Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms 9781442674417

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E N C Y C L O P E D I A OF CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY Approaches, Scholars, Terms The last half of the twentieth century has witnessed a revolution in literary studies. Drawing on a vast network of other disciplines - such as philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, political economy, sociology, women's studies, religion - the new literary theories are not only changing traditional boundaries and issues of literary study, but also questioning the very foundations of Western thought. Irena R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to this complex field. The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory surveys this enormous range of literary theories, theorists, and critical terms, and provides lucid explanations of each. A distinguished international group of 170 scholars has contributed to this three-part volume. In Part i, forty-eight evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools and approaches to literature arose, the uses and limitations of each, and the key issues they address. A bibliographical essay on theory and pedagogy concludes this section; it suggests some of the ways that the theoretical issues have altered and will continue to alter ways of teaching literature. Focusing on individual theorists, Part 2 examines their achievements, influence, and their place in the larger critical context. Part 3 deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. Bibliographies for each entry and extensive cross-referencing throughout make the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians, and for all scholars of contemporary criticism and culture. 1 R E N A R. M A K A R Y K is Chair of Graduate English Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Comic Justice in Shakespeare, editor of and contributor to 'Living Record': Essays in Memory of Constantine Bida, and translator and editor of About the Harrowing of Hell: A jyth-Century Ukrainian Play in Its European Context.

Advisory Board Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto Patrick Imbert, University of Ottawa Louis Kelly, University of Ottawa Camille R. La Bossiere, University of Ottawa Sheldon P. Zitner, University of Toronto Editorial Assistant Micheline White

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF C O N T E M P O R A R Y LITERARY THEORY Approaches, Scholars, Terms

IRENA R. MAKARYK General Editor and Compiler

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO Toronto

Buffalo

London

PRESS

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1993 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Paperback reprinted 1993,1994,1995,1997, 2000 Hardcover reprinted 1995 ISBN 0-8020-5914-7 (cloth) ISBN o-8o20-686o-x (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper Theory/Culture General editors: Linda Hutcheon and Paul Perron

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory (Theory/culture) Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5914-7 (bound) ISBN o-8o2o-686o-x (pbk.) i. Criticism - Encyclopedias, i. Makaryk, Irena Rima, 1951ii. Series. PN8i.E63 1993

801'.95

C92-095270-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Canada

Contents

Introduction vii Contributors xi

1 APPROACHES 3

Theory and Pedagogy 218 2 SCHOLARS 223

3 T E R M S 503 List of entries 653

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Introduction

'A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers.' Bertolt Brecht One hundred and seventy eminent scholars from around the world have helped create this book. Gathered from various departments Religion, Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Linguistics, Women's Studies, English, Modern Languages, French, Political Science, Comparative Literature, Slavic Studies, Translation, Administration - the contributors to this encyclopedia suggest, by the very diversity of their affiliations, the rich variety of contemporary theory. Yet this book in itself may be perceived as a kind of literary paradox - a strange platypus for the beast described here not only resists classification (not an uncommon characteristic of any discipline) but even rejects the very nature of this task. Simply by being, this encyclopedia is an offence to some of the very subject-matter with which it deals - the 'new new theory' which questions the apparent tradition into which this genre of work falls: the encyclopedia. Many schools, approaches and theorists discussed here attack such 'magisterial' products, as well as presuppositions concerning the neutrality and disinterestedness of scholarship, the idea of literary canons, the transparency of language, and even the notion of clarity itself as a desirable or necessary feature of argument. Issues discussed reappear from a variety of points of view, some that overlap, others that contradict each other; all in combination suggest the contestatory nature of the current critical and theoretical scene. Selection of entries The present-day field of literary theory and criticism is as vast as it is varied. Though it is

not meant to be complete, this volume is intended to suggest something of the immense scope of current theoretical approaches. In establishing the list of entries, the editor consulted a variety of sources, including the PMLA annual bibliographical listings under literary criticism and theory, the most-cited authors in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Current Comments, and an array of monographs and bibliographies on contemporary theory. The schools, approaches and theorists were generally selected on the basis of their most-frequently cited status. In a few other cases, such as Quebec feminism and some European approaches, the decision for inclusion was based on the desire to make more widely known to an anglophone audience the work of lesser-known but important theories. At the core of this volume is the attempt to delineate the different kinds of approaches and schools since New Criticism, that is, the trends, tendencies and critics who have commanded attention over the past 50 years. Yet many of these approaches are grounded in earlier theoretical work. For this reason, a number of important precursors appear in this volume - Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, among others - and a number of schools, such as the Neo-Aristotelians, the Russian formalists, the Prague School. While the original list of entries for this volume was considerably shorter, expansion and revision have occurred after extensive correspondence with scholars from around the world. Unfortunately, some entries had to be abandoned either when it proved impossible to find a contributor who could prepare an entry within the time constraints of

Introduction the project, or, in much rarer cases, when the entry did not meet the standards of the volume. Evaluation Each of the entries has undergone a rigorous evaluation procedure. In some cases, this has meant that as many as nine readers commented on a single article. Revisions following these numerous reports were often extensive. The contributor alone, however, is responsible for the final version of the entry. Organization Constructed as both dictionary and analytic compendium, this book includes three sections designed to serve as either building blocks or as separate points of entry. Each section is alphabetically arranged. Part i of this volume, 'Approaches' - 48 evaluative essays - examines the great variety of schools and approaches to literary studies, providing a sense of their historical, social and cultural contexts, an overview of the basic issues and of their major practitioners. Some of these essays examine large, systemic theories shared by scholars working in different parts of the world. Others are affiliated with particular schools (and hence with specific geographical locations) which have developed a common point of view. Still others merely share some general assumptions but employ a plethora of different methodologies. This section concludes with a bibliographical essay on the connections between theory and pedagogy. In particular, it examines the nature of the evolution of English studies as a case study of the development of literary theory. Part 2, 'Scholars,' focuses on those who have helped transform the study of literature. The list includes not only literary theorists and critics but also historians, philosophers, linguists, social scientists, theologians, polemicists, authors. Not always neatly pigeon-holed into any particular school or approach, the work of these theorists and critics is explored and assessed. Part 3, 'Terms,' deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. A selected list, it encompasses what Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov have called both methodological and descriptive concepts. These have been chosen on the basis of difficulty, the frequency with which

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students may encounter these terms or their centrality to an understanding of a particular theory or approach. Throughout the volume, the contributors have attempted to make the language as straightforward as possible, recognizing that here literary scholars are speaking to each other and thus are still heavily dependent upon their own dialect. Thus, the implied reader to whom this book is directed is not the general reader, but the advanced student of literature, the reader already engaged in literary criticism, and often either on the way to or already in the profession. In some cases, where the very nature of the material deliberately confounds logic, and where the theorists themselves refuse linearity of argument and espouse what used to be called a more poetic manner of writing, the density and flavour of the work have been retained. While some uniformity of style has been imposed on the entries, the individuality of the scholars has not, I hope, been entirely suppressed. Transliteration The transliteration of Slavic languages follows the Library of Congress system, except where bibliographical information provides alternative spellings, or when a more commonly used spelling would be more readily identified by the reader. Directions for use 1 Articles are arranged alphabetically within each of the three sections. 2 Asterisks refer the reader to another article in the volume. 3 Bibliographies at the end of each entry suggest material for further study. Acknowledgments This volume is unusual in having received all of its support from the University of Ottawa. The Research Committee of the School of Graduate Studies and Res'earch provided the initial funding for the project in late 1986. Subsequently, the Committee's additional grants were augmented by the generosity of three consecutive deans: Dr. Marcel Hamelin (now Rector of the University), Dr. Nigel Dennis, and Dr. Jean-Louis Major, who

Introduction chaired the Research Committee of the Faculty of Arts. Such assistance would not be possible without the unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement of Dr. Frank Tierney, then Chair of the Department of English, who first listened to the idea many years ago, and then convinced the appropriate committees of the necessity of their financial support. With similar zeal, Dr. David Staines, his successor, helped see the project to its completion and, like Dr. Tierney, supplied the project with much-needed graduate assistants, and with larger office space for the growing number of files. A number of colleagues provided very helpful suggestions and criticisms. In the first few years of the project Dr. Peter McCormick was particularly invaluable in areas where the literary crossed with the philosophical. Also, much profit was derived from conversations with Professors Ina Ferris, David L. Jeffrey, Sheldon P. Zitner, Linda Hutcheon, and, especially, Camille R. La Bossiere. Instrumental to the success of this book has been the work of the members of the Advisory Board: Linda Hutcheon (Toronto), Louis Kelly (Ottawa), Patrick Imbert (Ottawa), Camille R. La Bossiere (Ottawa), and Sheldon P. Zitner (Toronto), who read all of the material and made valuable comments and suggestions. They have also helped encourage this harmless drudge when my resolution became sluggish, and my patience dull. The difficult and very important task of reading and evaluating the entries fell to Naomi Black (York), William Bonney (Mississippi), Donald J. Childs (Ottawa), J. Douglas Clayton (Ottawa), Andrew Donskov (Ottawa), David Dooley (Toronto), Ina Ferris (Ottawa), Len Findlay (Saskatchewan), Terry Goldie (York), Rosmarin Heidenreich (St. Boniface), John S. Hill (Ottawa), Nina Kolesnikoff (McMaster), Peter McCormick (Ottawa), Dominic

Manganiello (Ottawa), Reed Merrill (Washington), Heather Murray (Toronto), Bernhard Radloff (Ottawa), David Raynor (Ottawa), Ronald de Souza (Toronto), and John Thurston (Ottawa). The English Department's Secretariat - especially Mrs. Marie Tremblay-Chenier, Mrs. Julie Sevigny-Roy and Mrs. Paula Greenwood passed on the great many faxes, telephone messages and photocopying orders with equanimity and good humour. Roy Gibbons, then of Research Services, set up the computer program for the project. Additional programing and a great deal of technical troubleshooting were graciously handled by Professor George White of the Computer Science Department. Mr. Roland Serrat, Computing and Communications Services, authoritatively directed the preparation of the machine-readable copy for the University of Toronto Press. Finally, an enormous amount of credit must be given to our University of Ottawa English Department graduate students, especially Anne-Louise Gibbons, who acted as my research assistant for over three years, inputting material and making helpful suggestions of her own. Marilyn Geary took upon herself the task of making our relatively orderly filing system truly so. Rhonda Waukhonen, Steven de Paul, Debbie James, and Chris Maguire were all at one time or another involved in the tedious business of photocopying, checking and dispatching materials. Sandra Schaeken and Cheryl Ringor (from Law) acted as inputters in the last months of the project. But most thanks are due to the diligence, astonishing cheerfulness, patience, and professionalism of Micheline White, the assistant who conquered the computer and in the last year of the project brought the whole volume together. The task literally could not have been done without her.

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Contributors

Adamson, Joseph (McMaster): deconstruction, differaiu'c/differciice, grammatology, metaphysics of presence, supplementarity, white mythology, Jacques Derrida Adey, Lionel (Victoria): C(live) S(taples) Lewis van Alphen, Ernst (Utrecht): narratology (with Marie-l.aure Ryan) Allen, Douglas (Maine): Mircea Eliade Anderson, Roland (Alberta): liminality (with Linda Woodbridge) Balfour, Ian (York): synecdoche Barasch, Frances K. (Baruch): theories of the grotesque Baross, Zsuzsa (Trent): poststructuralism Barsky, Robert (McGill): discourse analysis theory Baxter, John (Dalhousie): mimesis Beddoes, fulie (Saskatchewan): recuperation Belleguu, Thierry (Queen's): dialogical criticism (with Clive Thomson) Best, Steven (Texas): Jean Baudrillard Biron, Michel (Ottawa): sociocriticism Bonney, William (Mississippi): J(oseph) Hillis Miller Bonnycastle, Stephen (KMC): Roland Barthes Bowen, Deborah (Ottawa): W(illiam) K(urtz) VVimsatt, Jr. Boyman, Anne (Barnard): Jean-Francois 1 .yotard Brady, Kristin (Western): Simone de Beauvoir Bristol, Michael D. (McGill): subversion Brown, Russell (Toronto): theme de Bruyn, Frans (Ottawa): genre criticism, Terry Eagleton, Fredric R. Jameson Buitenhuis, Peter (Simon Eraser): Lionel Trilling Burnham, Clint (York): Pierre Macherey Camden, Vera J. (Kent): psychoanalytic theory Campbell, Gregor (Toronto): imaginary/symbolic/real, latiguc/parole, mirror stage (with Gordon E. Slethaug), Name-of-the-Father,

signified/signifier/signification, structuralism, Norman N. Holland, John R. Searle Capozzi, Rocco (Toronto): Umberto Eco Carr, David (Emory): Hayden White Cavell, Richard (UBC): spatial form, Antonio Gramsci Chaitin, Gilbert D. (Indiana): metonymy/metaphor Chamberlain, Daniel (Queen's): Oswald Ducrot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty Childs, Donald J. (Ottawa): New Criticism Chisholm, Dianne (Alberta): Toril Moi Clark, Michael (California, Irvine): Michel Foucault Cleary, Jean Coates (Victoria): Carl Gustav Jung Collins, Robert G. (Ottawa): Cleanth Brooks Cooke, Nathalie (McGill): closure/dis-closure Cuddy-Keane, Melba (Toronto): Virginia Stephen Woolf Cunningham, Valentine (Oxford): logocentrism Danesi, Marcel (Toronto): semiosis Diedrick, James (Albion): heteroglossia, polyphonic novel Dimic, Milan (Alberta): polysystem theory Dolezel, Lubomir (Toronto): Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School (Prague School) Dooley, David J. (Toronto): Jacques Maritain Dopp, Jamie (Victoria); ideologeme, materialist criticism, metalanguage Eggers, Walter (New Hampshire): Ernst Alfred Cassirer Eldridge, Richard (Swarthmore): Ludwig Wittgenstein Emerson, Caryl (Princeton): Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin Endo, Paul (Toronto): anxiety of influence, Harold Bloom Falconer, Graham (Toronto): genetic criticism Faraday, Nancy (Ottawa): Claude Levi-Strauss Fekete, John (Trent): Raymond Williams

