MLS

Modern Literary
Studies
University of Bisha
College of Arts
Department of English
‫الدارسا‬
‫ت‬
‫احلديثة‬ ‫األدبية‬
‫عادل‬ ‫عبدالفتاح‬ .‫د‬ ‫المقرر‬ ‫أستاذ‬

Course Overview
This course will familiarize students with some of
the principal questions which have preoccupied
intellectuals from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards. It will provide students with a solid
grounding in the major theoretical methodologies
and paradigms in modern literary studies. It will
also afford them an opportunityto read and engage
different literary theories as they might a literary
text. The readings are organized around a series of
concepts. Our discussions of the readings will
provide an overview of each topic and a sense of
what is at stake in debates surrounding that topic.

Course Objectives
By the end of the course, learners will be able to:
1. Describe literature through literary theory and vice versa.
2. Outline the historical relationships between differing
critical schools and their individual proponents.
3. Demonstrate complex analysis and understanding of
important theoretical practices by reflecting on key
concepts and arguments.
4. Apply some of the concepts and arguments successfully in
a close reading of a literary text.
5. Propose arguments that present, advance, and support
insightful claims about literary texts through a critical
engagement with modern literary theories.
6. Locate and interpret literary texts in relation to
theoretical, philosophical, historical, and cultural contexts.
7. Appreciate the relevance and value of theoretical models
and schools in modern literary studies; discuss cogently,
both orally and in writing: significant theories, arguments,
and periods growing out of a specialized area of study.

Course Items
1. Form: New Criticism
2. Sign: Structuralism, Linguistics, Narratology
3. Rhetoric, Phenomenology, Reader Response: Reader-
Oriented theories
4. Structure, Author/Text: Post-structuralism,
Deconstruction, Post-modernism
5. The Subject: Psychoanalysis and Psychology
6. Discourse, Power/Knowledge: Historicisms
7. Gender, Sexuality, Feminism: Feminism and Gender
Studies
8. Post-coloniality and decolonization: Colonial, Post-
colonial, and Transnational Studies

Formalisms: Russian Formalism
and New Criticism
Page 5
1

Introduction: Formalisms
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
It has become a commonplace of literary study that to study literature is to study
language, yet prior to the formalist movements of the early twentieth century -Russian
Formalism and American New Criticism - the study of literature was concerned with
everything about literature except language, from the historical context of a literary work
to the biography of its author. How literary language worked was of less importance than
what a literary work was about. Two movements in early twentieth-century thought
helped move literary study away from this orientation. The first movement was the
attempt on the part of philosophers of science like Edmund Husserl to isolate objects of
knowledge in their unmixed purity. The Russian Formalists, a group of young scholars
(Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum) who
wrote in the teens and twenties, were influenced by this approach. For them, literature
would be considered not as a window on the world but as something with specifically
literary characteristics that make it literature as opposed to philosophy or sociology or
biography. Literature is not a window for looking at sociological themes or philosophic
ideas or biographical information; rather, it is a mural or wall painting, something with a
palpability of its own which arrests the eye and merits study. The manipulation of
representational devices may create a semblance of reality and allow one to have the
impression of gazing through glass, but it is the devices alone that produce that
impression, and they alone are what makes literature literary.
The second movement was the attempt on the part of idealist philosophers like
Benedetto Croce to develop a new aesthetics, or philosophy of art, which would rebut the
claim of science that all truth is grounded in empirical facts knowable through scientific
methods. Art provides access to a different kind of truth than is available to science, a
truth that is immune to scientific investigation because it is accessible only through
connotative language (allusion, metaphor, symbolism, etc.) and cannot be rendered in the
direct, denotative, fact-naming language of the sciences. The American New Critics
(Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsett, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate) were influenced
by the new aesthetic philosophies. For them, literature should be studied for the way
literary language differs from ordinary practical language and for the unique truths
conveyed only through such literary language.
The Russian Formalists were interested both in describing the general characteristics
of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such
language. Perhaps their most famous general claim is that literary language consists of an
act of defamiharization, by which they mean that such literature
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4 Formalisms
presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such uncon-
ventional and self-conscious language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perceptions of
those things are disturbed. We are forced to see things that had become automatic and
overly familiar in new ways. Shklovsky cites the example of Tolstoy, who presents a
meditation on property from the point of view of a horse, or who recounts the story of a
flogging in such a blank manner that the then accepted practice seems strange and novel
to the otherwise inured reader.
More specifically, the Formalists were interested in analyzing literature into its
component parts and in describing its principal devices and modes of operation. This
analysis took two main forms in the two major genres of prose narrative and poetry,
concentrating in the first on the operations of narrative and in the second on sound in
verse. The Formalists noticed that narrative literature consisted of two major
components: the plot, by which they meant the story as narrated within the pages of the
book (with all the attendant arrangements of chronological sequence, point of view, etc.),
and the story, by which they meant the sequence of events in the order and the actual
duration in which they ostensibly occurred. Once this simple distinction is made, one can
begin to analyze all of the features of story-telling, the many devices such as point of
view, delayed disclosure, narrative voice, and the like that go into the creation of the
imaginary story through the manipulation of plot or story-telling devices. One can, for
example, begin to study a. novel like The Scarlet Letter for its narrative strategies instead
of for the ways in which it depicts Puritanism.
In the analysis of poetry, the Formalist focus was on the qualities of poetic language
that distinguish it from ordinary practical language, the distinction between the literary
and the non-literary being more pronounced in this genre. Whereas ordinary language
must subordinate its rules of operation (grammar) to the practical goal of communicating
information, poetic language is distinguished by the foregrounding of such devices or
motifs as euphony, rhythm, alliteration, consonance, repetition, and rhyme which obey a
very different logic from that required to communicate information. A meteorologist
might say that "precipitation in the Iberian peninsula is concentrated in the central
plateau," and in light of that practical use of language, the internal rhyming of "the rain in
Spain falls mainly on the plain" will seem impractical and unnecessary, but it is such
devices that make poetry a distinct linguistic undertaking, a mode of language use with
autonomous rules of operation which, unlike grammar, are not subordinated to a practical
function. While practical speech facilitates access to information by making language as
transparent as possible, poetic speech contorts and roughens up ordinary language and
submits it to what Roman Jakobson called "organized violence," and it is this roughening
up of ordinary language into tortuous "formed speech" that makes poetry poetry rather
than a weather report.
While literature for the Formalists is characterized by invariant patterns, recurring
devices, and law-like relations, it also changes over time and varies from one historical
epoch to another. The Formalists account for such change in two ways. They claim that
literary evolution is the result of the constant attempt to disrupt existing literary
conventions and to generate new ones. And they argue that literary change is the result of
the autonomous evolution of literary devices.
A more traditional concept of the content/form distinction might lead one to conclude
that literature changes when the world changes because literature merely
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Formalisms 5
gives form to ideas and realities that lie outside the literary realm and constitute its cause
or motivation. But for the Formalists, literary devices owe no debt to such motivations;
they evolve autonomously of them and are motivated entirely by literary origins. For
literature to be literature, it must constantly defamiliarize the familiar, constantly evolve
new procedures for story-telling or poetry-making. And such change is entirely
autonomous of the social and historical world from which the materials of literature are
taken. Cervantes' satiric novel Don Quixote, for example, makes fun of the popular
romantic novels about knights and quests which constituted the dominant form of story-
telling in his day. It emerged not because of changes in the world or in Cervantes' life but
rather as a result of a specifically literary evolution. The new device of the problematic
hero was made possible and necessary by the development of the novel form itself.
You will find a major Russian Formalist, Roman Jakobson, placed under Structuralism
in this anthology because there is a strong historical as well as methodological link
between the two intellectual movements. Many of the original Formalists were linguists,
with Jakobson being the most influential. He left Russia in 1920 and traveled to
Czechoslovakia, where he was part of the linguistic circles that inspired French
Structuralism in the 1940s and 1950s. The Structuralists, whose work was particularly
influential in France through the 1960s, share a methodological interest with Formalist
linguistics in that they saw culture in general as constituted by the same rules of
operation that one finds in language. Although the Russian Formalists were suppressed
by the Stalinist government in Russia in the 1920s, news of their work was borne West
by East European emigres such as Rene Wellek, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan Todorov,
where it helped shape French Structuralism as well as such literary critical schools as
poetics, stylistics, and narratology.
The impulse toward formal analysis was not limited in Russia to the group of thinkers
usually clustered under the rubric Russian Formalists. Vladimir Propp was a scholar of
folktales who wrote at the same time as the Formalists and who analyzed the component
features of folktale narratives. A wide range of tales could be shown to share the same
sequence of narrative motifs, from "the hero leaves home" to "the hero receives a magic
token" to "the hero is tested in battle." The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, while it is
historically at odds with the Formalists in its emphasis on the social and ideological
features of literature, shares their concern with describing those formal elements that
make a literary genre such as the novel distinct from other literary forms. His work also
represents an expansion of the original Formalist undertaking to include not only genres
but also extra-literary uses of language such as that of the carnival, which Bakhtin saw
influencing the work of certain writers such as Francois Rabelais.
While the Russian Formalist movement was scientific and rational, the other major
formalist school - American New Criticism - was anti-scientific and interested in the
nonrational dimension of art. Both critical movements nevertheless shared an interest in
what it is about literary language that makes it different from the ordinary use of
language, and both considered the proper object of literary study to be literary texts and
how they worked rather than authors' lives or the social and historical worlds to which
literature refers. Two well-known terms that are part of a New Critical legacy - the
intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy - name this act of delimiting the object of
literary study and separating it from biography or sociology. According to the intentional
fallacy, meaning resides in the verbal design of a literary work, not in
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6 Formalisms
statements regarding his or her intention that the author might make. According to the
affective fallacy, the subjective effects or emotional reactions a work provokes in readers
are irrelevant to the study of the verbal object itself, since its objective structure alone
contains the meaning of the work.
While the Russian Formalists were concerned with elucidating the modes of operation
of entire genres such as the novel, the New Critics concentrated their energies on
individual literary works, especially poems. "Close reading" is the term most often used
to describe their method. The purpose of such close reading was not, however, the
analysis of literary devices or motifs considered as an end in itself. It was instead the
elucidation of the way literature embodies or concretely enacts universal truth, what the
New Critics called "concrete universals."
Poetry, they argued, differs from ordinary practical speech, which uses language
denotatively (one word for one thing), in that poetry uses language connotatively or in a
way that evokes secondary meanings. Such language use allows poetry to be both
concrete and specific as well as universal and general. An urn can be both an ordinary
object and a metaphor for the eternal durability of art. Poetic language thus reconciles the
ordinarily opposed elements of the concrete and the universal, the specific word and
general meaning, body and spirit. Such reconciliation is possible in connotative poetic
tropes such as paradox, irony, and metaphor, tropes which either join ordinary objects to
universal meanings (metaphor, symbol) or reconcile seemingly opposed elements (irony,
paradox). Cleanth Brooks, for example, notices in a famous close reading that Keats'
poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is full of paradoxes such as "Cold pastoral" and "unheard
melodies" which imply both life and death at once, the paradoxical cohabitation of what
is vivid and moving with what is frozen and still. This is so, Brooks argues, because the
poem is about how art, figured in the urn, is more vivid than life itself, even though it
seems lifeless. Although dead, it possesses eternal life.
The practical denotative language of science cannot name such truth because such
language is limited to the naming of positive empirical facts that can be grasped by the
senses. The realm of universal meaning, however, is beyond sensory experience and
cannot be analyzed using scientific methods. It can only be alluded to indirectly in poetic
language and cannot be paraphrased in literal, denotative speech. For the American New
Critics, therefore, the description of literary devices such as metaphor, irony, and paradox
was inseparable from a theory of universal meaning that was a polemical response to
modern positivist science. While the Russian Formalists sought a value-free mode of
critical description, one that would scientifically specify what it is about literature that is
literary, the New Critics informed the study of literature with a concern for traditional
religious and aesthetic values of a kind being displaced by science, in this case, the values
of Christian theology and idealist aesthetics (that is, an aesthetics rooted in the idea that
universal truth is available through art of a kind that is not determined by material social
and historical circumstances). Those values have receded in importance with time, and
the legacy of the New Criticism that has remained most abiding is the concern with the
close reading of texts and with the analysis of the operation of literary language in all its
complexity.
Page 9

