948 MLA
Conference marked the transformation of the General Aesthetics
group into the Literary Theory group. In other words, Wimsatt used
the concept of s ty lis tic s to argue that lite r a r y theory should be
independent of general aesthetics; and the influence of his posi
tion resulted in the f i r s t in stitution al recognition of the concept
of theory. Prior to this time, the MLA had not recognized, through
any of its organs (e .g ., the annual bibliography) the concept of
lite r a r y theory.
245
^On Spitzer's influence, see Gray.
15
I t was the influence of this conference and its published
papers that introduced many American scholars to European struc
t u r a l i s t lin g u is t ic s as i t was presented in Roman Jakobson's
"Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics."
1
The history of this co n flict and its effects on the d isci
pline, in p articu lar, the rise of the New Criticism , has yet to be
wri tten.
17
Perhaps the best known of such attacks on academic criticism
is Randall J a rr e ll's "The Age of Criticism" (1952).
1 R
' On the g u erilla p o litics of Tel Quel, see Roudiez.
19
In my discussion of the content of this chapter of Theory of
L i t e r a t u r e , I refer only to Wellek (not to Wellek and Warren)
because he is responsible for -the-chapter, as the Preface o f the -
book makes e x p lic it. Also, I think that i t is appropriate to
single out Wellek since the argument presented in the opening
chapter of Theory of Literature emigrated with Wellek from the
Conti nent.
20
The neo-Kantian foundation of Wellek's new criticism has
not, to my knowledge, been examined. By characterizing his work as
"new c r it ic a l," most students of theory have fa ile d to notice that,
essentially, Wellek introduced hermeneutic philosophy (e .g ., D il-
they, Rickert) to the United States 20 years before i t was to
become in flu e n tia l. Another work, written about the same time,
that deals with the epistemological c o n flic t between positivism and
the Heidelberg philosophers' hermeneutic approach too the human
sciences is his "The Revolt against Positivism in Recent European
Literary Criticism" (1946).
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Appendix: The In s t i t u t i o n a l i z a t i o n of "Theory" w ith in MLA
Discussion Groups, 1921 to 1975
To provide the reader with a way to id en tify the specific theoreti
cal topics discussed within the Modern Language Association and,
thus, with a way to get a sense of the shifts of interest through
out the history of lite r a r y studies in America, this appendix lis ts
the meetings held by MLA discussion groups that were formed to
address questions of lite r a r y and c r itic a l theory.
As I discuss in the final section of Chapter Four, the "Poet-
ics and Literary Theory" group underwent two major changes during
its f i r s t 30 years:
(1) prior to 1927, the group had been called "Problems in
General Aesthetics"; in 1927, i t merged with the "Poetic
Form" (Metrics) group and became "Poetic Form and General
Aesthetics";
(2) in 1948, the group decided to change its name to "Poetics
and Literary Theory," thus becoming the f i r s t organ of
the MLA to use the term theory.
The l i s t begins in 1921, the year when discussion groups were
added to the program of the national convention. I have decided to
end the l i s t at 1975, the last year of a single group devoted to
theory, having since been replaced by a set of "divisions" that
address theoretical questions (Literary Criticism , Anthropological
Approaches to Literature, Linguistic Approaches to Literature, Lin
guistic Approaches to L ite ra tu re , Philosophical Approaches to
267
Literature, Psychological Approaches to L it e r a t u r e , and Socio
logical Approaches to L itera tu re ). I should note here that even
before this new system of "divisions," discussions of theory were
not restricted to the Poetics and Literary Theory group. There
were numerous "seminars" and "special sessions" that were held each
year, especially during the late 1960s and the 1970s, to address
specific theoretial concerns. But the fact of this proliferation
of theory is , I think, more important than the individual topics
addressed; and I have, therefore, decided not to reproduce informa
tion that is easily found.
The information foor this appendix was taken from the "Pro
ceedings" and from the "Programs" of the annual conventions, which
are published each year in the Association's journal, Pub!ications
of the Modern Language Association of America. I have omitted
information that I thought unnecessary for this study, e .g ., names
of the group's s e c re ta rie s and the institutions of the group
o ffi cers.
1921 Chair, Fred Newton Scott
Papers:
1. Charles E. Whitmore, "C learing the Ground for
Aesthetics"
2. Joel Spingarn, "Scholarship and Criticism"
1922 Chair, F. N. Scott
Papers:
1. Rose F. Egan, "Art for A rt's Sake"
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
268
(c o n t.)