Contributors Ferns, John (McMaster): William Empson, (Arthur) Yvor Winters Findlay, Len (Saskatchewan): Paul Ricoeur Fizer, John (Rutgers): Alexander A. Potebnia Fortier, Mark (Toronto): Pierre Felix Guattari Gallays, Francois (Ottawa): disnarrated, ideal reader, Gerald Prince Gamache, Lawrence (Ottawa): D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence Garrett, Julia M. (California, Santa Barbara): Clifford Geertz Gelfand, Elissa (Mount Holyoke): French feminist criticism Godard, Barbara (York): intertextuality, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray Goellnicht, Donald C. (McMaster): Black criticism, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Goldie, Terry (York): ideological horizon, post-colonial theory (with Jonathan Hart), Edward W. Said Goodwin, David (Western): rhetorical criticism Harris, Wendell V. (Penn. State): E(ric) D(onald) Hirsch, Jr., Robert Scholes Hart, Jonathan (Alberta): post-colonial theory (with Terry Goldie) Harvey, Elizabeth (Western): gynesis, trope Harvey, Robert (Stony Brook): Jean-Paul Sartre Hatch, Ronald B. (UBC): David Bleich Hauch, Linda (Ottawa): diegesis Havercroft, Barbara (Quebec, Montreal): enonciation/'enonce, Gerard Genette Hebert, Pierre (Sherbrooke): Claude Bremond, Jean Rousset Heble, Ajay (Guelph): trace Heidenreich, Rosmarin (St. Boniface): Wolfgang Iser Henderson, Greig (Toronto): J(ohn) L(angshaw) Austin, Kenneth Duva Burke, T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot, I(vor) A(rmstrong) Richards Henricksen, Bruce (Loyola): Murray Krieger Hill, John Spencer (Ottawa): Wilhelm Dilthey Holub, Robert C. (Berkeley): Constance School of Reception Aesthetics (Reception Theory), horizon of expectation, implied reader, indeterminancy, Hans Robert Jauss Hutcheon, Linda (Toronto): postmodernism, Charles Mauron Imbert, Patrick (Ottawa): Charles Grivel Jeffrey, David Lyle (Ottawa): Frank Kermode, Durant Waite Robertson, Jr. Jirgens, Karl E. (Toronto): Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan, Walter Jackson Ong

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Jones, Heather (Mount Allison): patriarchy, phallocentrism Jones, Manina (Waterloo): textuality Keith, W.J. (Toronto): F(rank) R(aymond) Leavis Kellner, Douglas (Texas): Marxist criticism Kelly, Louis G. (Ottawa): theories of translation, Erich Auerbach Kerby, Anthony (Ottawa): hermeneutics Kidder, Richard (Toronto): Roman Jakobson King, Ross (University College): interpellation, reification Kneale, J. Douglas (Western): Geoffrey H. Hartman Kolesnikoff, Nina (McMaster): defamiliarization, Russian formalism, story/plot, Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, Vladimir lakovlevich Propp, Viktor Borisovich Shklovskii, Boris Viktorovich Tomashevskii, lurii Nikolaevich Tynianov Kompridis, Nikolas (York): Theodor Adorno La Bossiere, Camille R. (Ottawa): irony, paradox, (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Lacombe, Michele (Trent): carnival Latimer, Dan (Auburn): Paul de Man Lawall, Sarah (Massachusetts): Geneva School, Rene Wellek Lee, Alvin A. (McMaster): archetypal criticism, archetype, myth, Northrop Frye Leenhardt, Jacques (EHESS): Lucien Goldmann Le Grand, Eva (Quebec, Montreal): kitsch, variation, lurii Mikhailovich Lotman, Jan Mukafovsky Lehmann, Winfred P. (Texas): Ferdinand de Saussure Leps, Marie-Christine (York): discourse Loriggio, Francesco (Carleton): Emile Benveniste, Benedetto Croce Loughlin, Marie H. (Queen's): bracketing, intention/intentionality, Lebenswelt, subject/ object McCallum, Pamela (Calgary): Walter Benjamin McCance, Dawne (St. John's College): chora, genotext/phenotext, signifying practice, Julia Kristeva McCracken, David (Washington): Rene Noel Girard McGee, C.E. (St. Jerome's): performance criticism Magnusson, A. Lynne (Waterloo): speech act theory Merrill, Reed (Washington): M.H. Abrams, Henry James, S0ren Aabye Kierkegaard,

Contributors Arthur Koestler, Mario Praz, Edmund Wilson Moyal, Gabriel (McMaster): Michael Riffaterre Moyes, Lianne (York): Sandra Mortola Gilbert and Susan David Gubar Mozejko, Edward (Alberta): constructivism, Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo [Croatian Philological Society], Nitra School, Polish structuralism Murphy, Timothy S. (California, Los Angeles): Gilles Delcuze Murray, Heather (Toronto): theory and pedagogy Nielsen, Greg (York): communicative action, critical theory, Frankfurt School, literary institution Noland, Richard W. (Massachusetts): Sigmund Freud Nostbakkon, Faith (Alberta): cultural materialism O'Grady, Walter (Toronto): Percy Lubbock O'Quinn, Daniel (York): episteme O'Nan, Martha (SUNY): Jean Starobinski Ouimette, Victor (McGill): lose Ortega y Gasset Paryas, Phyllis Margaret (Ottawa): character zones, double-voicing/dialogism, embedding, monologism, polyphony/dialogism Paterson, Janet M. (Toronto): Tartu School de Paul, Steven (Ottawa): phenomenological criticism Perron, Paul (Toronto): A(lgirdas) J(ulien) Greimas Prado, C.G. (Queen's): Richard Rorty Radloff, Bernhard (Ottawa): hermeneutic circle, text, Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden Ray, William (Reed College): affective stylistics, Stanley Fish, Georges Poulet Rinehart, Hollis (York): pluralism, Elder Olson Rivero, Maria-Luisa (Ottawa): competence/ performance, Noam Avram Chomsky Ross, Trevor (Dalhousie): aura, canon, literature Ryan, Marie-Laure (California): code, narratee, narrative code, narratology (with Ernst van Alphen), narrator Saim, Mirela (McGill): Georg Lukacs St. Jacques, Kelly (Ottawa): E(dward) M(organ) Forster Savan, David (Toronto): C(harles) S(anders) Peirce Schellenberg, Elizabeth (Simon Eraser): readerresponse criticism Seamon, Roger (UBC): Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich

Sexton, Melanie (Ottawa): code, self/other Shea, Victor (York): New Historicism, Jonathan Dwight Culler Siemerling, Winfried (Toronto): margin, praxis Slethaug, Gordon E. (Waterloo): centre/decentre, demythologizing, desire/lack, floating signifier, game theory, mirror stage (with Gregor Campbell), parody, theories of play/ freeplay Solecki, Sam (Toronto): ideology, David John Lodge, George Francis Steiner Springer, Mary Doyle (St. Mary's College): Wayne C. Booth Steele, James (Carleton): expressive devices, poetics of expressiveness, Tzvetan Todorov, Boris Andreevich Uspenskii, Alexander K. Zholkovskii Stout, John (McMaster): semiotics Straznicky, Marta (Queen's): authority, power Thomson, Clive (Queen's): dialogical criticism (with Thierry Belleguic) Thurston, John (Ottawa): hegemony, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAS), overdetermination, problematic, social information, structural causality, symptomatic reading, Louis Althusser Tome, Sandra (UBC): Leslie A. Fiedler Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven (Alberta): Empirical Science of Literature (Constructivist Theory of Literature) Trussler, Michael (Toronto): misprision Turner, Hilary (McMaster): Maud Bodkin Ungar, Steven (Iowa): Maurice Blanchot Valdes, Mario J. (Toronto): aporia, binary opposition, concretization, intersubjectivity, reference/referent, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas Vandendorpe, Christian (Ottawa): actant, classeme, isotopy, seme Van de Pitte, Margaret (Alberta): Edmund Husserl Vigneault, Robert (Ottawa): Gaston Bachelard Vince, Ronald W. (McMaster): Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago School, R(onald) S(almon) Crane Vulpe, Nicola (Leon): Pierre Felix Bourdieu, Galvano della Volpe Walker, Victoria (Ottawa): Anglo-American feminist criticism (with Chris Weedon), Quebec feminist criticism Wallace, Jo-Ann (Alberta): Elaine Showalter Walton, Priscilla L. (Carleton): totalization Waring, Wendy (University of Technology, Perth): essentialism Weedon, Chris (Cardiff): Anglo-American feminist criticism (with Victoria Walker)

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Contributors Whiteside-St. Leger Lucas, Anna (McMaster): communication theory, hypogram, icon/ iconology, index, sign Wilson, Barrie A. (York): metacriticism Woodbridge, Linda (Alberta): liminality (with Roland Anderson) Zichy, Francis (Saskatchewan): pleasure/bliss, readerly/writerly text Zitner, Sheldon P. (Toronto): universal

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1 APPROACHES

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Archetypal criticism

Anglo-American feminist criticism: see Feminist criticism, AngloAmerican

Archetypal criticism Archetypal criticism focuses on the generic, recurring and conventional elements in "literature that cannot be explained as matters of historical influence or tradition. It studies each literary work as part of the whole of literature. This kind of criticism accepts as its informing principle that archetypes - typical images, characters, narrative designs, themes, and other literary phenomena - are present in all literature and so provide the basis for study of its interconnectedness. Sometimes called 'myth criticism,' archetypal literary criticism emerged in the 19305, 19405 and 19505 in the work of *Maud Bodkin, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, G. Wilson Knight, Richard Chase, Francis Fergusson, Philip Wheelwright, *Northrop Frye, and others. It made extensive use of the ideas of social scientists, especially James G. Frazer and *Carl G. Jung. (See also *archetype, *myth.) Frazer was one of the so-called Cambridge School of anthropologists, classicists and Middle East specialists. His massive 12-volume The Golden Bough (1890-1915) traces archetypal patterns of myth and ritual in the tales and ceremonies of diverse cultures. Importantly for literary criticism, Frazer tended to the view, a matter of controversy for many decades, that myth is an offshoot or projection of ritual, a narrative following or accompanying the ritual action. More recently *Claude Levi-Strauss (1908) set aside the question of which comes first, ritual or myth. For him they were closely associated, with myth functioning on the conceptual level and ritual on the level of action. Frye went further and saw The Golden Bough as a 'kind of grammar of the human imagination/ 'a study of unconscious symbolism on its social side' complementing what *Sigmund Freud and Jung did with the private symbolism of dreams. For Frye the question of the origin of myth or ritual is unimportant; Frazer's work embodies an archetypal ritual from which the literary critic may logically but not chronologically derive the structural principles of naive drama. For the critic, ritual is the con-

tent not the source or origin of drama, because dramatists know that ritual is the best way of holding an audience's attention. Archetypal criticism had a second extraliterary source in addition to cultural anthropology. It developed in part from Jung, particularly the Jungian idea of a 'collective unconscious' underlying the production of myths, visions, religious ideas, and certain kinds of dreams common to numerous cultures and periods of history. For Jung one major product of the unconscious is the hero myth, an exposition in the language of fairy tale of a child's development from infancy to adulthood. The details of this archetypal myth vary from culture to culture but the essentials are common. In Jung's writings the archetypes are not inherited by individual human beings. Rather what is passed on in the human species is a predisposition to fashion meaningful myths and symbols from the common experience of each individual life. For Jung archetypal situations, figures, images, and ideas are thought to have powerful emotional meaning and to be expressions of typical human experience raised to a level of immense importance. In the 20 volumes of Jung's collected works numerous archetypes are mentioned or described but five have particular prominence. The archetypal mother and father figures, caused by the child's experience of parents, are paralleled by images underlying the individual's experience of the opposite sex. The anima is the name Jung gives to a man's image of a woman, the animus to a woman's image of a man. On one level these are simply personifications of erotic desire but, on another, they take on a wide range of connotations. Another archetypal figure, not clearly distinguished by Jung from the father figure but described as separate is the 'wise old man,' symbolizing intelligence, knowledge and superior insight. The 'shadow' archetype, never fully delineated in Jung, designates the negative or dark side of the individual human being, those grasping, mean, malicious, lustful, or even devilish aspects of the individual that are usually held in abeyance in mature, sane people but are given full scope in rituals, myths, religion, literature, and other art forms. The most important archetype for Jung is the '*self/ central to the process of individuation, which is his main contribution to analytic psychology and pertains to the second half of the individual's life, succeeding the 'hero myth'