Art as Technique
Viktor Shklovsky
One of the founders of the Formalist study group in Petrograd in the early twentieth century,
Shklovsky was also one of its most innovative thinkers. In seeking to move literary study out of
the realm of religion and into that of science, Shklovsky and his colleagues argued against the
Symbolists who conceived of poetry in spiritualist terms. In continuing the effort to exactly
delineate the "literary" quality of those devices and techniques that separates them from
ordinary prose, Shklovsky argues in this essay (1916) that such devices impede normal percep-
tions. This essay demonstrates the similarity between the formal scholarly undertaking and the
innovations in poetry that were occurring at the same time in Europe, such as Dada. Con-
cerned with writing that would be brutally honest and shockingly new, these writers rejected
traditional culture and traditional artistic forms that had for them become both boring and
overly conventional. Shklovsky, thinking along similar lines, saw all poetry as producing a
shock effect that disrupted habitual ways of seeing and thinking.
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes
habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of
the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of
speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at
performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation
explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and
words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by
symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are
barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the
sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a,
b.
This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even
prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic"
method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do
not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We
see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its
configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of
prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the
essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the
prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article ) and, hence, why (along with
other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of "algebrization," the
over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort.
Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number,
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16 Formalisms
for example — or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in
cognition:
I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember
whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I
could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if I had dusted
it and forgot — that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not.
If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If,
however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives
of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.3
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture,
one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on
unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may
recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as
they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important...
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of
us and we know about it, but we do not see it - hence we cannot say anything significant
about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I
want to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who, for
Merezhkovsky at least, seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in
their entirety, and did not alter them.
Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He
describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were
happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its
parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. For example, in "Shame"
Tolstoy "defamiliarizes" the idea of flogging in this way: "to strip people who have
broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to rap on their bottoms with switches," and,
after a few lines, "to lash about on the naked buttocks." Then he remarks:
Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other - why
not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the
feet in a vise, or anything like that?
I apologize for this harsh example, but it is typical of Tolstoy's way of pricking the
conscience. The familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and
by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this
technique of "defamiliarization" constantly. The narrator of "Kholstomer," for example,
is a horse, and it is the horse's point of view (rather than a person's) that makes the
content of the story seem unfamiliar. Here is how the horse regards the institution of
private property:
I understood well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was
absolutely in the dark. What's the meaning of "his own," "his colt"? From these
Page 11