2. Theodore F. Stenberg, "The Laws of Sentence and
Paragraph Length"
3. Charles E. Whitmore, "The Concept of U t i l i t y in Art"
Acting Chair, Charles E. Whitmore
Paper:
1. Theodore 0. Wedel, "What Is Art? On a Text of Homer"
General discussion of present tendencies in aesthetics as
represented by Croce and his opponents.
Chair, C. E. Whitmore
Papers:
1. Fred N. Scott, "Favorite Words"
2. Theodore T. Stenberg, "Croce and American Literary
Cri t ic i sm "
3. C. E. Whitmore, "Clearing the Ground for Aesthetics"
Chair, Charles E. Whitmore
Papers:
1. Alice D. Snyder, "Dewey's Experience and Nature as
an Approach to C ritic a l Theory"
Joint session with Poetic Forms (Metrics); Chairs, Bliss
Perry and Charles E. Whitmore
Papers:
1. C. D. Thorpe, "The Aesthetic Experience"
2. C. M. Lopspeich, "The Metrical Technique of Pope's
Illu s tr a tiv e Couplets"
269
1926 ( cont.)
3. John W . Draper, "A B ib lio g ra p h ic a l Problem in
Eighteenth-Century English Aesthetics"
1927 Poeti c
Paper:
Form and General Aesthetics Chair, C. M. Lopspeich
1 . Theodore Stenberg, "Abercrombie1s View of Poetry"
Decision to revise the Report on Metrical Notation
1928 Chair, Theodore Stenberg
Papers
;
1 .
L e s lie N. Broughton, "A Glance at Browning's
Poetics"
2 . Murray W. Bundy, "The Development of the Modern
Concept of the Poetic Faculty"
3. W illiam S. K nickerbocker, "A Comparison of the
C ritical Methods of Arnold and Pater as Exemplified
in th eir Treatment of Coleridge"
4. Gilbert Macbeth, "The Development of the Concept of
Taste in English Aesthetic Theory"
5. Floyd Stovall, "Shelly, Plato, and the Imagination"
6 . Peter Monro Jack, "Application of a Theory of Value
to Aesthetics"
1929 Chair, Theodore Stenberg
Papers
;
1. W . L. Werner, "Poe's Theories and Practice of Poetic
Technique"
270
1929 (cont.)
2. L. L. Click, "Gestalt Psychology and the Aesthetic
Atti tude"
3. Edward H. Weatherly, "Verse Form in the Popular and
the Vulgar Ballad"
4. Theodore Stenberg, "John Barley, Hutcheson, and
Unity in Variety"
1930 Chair, C. D. Thorpe
Papers:
1- .Thomas Munro, _"A S cientific Approach to Literary
Values"
2. R. W. Cowden, "Manuscript Revision apropos the
Problems of Values"
3. Ada L. F. Snell, "Laird and Others"
4. Elizabeth Nitchie, "Poetic Values: A Debate with
I . A. Richards"
5. Edward D. Snyder, " L ite r a r y Values in Hypnotic
Poetry"
1931 Chair, Ada L. F. Snell
Papers:
1. A. R. Morris, "Laboratory Data upon the Aesthetics
of Meter"
2. John W . Draper, "The Rise of Music as a Determinant
of Poetic Theory"
1931
1932
1933
271
(c o n t.)
3. Alice Bidwell Wesenberg, "Some Observations on the
Emily Dickenson Stanza"
4. Samuel S. Seward, J r ., "Form in Humorous Verse"
5. W illiam E lle ry Leonard, "The Poetic Process from
Insi de"
Chair, Philo M. Buck, Jr.