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Archetypal criticism and its concerns with the way the individual establishes himself or herself in the world. Jung placed the production of works of art on a lower level than the emergence of religious ideas and he was reluctant to apply his concepts to literature. Many others, who place a high value on art and literature, have made extensive use of the ideas of Jung, and Frazer as well, and have tried to show how archetypal myths lie behind all literature. Maud Bodkin, in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), interpreted Coleridge's The Ancient Manner and *T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land as poems about the myth of rebirth. Robert Graves (The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth 1948 and Greek Myths 1958) attempted to demonstrate that many of the myths known to the modern world are misconstructions of pictures and sculptures of earlier myth and that an archetypal myth of a primordial Earth Mother served by males underlies all subsequent myths. Joseph Campbell, with a Jungian emphasis, considered the myth of the questing hero as the all-encompassing monomyth (The Hero with a Thousand Faces 1949). G. Wilson Knight, interpreter of Shakespeare and several other major English poets, made extensive use of myth, ritual and archetypal symbols. In Fearful Symmetry (1947) Northrop Frye interpreted Blake's poetic prophecies as coherent myths. In The Quest for Myth (1949) Richard Chase declared that 'myth is literature and must be considered as an aesthetic creation of the human imagination.' Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater (1949) pointed to the rituals behind dramas from the classical Greeks until the 2oth century. Philip Wheelwright used myth criticism to interpret the Oresteia of Aeschylus and Eliot's The Waste Land (The Burning Fountain 1954). By the time of Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) the theory and practice of archetypal criticism were well established and were capable of being placed in the context both of other schools of criticism and of a 'polysemous' theory of literary meaning. So far as Frye's account of archetypal criticism is concerned, it is important to recognize that he disengaged the concept of the literary archetype from its anthropological and psychological beginnings. For him Frazer's work is a study of the ritual basis of naive drama and Jung's work makes possible an understanding of the dream basis of naive romance. In learning from either of these pioneering thinkers, ac-

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cording to Frye, the critic need not be concerned with ultimate sources in primitive ritual or a primordial unconscious, nor with questions of historical transmission. Archetypes are present in literature however they come to be there. The literary critic accepts this as a fact and goes on to use the archetypal perspective as one part of a comprehensive critical methodology. The archetypal interconnectedness of literature has implications for considerations of an author's originality. The greatness in a literary work arises more often from the themes and images it shares with other texts than from the author's own originality. The first English poet known by name, Caedmon, was initiated, according to the Venerable Bede, into a Germanic 'word-hoard' and a biblical mythology, both of which existed prior to his career as a poet. Without both of these he had no significance as a poet. His new compositions were born into an already existing order of words. Because that order existed, his listeners understood and were deeply moved by the poems he fashioned. A new poem, from the perspective of archetypal criticism, manifests something that is already latent in the order of words. It communicates meaning because both poet and audience are members of a community in which that order already exists. Archetypal criticism, then, is concerned with texts as social facts, as involved in techniques that give imaginative focus to an existing community. Archetypal criticism has been criticized as reductionist, as a reading of all literature in terms of a few monotonous patterns. It has also been judged negatively as blurring the boundaries between art and myth or between art and religion or philosophy. The most knowledgeable practitioners, however, like Frye, use archetypal concepts and methods as part of a larger critical and humanistic enterprise. So used, archetypal criticism is a valuable complement to other kinds of inquiry. It need not compete with historical criticism and its preoccupation with sources, influences and social context, or with biographical criticism's concern with the facts of a writer's life, because like these kinds of criticism it recognizes the importance of learned associations in literary experience. It may be of major assistance in the study of literary genres, which is based on analogies of form and proceeds on the hypothesis that whatever connections a literary work has with life, reality, the physical world,

Black criticism society, or philosophy for its content, it is not fashioned from these things. (See *genre criticism.) The literary work takes its form or shape or design from other literature, thus illustrating a central principle of archetypal criticism: works of literature imitate other works of literature. Archetypal criticism complements close reading of texts as things in themselves, the special concern of the *New Criticism that developed from the 19205. It sits, less easily, beside Leavisite evaluative criticism (see *F.R. Leavis) since archetypal criticism easily includes the popular and the naive as well as the complex sophisticated works of the traditional *canon. In a major sense, archetypal criticism, especially as articulated and practised by Frye, anticipates or prepares the way for *structuralism. When the work of the French structuralists emerged, saying that language in fact constructs our reality rather than reflects it, it had much in common with archetypal criticism. Similarly, the recognition in archetypal theory that the author does not control the whole meaning of his or her text prepared the way for what has come to be called '''readerresponse criticism, with its emphasis on the reader as a source of meaning-giving, a source conditioned by cultural experience, conscious or unconscious, by social and sexual roles, by ideological assumptions, and so on. Now, late in the 20th century, archetypal criticism is still widely used, especially in genre criticism and in those intertextual and comparative studies that include recognition and analysis of persistent, recurrent literary phenomena that cannot be adequately explained in terms of one particular historical tradition. ALVIN A. LEE

Primary Sources Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination. London: Oxford UP, 1934Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Paces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949. Chase, Richard. The Quest for Myth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1949. Day, Martin S. The Many Meanings of Myth. Lanham, New York, London: University Presses of America, 1984. Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater, a Study of Ten Plays: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949.

Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 12 vols. London: Macmillan, 18901915. Abr. in i vol., 1954. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. - Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947. Graves, Robert. Greek Myths. London: Cassell, 1958. - The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myths. Amended and enl. ed. New York/London: Vintage Books/Faber and Faber, 1961. Jung, Carl G. Collected Works. 20 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953-79. Knight, G. Wilson. The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies, including the Roman Plays. 3rd ed., repr. with minor corrections. London: Methuen, 1963. - The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision. London: Methuen, 1959. - The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. 4th rev. and enl. ed. London: Methuen, 1959. Wheelwright, Philip. The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism. New and rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.

Black criticism Black criticism in its narrowest sense encompasses the study of African American literature, culture and theory, but in its broadest includes the study of certain post-colonial literatures and cultures (African and Caribbean) and overlaps with the feminist concerns of women of colour. (See *post-colonial theory, *feminist criticism, ""literature.) Underlying all black criticism is the assumption that 'race' is a fundamental category of literary and cultural analysis (just as the broad range of feminisms takes gender to be a fundamental category of analysis). But exactly what constitutes race is not agreed upon; increasingly, it is viewed as less an essential or biological category than a social construct in which 'blackness' becomes a subject position in relation to the cultural dominant ('whiteness' or Euro-Americanism). Valerie Smith's definition of black feminist theory can usefully be adapted to define black theory: 'a way of reading inscriptions of race (particularly but not exclusively blackness) ... in modes of cultural expression' ('Black Feminist Theory' 39).

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Black criticism Origins and development Black criticism, albeit without this title, has a fairly long tradition in American letters. Early examples include the work of the historiansociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, whose concept of the 'double consciousness' of the African American remains influential today; Alain Locke (editor of the journal The New Negro) and the theorists of the Harlem Renaissance, who supported Pan-Africanism and saw art as a way of defining a black identity and fostering racial pride; Zora Neale Hurston, whose collecting and championing of black folklore when others were predicting its demise provided an invaluable service to American culture; and Ralph Ellison, whose Shadow and Act still elicits responses from more recent critics. Black criticism as practised under that designation began to flourish in the 19605 'along with the radicalization of the word "Black" and the emergence of the Black Power philosophy' (Henderson 'The Question of Form' 24). Since then, black criticism has taken a variety of forms, often grounding itself in other approaches but always revising them according to its own concerns and agendas. As *Henry Louis Gates, Jr., observes: 'The challenge of black literary criticism is to derive principles of literary criticism from the black tradition itself, as defined in the idiom of critical theory but also in the idiom which constitutes the "language of blackness" ... The sign of the successful negotiation of this precipice of indenture, of slavish imitation, is that the black critical essay refers to two contexts, two traditions the Western and the black' (Black Literature and Literary Theory 8). To explore black cultural difference, critics must redefine 'theory' which is not neutral - by turning to the black vernacular tradition for models (Gates 'CanonFormation' 28). Barbara Christian argues that 'people of color have always theorized - but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing ... is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language' ('The Race for Theory' 226). (See ""theories of play/free-play.) Although the variety of African American criticism practised at any given time makes it difficult to trace a simple historical development, "Houston A. Baker, among others, has sketched broad 'generational shifts' in this criticism over the past 40 years (Blues, Ideology

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68-112). The first stage, from the mid-1950s to the early 19603, Baker labels a period of 'integrationist poetics/ characterized by a faith that recent landmark legislative and judicial decisions in the United States signalled the advent of social equality in America. In such a soonto-be raceless, classless, pluralistic, democratic society, according to these optimistic critics, black American cultural forms would be integrated into the artistic mainstream; accordingly, any sense of a separate black tradition would rightly disappear, along with the belief that separate forms of cultural expression might call for separate standards of critical judgment. The proponents of 'integrationist poetics' included Richard Wright ('The Literature of the Negro in the United States'), Arthur P. Davis ('Integration and Race Literature') and Sterling Brown; even James Baldwin, no simple 'integrationist,' claimed at the time that black writers needed to appropriate the Western white cultural heritage in order to make their own romantic voyage of selfdiscovery. The obvious failure of legal and political decisions and of the peaceful civil-rights movement in the American South to bring about meaningful social change resulted by the mid1960s in the adoption of a much more militant stance against the dominant white "ideology and the development of a decidedly revolutionary, Afro-centred ideology known as 'Black Power.' As defined by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power 'is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations' (Black Power 44). The cultural wing of the Black Power movement was the Black Arts Movement, led by artists like Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) who founded the outdoor Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theater School in 1965 as a way of fostering and promoting the expressive forms, the art, of black Americans (jazz, blues, field hollers, work songs, spirituals, folk tales, and so on). Art, according to activists like Baraka, was to be used to further the social and political aims of African Americans. As Larry Neal states in his now-famous essay 'The Black Arts Movement': 'the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology,

Black criticism critique, and iconology' (The Black Aesthetic 272). Baraka's theatre school and Neal's rhetoric provided the model for revolutionary black cultural groups which sprang up across urban America and found outlets for their voices in such journals as Black Scholar, Umbra, Black Dialogue, and Journal of Black Poetry. The advent of wide interest in a distinctly black cultural heritage also gave rise to the establishment of Black Studies programs at many American universities in the late 19605. The theory of the Black Aesthetic reached a high point in Stephen Henderson's essay 'The Form of Things Unknown/ which claims that the 'commodity "blackness" ' is most evident in black poetry and that such poetry can be truly appreciated only by a black-reference public or audience: 'the ultimate criteria for critical evaluation must be found in ... the Black Community itself (66). Such 'folk/ by virtue of being in touch with their 'ethnic roots/ are fully immersed in and cognizant of the cultural codes (the 'Soul Field') necessary to comprehend and judge black poetry. These notions of cultural relativity, borrowed in part from anthropology, deny the existence of any 'universal' standards of literary judgment. (See ""universal.) Like its predecessor 'integrationist poetics/ the Black Aesthetic was overtaken by failure to achieve its own goals: despite the surge of interest in black history, culture and expressive forms, no separate black 'nation' came into being. The Black Arts Movement did not ultimately move audiences to revolutionary action and by the mid-1970s critics were accusing the movement of chauvinism, introspection and Marxist rhetoric. Neal himself was one of the first to recognize that art had failed to bring about social and political change. In a reassessment of the movement, 'The Black Contribution to American Letters/ he claims that the Black Aesthetic is a 'Marxist literary theory in which the concept of race is substituted for the Marxist idea of class.' (See *Marxist criticism.) He concludes that 'through propaganda alone the black writer can never perform the highest function of his art: that of revealing to man his most enduring human possibilities and limitations' (783-4). Neal had come full circle to Baldwin's romantic idealism; at the same time, he called for more rigorous attention to the uniqueness of expressive form in black art, a call later echoed by Stephen Henderson in 'The Question of Form and Judgement.'