The Formalist Critics
Cleanth Brooks
Published (1951) in The Raritan Review, this polemic in favor of the New Criticism was
written by one of the major practitioners and promoters of the new approach to literature -
Cleanth Brooks. Brooks had studied in Cambridge with I. A. Richards, who first laid the
foundation for the New Criticism in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). Upon his return
to the United States, Brooks began writing a series of books, from An Approach to Literature
(1936) to The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), that helped
establish "close reading" as the dominant form of literary study in the American academy
from the 1940s through the late 1960s.
Here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to:
That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object.
That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity - the kind of whole
which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to
each other in building up this whole. That the formal relations in a work of literature may
include, but certainly exceed,
those of logic. That in a successful work, form and content cannot be
separated. That form is meaning.
That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic. That the general and the universal are
not seized upon by abstraction, but got at
through the concrete and the particular. That literature is not a surrogate for religion. That, as
Allen Tate says, "specific moral problems" are the subject matter of literature,
but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral. That the principles of criticism define
the area relevant to literary criticism; they do not
constitute a method for carrying out the criticism.
Such statements as these would not, however, even though greatly elaborated, serve any useful
purpose here. The interested reader already knows the general nature of the critical position
adumbrated - or, if he does not, he can find it set forth in writings of mine or of other critics of like
sympathy. Moreover, a condensed restatement of the position here would probably beget as many
misunderstandings as have past attempts to set it forth. It seems much more profitable to use the
present occasion for dealing with some persistent misunderstandings and objections.
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The Formalist Critics 23
In the first place, to make the poem or the novel the central concern of criticism has
appeared to mean cutting it loose from its author and from his life as a man, with his own
particular hopes, fears, interests, conflicts, etc. A criticism so limited may seem bloodless
and hollow. It will seem so to the typical professor of literature in the graduate school,
where the study of literature is still primarily a study of the ideas and personality of the
author as revealed in his letters, his diaries, and the recorded conversations of his friends.
It will certainly seem so to literary gossip columnists who purvey literary chitchat. It may
also seem so to the young poet or novelist, beset with his own problems of composition
and with his struggles to find a subject and a style and to get a hearing for himself.
In the second place, to emphasize the work seems to involve severing it from those
who actually read it, and this severance may seem drastic and therefore disastrous. After
all, literature is written to be read. Wordsworth's poet was a man speaking to men. In
each Sunday Times, Mx J. Donald Adams points out that the hungry sheep look up and
are not fed; and less strenuous moralists than Mr Adams are bound to feel a proper
revulsion against "mere aestheticism." Moreover, if we neglect the audience which reads
the work, including that for which it was presumably written, the literary historian is
prompt to point out that the kind of audience that Pope had did condition the kind of
poetry that he wrote. The poem has its roots in history, past or present. Its place in the
historical context simply cannot be ignored.
I have stated these objections as sharply as I can because I am sympathetic with the
state of mind which is prone to voice them. Man's experience is indeed a seamless
garment, no part of which can be separated from the rest. Yet if we urge this fact, of
inseparability against the drawing of distinctions, then there is no point in talking about
criticism at all. I am assuming that distinctions are necessary and useful and indeed
inevitable.
The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and plays and novels are
written by men - that they do not somehow happen - and that they are written as
expressions of particular personalities and are written from all sorts of motives - for
money, from a desire to express oneself, for the sake of a cause, etc. Moreover, the
formalist critic knows as well as anyone that literary works are mere potential until they
are read - that is, that they are recreated in the minds of actual readers, who vary
enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas. But the
formalist critic is concerned primarily with the work itself. Speculation on the mental
processes of the author takes the critic away from the work into biography and
psychology. There is no reason, of course, why he should not turn away into biography
and psychology. Such explorations are very much worth making. But they should not be
confused with an account of the work. Such studies describe the process of composition,
not the structure of the thing composed, and they may be performed quite as validly for
the poor work as for the good one. They may be validly performed for any kind of
expression - nonliterary as well as literary.
On the other hand, exploration of the various readings which the work has received
also takes the critic away from the work into psychology and the history of taste. The
various imports of a given work may well be worth studying. I. A. Richards has put us all
in his debt by demonstrating what different experiences may be derived from the same
poem by an apparently homogeneous group of readers; and the scholars have pointed out,
all along, how different Shakespeare appeared to an eighteenth-century as compared with
a nineteenth-century audience; or how sharply
Page 13

The Language of Paradox
Cleanth Brooks
In this essay from The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks defines the New Critical conception
of poetry. Brooks' essay makes clear the debt the New Critics owed to Romanticism and
especially to the idealist poetic theories of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Romanticism, in their
work, represented an attempt to reassert the claims of religion in the face of the rationalist
skeptical critique of religion that emerged in the eighteenth century. The New Criticism is in
some respects a latter-day Romantic school of thought that also seeks to reintroduce reli-
gious meaning into literary study.
Few of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language of poetry is the language
of paradox. Paradox is the language of sophistry, hard, bright, witty; it is hardly the
language of the soul. We are willing to allow that paradox is a permissible weapon which
a Chesterton may on occasion exploit. We may permit it in epigram, a special sub variety
of poetry; and in satire, which though useful, we are hardly willing to allow to be poetry
at all. Our prejudices force us to regard paradox as intellectual rather than emotional,
clever rather than profound, rational rather than divinely irrational.
Yet there is a sense in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to
poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of
paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of
paradox. I overstate the case, to be sure; it is possible that the title of this chapter is itself
to be treated as merely a paradox. But there are reasons for thinking that the
overstatement which I propose may light up some elements in the nature of poetry which
tend to be overlooked.
The case of William Wordsworth, for instance, is instructive on this point. His poetry
would not appear to promise many examples of the language of paradox. He usually
prefers the direct attack. He insists on simplicity; he distrusts whatever seems sophistical.
And yet the typical Wordsworth poem is based upon a paradoxical situation. Consider
his celebrated
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun,
Breathless with adoration. ...
The poet is filled with worship, but the girl who walks beside him is not worshiping. The
implication is that she should respond to the holy time, and become like the evening
itself, nunlike; but she seems less worshipful than inanimate nature itself. Yet
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The Language of Paradox 29
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou
liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; And
worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, God
being with thee when we know it not
The underlying paradox (of which the enthusiastic reader may well be unconscious) is
nevertheless thoroughly necessary, even for that reader. Why does the innocent girl
worship more deeply than the self-conscious poet who walks beside her? Because she is
filled with an unconscious sympathy for all of nature, not merely the grandiose and
solemn. One remembers the lines from Wordsworth's friend, Coleridge:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small.
Her unconscious sympathy is the unconscious worship. She is in communion with nature
"all the year," and her devotion is continual whereas that of the poet is sporadic and
momentary. But we have not done with the paradox yet. It not only underlies the poem,
but something of the paradox informs the poem, though, since this is Wordsworth, rather
timidly. The comparison of the evening to the nun actually has more than one dimension.
The calm of the evening obviously means "worship," even to the dull-witted and
insensitive. It corresponds to the trappings of the nun, visible to everyone. Thus, it
suggests not merely holiness, but, in the total poem, even a hint of Pharisaical holiness,
with which the girl's careless innocence, itself a symbol of her continual secret worship,
stands in contrast.
Or consider Wordsworth's sonnet, "Composed upon Westminster Bridge." I believe
that most readers will agree that it is one of Wordsworth's most successful poems; yet
most students have the greatest difficulty in accounting for its goodness. The attempt to
account for it on the grounds of nobility of sentiment soon breaks down. On this level,
the poem merely says: that the city in the morning light presents a picture which is
majestic and touching to all but the most dull of soul; but the poem says very little more
about the sight: the city is beautiful in the morning light and it is awfully still. The
attempt to make a case for the poem in terms of the brilliance of its images also quickly
breaks down: the student searches for graphic details in vain; there are next to no realistic
touches. In fact, the poet simply huddles the details together:
silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields...
We get a blurred impression - points of roofs and pinnacles along the skyline, all
twinkling in the morning light. More than that, the sonnet as a whole contains some very
flat writing and some well-worn comparisons.
The reader may ask: Where, then, does the poem get its power? It gets it, it seems to
me, from the paradoxical situation out of which the poem arises. The speaker is honestly
surprised, and he manages some sense of awed surprise into the poem. It is odd to the
poet that the city should be able to "wear the beauty of the morning" at all. Mount
Snowdon, Skiddaw, Mont Blanc - these wear it by natural right, but
Page 15

Structuralism, Linguistics,
Narratology
Page 16
2

Introduction: The Implied Order:
Structuralism
Structuralism begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, an early twentieth-century
Swiss linguist who argued that language should be studied as if it were frozen in time
and cut transversely like a leaf. What results is a vision of the entire language system as
it exists in implied or unconscious fashion in any spoken utterance. Utterances are
merely the manifestation of the rules of the system that lend order to the heterogeneity of
language. This notion of an implied order is central to the Structuralist undertaking, as it
spreads out from linguistics to anthropology and philosophy and to literary criticism
through the course of the twentieth century.
Structuralism derives both historically and logically from Formalism. Roman
Jakobson, one of the original Formalists, was also, by virtue of emigration, one of the
first major influences on French Structuralism, which flourished from the 1950s through
the 1960s. The scientific impulse evident in Formalism also finds its fulfillment in the
Structuralist emphasis on the task of adducing the internal system or order of linguistic,
cultural, and literary phenomena.
From Jakobson, early Structuralists such as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss learned
of Saussure's ideas about language. Levi-Strauss began to see that culture, like language,
is a system characterized by an internal order of interconnected parts that obey certain
rules of operation. A structure is both like a skeleton and like a genetic code in that it is
the principle of stability and coherence in any cultural system, while also being the
principle of action that allows the culture to exist in time as a living thing. After meeting
Jakobson in New York during their mutual exile during World War II, Levi-Strauss began
to think about culture as a form of communication like language. What was
communicated between cultural participants were tokens, like words, that enacted and
reproduced the basic assumptions and rules of the culture. In his analysis of kinship
systems, Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Levi-Strauss argued that primitive
cultures maintain peace between social groups by using women as tokens in marriage.
Such inter-familial and intertribal marriages function as a form of communication and
create personal or family relations that work to diminish the possibility of conflict. Levi-
Strauss went on to conduct famous studies of myths that noticed, in the same manner as
Russian critic Vladimir Propp's path-breaking work on folk tales, that such myths, despite
their heterogeneity and multiplicity, told the same kernel narratives. Those narratives
tended to work to resolve contradictions in the culture, such as that between a conception
of humans as plant-growing and peaceful and humans as hunters and
Page 17