Papers:
1. Louis Cons, "Aesthetics of Racine"
2. Bayard Q. Morgan, "Goethe'js_ Classicism”
3. Alfonso de Salvio, "Carducci's Classicism"
4. Morton Dauwen Zabel, "The Distinction of Classicism
in Modern Poetry"
Chair, Edgar C. Knowlton
Papers:
1. Carl E. W . L. Dahlstrom, "Situation in Literature"
2. W . W. Walton, "Three Types of Endings of Short
Poems: A Study in Literary Aesthetics"
3. Friedrich Bruns, "The Concept of Inner Form in Lyric
Poetry"
4. Clarence D. Thorpe, "Art as a Relief from Ennui:
Addison and the Abbe du Bos"
5. Merrel D. Clubb, "Wanted: A New Foundling Hospital
for Wit"
1934
1935
1936
11 1
Chair, Albert M. Turner
General Subject: The Function of Poetry
Papers:
1. E. G. A. Rose, "The Function of Poetry according to
Schi 11er"
2. Oscar James Campbell, "The Function of Poetry
according to Vigny"
3. George D. Henning, "The Function of Poetry according
to Vigny"
Chair, A. E. Zucker
Papers:
1. C. N. Wegner, "Portraiture of Transmuting Characters
in Contemporary Literature"
2. Frank W . Chandler, "Expression and Communication"
3. C. D. T h o rp e, "Hobbes's C ontribution to the
Psychological Approach in Criticism"
Discussion: Professor Chandler's adverse criticism of the
so-called "new" poetry and the theories which i t is an
expression stimulated a number of rejoinders.
Chair, John Crowe Ransom
Topic: The New or In te lle c tu a lis t Poetry
Papers:
1. Allen Tate, "Its Literary Relationships"
2. R obert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, " It s
Audidence"
1936 ( cont.)
273
3. Mark Van Doran, "Its Achievements"
1937 Chair, John Crowe Ransom
Papers
1.
R. S. Crane, "The Two Modes of Criticism"
2 . C liffo r d P. Lyons, "The Province of Criticism: A
1933 Chair,
Mote"
Ernst Rose
Topic: Mew Approaches to Aesthetic Theory
Papers
1.
Seymour M. Pitcher, "Contemporary Interpretations of
2 .
A risto tle 's Poetics"
Frederick P. Mascioli, "Benetto Croce's Distinction
3.
between Poetic Expression and Literary Expression"
Frank H. Wood, J r ., "Rilke: Paradoxes"
1939 Chair, Morton D. Zabel
Topic: The Relation between Music and Literature, a Problem
Papers
in Form Papers
1.
Morton D. Zabel, "Introduction: The Problems in
2 .
Cri t ic i sm"
Calvin S. Brown, J r ., "The Poetic Use of Musical
3.
Forms"
Rene de Messieres, "Proust et la musique"
4. W . P. Jones, "Joyce's Use of Musical Technique"
274
1940 Chair, Morton D. Zabel
Topic: The Form of Fiction: The Problem in Criticism
Papers:
1. A llen Tate, "The Post of Observation in Fiction:
What Flaubert Did"
2. Carlos Lynes, J r ., "Andre Gide and the Problem of
Form in the Novel"
3. Theodore Spencer, "James Joyce: The Making of the
A rtis t. A discussion of an Unpublished Version of A
P o rtrait of the A rtis t as a Young Man"
1941 Chair, Frank Cudworth F lin t
Topic: Vocabulary: A problem for the Contemporary Poet
Papers:
1. M. H. Abrams, "Unconscious Expectations in the
Reading of Poetry"
2. W illiam Troy, "The New Parnassianism and Recent
Poetry"
3. John C. M c G a llia r d , "The Words of Archibald
Macleish"
1942-43 No national meetings because of the war
1944 Chair, Lionel T r illin g
Papers:
1. F. W . Dupee, " D iffic u lty as Style"
2. Robert Gorhan Davis, " L ite r a ry D iffic u ltie s and
th e ir Analogues"
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
275
( cont.)
3. Wylie Sypher, "Obscurity as Fetish"
4. William Y. Tindall, "Exiles: Rimbaud to Joyce"
Chair, Austin Warren
Papers:
1. Harold Whitehall, "S tylistics and Linguistics"
2. Craig La D rie re , "C ritical Theory and Theory of
Li terature"
3. Arther Mizener, "The Motive of Action"
— Chair, William-Troy —
Papers:
1. Franklin Gary, "Some Meanings of Naturalism"
2. Robert W . Stallman, "Hardy's Hour-Glass Novel"
3. Q uentin A nderson, "Aspects of Henry James's
Symbolism"
Chair, Arthur W . Mizener
Papers:
1. James B e n z in g e r, "O rganic U nity: L eib n iz to
Coleridge"
2. Claude A. Strauss, "The Ego and the Unconscious in
the Poetic Process"
3. John Pick, "Inscape in the Aesthetics of G. M.
Hopkins"
Chair, Craig La Driere
Topic: Some Problems of Meaning
1948
1949
1950
1951
275
(c o n t.)