After 1975 - ironically at the very time formalism in both its guises of *New Criticism and ""structuralism was coming under attack in the academy - a concern with the 'literariness' or formal properties of African American writing achieved the ascendancy, as scholars sought a solid theoretical ground for black expressive culture. This shift coincided with the movement of much African American literary study out of interdisciplinary Black Studies programs (where it had been treated like history or sociology) into mainstream English departments, where its existence needed to be justified in formal terms and where, through the 19805, it replaced black history as the dominant area of Black Studies. Scholars now examined the 'blackness' of texts through their uses of language; political and ideological concerns were deliberately subordinated to formalist issues, leading some radical scholars to view this move towards professionalism as a capitulation to the standards of white academia by an emerging black middle class more concerned with higher education than with revolutionary change. The 'reconstruction of instruction/ as it came to be called, was initiated by a number of significant conferences and resultant books. Three especially influential texts were Minority Language and Literature (1977), edited by Dexter Fisher, Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979), edited by Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto, and English Literature: Opening Up the Canon (1981), edited by ""Leslie Fiedler and Houston Baker. These books brought together the work of a new generation of scholars, including Mary Helen Washington, Generva Smitherman, Houston Baker, Robert Stepto, Kimberly Benston, Addison Gayle, Henry Louis Gates, Sherley Ann Williams, and Arnold Rampersad. All three volumes sought to revise the narrow *canon of American literature so as to make it more inclusive and representative of a pluralistic, multicultural society, while Addison Gayle's 'Blueprint for Black Criticism' called for the creation of 'positive' black characters who could combat 'the stereotypes of blacks' (44). The Fisher-Stepto collection also focused on 'a "literary" [formalist-structuralist] understanding of the literature' (vii). The FiedlerBaker collection went a step further, however, by attacking the notion that the English language itself is a neutral container of cultural forms; language is marked as a political tool

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Black criticism with ideological ramifications that need to be exposed and explicated, so that the study of black literature begins to move once more from a formalist to a poststructuralist stage sometimes referred to as a 'new black aesthetic' (Gates PMLA 21). (See *poststructuralism.) As Gates observes, in the work of these recent critics 'an initial phase of theorizing has given way to the generation of close readings that attend to the "social text" as well ... Black studies has functioned as a strategic site for autocritique within American studies itself. No longer, for example, are the concepts of "black" and "white" thought to be preconstituted; rather, they are mutually constitutive and socially produced' (PMLA 21). Gates himself has been at the forefront of promoting this type of criticism, both in his own work like The Signifying Monkey - which traces the relationship between African and African American vernacular traditions and cultural forms and in his numerous editorial projects like Black Literature and Literary Theory and 'Race/ Writing, and Difference. Gates raises such questions as the relationship between African cultural and Western mainstream cultural traditions, the relationship between the black vernacular and the black formal traditions, and the applicability of contemporary literary theory - particularly poststructuralism - to the reading of black texts. The only other male critic to rival Gates' position of dominance in contemporary black criticism is Houston Baker who, while adopting strategies he finds useful from the 'reconstruction' project, nevertheless clings strongly to a neo-Marxist insistence on the contextualizing of literature. In Blues, Ideology, and AfroAmerican Literature, Baker builds what he calls an anthropology of art which insists 'that works of Afro-American expressive culture cannot be adequately understood unless they are contextualized within the interdependent systems of Afro-American culture' (109). Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance and AfroAmerican Poetics are further instalments in this project. None of this theorizing would be possible, however, without the painstaking archaeological work that has, over the past decade, unearthed a host of 'lost' texts that now form the canon of African American literature. Examples - by no means exhaustive - of such recuperative projects include William L. Andrews' edi-

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tions of African American autobiographies, especially slave narratives; The Schomburg Library of lyth-Century Black Women Writers (Oxford) series, under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates, who is also the editor of G.K. Hall's African American Women Writers series, the director of Chadwyck-Healey's Black Periodical Fiction project, and the chief editor of the Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature; and new editions of the works of many older black women writers, as well as more general anthologies, edited by feminist scholars like Mary Helen Washington (editor of Black-Eyed Susans, Midnight Birds and Invented Lives), Deborah E. McDowell (editor of the Black Women Writers series for Beacon Press), Gloria T. Hull (co-editor of All the Women are White), and Barbara Smith (editor of Home Girls). These projects - together with critical studies like Andrews' To Tell a Free Story, Bernard Bell's The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, and Barbara Christian's Black Women Novelists - have been instrumental in establishing alternative literary histories within American culture. Black feminist criticism One of the most active areas - some might claim the most active area - of recent black criticism is black feminist criticism, which has experienced an explosion of theory and practice over the past 20 years, and especially during the last decade, as a direct result of the growing critical acclaim for African American women writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor (who, between them, have won Pulitzer Prizes and National and American Book Awards), Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jamaica Kincaid, and the poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Rita Dove. Black women writers have themselves played prominent roles in such criticism: Alice Walker has fought hard for the recuperation and recognition of a long tradition of black women writers within which she can discover a theory of black female creativity (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens), while Audre Lorde - before it became widely accepted - remarked, in essays like 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,' on the importance of developing and valorizing female language and emotional knowledge.

Black criticism Black feminist criticism and theory emerged in the 19805 from the complex and conflicted relationship of black women to black men during the Black Power and civil-rights movement of the 19605, and of women of colour to white women during the Women's Liberation Movement of the 19705. Many black women recognized that while the Black Power movement was radically Afrocentric, it also remained powerfully androcentric, with the liberation of women within the group being subordinated to the aspirations of the group as a whole. The feminist movement seemed to offer some redress but women of colour increasingly saw that the concerns and standards of the movement were those of white, middle-class women who tended to ignore the different needs and desires of women of colour and Third World women. Powerful expressions of these arguments are found in bell hooks' Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Michelle Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Perhaps the most influential certainly the most galvanizing - work of black feminist criticism to date has been Barbara Smith's essay 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticism' (1977). Lamenting the fact that 'Black women's existence, experience and culture and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these are in the "real world" of white and/or male consciousness beneath consideration, invisible, unknown' (168), Smith proclaimed that 'a Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers is an absolute necessity' (170). Despite the essentialist flaws in her argument - black feminist criticism is now practised by a number of critics who are neither female nor black - Smith's essay gave a name and a direction to this literary movement; it also championed the cause of black lesbian writing. Following Smith's lead, black feminist criticism has become increasingly theoretical and more sophisticated, although the whole question of theory versus practice remains a contentious one in black feminist circles. Barbara Christian, for example, in 'The Race for Theory' argues passionately against critical theory, which she claims now dominates the academy in hegemonic fashion: 'some of our most daring and potentially radical critics (and bv our I mean black, women, Third World)

have been influenced, even co-opted, into speaking a language and defining their discussion in terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientation' (226). Joyce A. Joyce has attacked Gates and Baker for moving into the sphere of ivy-league elitism, where the former is too influenced by *deconstruction (*Jacques Derrida and *Paul de Man) and the latter by poststructuralist Marxism (*Michel Foucault, *Jean Baudrillard, *Louis Althusser). Still, some of the best recent black feminist criticism is what we would call highly theoretical; examples include the work of Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Susan Willis, and Deborah McDowell. Warning against the simplifications of a linear historiography, Spillers challenges the notion of a unified, intertextual 'tradition' of African American women's writing, which she retheorizes as 'a matrix of literary discontinuities' (Conjuring 251). (See *intertextuality.) Similarly, Carby advocates that 'black feminist criticism be regarded as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions' (Reconstructing Womanhood 15) in which the identity and experience of black womanhood must be seen as polyvalent, shifting, even self-contradictory. (See *sign.) She examines the material conditions under which black women intellectuals produced their work in order to explore how they represented the sexual ideologies of their times. McDowell also sees black women's *discourse as supremely dialogical, while Willis brings poststructuralist theories of ""cultural materialism to bear in establishing historical contexts for black women's literature. (See also *double-voicing/dialogism.) As Valerie Smith points out, all of these approaches view black women's oppression as specific and complex and their methodologies examine the variables of race, gender and class without proclaiming the centrality of any one. At the same time, they challenge the traditional conceptions of literary study by making such questions important to literary analysis ('Black Feminist Theory' 46-7). The significance of black/African American criticism and of black feminist criticism is manifold. As well as providing close readings of individual texts and the works of individual authors, black criticism has been instrumental in questioning the American canon and providing alternative lines of literary inheritance and literary tradition. Together with feminism, it has launched an assault on traditional ways

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Black criticism of studying English and has thus repoliticized the 'institution' of English itself. Black feminist critics have also been in the vanguard of those challenging the totalizing tendencies of Western academic feminism (see ""totalization). They have demonstrated that the very concept of woman is far more various than the mainstream may have thought and have presented black women's experience as an exemplary site both for rematerializing black critical theory and for examining the shifting positionality of the female subject. Finally, the acceptance of black literature and criticism as valid and important enterprises has paved the way for the introduction of a host of other ethnic and/or 'minority' literatures - Asian American, Chicano, Native American, gay, Third World into the academy. DONALD C. GOELLNICHT

Primary Sources Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1-7601865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988. - Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984. - The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980. - Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1987. - and Patricia Redmond. Afro-American Literary Study in the 19903. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1989. Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Delta, 1962. - Notes of a Native Son. 1955. Boston: Beacon P, 1961. Baraka, Amiri. 'The Myth of a "Negro Literature." ' In Home: Social Essays. New York: William Morrow, 1966. - and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow, 1968. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987. Bell, Roseann P., Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly GuySheftall, eds. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1979.

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Black American Literature Forum (a journal). Brown, Sterling, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, eds. The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes. New York: Dryden P, 1941. Cade, Toni, ed. The Black Woman, An Anthology. New York: Signet, 1970. Callaloo (a journal). Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage, 1967. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Pergamon P, 1985. - Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1980. - 'The Race for Theory.' In Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, 225-37. Davis, Arthur P. 'Integration and Race Literature.' In The American Negro Writer and His Roots. New York: American Society of African Culture, 1960. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. 1903. Greenwich, Conn.: Crest, 1965. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. 1964. New York: Signet, 1966. Evans, Mari. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor P, 1984. Fiedler, Leslie, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds. English Literature: Opening Up the Canon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Fisher, Dexter, ed. Minority Language and Literature: Retrospective and Perspective. New York: MLA, 1977. - and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction. New York: MLA, 1979. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 'Canon-Formation and the Afro-American Tradition.' In Afro-American Literary Study in the 19905. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1989, 14-39. - Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the 'Racial' Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. - The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. - ed. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984. - ed. PLMA 105 (Jan. 1990). Special issue on African and African American Literature. - ed. 'Race,' Writing, and Difference. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985-6. - ed. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. New York: Meridian, 1990. Gayle, Addison, Jr. ed. 'Blueprint for Black Criticism.' First World (Jan.-Feb. 1977): 41-5. - The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor, 1972.

Communication theory Henderson, Stephen. 'The Form of Things Unknown.' In Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: William Morrow, 1973, 1-69. - The Question of Form and Judgement in Contemporary Black American Poetry, 1962-1977.' In A Dark and Sudden Beauty: Two Essays on Black American Poetry by George Kent and Stephen Henderson. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. Philadelphia: Afro-American Studies Program of the University of Pennsylvania, 1977. Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1987. hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End P, 1981. Hughes, Langston. 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.' Nation, 23 June 1926, 692-4. - and Arna Bontemps, eds. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1982. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. New York: Lippincott, 1971. Joyce, Joyce A. ' "Who the Cap Fit": Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.' New Literary History 18 (1987): 371-84. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Lorde, Audre. 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.' In Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing P, 1984, 110-13. McDowell, Deborah E. 'Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin.' In Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990$. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1989, 51-70. - 'New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism.' In The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985, 186-99. Neal, Larry. 'The Black Arts Movement.' In The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Doubleday, 1971. - 'The Black Contribution to American Letters: Part II, The Writer as Activist - 1960 and After.' In The Black American Reference Book. Ed. Mabel M. Smythe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976, 781-4. Smith, Barbara. 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.' 1977. In The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985, 168-85. - ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color P, 1983. Smith, Valerie. 'Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the "Other." ' In Changing Our Own Words. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1989, 38-57.

- Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Spillers, Hortense }., and Marjorie Pryse, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983. Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1989. Wallace, Michelle. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. London: Calder, 1979. Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor, 1975. - Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 18601960. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987. - Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1980. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Wright, Richard. 'Blueprint for Negro Writing/ New Challenge 2 (Fall 1937): 53-65. - The Literature of the Negro in the United States.' In White Man, Listenl Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1964, 69-105.

Chicago School: see NeoAristotelian or Chicago School

Communication theory A vast subject, communication theory deals with systems and models of communication ranging from communications engineering to psycholinguistics and is related to a host of far-ranging fields (such as cybernetics, computer science, telemetry, *semiotics, neurology). The linguistic models are most relevant to literary theory. Communication, as defined by the linguist John Lyons, is 'the intentional transmission of information by means of some established sig-

11

Communication theory nailing-system.' All communications models account for the transmission of a signal or message between a sender and a receiver in some mutually decipherable *code. Shannon and Weaver's now classic model represents communication as a signal transmitted from a source by a transmitter through a channel. The signal is received by a receiver which relays it to its destination. The signal may be altered by 'noise' (defined as any information loss occurring in the channel of communication). In *Ferdinand de Saussure's model, the source is the brain, where the concept occurs before being translated into a sound image and transmitted by the voice. The ear is the receiver and the destination the brain, which decodes the signal into concepts. Transmitter and receiver may be far more complex. For example, an actor saying 'Is this a dagger which I see before me ...?' involves a transmitter which adds the conversion into a *text and the actor's articulation of it; the receiver is here expanded to include the deciphering of the written text. The ultimate destination in this case would be the audience or rather the mind of each spectator-listener. One might also add a further level of encoding and decoding to account for a producer's particular interpretation; lighting effects, make-up, costume, accent and inflexion, and sound effects would further add to the complexity of transmission, as would translation into another language. In the latter case the original sender (the author) and the ultimate receiver (the listener) do not share the same linguistic code. The more levels of encoding and decoding added, the greater the possibility of 'noise' interfering with communication, since communication implies meaning for the sender and for the receiver (even if these meanings do not coincide). 'Noise' may be a gap, a distortion, creating confusion as to sound, code, context, or meaning. For example, communication in a novel may be temporarily suspended by a gap between chapters or a sudden switch in point of view, place or time, forcing the reader to deduce what is missing. In a thriller, conflicting versions may upset communication. Ambiguity or polyvalence may give rise to parallel levels of communication which may vie with or mutually enhance each other: an actress who says she is leaving, but signals by her movements or tone of voice that she is intent