54 Structuralism, Linguistics, Neonatology
warriors. The many versions of the Oedipus myth, for example, all tell a story about the
conflict between the idea that humans emerge from the earth ("Oedipus" means lame in
the foot) and the idea that they are born from other humans (hence the sanctity of the
incest taboo). The tale's function is to provide a mediation to the contradiction between
nature (sexuality) and culture (rule against incest) by forbidding natural sex between
family members.
The second major contribution that Saussure made to Structuralism was his conception
of the linguistic sign. Words, he noted, are signs, and linguistics rightly belongs to
another discipline called semiology, which would study the way signs, including words,
operate. Words are signs in that they consist of two faces or sides -the signifier, which is
the phonic component, and the signified, which is the ideational component. A word is
both a sound and an idea or image of its referent. Alongside and often in conjunction
with the Structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, there developed in France in the 1950s,
especially in the work of Roland Barthes, a concern with the study of the semiological
dimension of literature and culture. A work of literature, Barthes noted, is, after all,
nothing but an assemblage of signs that function in certain ways to create meaning. In
studying culture, Barthes noticed that films, commodities, events, and images are lent
meaning by their association with certain signs. Barthes went on in the 1960s to become
one of the major practitioners of semiological analysis in literature. His most important
books are Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), On Racine (1963), Critical
Essays (1964), Elements of Semiology (1965), and S/Z (1970).
A direct link between French Structuralism and Russian Formalism was established in
1965 with the publication of Tzvetan Todorov's collected translations of the Formalists'
Theory of Literature. Todorov's work is associated most often with the study of narrative,
and he helped formulate the Structuralist conception of narrative as the common element
of organization among diverse examples. In his study of Henry James's tales, for example
("The Structural Analysis of Narrative" in Poetics of Prose [1971]), he contends that they
all revolve around a missing center, a point of desire that is sought but that never appears.
The study of narrative (or narratology, as it is also called) is one of the most abiding
strands of Structuralist thinking.
By the mid-1960s, Structuralism was the dominant school of thought in French
intellectual life, and its influence is evident in the work of historian Michel Foucault,
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, literary critic Julia Kristeva, and philosopher Louis
Althusser. Foucault's work at that time included The Order of Things: An Archeology of
the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les choses, 1966), The Archeology of Knowledge (1969),
and The Order of Discourse (1970). Foucault is important for drawing attention to the
role of language in the conceptual frameworks or "epistemes" that are used in different
epochs for understanding the world. Words provide us with maps for assigning order to
nature and to society. Foucault notices that what counts as knowledge changes with time,
and with each change, the place of language in knowledge is also modified. In one era,
the world is considered to be a site of analogies between levels, but in a later epoch, the
world is broken down into discrete parts that are then organized into taxonomies.
Foucault is important as well for developing the idea of discourse and of discourse
formation. A discursive formation is a coherent group of assumptions and language
practices that applies to one region of knowledge, or expresses the beliefs of a social
group, or articulates rules and ideals regarding kinds of behavior. Modern science is
Page 18

The Implied Order: Structuralism 55
a discursive formation in that it is characterized both by a list of discoveries and a body
of knowledge, but also by recognized and widely accepted linguistic forms for describing
the methods and findings of science. When we get to feminism, you will encounter
feminists who speak of the "discourse of patriarchy," the set of ways of thinking and of
practicing language that lend coherence to male rule in society. They also describe the
discourse of advice books that educated women prior to the modern era in how to behave
"properly" as women, that is, in how to be "chaste, silent, and obedient."
Foucault's work draws attention to the fact that many assumptions in a culture are
maintained by language practices that comprise a common tool both for knowing the
world and for constructing it. By construction here, we mean the translation of physical
realities into discursive realities. The "dominant discourse" of the US, for example, is one
that lends great privilege to the "freedom" of the individual. The physical reality of
modern life is hemmed in and constrained in many complex ways, from laws that allow
police to search automobiles without cause to an economic system that requires
enormous amounts of time spent at the workplace under someone else's control.
Nevertheless, this physical and institutional reality is rendered discursively in the
American lexicon as "freedom." Just as all women were far from being chaste, silent, and
obedient, despite what the dominant discourse of the advice or courtesy books mandated,
so also most Americans have limited access to the kind of pure freedom the dominant
term seems to imply. What Foucault noted was that the world we live in is shaped as
much by language as by knowledge or perception. Indeed, according to him, knowledge
and perception always occur through the mediation of language. We would not be able to
know anything if we were not able to order the world linguistically in certain ways.
In his later work, Foucault explores the way sexuality is characterized over history in
different discourses of the body {History of Sexuality [1976]). And he examines the
change in regimes of social discipline from medieval times to modern times {Discipline
and Punish [1975]).
Page 19

j f) 1 il / . hi ■-] - ! ; | 3 U
[}" ll u i' M.:
U (.:. The
Linguistic Foundation
Jonathan Culler
Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975) was one of the first complete introductions in
English to the French structuralist movement in literary criticism. In this selection, he pro-
poses an analogy between the structuralist description of how language operates and the
rules and conventions that make up human culture.
The notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena is based
on two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply
material objects or events but objects or events with meaning, and hence signs; and
second, that they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations, both
internal and external. Stress may fall on one or the other of these propositions - it would
be in these terms, for example, that one might try to distinguish semiology and
structuralism - but in fact the two are inseparable, for in studying signs one must
investigate the system of relations that enables meaning to be produced and, reciprocally,
one can only determine what are the pertinent relations among items by considering them
as signs.
Structuralism is thus based, in the first instance, on the realization that if human
actions or productions have a meaning there must be an underlying system of dis
tinctions and conventions which makes this meaning possible. Confronted with a
marriage ceremony or a game of football, for example, an observer from a culture
where these did not exist could present an objective description of the actions which
took place, but he would be unable to grasp their meaning and so would not be
treating them as social or cultural phenomena. The actions are meaningful only with
respect to a set of institutional conventions. Wherever there are two posts one can
kick a ball between them but one can score a goal only within a certain institutional
ized framework. As Levi-Strauss says in his "Introduction a l'ceuvre de Marcel
Mauss," "particular actions of individuals are never symbolic in themselves; they are
the elements out of which is constructed a symbolic system, which must be collect
ive" (p. xvi). The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a
whole system of constitutive rules: rules which do not regulate behavior so much as
create the possibility of particular forms of behavior. The rules of English enable
sequences of sound to have meaning; they make it possible to utter grammatical or
ungrammatical sentences. And analogously, various social rules make it possible to
marry, to score a goal, to write a poem, to be impolite. It is in this sense that a
culture is composed of a set of symbolic systems ___
To claim that cultural systems may with profit be treated as "languages" is to suggest
that one will understand them better if one discusses them in terms provided
Page 20

The Linguistic Foundation 57
by linguistics and analyzes them according to procedures used by linguists. In fact, the
range of concepts and methods which structuralists have found useful is fairly restricted
and only some half-dozen linguists could qualify as seminal influences. The first, of
course, is Ferdinand de Saussure, who waded into the heterogeneous mass of linguistic
phenomena and, recognizing that progress would be possible only if one isolated a
suitable object for study, distinguished between speech acts (la parole) and the system of
a language (la langue). The latter is the proper object of linguistics. Following Saussure's
example and concentrating on the system which underlies speech sounds, members of the
Prague linguistic circle - particularly Jakobson and Trubetz-koy - effected what Levi-
Strauss called the "phonological revolution" and provided what was to later structuralists
the clearest model of linguistic method. Distinguishing between the study of actual
speech sounds (phonetics) and the investigation of those aspects of sound that are
functional in a particular language (phonology), Trubetzkoy argued that "phonology
should investigate which phonic differences are linked, in the language under
consideration, with differences of meaning, how these differentiating elements or marks
are related to one another, and according to what rules they combine to form words and
phrases" (Principes de phonologie, pp. 11-12). Phonology was important for
structuralists because it showed the systematic nature of the most familiar phenomena,
distinguished between the system and its realization and concentrated not on the
substantive characteristics of individual phenomena but on abstract differential features
which could be defined in relational terms....
The basic distinction on which modern linguistics rests, and which is equally crucial
to the structuralist enterprise in other fields, is Saussure's isolation of langue from parole.
The former is a system, an institution, a set of interpersonal rules and norms, while the
latter comprises the actual manifestations of the system in speech and writing. It is, of
course, easy to confuse the system with its manifestations, to think of English as the set
of English utterances. But to learn English is not to memorize a set of utterances; it is to
master a system of rules and norms which make it possible to produce and understand
utterances. To know English is to have assimilated the system of the language. And the
linguist's task is not to study utterances for their own sake; they are of interest to him
only in so far as they provide evidence about the nature of the underlying system, the
English language.
Within linguistics itself there are disagreements about what precisely belongs to
langue and what to parole: whether, for example, an account of the linguistic system
should specify the acoustic and articulatory features that distinguish one phoneme from
another (/p/ is "voiceless" and /b/ "voiced"), or whether such features as "voiced" and
"voiceless" should be thought of as the manifestations in parole of what, in la langue
itself, is a purely formal and abstract distinction. Such debates need not concern the
structuralist, except in so far as they indicate that structure can be defined at various
levels of abstraction. What does concern him is a pair of distinctions which the
differentiation of langue from parole is designed to cover between rule and behavior and
between the functional and the nonfunctional.
The distinction between rule and behavior is crucial to any study concerned with the
production or communication of meaning. In investigating physical events one may
formulate laws which are nothing other than direct summaries of behavior, but in the case
of social and cultural phenomena the rule is always at some distance from actual behavior
and that gap is a space of potential meaning. The instituting of the simplest rule, such as
"members of this club will not step on cracks in the
Page 21