Papers:
1. Rudolf Arnheim, "On the Psychology of Metaphor"
2. C h a rle s N. F e id e ls o n , J r . , "The Genesis of
Symbolism"
Business:
1. I t was voted to change the name of the group to
"General Theory and Poetics"
2. I t was voted to form a jo in t Bibliography Committee
with General Topics IX (Literature and the Arts of
Desi gn)
Chair, W . K. Wimsatt, Jr.
Topic: The Role of Convention to Poetry
Papers:
1. Victor M. Hamm, "Meter as Meaning"
2. Charles S. Muscatine, "Levels of Style"
Chair, Ruth C. Wallerstein
Papers:
1. Helen Adolf, "The Essence and Origin of Tragedy"
2. G. Giovanni, "Realism and the Tragic Emotions in
Renaissance Criticism"
Chair, W . K. Wimsatt, Jr.
Papers:
1. Malcolm M. Ross, "Analogy and Metaphor: A Note on
the Decline of Metaphysical Poetry"
277
1951 ( cont.)
2 . Richard H. Fogle, "Romantic Imagery: Wordsworth and
Coleridge"
3. Anna Balakian, "The Structure of Surrealist Imagery"
1952 Chair, Robert W . Daniel
Papers
:
1.
Scott Elledge, "Phaedrus as a Statement of Modern
C ritical Assumptions"
2 . Walter J. Ong, "Metaphor and the Twinned Vision"
3.
Frederick J. P o ttle , "The New C r itic s -a n d the_
Historical Method"
1953 Chair, Reuben A. Brower
Topic: Imagery and Character in Criticism of Drama and
Fiction
Papers
:
1. Francis Fergusson, "The Common Purpose of Imagery
and Characterization"
2 . Dorothy Bethurum, "Imagery and Character in The
Winter's Tale"
3. Marvin Mudrick, "Conrad and the Terms of Modern
C ritic i sm"
1954 Chair, Scott El ledge
Topic: Benedetto Croce and Contemporary Theory
278
1954 (cont.)
Papers:
1. R. P. Blackmur, "Croce's Estate: A S ele ctiv e
Inventory"
2. Warren T a y lo r, " In t u i t io n and the Greatness of
Vision"
3. Murray Kreiger, "Croce and the Recent Poetics of
Organici sm"
1955 Chair, M. H. Abrams
_ Papers:_ _ .................. .....
1. A. S. P. Woodhouse, "The C ritic as Interrogator"
2. R. S. Crane, "The High Priori Road"
1956 Chair, Robert W . Stallman
Topic: Re-examining the Enterprise of Criticism
Papers:
1. W . J. Ong, "The Literary Object: Surface or Word?"
2. W. K. Wimsatt, "The L it e r a r y Object: Toward a
C ritica l Equilibrium"
1957 Chair, R. W . Stallman
Papers:
1. Allan H. G ilbert, "A ristotle's Poetics"
2. G. N. S. Orsini, "Croce's Theory of the Language of
Poetry"
3. Donald H a ll, "Ideas of the Organic in Literary
C riti ci sm"
279
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
(cont.)
4. Harvey T. Lyon, "Keats's Well-Read Urn"
Chair, Janies C. La Driere
Topic: Linguistics and Literary Theory
Papers:
1. Thomas A. Sebeok, "Report on the Indiana Conference
on Style"
2. Roman Jakobson, "Poetics and Linguistics"
Chair, W . J. Ong
Xopic: E x is te n tia lis t and Phenomenological_Literary Theory
Papers:
1. Neal Oxenhandler, "Paradox and Negation in the
Criticism of Maurice Blanchot"
2. V ic to r E r lic h , "A Note on Sartre's Poetics: The
Limits of the E xis te n tia lis t Engagement"
Chair, Donald Hall
Papers:
1. Paul de Man, "Style as an Intentional Structure"
2. John Hollander, "Poem and T itle "
3. Marvin Mudrick, "The Poetics of Fiction: Character
and Events"
Chair, Robert C. E llio t
Topic: The Art and Science of Poetry
280
1961 ( cont.)
Papers
-
1. Dwight W. Bolinger, "Some Poetic Implications of the
Pitch Accent"
2 . Seymour Chatman, "On the R elation of Meter
Performance"
to
3. K. Taranovski, "Problems of Enjambment (with Russian
and other Illu s tra tio n s )"
1962 Chair,
Papers
R. C. E llio t
__
1. Anna B alakian, "Metaphor and Metamorphosis
Breton's Poetics"
in
2 . Walter Sutton, "Literary Form and Social Values"
3. E. Kahler, "The Forms of Form"
1963 Chair,
Papers
1 .