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on staying, may first appear to defy the sense of the communication and, subsequently, to communicate that this departure is metaphysical rather than physical, that she does not mean what she says; in short, she may communicate, even if it is not the message we originally thought it was. Despite interference, meaning may be retroactively restored. Thus a poem of seemingly unconnected sentences which at first fails to connect or communicate anything may, by the time we reach its end, communicate as the pieces fall into place in a recognizable pattern of meaning. Then, at last, we may see them as variants of the same matrix, as the expression of a *hypogram. The model of linguistic communication most frequently used in literary analysis is probably *Roman Jakobson's. It comprises six elements: an addresser sending a message in a particular code and implying a context, to an addressee by means of some form of contact. For Jakobson meaning resides in the total act of communication. Otherwise, how do we know what deictics and shifters such as 'this,' 'here/ 'now,' 'then,' 'she,' 'it,' 'I,' refer to? How are we to interpret, for example, 'red'? Is it part of a traffic code addressed by a traffic operator to highway users, by sailors to show their port? Or is it part of a different code used in a different context to signify danger or passion? To account for all the factors which contribute to communication, Jakobson describes six functions corresponding to the six elements of his communication model: emotive, phatic, referential, metalinguistic, conative, poetic. The emotive function dominates when the addresser or implied T expresses his emotions, as in a first-person narration or lyric poetry. If contact is being established, tested or maintained without there being any substance to the message, then the phatic function dominates. Such is the case when we say 'Hello/ 'How are you?/ or make comments about the weather: we are primarily establishing or maintaining contact, rather than wanting to communicate any message. lonesco's cliche-ridden empty dialogue makes extensive use of the phatic function, showing how his characters are no longer capable of true communication. The referential function identifies the context so that, for example, we know that 'bat' refers in a

Communication theory given instance to a flying mouse-like animal and not to a baseball bat. The code is enhanced when the metalinguistic function comes to the fore, as it would if, for example, one wished to determine that 'bat' is an English word here, and not, say, French. If communication centres on the addressee, the conative (or vocative) function dominates, as in expressions like 'Look here,' 'Listen!' 'You there!' When communication accentuates the message, the poetic (or aesthetic) function is uppermost. This poetic function is paramount in literary texts and accounts for the special self-conscious quality of literary discourse, drawing attention to itself as form to further enhance the message, so that the form is the message. Verbal art, says Jakobson, is not a transparent window on the outside world, but is opaque and self-referential: it is its own subject. *Roland Barthes goes a step further by saying that form is the ultimate literary referent. (See ""reference/referent.) *Speech act theory is yet another aspect of communication theory, and deals primarily with speech production. In literary theory it accounts for the factors associated with discourse production, the way these are encoded in the text, the signs by which the receiver discerns them, and how they influence reception. (See *discourse, *sign.) *John L. Austin, *Emile Benveniste and Peter Strawson were among the first to show how speech act theory could be applied to textual analysis. *John Searle has developed their ideas. Important aspects of speech act theory are the central role of T (the utterer producing the utterance), the relationship between the utterer and ( i ) what he is talking about, and (2) the person to whom he is talking. Speech act theory takes into account situational (spatio-temporal) factors, mood and types of utterance. According to Austin these types are constative (statements) or performative (they accomplish an act: e.g. '1 promise'). Utterances can be serious or non-serious (fictional). Fictional utterances seem to have all the attributes of nonfictional ones, except for the understanding between writer and reader that the fictional utterance is a 'non-deceptive pseudo-performance,' to use Searle's expression. Within this framework, *Gerard Genette examines the relationship between different levels of fictional utterances, as when tales are told within tales and between their concomitant narrators and narratees. (See *narrator, narratee.)

Austin distinguishes three speech acts: (i) locutionary (the spoken act); (2) illocutionary (the act performed in saying something, e.g. asking, ordering, asserting); and (3) perlocutionary (the act performed indirectly by saying something; e.g. 'it's cold in here' could be a way of persuading someone to shut the door or turn up the heat). French speech act theorists tend to represent relationships between utterer and utterance, utterer and receiver, receiver and utterance in terms of four concepts: (i) distance (the speaker may distance himself from his utterance by using the third person; e.g. 'He did it.'); (2) adherence (the utterer indicates his attitude by means of modalisors; e.g. 'doubtless/ 'horrifying/ 'it seemed .../ 'perhaps/ and other indications of judgment); (3) transparency or opaqueness (the receiver's absence from or presence in the utterance - the more intimate the utterance [e.g. a letter to a friend] the more opaque it will be); and (4) tension (the dynamics between utterer and receiver). Communication theory inevitably implies many related fields. Among these *structuralism, semiotics, poetics and *discourse analysis theory are some of the most obvious of interest to scholars of ""literature. ANNA WHITESIDE-ST. LEGER LUCAS

Primary Sources Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1961. Benveniste, Emile. Problemes de linguistique generate. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 1974. Genette, Gerard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Jakobson, Roman. 'Closing Statements/ In T.A. Sebeok, Style and Language. New York: Technology P of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley and Sons, 1960. Lyons, John. Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Searle, John. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. - Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Strawson, Peter F. Logico-Linguistic Papers. London: Methuen, 1971.

Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

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Constance School

Constance School of Reception Aesthetics [Reception Theory] The Constance School is commonly used to designate a direction in literary criticism developed by professors and students at the University of Constance in West Germany during the late 19605 and early 19703. In general the members of the Constance School turned to the reading and reception of literary texts instead of to traditional methods that emphasize the production of texts or a close examination of texts themselves. (See *text.) Their approach is therefore related to *reader-response criticism in the U.S.A., although for a time the Constance School was much more homogeneous in its theoretical presuppositions and general outlook than its American counterpart. Commonly known as reception theory or the aesthetics of reception (Rezeptionsasthetik), the approach developed by the Constance School dominated literary theory in Germany for about a decade but was not well known in the English-speaking world until around 1980, when the most seminal works were translated. *Hans Robert Jauss and *Wolfgang Iser are the two most original theorists of the school, although several of Jauss' students, among them Rainer Warning, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karlheinz Stierle, also made important contributions. In response to the writings of Jauss and Iser, scholars from the German Democratic Republic such as Robert Weimann, Manfred Naumann and Rita Schober raised objections to some propositions and suggested Marxist alternatives, with the result that the most productive East-West postwar dialogue in literary theory involved issues of reception and response. (See also *Marxist criticism.) The Constance School arose at a time of great turbulence in West Germany society. At universities throughout the country the student movement agitated for educational reform and advocated a basic questioning of traditional methods and educational standards. The experimental University at Constance, founded in 1967, was at the forefront of educational reform and hence fostered an atmosphere in which new ideas in literary theory and aesthetics flourished.

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Hans Robert Jauss and the aesthetics of reception Reception theory dates from the 1967 inaugural lecture by Hans Robert Jauss, the newly appointed professor of Romance languages. His title echoed the famous inaugural essay by Friedrich Schiller at the University of Jena on the eve of the French Revolution. Schiller's 'Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?' ['What is and for what purpose does one study universal history?'] was modified by Jauss who substituted the word Literatur [literary] for 'Universal.' This alteration did not diminish the impact. Jauss suggests, as Schiller had in 1789, that the present age needed to restore vital links between the artefacts of the past and the concerns of the present. For literary scholarship and instruction such a connection can be established only if literary history is no longer relegated to the periphery of the discipline. The revised title of this lecture, 'Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft' ['Literary History as a Provocation to Literary Scholarship'], captures Jauss' innovative challenge. The approach to literary texts outlined in his lecture became known as Rezeptionsasthetik and was an attempt to overcome what Jauss viewed as limitations in two important and putatively opposed literary theories: *formalism and Marxist criticism. In general, Marxism represents for him an outmoded approach to "literature related to an older positivist paradigm. Yet Jauss also recognizes in this body of criticism, especially in the writings of less orthodox Marxists like Werner Krauss, Roger Garaudy and Karel Kosik, a fundamentally correct concern with the historicity of literature. The formalists, on the other hand, are credited with introducing aesthetic perception as a theoretical tool for exploring literary works. However, Jauss also detects in their works the tendency to isolate art from its historical context, a I'art pour I'art aesthetics which supposedly values a 'timeless' formal organization over the historicity of the literary work. The task for a new literary history, therefore, becomes to merge the best qualities of Marxism and formalism. This can be accomplished by satisfying the Marxist demand for historical mediation while retaining the formalist advances in the realm of aesthetic perception.

Constance School The aesthetics of reception propose to do this by altering the perspective from which we normally interpret literary texts. Traditional literary histories were composed from the perspective of the producers of texts; Jauss proposes that we can truly understand literature as a process by recognizing the role of the consumer or reader. Interaction between author and public replaces literary biography as the basis for literary historiography. Thus Jauss meets the Marxist demand by situating literature in the larger continuum of events; he retains the formalist achievements by placing his concern with the perceiving consciousness at the centre. The historical significance of a work is not established by qualities of the work or by the genius of its author but by the chain of receptions from generation to generation. In terms of literary history Jauss thus envisions a historiography that will play a conscious, mediating role between past and present. The historian of literary reception is called upon to rethink continually the works of the canon in light of how they have affected, and are affected by, current conditions and events. Past meanings are understood as part of the prehistory of present experiencing. The integration of history and aesthetics is to be accomplished largely by examining what Jauss refers to as the *horizon of expectation (Envartungshorizont). This methodological centrepiece of Jauss' theory is an obvious adaptation of the notion of horizon (Horizont) found most prominently in the hermeneutic theory of Jauss' teacher *Hans-Georg Gadamer. (See *hermeneutics.) For Gadamer the horizon is a fundamental tenet for the hermeneutical situation. It refers primarily to our necessarily perspectival and limited worldview. Jauss' use of the term is slightly different. For him it denotes a system or structure of expectations that an individual brings to a text. Works are read against some horizon of expectation; indeed, certain types of texts - *parody, for example - intentionally foreground this horizon. The task of the literary scholar is to 'objectify' the horizon, so that we may evaluate the artistic character of the work. This is most readily accomplished when the work makes its horizon its theme. But even works whose horizon is less obvious can be examined with this method. Generic, literary and linguistic aspects of a work can be used to construct a probable horizon of expectation. After establishing the horizon of expectation,

the critic can then proceed to determine the artistic merit of a given work by measuring the distance between the work and the horizon. Basically Jauss employs a deviationist model: the aesthetic value of a text is seen as a function of its deviation from a given norm. If the expectations of a reader are not 'disappointed' or violated, then the text will be second-rate; if it breaks through the horizon, it will be high art, although a work may break its horizon of expectation and yet remain unrecognized as great. This poses no problems for Jauss. The first experience of disrupted expectations will almost invariably evoke strong negative responses which will disappear for later readers. In a later age the horizon changes and the work no longer ruptures expectations. Instead it may be recognized as a classic, that is, a work which has contributed to the establishment of a new horizon of expectation. Wolfgang Iser and the phenomenology of reading Jauss' historical approach to understanding literary works was complemented by Wolfgang Iser's examination of the interaction between reader and text. Like Jauss, Iser attracted attention with his inaugural lecture, but his theory is perhaps best represented in Der Akt des Lesens [The Act of Reading 1976]. What interests Iser is how and under what conditions a text has meaning for a reader. Whereas traditional interpretation has sought to elucidate hidden meanings, Iser wants to see meaning as the result of an interaction between text and reader, as an effect that is experienced, not a message that must be found. *Roman Ingarden provided a useful framework for his investigation. According to Ingarden the aesthetic object is constituted only through the reader's act of cognition. Adopting this precept from Ingarden, Iser thus switches focus from the text as an object to the text as potential, from the results to the act of reading. To examine the interaction between text and reader Iser looks at those qualities in the text which make it readable or which influence our reading and at those features of the reading process essential for understanding the text. Particularly in his early work he adopts the term *implied reader to encompass both of these functions; it is at once textual structure and structured act. Later, depending more heavily on Ingarden's terminology, he distin15

Constance School guishes between the text, its *concretization, and the work of art. The first is the artistic aspect, what is placed there by the author for us to read, and it may be best conceived as a potential awaiting realization. Concretization, by contrast, refers to the product of our own productive activity; it is the realization of the text in the mind of the reader, accomplished by the filling in of blanks or gaps (Leerstellen) to eliminate ""indeterminacy. Finally, the work of art is neither text nor concretization but something in between. It occurs at the point of convergence of text and reader, a point which can never be completely defined. The work of art is characterized by its virtual nature and is constituted by various overlapping procedures. One of these involves the dialectic of protention and retention, two terms borrowed from the phenomenological theory of *Edmund Husserl. (See *phenomenological criticism.) Iser applies them to our activity in reading successive sentences. In confronting a text we continuously project expectations which may be fulfilled or disappointed; at the same time our reading is conditioned by foregoing sentences and concretizations. Because our reading is determined by this dialectic, it acquires the status of an event and can give us the impression of a real occurrence. If this is so, however, our interaction with texts must compel us to endow our concretizations with a degree of consistency - or at least as much consistency as we admit to reality. This involvement with the text is seen as a type of entanglement in which the foreign is grasped and assimilated. Iser's point is that the reader's activity is similar to actual experience. Although Iser distinguishes between perception (Wahrnehmung) and ideation (Vorstellung), structurally these two processes are identical. According to Iser, reading therefore temporarily eliminates the traditional subject-object dichotomy. (See ""subject/object.) At the same time, however, the subject is compelled to split into two parts, one which undertakes the concretization and another which merges with the author or at least the constructed image of the author. Ultimately the reading process involves a dialectical process of self-realization and change. By filling in the gaps in the text, we simultaneously reconstruct ourselves, since our encounters with literature are part of a process of understanding others and ourselves more completely.