Course in General Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure
Assembled by students from class notes and published in 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure's
Course in General Linguistics quickly became one of the most influential books of the
twentieth century. It inspired a wide range of work in anthropology, sociology, philosophy,
and literary criticism that is usually referred to as Structuralism.
In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating: (1) what is
social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more
or less accidental.
Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated
by the individual. It never requires premeditation, and reflection enters in only for the
purpose of classification, which we shall take up later.
Speaking, on the contrary, is an individual act. It is willful and intellectual. Within the
act, we should distinguish between: (1) the combinations by which the speaker uses the
language code for expressing his own thought; and (2) the psychophysical mechanism
that allows him to exeriorize those combinations.
To summarize, these are the characteristics of language:
(1) Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts. It can
be localized in the limited segment of the speaking-circuit where an auditory image
becomes associated with a concept. It is the social side of speech, outside the individual
who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of
contract signed by the members of a community. Moreover, the individual must always
serve an apprenticeship in order to learn the functioning of language; a child assimilates
it only gradually. It is such a distinct thing that a man deprived of the use of speaking
retains it provided that he understands the vocal signs that he hears.
(2) Language, unlike speaking, is something that we can study separately. Although
dead languages are no longer spoken, we can easily assimilate their linguistic organisms.
We can dispense with the other elements of speech; indeed, the science of language is
possible only if the other elements are excluded.
(3) Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as defined, is homogeneous. It is a
system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-
images, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological.
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60 Structuralism, Linguistics, Narratology
(4) Language is concrete, no less so than speaking; and this is a help in our study of it.
Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not abstractions; associations which
bear the stamp of collective approval - and which added together constitute language - are
realities that have their seat in the brain.
We have just seen that language is a social institution; but several features set it apart
from other political, legal, etc. institutions.
We must call in a new type of facts in order to illuminate the special nature of
language.
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a
system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military
signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems.
A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part
of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology
(from Greek semeion, "sign"). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws
govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it
has a right to existence, a place started out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the
general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to
linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of
anthropological facts...
Sign, Signified, Signifier
Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a naming-process only - a
list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names. For example:
etc. etc.
This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas
exist before words...; it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological
Page 23

Two Aspects of Language
Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson helped found the Moscow Linguistic Circle, and he worked with Viktor
Shklovsky at the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. After emigrating from Russia in
1920, he worked in Prague with the Prague Linguistic Circle. Eventually, he made his way to
the US, where he helped inspire Claude Levi-Strauss, another European exile driven from
home by the Nazis, to invent Structuralist Anthropology, an attempt to merge linguistic
theory and anthropological analysis. Jakobson, along with N. S. Troubetzkoy, contributed to
the "phonological revolution," the insight that words are generated from differences be-
tween distinctive features such as voiced and unvoiced or aspirated and non-aspirated
sounds. This selection was first published in 1956.
The varieties of aphasia are numerous and diverse, but all of them oscillate between the
two polar types just described. Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some
impairment, more or less severe, either of the faculty for selection and substitution or for
combination and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of
metalinguistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the
hierarchy of linguistic units. The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former, the
relation of contiguity in the latter type of aphasia. Metaphor is alien to the similarity
disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder.
The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one
topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The
metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic
way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and
metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted or
totally blocked - an effect which makes the study of aphasia particularly illuminating for
the linguist. In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but
careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality,
and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other.
In a well-known psychological test, children are confronted with some noun and told
to utter the first verbal response that comes into their heads. In this experiment two
opposite linguistic predilections are invariably exhibited: the response is intended either
as a substitute for, or as a complement to the stimulus. In the latter case the stimulus and
the response together form a proper syntactic construction, most usually a sentence.
These two types of reaction have been labeled substitutive and predicative.
To the stimulus hut one response was burnt out; another is a poor little house. Both
reactions are predicative; but the first creates a purely narrative context, while in the
Page 24

Two Aspects of Language 11
second there is a double connection with the subject hut; on the one hand, a positional
(namely, syntactic) contiguity, and on the other a semantic similarity.
The same stimulus produced the following substitutive reactions: the tautology hut;
the synonyms cabin and hovel; the antonym palace, and the metaphors den and burrow.
The capacity of two words to replace one another is an instance of positional similarity,
and, in addition, all these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or
contrast). Metonymical responses to the same stimulus, such as thatch, litter, or poverty,
combine and contrast the positional similarity with semantic contiguity.
In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their
aspects (positional and semantic) - selecting, combining, and ranking them - an
individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences.
In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich
material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a
compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the
West Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral traditions. This provides an objective
criterion of what in the given speech community acts as a correspondence. Since on any
verbal level - morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological - either of these two
relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear -and each in either of two aspects - an
impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational
poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions
predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant.
In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these
alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism
and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized
that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the
so-called "realistic" trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of
romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of
contiguous relationships, the realistic author metonymic-ally digresses from the plot to
the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of
synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide Tolstoy's artistic attention is
focused on the heroine's handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches "hair on the
upper lip" or "bare shoulders" are used by the same writer to stand for the female
characters to whom these features belong.
The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes is by no
means confined to verbal art. The same oscillation occurs in sign systems other than
language.1
A salient example from the history of painting is the manifestly metonymical
orientation of cubism, where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches; the
surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the
productions of D. W. Griffith, the art of the cinema, with its highly developed capacity
for changing the angle, perspective, and focus of "shots," has broken with the tradition of
the theater and ranged an unprecedented variety of synecdochic "close-ups" and
metonymic "set-ups" in general. In such pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin, these
devices in turn were superseded by a novel, metaphoric "montage" with its "lap
dissolves" - the filmic similes.
The bipolar structure of language (or other semiotic systems), and, in aphasia, the
fixation on one of these poles to the exclusion of the other require systematic
Page 25

Mythologies
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes played a major role in the development of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist
literary criticism in France from the 1950s to the 1970s. In his early work, Elements of
Semiology (1965), he introduced the ideas of Saussure to the French intellectual community,
and he offered a wide range of exemplary applications of "semiology," or the science of
signs, to everything from literature to fashion and cuisine. He went on to write numerous
works of Structuralist literary criticism. After 1968, influenced by the work of Jacques
Derrida, Barthes turned away from classic Structuralism's concern with the orders of signs
and worked instead on the disordering potential of literary semiosis, its tendency,to trans-
gress the identities and boundaries (such as the idea of the "author") that define traditional
literary study. His essay "Death of the Author" (1968) is something of a Post-Structuralist
manifesto, and this stage of Barthes's work achieves its most mature manifestation in his
famous S/Z (1970), a lengthy reading of a short story by Balzac. These selections from
Mythologies date from 1957.
In myth, we find again the tri-dimensional pattern which I have just described: the
signifier, the signified and the sign. But myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed
from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semio-logical
system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in
the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the
materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals,
objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as
soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their
unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language. Whether it deals with
alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in them only a sum of signs, a global
sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. And it is precisely this final term which
will become the first term of the greater system which it builds and of which it is only a
part. Everything happens as if myth shifted the formal system of the first significations
sideways. As this lateral shift is essential for the analysis of myth, I shall represent it in
the following way, it being understood, of course, that the spatialization of the pattern is
here only a metaphor:
Language
MYTH
1. Signifier 2. Signified
3. Sign I
SIGNIFIER
II SIGNIFIED
III SIGN
Page 26