Victor M. Ham m
E. D. Hirsch, "Criticism versus Historicism"
2 . Robert Marsh, "Fact and A rtifact: A Rationale
the History of Criticism"
for
3. John Hist, "The Word-Group Cadence: Basis of English
Metrics"
1964 Chair,
Papers
John E. Grant
1. R obert S c h o le s , "Two T h e o rie s of N a r r a t iv e
Li terature"
1964 (co n t.)
281
2 . F. Wiley, "The Novel and Spontaneous Feeling"
o
O • N. Friedman, "Mill on Poetry and Morality"
1965 Chair, Walter Sutton
Papers
1. E. Callan, "W. H. Auden: The Farming of a Verse"
2 . M. J. Rosenthal, "Poetic Theory of Some Contemporary
3.
Poets"
L. F. Manheim, "Contributions of Psychoanalytic
— ----------
Critixism to-a-Theery-of Literature" — — -
1966 Chair, Bernard Weinberg
Topi c : Current Continental Theories of Poetry
Papers
1. H. Davidson, "The C r it ic a l P o sitio n of Roland
2 .
Barthes"
A. M. Mlikotin, "Yugoslav Revision of the Marxist
3.
Theory of Literature"
J. C. Bruce, "The Poetics of Emil Steiger"
1967 Chair, Robert Scholes
Topic: The Problem of Evaluation in Modern L ite r a r y
Papers
Cri ti ci sm
(two position papers):
1. Murray Krieger
2 . Northrop Frye
282
1968 Chair, Hugh Davidson
Papers
;
1. T. W right, "Lyric Tense: The Simple Present in
English Poems"
2 . E. L. Rivers, "Gongora's Heresy"
3. M. Benamou, "Contemporary French Poetics"
1969 Chair, Hazard Adams
Papers
1. R. M c A l l i s t e r , "Mazzoni's Debt to Dante:
Accommodative Metaphor"
2 . B. Hathaway, "Mazzoni's Place in Renaissance
Cri ti ci sm "
3. M. E. Brown, "Giovanni Gentile: From Cultural to
Aesthetic Criticism"
1970 Chair, E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
Papers
:
1. Michael Hanscher, "The Science of Interpretation and
the Art of Interpretation"
2 . Alexander Gelley, "The Status of Texts: Some
I m p l i c a t i o n s of Jacques D e r r i d a ' s De la
grammatologie"
3. Kurt Muller-Vollmer, "To Understand an Author Better
than the Author Himself: On the Hermeneutics of the
Unspoken"
283
1971 Chair, Wallace Martin
Papers
;
1. A. Mandelbaum, "Lukacs: The F ir s t and Final
Chapters"
2 . H. Goldberg, "Center and Periphery: Implications of
Frye's 'Order of Words'"
3. J. R. Huffman, "Murray Krieger and the Impasse in
Contextualist Theory"
1972 Chair, W . Martin
Papers
;
1 .
Stanley Fish, "How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?"
2 . Ruth Roberts, "Waiting for Godel"
3. Paul Hernadi, "The Scope and Mood of Literary Works:
Toward a Poetics Beyond Genre"
1973 Chair, Murray Krieger
Papers
:
1. Harvey Gross, "The Problem of Style and the Poetry
of the Sixties"
2 . John Vernon, "Naked Criticism"
3. Marjorie G. Perl off, "New Thresholds, Old Anatomies:
Contemporary Poetry and the Limits of Exegesis"
1974 Chair, M. Krieger
Topic: Recent Theory and the Graduate Teaching of English
284
1974 (cont.)
Papers:
1. Wesley Morris, "A D ifferent Object Proposed: The New
Pluralism of Graduate Literary Studies"
2. Frank Lentricchia, "Myths of Accessible Selfhood"
3. M. L. Rosenthal, "Critical Theory and the Graduate
Program and the Slippery T h in g -in -Itself"
1975 Chair, Paul Hernadi
Topic: What Is Literature?
Papers:
1. Rene Wellek, "The History of the Term 'Literature'
and Its Cognates"
2. Martin Steinmann, Jr. and Robert L. Brown, Jr., "A
Speech-Act and Genre Approach to Defining Litera
ture"
3. Michael McCanles, "All Discourse Aspires to the
Analytic Proposition"
4. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "What Isn't Literature?"

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