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Continuations and criticisms Iser's model of reading has been productively supplemented by the work or Karlheinz Stierle, the most incisive second-generation theorist from the Constance School during the 19705. Stierle proceeds from Iser's contention that the formation of illusions and images is essential for the reading process and labels this level of reading 'quasi-pragmatic,' a designation that distinguishes it from the reception of non-fictional texts ('pragmatic reception'). While Iser seems to remain on this plane in his studies, Stierle suggests that the quasipragmatic reading must be supplemented with higher forms of reception capable of doing justice to the peculiarities of fiction. What distinguishes narrative fiction is pseudo-referentiality, which may be considered auto-referentially in the guise of referential forms. (See ""reference/referent.) Fiction is self-referential, although it appears to be referential. What Stierle suggests, therefore, is an additional reflexive level of understanding in our encounter with literary texts. The critics of the Constance School from the German Democratic Republic approached the accomplishments of reception theory from a somewhat different stance. Robert Weimann and Manfred Naumann are not as interested in the reading process outlined by Iser and Stierle as they are in the literary historiography developed by Jauss. Their objections to his theory are threefold. First they complain that reception theory has gone too far in emphasizing response. While Weimann and Naumann admit that this is an important aspect - perhaps downplayed somewhat in the Marxist tradition - Jauss and his colleagues, in positing reception as the sole criterion for a revitalization of literary history, destroy the dialectic of production and reception. Second, these Marxist critics detect a danger in the totally subjective apprehension of art and the resultant relativizing of literary history. The problem here is that if we follow Jauss (and Gadamer) in relinquishing all objective notions of the work of art then our access to history would seem to be completely arbitrary because it is ceaselessly changing. Finally, the Constance School model of reception theory provides scant sociological grounding for the reader who supposedly stands at the centre of its concerns. Scholars from the GDR found a general failure to link literary history with larger concerns. The reader in the reception theory of

Constance School Jauss and Iser, they claim, is conceived as an idealized individual, rather than as a social entity with political and ideological, as well as aesthetic, dimensions. (See "Ideology.) Jauss and Iser defended their positions against these and other objections in polemical rejoiners during the 19705. They have also modified and refined their theoretical positions on the basis of this criticism. But the cost of correction has been a loss of the excitement surrounding the emergence of reception theory. Both Jauss and Iser subsequently took directions which depart from their most influential work. Increasingly Iser has concerned himself with the notions of the imaginary in fiction and literary anthropology. Jauss' magnum opus Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik [Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics 1977 and 1982], develops a more differential notion of response, relinquishing the primarily deviationist model of the 'Provocation' essay. This work, however, has had a comparatively smaller impact on critical circles in Germany and its reception marked a diminishing of the influence of reception theory in the early 19805. The Constance School, on the other hand, has survived the demise of its most important theoretical product by virtue of the personalities of its members and the biannual scholarly colloquia held there. The meetings of the group Toetik und Hermeneutik' ['Poetics and Hermeneutics'], so important for the advent of reception theory, continue to produce exciting contributions of literary, cultural and philosophical criticism in Germany. ROBERT C. HOLUB Primary Sources Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 'Konsequenzen der Rezeptionsasthetik oder Literaturwissenschaft als Kommunikationssoziologie.' Poetica j (1975): 388-413. Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie Asthetischer Wirkung. Munich: Fink, 1976. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. - Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa. Konstanz: G. Hess, 1970. 'Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction.' In Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. J. Hillis Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1971, 1-45. - 'The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary.' Neiv Literary History 11 (1979):1-20.

- Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Ro-

mans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Munich: Fink, 1972. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Jauss, Hans Robert. Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. Munich: Fink, 1977. Rev. and exp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Theory and History of Literature 3. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. - Kleine Apologie der asthetischer Erfahrung. Konstanzer Universitatsreden 59. Konstanz: Universitatsverlag, 1972. - Literaturgeschichte als Provokation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. - 'Paradigmawechsel in der Literaturwissenschaft.' Linguistische Berichte 3 (1969): 44-56. - Toward an Aesthetic of Reception Theory and History of Literature 2. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Naumann, Manfred. 'Das Dilemma der Rezeptionsasthetik.' Poetica 8 (1976): 451-66. - et al. Gesellschaft - Literatur - Lesen: Literaturrezeption in theoretischer Sicht. Weimar: Aufbau, 1973. Schober, Rita. Abbild, Sinnbild, Wertung: Aufsatze zur Theorie und Praxis literarischer Kommunikation. Berlin: Aufbau, 1982. Stierle, Karlheinz. Text als Handlung: Perspektiven einer systematischen Literaturwissenschaft. Munich: Fink, 1975. - 'Was heisst Rezeption bei fiktionalen Texten?' Poetica 7 (1975): 345-87. Abbr.: 'The Reading of Fictional Texts.' In The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980, 83-105. Warning, Rainer, ed. Rezeptionsasthetik: Theorie und Praxis. Munich: Fink, 1975. Weimann, Robert. ' "Rezeptionsasthetik" und die Krise der Literaturgeschichte: Zur Kritik einer neuen Stromung in der burgerlichen Literaturwissenschaft.' Weimarer Beitrage 19.8 (1973): 5-33' "Reception Aesthetics" and the Crisis of Literary History.' Clio 5 (1975): 3-33. - ' "Rezeptionsasthetik" oder das Ungeniigen an der burgerlichen Bildung: Zur Kritik einer Theorie literarischer Kommunikation.' In Kunstensemble und Offentlichkeit. Ed. Robert Weimann. Halle-Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1982, 85-133. Weinrich, Harald. 'Fur eine Literaturgeschichte des Lesers.' Merkur 21 (1967): 1026-38.

Secondary Sources Burger, Peter. 'Probleme der Rezeptionsforschung.' Poetica 9 (1977): 446-71. Fish, Stanley. 'Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser.' Diacritics 11.1 (1981): 2-13. Fokkema, D.W., and Elrud Kunne-Ibisch. The Reception of Literature: Theory and Practice of "Rezeptionsasthetik." ' Theories of Literature in

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Constructivism the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin's P, 1977, 136-64. Grimm, Gunter. Rezeptionsgeschichte: Grundlegung einer Theorie. Munich: Fink, 1977. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, ed. Sozialgeschichte und Wirkungsasthetik: Dokumente zur empirischen und marxistischen Rezeptionsforschung. Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1974. Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen, 1984. Link, Hannelore. ' "Die Appellstruktur der Texte" und "em Paradigmawechsel in der Literaturwissenschaft" ' Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 7 (1973): 532-83. Solms, Wilhelm, and Norbert Scholl. 'Rezeptionsasthetik.' In Literaturwissenschaft heute. Ed. Friedrich Nemec and Wilhelm Solms. Munich: Fink, 1979' 154-96. Zimmermann, Bernhard. Literaturrezeption im historischen Prozess: Zur Theorie einer Rezeptionsgeschichte der Literatur. Munich: Beck, 1977.

Constructivism Literary constructivism in Russia began with the Literaturnyi tsentr konstruktivistov [Literary Centre of Constructivists], established in 1923. The name derived from applied and visual arts such as sculpture, painting and film where it was used for the first time around 1920. The first official manifesto was published in the pages of LEF in 1924. The understanding of creative activity by literary constructivists differed considerably from that of their counterparts in other branches of art: they opposed blatantly utilitarian aesthetics and practical approaches to artistic creativity as represented, for example, by A. Gan in his book Konstruktivizm [Constructivism 1922]. Its main theoreticians were Ilia Sel'vinskii, Kornelii Zelinskii, Valentin Asmus, and Aleksandr Kviatkovskii. The group was strengthened in the mid-19205 by the poets Vera Inber, Vladimir Lugovskoi and Eduard Bagritskii. Among the multiplicity of diverse artistic groupings of Soviet Russia in the 19205, constructivists stressed that theirs was the "'literature of the technological age, a kind of homologue to scientific discoveries of the 2oth century. This is probably why constructivists were sometimes mistakenly viewed as not more than an offshoot of futurism and its early Soviet continuation - the Left Front of Art. While one cannot deny a certain degree of affinity between the two groups, it should be kept in mind that constructivists differed fun18

damentally from their predecessors on two accounts: they rejected the futurist principle of deformation in literature, that is, of radical artistic experimentation which destroyed the comprehensibility of content and opposed LEF's postulate of documentary literature, the literatura fakta [literature of facts]. Instead, they defended the integrity of content and the necessity of delivering a message to the reader; at the same time they postulated invention as the basic principle which leads to the existence and specificity of imaginative literature. In programmatic statements made in the late 19205 constructivists sometimes referred to themselves as modern heirs to the 19thcentury 'Westernizers' who fought Russian backwardness and isolation from the rest of Europe. If proletarian writers claimed to represent the aspirations of the working class, constructivists expounded their own activity as an implementation of the aims and vision of the Russian intelligentsia. Constructivism perceived culture as an allembracing and comprehensive phenomenon, penetrating all spheres of human existence and activity. Hence, literary constructivists fostered the idea of creating not only literature but also its broad theoretical foundations. Constructivists showed clear preference for the genre of poetry, followed by drama and then prose. Thematically, the literature of constructivism tended to raise issues related to the Revolution, the importance of technological progress, and the place of the intelligentsia in the process of industrial production. (See *theme.) While trying to create the image of a business-like protagonist, constructivists did not avoid moral questions and their assessment of the Revolution was not always credulous or flattering. The most prominent writer of this group was Ilia Sel'vinskii, author of the epic poem Ulialaievshchina [The Ulalayev's Revolt] and the play Kamandarm-2 [The Army Commander-2]. Sel'vinskii also showed a strong interest in theoretical problems and formulated the concept of 'double realism': the manner in which an aesthetic idea is shaped, its material organized and perceived. Realism did not necessarily mean a 'truthful reflection of life' because it allowed the writer a subjective interpretation of the external world. Consequently, Selvinskii formulated double realism as a polychromatic, manifold representation of a transitional epoch in its contradicting aspirations. He clearly distanced himself from 19thcentury realism with its developed 'sense of

Constructivism proportion' based on the aesthetic principle of *mimesis. If 19th-century realism was governed by the rule of expediency, then double realism would be founded on the precept of purposefulness. Double realism is neither a repetition of past artistic models nor a simple mimetic 'reflection of reality' as advocated by Marxists. The term assumes the fullest possible freedom of the writer's perception of the world that surrounds us and makes allowance for his or her whims, that is, it anticipates the use of artistic (creative) deformation. Programmatic poetics and theory of literature occupied a large and important place in constructivist writings. Good literary practice rested on four basic principles: ( i ) the semantic dominant [smyslovaia dominant a]; (2) the assertion of the maximum 'weight' of meaning on the smallest possible textual unit; (3) the postulate of local semantics; and (4) the inclusion of epic narrative and artistic devices of prose in poetry. These principles were directed first of all against the modernist destruction of 'story-telling' literature so evident, for example, in the experimental devices of futurism. Constructivists opposed the formalist idea of 'artistic dominant' (formulated by *Roman Jakobson) to the concept of 'semantic dominant'; that is, each work of literature always expresses some prime ideological, philosophical, political, or ethical idea. (See "ideology.) Although a literary work of art evokes ambiguity and may provoke a multitude of interpretations, it remains subordinated to one organizing thought. Constructivist writers aimed to achieve two first principles through rationality, succinctness, expediency, and clarity in their works; they held the belief that the shortest possible unit of literary text must bear the maximum 'weight' of meaning. The text must be 'loaded' with meaning and the theme exploited to the utmost. The concept of local semantics meant a particular interpretation of what is known in literature as 'local colour.' A theme, according to constructivist theoreticians, can be made homogeneous and artistically consistent if it avails itself of a store of words which is typical of its semantic field. Thus if a poet composes a poem about miners and their work, the poet ought to find the right words (for example, from their technical language) which would be most homologous to their professional occupation and way of thinking. The fourth principle calling for the introduction of epic elements into poetry followed the constructivist insistence

that artistic literature must deliver a message which can be accomplished through narrative and plot. (See *story/plot.) On another theoretical level, constructivists presented their own definition of literature and the literary work of art. In Poeziia kak smysl [Poetry as Sense], Zelinskii argued for poetry as a fulfilment of both formal and semantic functions. The title of Zelinskii's treatise stood in clear contradiction to *Viktor Shklovskii's earlier statement of the formalist view. In Tskusstvo kak priem' ['Art as Technique'; also translated as 'Art as Device' 1917], Shklovskii argued that the evolution of literature means a continuous renewal of literary form and its artistic devices. (See also "formalism, Russian.) Zelinski did not dispute the assertion that poetry means an organization of form; in fact, the term 'organization' played a key role in constructivist theoretical thought, which claimed that every realm of human activity must be subjected to rational organization. However, Zelinskii rejected the formalist idea of treating literature as a technique only. For him, the most important, determinant factor in the evolution of literature remained sense, which he perceived as a manifestation of the dialectical relationship between the artist, the external world and the reader. The existence of poetry is conditioned by the constant struggle with sense. Poetry wants to subjugate life by endowing it with sense because there is an opposition between the sense of word and the sense of outer reality. Poetry does not 'reflect' life but creates sense. Whenever a writer tries to make poetry represent something, sh/e experiences constant disillusionment because sh/e is unable to express herself as adequately as initially intended but only in approximations. The contrasting forces that stand in the poet's way as impediments to expression are the outer world of objects and the word. Both these worlds stand in opposition not only to the writer but also in relation to each other. Consequently, the function of poetry consists of a continuous pursuit of sense. Understandably, within such a concept of literature considerable attention is given to the 'word' as the main bearer of sense. Zelinskii differentiated between 'sense' and 'meaning' of the word: meaning is the more important, for it also functions as the bearer of 'sense.' When a writer wants to express something, he implements an inner orientation or intention to denote it. This process is accompanied by new forms which are conditioned bv what Zelinskii 19