The Structure of Narrative
Transmission
Seymour Chatman
Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) played
an important role in the development of modern "narratology." In this earlier essay (1972), he
begins to develop the idea that narrative is a discourse that follows conventions and rules,
It is popular nowadays to assume that narrative is a semiological or quasi-semio-logical
structure quite separate from the language or other medium which communicates it. As
such it consists of an expression plane (called 'narrative discourse', or simply 'discourse')
and a content plane (called 'story').1
The expression plane contains the set of narrative
statements, where 'statement' is independent of and more abstract than any particular
manifestation. A certain posture in the ballet, a series of film shots, a whole paragraph in
a novel, or only a single word - any of these might be the actualizations of a single
narrative statement, since narrative as such is independent of medium. The fundamental
narrative verb is DO, or where the subject is patient, rather than agent, HAPPEN. As
Aristotle maintains, action is the fundamental narrative element. Of course, actions are
only performed by (or happen to) actors, upon or in reference to objects. So we must
recognize not only narrative statements of actions - I will call them PROCESS statements -
but also narrative statements of existence which I will call EXISTENCE statements (these
include descriptions).
Crosscutting this dichotomy is another which is based on whether the statement is
directly presented to the audience or mediated by someone - the someone we call the
narrator. Direct presentation presumes a kind of 'overhearing' or 'spying' on the audience's
part; in mediated narration, on the other hand, the audience is directly addressed by a
narrator. This is essentially the ancient distinction between mimesis and diegesis, or in
modern terms between showing and telling. Insofar as there is telling, there must be a
teller, a narrating voice. To specify the four consequent possibilities, I propose the terms
ENACTS (the operation of an unmediated or 'shown' process statement), RECOUNTS (that of
a 'told' process statement), PRESENTS (that of a 'shown' stasis statement) and DESCRIBES
(that of a 'told' stasis statement). It is essential to understand that 'statement' is used here
in an abstract sense, independent of any particular medium. We can still agree with
Aristotle that mimesis is the mode of the drama and diegesis that of the dithyramb or pure
lyric expression, and that epic or narrative is a mixed mode, combining elements both of
direct and imitated speech. Cinema of course can also contain diegetic elements - for
instance, captions and legends which help to set the scene or which recount interven-
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98 Structuralism, Linguistics, Narratology
ing events. And Brecht has brought such devices into the theatre. But the medium of
drama is more typically presentational; there do not need to be existence statements, since
the existents are simply there, on the stage or screen - characters, props, stage-settings. Of
course, mixed modes are possible: for instance, a character may narrate a story on stage,
or the like. The cinema regularly uses a disembodied narrative voice (technically marked
in scripts as 'Voice Over'). It sometimes happens that there is a virtual redundancy - the
narrative voice telling exactly what the camera shows; good examples occur in Robert
Bresson's film version of Bernanos' Journal d'un Cure de Campagne. For this, as for
other reasons, the narrative film has affinities with literary narrative that it does not share
with plays. Indeed, the term 'narrative film' is often used to distinguish this genre from
the 'documentary'. Ballet, too, is radically mimetic; but comic-strips are generally mixed
(although a fad for the pantomimic style has recently developed). Literary narrative can
be more or less purely mimetic: stories can be written consisting solely of dialogue, for
example.
So a central consideration for the theory of narrative is the transmitting source which
is postulated. By 'transmission' I simply mean the class of kinds of narrative presentation
which includes as its two subclasses showing and telling (always remembering that
narrative showing is different from, say, theatrical showing). We can distinguish two
broad categories, according to whether or not there is an explicit narrator, and if there is,
whether his existence is obvious, that is overt, or covert. This distinction is often
subsumed under the term 'point of view', but it is clear that that term can be seriously
misleading and so will be avoided in the present work.
The initial question, then, is whether a narrator is present, and if he is, how his
presence is recognized and how strongly it is felt by the audience. The narrator comes
into existence when the story itself is made to seem a demonstrable act of communi-
cation. If an audience feels that it is in some sense spoken to (regardless of the medium),
then the existence of a teller must be presumed. In other cases, the audience feels that it is
directly witnessing the action. Naturally, in all but the scenic arts - like drama and the
ballet - pure mimesis, that is, direct witnessing, is an illusion. The question, then, is how
this illusion is achieved, by what convention does a reader, for example, accept the idea
that it is 'as if he were personally on the scene, though the fact is that he comes to it by
turning pages and reading words. It is clear that the author must make special efforts to
preserve the illusion that the events are literally happening before the reader's eyes. And it
is only very recently - within the last hundred years - that attempts at a purely 'dramatic'
narrative have been made.
That it is essential not to confuse author and narrator is now a commonplace of modern
criticism. As Monroe C. Beardsley argues, '... the speaker of a literary work cannot be
identified with the author - and therefore the character and condition of the speaker can
be known by internal evidence alone - unless the author has provided a pragmatic
context, or a claim of one, that connects the speaker with himself.'3
And even in such a
context, it is preferable to speak not of the author, but of the 'author', or even better, '
"author"-narrator', for he is simply one of the possible kinds of narrators. The 'author'-
narrator is never equivalent to the flesh-and-blood Dickens or Hemingway or Fielding. If
he were, we could not account for the inevitable discrepancies between the values and
ideas and experiences of authors as we know them from biographies, and the values,
ideas and experiences implicit in their works. Or between two works by the same author,
between the 'Fielding' of Tom
Page 28

Rhetoric, Phenomenology,
Reader Response
Page 29
3

Introduction: Language and Action
In this section, we bring together two sides of the equation of reading - the production of
language acts known as rhetoric and the reception of such acts in reading and
interpretation. The dialogic structure of the literary text requires that both sides be taken
into account. Rhetoric, the formulation of language for readers, invites and solicits a
response from readers.
In ancient Greece and Rome, language was recognized as an important feature of
social and political life. Training in how to think properly took the form of training in
how to use language effectively. Logic, the right use of such mental processes as
induction and deduction, was studied in conjunction with rhetoric, the use of forms to
give shape to language and the use of language to make argumentative points and attain
emotional effects. In the modern period, the rise of a positivist model of science and the
development of more refined forms of abstract mathematical logic eroded the link
between philosophy and rhetoric. A study of the forms, tropes, topics, and genres of
discourse was no longer considered sufficient for gaining an understanding of how
thinking worked or of how far logic could be extended and elaborated. Rhetoric receded
in importance in the humanities. Some literary scholars, like Kenneth Burke in the 1930s,
still spoke of the importance of rhetoric for an understanding of social action and literary
form, but they were few in number. The intellectual movement called Positivism, which
favored scientific method and the study of positive facts, displaced rhetoric from its
central place in the humanities in education.
One of the major intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century consisted of restoring
importance to the study of language. It began in linguistics and carried over into
anthropology, philosophy, and the literary criticism of the Russian Formalists and the
French Structuralists. Continental philosophers, such as Ernst Cassirer and Martin
Heidegger, were among the first to argue for the centrality of language to human
experience and to social institutions. Language philosophers in England, such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, noted that human knowledge takes place in language and
that language is central to human social activity. In conjunction with these intellectual
movements there arose a new interest in rhetoric on the part of literary scholars in the mid
to late twentieth century.
The work of J. L. Austin, especially his seminal How To Do Things With Words
(1962), provoked an interest in the way language acts to create institutions, social bonds,
emotional effects, and modified realities. He described a class of what he called
"performative utterances," statements such as "I pronounce you man and wife" or "I
sentence you to death" that make things happen in the world. The
Page 30