Constructivist theory of literature calls a 'logical quantum.' The destruction of an old form does not have any logical justification; in fact, it is marked by a certain absurdity, a break or jump in logic. This break, that is, the destruction of the logic of old form together with the discovery of new innumerable designations and meanings, is defined by Zelinskii as the logical or verbal quantum. In this process 'word' plays a crucial role, but it is conditioned by various factors and cannot be recognized as a direct expression of what we want to say or designate. Constructivists, above all Zelinskii, introduced the notion of sensing word [osmyslennnoe slovo]. If the function of thought is to designate singular units of sense, then the role of logic consists of linking these units into larger and purposeful entities. This process of 'constructing' such entities does not proceed without resistance. It is opposed by two forces: on the one hand, word is an unsteady value, constantly changing in its semantic quality because a word is a function of matter and whenever it is used it registers anew the relationship between man and nature; on the other hand, the semantic changeability of a word is opposed by its striving for stability, for semantic permanence derived from previous utterances. The word, then, is at the same time concrete, symbolic and ambiguous. Unlike other groups or currents within modernism which often promoted ambiguity as their most important aesthetic principle, constructivists aimed at creating sense and precision. To achieve this, they proposed applying visual effects such as additional diacritical signs, diagrams, letters of the old Greek and Latin alphabets, and geometric figures. In the early experimental stages, they also used mathematical symbols such as square roots, placed at the end of or beside a poem, giving the synopsis and explanation of its content. Experimentation was proposed on various levels of literary works of art, particularly poetry. Kviatkovskii, for example, emphasized the need for innovative changes in the Russian system of versification. He proposed the elimination of the existing systems of versification for the sake of introducing a new technique the taktometr, which was intended to do away with the existing tonic metres (iamb, trochee, dactyl, and so on) and to introduce a more flexible poetic unit in order to reach a greater sense-capacity and bring poetry closer to music.

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Constructivists did not have a chance to verify many of their experiments. Unfortunately, their most interesting theoretical statements of the late 19205 coincided with the growing bureaucratization and dogmatism of Soviet cultural life. In the spring of 1930 the most prominent Constructivists (Zelinskii, Inber, Sel'vinskii) formed the Brigade M i which was incorporated into the main organization of proletarian writers - RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), a compromise which aimed to appease the most severe critics from the dogmatic Marxist camp. Under the umbrella of a proletarian organization, the constructivists hoped to survive, at least for a time. However, pressure grew and criticism remained unabated. Towards the end of 1930 the group ceased to exist, although its writers and critics continued to participate in Soviet literary life throughout the thirties, forties and fifties by accepting and practising the theoretical tenets of socialist realism. (See also *Marxist criticism.) EDWARD MOZEJKO

Primary Sources Grubel, R.G. Russicher Konstruktivismus. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981. Mozejko, E. 'Russian Literary Constructivism: Towards a Theory of Poetic Language.' In Canadian Contributions to the Vlll International Congress of Slavists. Ed. E. Heier, G. Luckyj, and G. Schaarschmidt. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1978, 16-70. Szymak, ]. Twurczosc Ilji Sielwinskiego na tie teorii konstruktyivizmu. Wroclaw, Warsaw, Krakow: PAN, 1965. Zelinskii, K. Poeziia kak smysl. Moskva: Federatsiia, 1929. - and Sel'vinskii. Biznes. Moskva: Gosizdat, 1929. - Caspian literatury. Moskva: Krug, 1925. - Zelinskii, K., A.M. Chicherin, and E.-K. Sel'vinskii. Mena vsekh, Konstruktivisty poety. Moskva, 1924.

Constructivist theory of literature: see Empirical Science of Literature Croatian Philological Society: see Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo

Cultural materialism

Cultural materialism Cultural materialism is an approach to *literature initiated in Britain in the late 19705 by the theoretical writings of *Raymond Williams. In the mid-1980s, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield borrowed and redefined the term as they applied it to the study of Renaissance drama. Rooted in Marxism, cultural materialism stresses interaction between cultural creations such as literature and their historical context, including social, political and economic elements. (See also *Marxist criticism.) Anthropological background The term 'cultural materialism' first appeared in anthropological studies. Marvin Harris applied the name 'cultural materialism' to a scientific method of studying the interaction between social life and material conditions (The Rise of Anthropological Theory 1968). Influenced not only by Marxist thought but also by Darwinian evolutionary theory, cultural materialism explains 'cultural phenomena in terms of their place and their history in the material circumstances of specific people, and in the productive and reproductive demands of their environment' (Ross, xvi). Like classical Marxism, it sees material conditions as the primary influence on social life. Unlike Marxism, however, cultural materialism stresses an empirical rather than a dialectical stance. Consequently, studies give more attention to societal influences on economic production than to identifying class exploitation within a capitalist system. The interdependence of science and politics forms the primary assumption of this anthropological theory. Raymond Williams Raymond Williams appears to have coined the phrase 'cultural materialism' in Marxism and Literature (1977) independently of the parallel development in anthropology. Nevertheless, the two fields similarly emphasize material influences on cultural activities and the consequent need to ground culture in its historical context. Applying Marxist historical materialism to literary studies, Williams revises its central base/superstructure model. Classical Marxism identifies the economic base of material production as the sole determining factor of the superstructure encompassing communi-

cation, art, human consciousness, and other cultural activities. Williams, however, adjusts both 'base' and 'superstructure' by describing the economic base as a process rather than a fixed state, by allowing superstructural aspects some autonomy from economic influences, and by indicating that the cultural superstructure is itself material. His understanding of materialism includes the cultural production of 'meanings and values' which use language as a material form that relies on 'specific technologies of writing' and 'mechanical and electronic communication systems' (Problems in Materialism and Culture 243). This theory of cultural materialism claims a 'constitutive' and 'constituting' relationship of activities at all levels of society as they mutually influence and determine one another. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield brought Raymond Williams' theory to a study of Shakespearian drama and defined its parameters in their own terms. Noting the significance of 'cultural' and 'material,' they point out that the cultural aspect of the theory combines two meanings: the analytical term 'culture' referring to social systems studied in anthropology and the social sciences, and the evaluative term referring to art and literature as forms of 'high culture.' In addressing the materialist aspect of the theory, they reject two opposing views: idealism which asserts that art transcends society and time, and classical Marxism which assumes that culture is secondary to politics and economics. Suggesting that literary texts 'represent' rather than 'transcend' or 'reflect' material reality, Dollimore and Sinfield assert literature's potential both to interact with and to intervene in accepted practices and beliefs. This active role of literature they complement by explicitly identifying the political goals of cultural materialism itself, as a theory founded on 'commitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class' (Political Shakespeare vii-viii). Prefacing their collection of essays by indicating that cultural materialism involves 'historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis' (viii), they see theory as broadly overlapping with and including studies of history, sociology, feminism,

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Cultural materialism Marxism, and *poststructuralism. (See also *sociocriticism, *materialist criticism, *feminist criticism.) Ideology A central concept in cultural materialism, '*ideology' has a complex background. From classical Marxism, it is a system of false beliefs founded on contradictions and inconsistencies that misrepresent social relationships. From the modified Marxism of theorists such as "Louis Althusser, it is the comprehensive system of ideas, beliefs and values that influences human behaviour in any society. Althusser describes all institutions, including educational systems, law, religion, and arts, as ""Ideological State Apparatuses which represent and reproduce the myths or beliefs needed to maintain a society's existing mode of economic production (137). (See *myth.) Williams incorporates both the original and the modified Marxist views by placing ideology in a context of change comprising 'residual,' 'dominant' and 'emergent' elements in culture. At any historical moment, the dominant elements form the controlling ideology, while residual aspects of previous ideologies maintain some influence and emergent elements in the form of new ideas and values initiate change by challenging central beliefs. Dominant values 'misrepresent' by failing to acknowledge the complexity of social interaction, but marginal beliefs complete the ideological picture by accounting for historical change and cultural contradictions. In this understanding, ideology encompasses all social practices, including the production of literary texts which both evaluate and participate in contemporary values and beliefs. (See also "margin.) Politics Cultural materialists focus their study on literary representations of ideology as it is used to reinforce *power and *authority in the face of opposition. 'Consolidation,' '*subversion' and 'containment' are key words in this political interpretation. As Jonathan Dollimore explains, 'The first refers, typically, to the ideological means whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself; the second to the subversion of that order, the third to the containment of ostensibly subversive pressures' ('Introduction,' Political Shakespeare 10). Materialists view po-

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litical power as a tenuous relationship between dominance and subversion. Their goal in textual analysis is to demystify the power described by pointing out that its legitimating ideas and values are merely chosen ideologies rather than sacred or inherently natural foundations of order. From a cultural materialist perspective, any dominant order restricts and falsifies human experience and literary texts play a politically subversive role by exposing the contradictions and inconsistencies which undermine domination. Renaissance drama Cultural materialism has significantly influenced the study of Renaissance drama, in which the interaction between politics and performance has been of particular interest in current literary criticism. (See *performance criticism.) Prior to identifying a name for the approach in Political Shakespeare (1985), Jonathan Dollimore applied its assumptions in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1984). His study incorporates two cultural materialist concerns: a political interpretation of texts and a challenge to modern essentialist views and criticism. (See *essentialism.) He portrays the Jacobean playwrights as political activists who, on the one hand, repeatedly question and subvert the ideological foundations of monarchical authority, but who, on the other hand, manifest adherence to some of the same contradictory beliefs because they lack ideological immunity to their own culture. In addressing modern assumptions and interpretations of Renaissance texts, Dollimore challenges essentialism, the view than human nature has inherent or universal qualities uniting readers and writers from one historical period to the next. To cultural materialists, individuals are not timeless and unchanging but historically and socially determined. This understanding has led scholars to study contextual influences on other Renaissance texts as well, from the political writings of Thomas More to the poetry of Edmund Spenser. (See also "universal.) Textual reproduction and reception Opposition to essentialism emerges in the cultural materialist attention to texts not only represented in their own cultural context but

Cultural materialism received and reproduced through history. Working on the assumption that literature serves political ends rather than capturing universal human values, materialists explore cultural practice in the 2oth century to identify current literary adaptations and interpretations. Renaissance scholars such as Graham Holderness (1985), jean Howard and Marion O'Connor (1987), and John Drakakis (1985) demonstrate an interest in historical, cultural change by evaluating contemporary television and film versions of Shakespeare's plays or by examining the image of Shakespeare fostered by the British educational system. They endeavour both to counter conservative views of early post-Second World War theatres and academics and to raise awareness that all textual appropriation and analysis have a subjective, political dimension. A concern with cultural self-consciousness and with literature and criticism as ideological practices provides the link between the popularity of cultural materialism in Renaissance studies and similar analytical methods applied to other historical periods and broader sociological topics. Jerome McGann's (1983) and Marjorie Levinson's (1986) focus on ideology and politics in Romantic poetry, Lee Patterson's (1987) re-evaluation of historical studies in medieval literature, Mary Poovey's (1988) study of material conditions affecting representations of women in Victorian society, and Alan Sinfield's Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989) represent the broad scope of cultural materialist influences. The evident interest in textual reproduction and reception throughout literary studies is part of a much wider sociological discussion among writers such as Stuart Hall (1980), Terry Lovell (1980) and Janet Wolff (1981), who consider art as materialist practice and culture as social production. Similar critical assumptions and influences underlie this whole range of academic discourse whether or not the scholars deliberately identify themselves as practitioners of a cultural materialist approach. Cultural materialism and old historicism Cultural materialism objects to older historicist assumptions while sharing an interest in the relationship of literary texts to historical surroundings. Cultural materialists resist the distinction between history as static background and literature as foregrounded subject by

seeing history more as subjective interpretation than as objectifiable fact and by including literature as an interactive part of history. They likewise assert cultural diversity, political instability and the interdependence of materialism and cultural expression to counter older historicist beliefs in a unified culture, a single political model and universal truths. In Renaissance studies, E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (1948) provides the key historicist stance against which materialists define their position. Tillyard argues for a cosmic and hierarchical political order founded on universal acceptance of Providentialism. The same historical World Picture becomes in a cultural materialist interpretation the dominant ideology perpetuated by the monarchy but challenged by marginal political voices and emerging humanist developments. Cultural materialism and *New Historicism Cultural materialism shares its reaction to older approaches with New Historicism, a theory having a similar impact in the study of Renaissance texts and first attracting attention in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). The two practices are so closely related that critics adopting and discussing them often conflate the two or simply acknowledge the difficulty of delineating their differences. Both cultural materialism and New Historicism share a focus on power and ideology and a view that writers challenge political power by exploring its representations and exposing its inconsistencies. Dissolving the boundaries between literature and other disciplines, both likewise share the assumption that literature is completely integrated with political, social and economic forces. Often understood as British and American counterparts of the same theory, cultural materialism and New Historicism can be distinguished partly by national differences. The British Marxist origins of cultural materialism link it to a tradition of oppositional politics, while New Historicism is influenced more directly by *Clifford Geertz's anthropology, *Michel Foucault's interest in power relations and *Jacques Derrida's *deconstruction theory than by American party politics. Marxist political background helps to account for the cultural materialist belief in freedom for social change through literary texts and analysis. Ties with deconstruction partly explain the