128 Rhetoric, Phenomenology, Reader Response
American philosopher John Searle, in his books Speech Acts (1970) and The Social
Construction of Language (1995), played an especially important role in furthering
Austin's "speech act" theory. Literary critics have used the theory to study how literary
language takes the form of lies, promises, excuses, etc.
Austin's work and speech-act theory in general more rightly belong to the field of
pragmatics, the study of the active work of language to achieve certain effects in
particular situations. Language is both a means of representing things and thoughts and a
means of acting in the world. In the contemporary era, the study of the language of
literature, which is usually called "stylistics," blends with the study of language in many
other arenas of use. Modern rhetoricians examine, for example, the use of language in the
discourse of medicine or of economics. They are concerned particularly with the way
language contains embedded within it schemas for understanding the world in a particular
way. An important assumption of such discourse analysis is that language shapes people's
perceptions of the world. Further developments in speech-act theory contend that
language also actively constructs social reality. Institutions such as money depend on
language acts that create them and guarantee their credibility.
Like such social institutions, literature depends on being read in a certain way in order
to be effective and successful. It is written for an audience, and that audience is implied
in the text. Reception, response, and interpretation are in a sense preordained by the
rhetoric of the literary work, but the audience also plays a role in shaping how the work
will be understood and what meanings it will have. Each new generation and each new
group of readers in a new setting brings to a work different codes for understanding it.
One of the first literary critics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, noticed that a work of
literature is as remarkable for its effects as for its causes. Tragedy, he famously remarked,
succeeds not so much for reasons of formal perfection as for reasons of the emotional
transformation that it works on audiences. The turn in the tragic plot is also a turn of
emotion in the audience as, with the tragic hero, the audience moves from blindness to
recognition. Such recognition is both a moment of cognitive turning or revelation and a
moment of affective response and fellow-feeling. Identified with the hero, we also
identify with his feelings of horror or pain or despair. His sense of revolt at the mockery
Fate works on human delusions is our own.
A sense of the importance of the contact between literary work and its audiences was
shunted aside by later aesthetic theories, especially those developed under the auspices of
Romanticism. They emphasized the genius of the writer or creator in bringing the ideal
and the real, the universal and the concrete, together in a work of art. Attention shifted
from the psychological and emotional link between work and audience to the inner
harmony or organic unity of the work itself. These aesthetic theories were Platonic rather
than Aristotelian, more indebted to the idealism of Plato than to the realism of Aristotle.
If a work of literature had an effect on its audience worth noting, it was to inspire awe at
the way it provided a sublime glimpse into Eternity.
Two schools of thought worked to resuscitate interest in the role of the audience in
literature. One was the historical school that in the eighteenth century argued that to
know the meaning of older texts, one had to reconstruct the context in which they were
originally written. Who a work was addressed to in part determined how it
Page 31

Language and Action 129
should retroactively be interpreted. The other school was the philosophy of Imman-uel
Kant, who argued that knowledge is shaped by inner mental categories that operate prior
to any sense experience. They determine how we know the world. Knowledge that was
made up of sensory experience alone would have no unity or coherence. Such ideational
unity could be provided only by logical operations that the mind could produce. One
implication of this argument was to shift attention toward the work of the observer in
constructing knowledge both of the world and of art.
The important point for literary criticism is that the mind comes to literature or to
reading already prepared to follow the logic of the narrative or the verse form, to
formulate judgments, and to ascribe or deduce meaning. While there may be an object
called King Lear that exists independently in the world, its very construction as an
orderly narrative assumes certain capacities on the part of its audience. They must be
capable of recognizing the temporal structure of the play as a unity. As a play in which
certain kinds of speech are practiced, certain conclusions are reached, and certain kinds
of character delineated, it presupposes that the audience is capable of perceiving this
display of literary signs as a coherent order. Each person's reading will be shaped by
mental operations that are idiosyncratic and determined by that person's life history and
sociocultural context, but some are universal in character (and thus pretty much the same
for everyone). The universal mental operations have to do with the ability to follow the
logic of temporal narrative and to recognize the different placements of characters in
space from scene to scene. The more socially and historically specific (and therefore
variable) a priori judgments vary according to gender (some women might read the play
differently from some men and find Goneril more attractive, for example, than Cordelia)
or geography (someone in a country suffering from tyrannical rulers might find the
demise of Lear a pleasing, rather than a tragic, resolution).
The Kantian investigation of the role of the mind in shaping knowledge of the world
and, by implication, shaping the perception of the work of art was continued by Edmund
Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth century. His work on the phenomenology of
knowledge deepened an understanding of the operations of consciousness in bringing to
sensory experience an ideational and presensory component that was a feature of the
mind itself. Husserl was interested in delimiting the pure ideas that were possible only in
consciousness. Other philosophers in the same tradition, especially Martin Heidegger and
Hans-Georg Gadamer, worked out a compromise between the historicist position and the
Kantian one. Knowledge, they argued, occurs in time and history; it cannot achieve the
kind of transcendence Husserl especially desired for it. Instead, all knowledge is
interpretation, a transfer of meaning from one moment of history into another that always
inflects what is known with the categories and assumptions of the later moment.
Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1972), went so far as to argue that as a result all
knowledge will be tinged with error.
The leap from these conclusions to an understanding of the role of the reader's
cognition in the work of art was executed by Georges Poulet and Roman Ingarden. The
phenomenological literary criticism of Poulet, especially his book Metamorphoses of the
Circle (1961), transferred to American criticism a sense of the importance of the reader's
experience of a literary work. Ingarden's Cognition of the Work of Art (1968) argued for
an essential link between the work of the audience and the work itself.
Page 32

The US critic most responsible for disseminating the idea that the reader's experience
is as important as those qualities inherent to the work itself was Stanley Fish. Fish argued,
famously, that "there is no text in this class," by which he meant that the reader's
experience takes precedence over a description of the formal features of the work and, in
fact, constitutes those formal features. (See Is there a Text in this Class? [1980].) Those
features cannot be described except insofar as the mind grasps them. Hence, they have no
independent existence apart from the reader's response to them.
More recent thinkers along these lines have explored such things as the psychological
workings of reader response to a work of literature. Such work takes two forms. One is
an analysis of the way a work manipulates such feeling states as desire, anxiety, and fear.
A work of art evokes and directs libidinal urges in its audience. Another strand of work
studies actual audiences and asks how they respond to a particular writer. Finally,
researchers have also taken to noticing how a single work can be remade by different
moments of history or interpreted differently by differently located social agents. King
Lear, for example, was produced for many years with a happy ending that the culture of
the nineteenth century found more appealing than its original tragic conclusion. John
Frow has noted that Homer's Iliad changes remarkably from one epoch to another, as
translators give shape to the original that is usually inflected with their own culture's
concerns and preoccupations. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues in his book,
Distinction (1979), that audiences have different tastes that are largely determined by
class location and educational level. We classify literary works according to schemes that
we have inherited from our culture and from our social class situation.
Page 33

How To Do Things With Words
J. L. Austin
J. L Austin's How To Do Things With Words (1962) is one of those books that at first seem
unremarkable but become increasingly more remarkable with time. Austin describes a class
of utterances, which he calls "performatives," that effect actions in the world. John Searle
popularized and deepened Austin's work in his book Speech Acts (1969). Austin's work has
been important for Post-Structuralists and for gender theorists.
Lecture I
Preliminary isolation of the performative1
The type of utterance we are to consider here is not, of course, in general a type of
nonsense; though misuse of it can, as we shall see, engender rather special varieties of
'nonsense'. Rather, it is one of our second class - the masqueraders. But it does not by any
means necessarily masquerade as a statement of fact, descriptive or constative. Yet it
does quite commonly do so, and that, oddly enough, when it assumes its most explicit
form. Grammarians have not, I believe, seen through this 'disguise', and philosophers
only at best incidentally. It will be convenient, therefore, to study it first in this
misleading form, in order to bring out its characteristics by contrasting them with those of
the statement of fact which it apes.
We shall take, then, for our first examples some utterances which can fall into no
hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of 'statement', which are not non-
sense, and which contain none of those verbal danger-signals which philosophers have
by now detected or think they have detected (curious words like 'good' or 'all', suspect
auxiliaries like 'ought' or 'can', and dubious constructions like the hypothetical): all will
have, as it happens, humdrum verbs in the first person singular present indicative active.
Utterances can be found, satisfying these conditions, yet such that
A they do not 'describe' or 'report' or constate anything at all, are not 'true or false';
and B the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which
again
would not normally be described as saying something.
This is far from being as paradoxical as it may sound or as I have meanly been trying
to make it sound: indeed, the examples now to be given will be disappointing.
Page 34

Horn To Do Things With Words 163
Examples:
(E. a) 'I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)' - as uttered in the
course of the marriage ceremony. (E. b) 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' -
as uttered when smashing the bottle
against the stem. (E. c) 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother'
- as occurring in a will. (E. d) 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.'
In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appro-
priate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering
to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the utterances cited is
either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it. It needs argument no more
than that 'damn' is not true or false: it may be that the utterance 'serves to inform you' -
but that is quite different. To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances)
the words 'I name, &c.'. When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c, 'I do', I am not
reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it.
What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a
performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, 'a performative'. The
term 'performative' will be used in a variety of cognate ways and constructions, much as
the term 'imperative' is.7
The name is derived, of course, from 'perform', the usual verb
with the noun 'action': it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an
action - it is not normally thought of as just saying something.
A number of other terms may suggest themselves, each of which would suitably cover
this or that wider or narrower class of performatives: for example, many performatives
are contractual ('I bet') or declaratory ('I declare war') utterances. But no term in current
use that I know of is nearly wide enough to cover them all. One technical term that
comes nearest to what we need is perhaps 'operative', as it is used strictly by lawyers in
referring to that part, i.e. those clauses, of an instrument which serves to effect the
transaction (conveyance or what not) which is its main object, whereas the rest of the
document merely 'recites' the circumstances in which the transaction is to be effected.
But 'operative' has other meanings, and indeed is often used nowadays to mean little
more than 'important'. I have preferred a new word, to which, though its etymology is not
irrelevant, we shall perhaps not be so ready to attach some preconceived meaning.
Can saying make it so? Are
we then to say things like this:
'To marry is to say a few words', or
'Betting is simply saying something'?
Such a doctrine sounds odd or even flippant at first, but with sufficient safeguards it may
become not odd at all.
A sound initial objection to them may be this; and it is not without some importance.
In very many cases it is possible to perform an act of exactly the same kind not by
uttering words, whether written or spoken, but in some other way. For example, I may
Page 35

Not so much a Teaching as an
Intangling
Stanley Fish
With the publication of Surprised by Sin in 1967, Stanley Fish launched a long, successful
career as the most passionate defender of reader response criticism in the United States,
a career that culminated with the publication of his humorously entitled Is there a Text in
this Class? in 1980. In this selection from Surprised by Sin, Fish notices how John Milton
manipulates his readers in order to advance his moral argument.
The right thing in speaking really is that we should be satisfied not to annoy our
hearers, without trying to delight them: we ought in fairness to fight our case with no
help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter except the proof of those
facts. Still, as has been said, other things affect the result considerably, owing to the
defects of our hearers.
ARISTOTLE, Rhetoric
(i) The Defects of our Hearers
I would like to suggest something about Paradise Lost that is not new except for the
literalness with which the point will be made: (1) the poem's centre of reference is its
reader who is also its subject; (2) Milton's purpose is to educate the reader to an
awareness of his position and responsibilities as a fallen man, and to a sense of the
distance which separates him from the innocence once his; (3) Milton's method is to re-
create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem's scene) the drama of the Fall,
to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam's troubled clarity, that is to
say, 'not deceived'. In a limited sense few would deny the truth of my first two
statements; Milton's concern with the ethical imperatives of political and social behaviour
would hardly allow him to write an epic which did not attempt to give his audience a
basis for moral action; but I do not think the third has been accepted in the way that I
intend it.
A. J. A. Waldock, one of many sensitive readers who have confronted the poem since
1940, writes: 'Paradise Lost is an epic poem of singularly hard and definite outline,
expressing itself (or so at least would be our first impressions) with unmistakable clarity
and point.' In the course of his book Waldock expands the reservation indicated by his
parenthesis into a reading which predicates a disparity between Milton's intention and his
performance:
Page 36

In a sense Milton's central theme denied him the full expression of his deepest inter-
ests. It was likely, then, that as his really deep interests could not find outlet in his
poem in the right way they might find outlet in the wrong way. And to a certain extent
they do; they find vents and safety-valves often in inopportune places. Adam cannot
give Milton much scope to express what he really feels about life; but Satan is there,
Satan gives him scope. And the result is that the balance is somewhat disturbed;
pressures are set up that are at times disquieting, that seem to threaten more than once,
indeed, the equilibrium of the poem.
The 'unconscious meaning' portion of Waldock's thesis is, I think, as wrong as his
description of the reading experience as 'disquieting' is right. If we transfer the emphasis
from Milton's interests and intentions which are available to us only from a distance, to
our responses which are available directly, the disparity between intention and execution
becomes a disparity between reader expectation and reading experience; and the resulting
'pressures' can be seen as part of an intelligible pattern. In this way we are led to consider
our own experience as a part of the poem's subject.
By 'hard and definite outline' I take Waldock to mean the sense of continuity and
direction evoked by the simultaneous introduction of the epic tradition and Christian
myth. The 'definiteness' of a genre classification leads the reader to expect a series of
formal stimuli - martial encounters, complex similes, an epic voice - to which his
response is more or less automatic; the hardness of the Christian myth predetermines his
sympathies; the union of the two allows the assumption of a comfortable reading
experience in which conveniently labelled protagonists act out rather simple roles in a
succession of familiar situations. The reader is prepared to hiss the devil off the stage and
applaud the pronouncements of a partisan and somewhat human deity who is not unlike
Tasso's 'il Padre eterno'. But of course this is not the case; no sensitive reading of
Paradise Lost tallies with these expectations, and it is my contention that Milton
ostentatiously calls them up in order to provide his reader with the shock of their
disappointment. This is not to say merely that Milton communicates a part of his
meaning by a calculated departure from convention; every poet does that; but that Milton
consciously wants to worry his reader, to force him to doubt the correctness of his
responses, and to bring him to the realization that his inability to read the poem with any
confidence in his own perception is its focus.
Milton's programme of reader harassment begins in the opening lines; the reader,
however, may not be aware of it until line 84 when Satan speaks for the first time. The
speech is a powerful one, moving smoothly from the exdamatio of 'But O how fall'n' (84)
to the regret and apparent logic of 'till then who knew / The force of those dire Arms' (93-
4), the determination of 'courage never to submit or yield' (108) and the grand defiance of
'Irreconcilable to our grand Foe, / Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy / Sole
reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n' (122-4). This is our first view of Satan and the
impression given, reinforced by a succession of speeches in Book I, is described by
Waldock: 'fortitude in adversity, enormous endurance, a certain splendid recklessness,
remarkable powers of rising to an occasion, extraordinary qualities of leadership (shown
not least in his salutary taunts)'. But in each case Milton follows the voice of Satan with a
comment which complicates, and according to some, falsifies, our reaction to it:
Page 37

Interpretive Communities
Stanley Fish
This selection from Fish's most anthologized essay, "Interpreting the Variorum" (1976),
contains his argument for a concept of interpretive communities, groups of readers who
share a set of conventions for understanding literary works in certain ways. According to
Fish, the formal properties of literary works exist only as they are activated by such commu-
nities of readers. Literature, in other words, is both production and consumption at once.
It seems then that the price one pays for denying the priority of either forms or intentions
is an inability to say how it is that one ever begins. Yet we do begin, and we continue,
and because we do there arises an immediate counterobjection to the preceding pages. If
interpretive acts are the source of forms rather than the other way around, why isn't it the
case that readers are always performing the same acts or a sequence of random acts, and
therefore creating the same forms or a random succession of forms? How, in short, does
one explain these two "facts" of reading? (1) The same reader will perform differently
when reading two "different" (the word is in quotation marks because its status is
precisely what is at issue) texts; and (2) different readers will perform similarly when
reading the "same" (in quotes for the same reason) text. That is to say, both the stability
of interpretation among readers and the variety of interpretation in the career of a single
reader would seem to argue for the existence of something independent of and prior to
interpretive acts, something which produces them. I will answer this challenge by
asserting that both the stability and the variety are functions of interpretive strategies
rather than of texts.
Let us suppose that I am reading Lycidas. What is it that I am doing? First of all, what I
am not doing is "simply reading," an activity in which I do not believe because it implies
the possibility of pure (that is, disinterested) perception. Rather, I am proceeding on the
basis of (at least) two interpretive decisions: (1) that Lycidas is a pastoral and (2) that it
was written by Milton. (I should add that the notions "pastoral" and "Milton" are also
interpretations; that is, they do not stand for a set of indisputable, objective facts; if they
did, a great many books would not now be getting written.) Once these decisions have
been made (and if I had not made these I would have made others, and they would be
consequential in the same way), I am immediately predisposed to perform certain acts, to
"find," by looking for, themes (the relationship between natural processes and the careers
of men, the efficacy of poetry or of any other action), to confer significances (on flowers,
streams, shepherds, pagan deities), to mark out "formal" units (the lament, the
consolation, the turn, the affirmation of faith, and so on). My disposition to perform these
acts (and others; the list is not meant to be exhaustive) constitutes a set of interpretive
Page 38

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