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Cultural materialism New Historicist view that individuals are selffashioned but decentred, that they lack the psychological or emotional unity entailed in the political commitment advocated by cultural materialists. (See *centre/decentre.) Theoretical purpose is consequently more overtly expressed by the materialists. The two also differ in their textual interpretation. Cultural materialists focus on the subversion of dominant ideologies and institutions represented in literature, while the New Historicists emphasize containment in asserting that the dominant is necessarily defined by the subversion it controls. Thus New Historicist studies frequently conclude with the inevitable and overwhelming presence of power, cultural materialists by asserting the contradictions that necessarily produce cultural change. In spite of their slightly different angles, the two approaches nevertheless remain closely aligned. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield's inclusion of New Historicist articles in Political Shakespeare: Essays on Cultural Materialism and Stephen Greenblatt's recent preference for the term 'cultural poetics' rather than New Historicism (Greenblatt 1989; Felperin 1990) demonstrate the uncertain and shifting boundaries between the two theories. Weaknesses and strengths The political bias of cultural materialism is its most controversial aspect. With a deliberate Marxist orientation, its practitioners often choose texts that validate their own position or impose anachronistic values and perceptions on pre-Marxist periods. While the cultural materialists partly exonerate themselves by not pretending to cloak the political intentions of their analyses in any other terms, their goals nevertheless often lead to a narrow, predictable reading of texts or to a discussion of contemporary politics which overshadows focus on texts and history altogether. The political purpose also makes the scope of cultural materialism difficult to determine because some scholars who adopt similar analytical methods deliberately avoid identifying themselves with the approach to distance themselves from a polemical stance. With the collapse of communist regimes and accompanying attacks on the Left, Marxist influences in criticism show signs of becoming even less acceptable. Scholars who do declare themselves cultural materialists have been criticized for being both

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too materialist and not materialist enough. Unintentionally, Raymond Williams undervalues materiality by asserting that it circumscribes every social practice, thereby leaving no nonmaterialist reality by which to identify the significance of the material. On the other hand, practitioners sometimes apply their assumptions to texts in such theoretical terms that they ignore historically and materially specific influences on writers, performers and publishers. Their assertion that textual production and reception are determined exclusively by external cultural forces can unsettle readers who recognize that their own appreciation of literature stems not solely from the need or desire to understand historical context but from pleasure in the story itself or identification with fictional experiences and personalities. Cultural materialists have contributed to literary criticism in their re-evaluation of the relationship between present and past. They remind readers that texts do have a history and that knowing historical conditions can enrich one's understanding and appreciation of literature. While exposing monolithic interpretations which simplify and unify past periods, they call for a closer look at the complexities existing in any society by portraying culture more as a living organism that constantly changes than as a fixed entity than can be objectively described. They likewise emphasize that readers, scholars and critics deceive themselves if they think their own values and attitudes do not influence their understanding of literature, their own culture and the past. FAITH NOSTBAKKEN

Primary Sources Dollimore, Jonathan. 'Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism.' Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985, 2-17. - Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. - and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985. Harris, Marvin. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968. Ross, Eric, ed. Beyond the Myths of Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism. New York: Academic P, 1980.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Deconstruction - Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: New Left Books, 1480.

Secondary Sources Althusser, Louis. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brevvster. London: New Left Books, i .

Itzkoff, Seymour W. Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1971. Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Lipton, David R. Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany 1914-7933. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1978. Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Evanston, 111.: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949.

Chomsky, Noam Avram (b. U.S.A., 1928-) Linguist, political writer and activist. The son of the Hebrew scholar and historical linguist William Chomsky, Noam Chomsky studied mathematics, philosophy and linguistics, and specialized in the last discipline, working under the direction of the American distributionalist Zelig S. Harris at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote a Master's thesis called 'Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew/ and began publishing articles on the logical structure of language in 1951. His Ph.D. thesis, Transformational Analysis/ is contained in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, written in 1955 on the basis of research done at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and published in part in 1975. Chomsky joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and has been Ferrari Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics since 1966 and Institute Professor since 1976. Chomsky is the founder of transformational generative grammar, the major trend in linguistics in the second half of this century. His proposals, first published in Syntactic Structures 0957)' revolutionized the development of linguistics. His work has been profoundly influential in psychology, philosophy and cognitive science, and has had repercussions in mathematics, anthropology and literary theory. He has also achieved eminence as a political writer and activist, vigorously opposing the foreign policies of the United States and aspects of the American social and political system tied to the military-industrial complex. According to Chomsky, the goals of a generative grammar are (i) to render explicit the implicit system of knowledge, or competence, of an adult speaker or hearer and (2) to account for the growth and attainment of that

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Chomsky knowledge with an explanatory theory where general principles are viewed as properties of a biologically given innate structure or Universal Grammar (the Innateness Hypothesis). (See *competence/performance.) From such a perspective, linguistics can be considered a branch of cognitive psychology within the rationalist tradition. Early 20th-century linguistics was concerned with cataloguing the facts of language. By contrast, Chomsky proposes to concentrate on the mental properties which underlie human linguistic abilities. Linguistic competence constitutes an autonomous system whose properties are not derivable from the society, culture or personality of the speaker or hearer, and includes the ability to produce and understand novel utterances, and to recognize ambiguities and deviations. Competence is one of the many components that interact to determine performance, that is, the actual use of language in concrete situations. In developing the above position, Chomsky employed ideas already voiced by the rationalist philosophers and grammarians of the i yth and i8th centuries. He provided incisive criticisms of behaviouristic, empiricist and taxonomic theories of language dominant in the European structuralist schools (*Prague School, glossomatics) and among the American structuralists, also known as distributionalists - followers of Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) in the second quarter of the century. He was instrumental in reviving rationalism, as opposed to logical empiricism (W.V. Quine in philosophy) and behaviourism (B.F. Skinner in psychology), and in reopening the debate on innate ideas in philosophy and psychology alike. An explicit characterization of linguistic competence is a formalized theory or a generative grammar. Such a grammar comprises a syntactic component which is central, a semantic component which assigns meaning to the structures generated - that is, explicitly enumerated - by the syntax, and a phonological component providing phonetic interpretation. The syntactic component has two different levels of representation known as 'deep structure' and 'surface structure/ and these are related by the transformational rules. Phrase-structure rules specify the hierarchical structure of the sentences of a language and generate deep structures in conjunction with the lexicon, which contains information about

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lexical items. The deep-structure phrase-markers are mapped by the transformations onto surface-structure phrase-markers. Speaking informally, the surface structure corresponding to 'What book will John think that we bought?' is derived from a deep structure resembling 'John will think that we bought what book' by the application of two transformations: (i) 'What book' is moved to the first position of the sentence in surface structure, and (2) 'will' is moved to the second position. The two transformations are subcases of the more general rule 'Move alpha/ with properties defined by the innate faculty of language or Universal Grammar. Since its inception, generative grammar has gone through several phases of development and elaboration. The first stage corresponds to Syntactic Structures (1957). The second phase, the Standard Theory or the Aspects-model is presented in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). The revised or Extended Standard Theory resulted from debates on the connection between the levels of representation in syntax and the semantic component, as partially reflected in Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972). The more recent Government and Binding or GB model, also known as the Principles-and-Parameters approach, begins with Lectures on Government and Binding (1981). Chomskyan linguistics held out the promise of a collaboration between linguists and literary scholars in analysing the grammatical base of a literary work in its historical context. More specifically, generative grammar has influenced literary criticism in stylistics and poetics, as reflected in the studies collected by D.C. Freeman in Linguistics and Literary Style (1970) and in Essays in Modern Stylistics (1981). The principles of generative phonology are applied to metrics in M. Halle and S.J. Keyser's English Stress (1971). Also, "Jonathan Culler has extended Chomsky's notion of competence to 'literary competence': the mastery of literary conventions required (in addition to linguistic competence) for an understanding of ""literature. From a philosophical perspective, alternative views to Chomsky's proposals can be found in the essays by H. Putman, W.V. Quine and J. Searle in On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays, ed. Harman (1974). Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky,

Cixous ed. Piattelli-Palmarini (1980) reflects psychological positions alternative to those of Chomsky. (See also *discourse analysis theory, *structuralism, *speech act theory.) M A R I A - LUISA RIVERO

Primary Sources Chomsky, N. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1965. - Barriers. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1986. - Cartesian Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. - Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. - Essays on Form and Interpretation. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977. - Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger, 1986. - Language and Mind. Enl. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1972. - Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Nicaraguan Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1988. - Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris, 198 i. - The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. New York: Plenum, 1975. - Reflections on Language. London: Fontana, 1976. - Rules and Representations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. - Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1982. - Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. - Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton, 1957. - Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.

Secondary Sources Cook, V. Chomsky's Universal Grammar. London: Blackwell, 1988. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1 9 / 5 . D'Agostino, F. Chomsky's System of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Freeman, D.C., ed. Essays in Modern Stylistics. New York: Methuen, 1981. - Linguistics and Literary Style. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Greene, J. Psycholinguistics: Chomsky and Psychology. London: Penguin, 1972. Halle, M., and S.J. Keyser. English Stress: Us Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse. New York: Harper and Row, 197 i. Harman, G. ed. On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Lyons, J. Chomsky. Rev. ed. by Frank Kermode. London: Fontana, 1977.

Newmeyer, F.]. Linguistic Theory in America: the First Quarter-Century of Transformational Generative Grammar. New York: Academic P, 1980. Piattelli-Palmarini, M., ed. Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Radford, A. Transformational Grammar: A First Course. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Smith, N.V., and D. Wilson. Modern Linguistics: The Results of Chomsky's Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Cixous, Helene (b. Algeria, 1937-) Feminist theorist, literary critic, novelist, playwright. In 1959, Helene Cixous passed the agregation in English, beginning her teaching career in the French university system as an assistante at the University of Bordeaux (1962), then maitre assistante at the Sorbonne (1965-7) and maitre de conference at Nanterre (1967). In 1968 she was awarded the Doctorat d'Etat es lettres for L'Exil de James Joyce ou I'art du rernplacernent, a poststructuralist study of Joyce and the decentring of subjectivity. (See *poststructuralism, *centre/ decentre.) In 1969, she won the Prix Medicis for her fiction. She also started the influential literary theory review Poetique (with *Tzvetan Todorov and *Gerard Genette). Named charge de mission to found the experimental Universite de Paris vin at Vincennes, now at SaintDenis, on its establishment in the autumn of 1968 she was appointed Professor of English Literature. Here in 1974 Cixous founded the Centre de recherches en etudes feminines of which she is director. Her graduate research seminar is offered at the College Internationale de Philosophic. (See also *feminist criticism, French.) To make a distinction between Cixous' 'creative' and 'critical' texts is problematic in the light of her insistence on the interrelatedness of reading and writing. Engagement with a *text involves one in the 'process of creation' ('Conversations' 148), encounter with the other and self-creation reaching a 'poetically beyond' (ibid. 145). (See *self/other.) Her aim, like that of *Jacques Derrida, is to blur boundaries, undo limits between genres and between subjects, not by pushing logic to its limits in the demonstrative movement of philosophy, but by responding to the call of an other, poeti-

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Cixous cally exploring the in-between that is the onewithin-the-other. (See *subject/object / *genre criticism.) While a number of Cixous' most recent 'theoretical' texts are explicit exercises in reading attentively, such as Reading with Clarice Lispector (1990), many of her 'creative' texts are meditations on or 'interventions' in the text of another writer/theorist. Her play Portrait de Dora (1976), stages *Sigmund Freud's analytic narrative in order to expose his own countertransference. Her 'fiction' Ilia (1980), resonates with *Martin Heidegger's 'il y a/ 'es gibt' ('De la scene' 22), as rewritten by Derrida (/'/ y a cent blancs), and raises questions of giving, investing and divesting in relation to writing and to the Orphic *myth so as to displace its social contract predicated on the sight and death of a woman. Such works are related to Cixous' attempts to write the 'present absolu' through the fragment or 'infinite detail' (Reading 227). This aim situates Cixous in the 'heretic hermeneutic' of the Rabbinic tradition which, on the basis of 'principles of multiple meaning and endless interpretability,' maintains that interpretation and text are inseparable, not hierarchized according to degrees of 'originality' (Handelman xiv). (See *hermeneutics, *metacriticism.) The narrative of a woman 'coming to writing' with its displacement of death and mourning in a revolutionary (Utopian) going 'beyond' is closely associated with her first fictional work, Dedans (1969). Here Cixous attempts to escape from her dead, hence idealized, father, an effort which continues to be part of the trajectory of her writing as she articulates it in 'De la scene de ITnconscient a la scene de 1'Histoire' ['From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History' 1990; trans. 1989]. Informed by the Oedipal myth, the scene of writing for Cixous is an attempt to go beyond the absent Father, to escape from the Law, the Symbolic. (See *imaginary/symbolic/real, *Name-of-the-Father.) Rather than remembering, writing entails a movement of getting beyond the ego in a dispossession through loss, mourning, an encounter with the undescribable, the radically other, a reciprocal pouring out as a gift to those others who make us strangers to ourself ('De la scene' 23-4). Rewriting the Hegelian Aufhebung, with its dialectics of appropriation and specularization, Cixous, unlike *Simone de Beauvoir, aims not for transcendence of the feminine and equality

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with men but for the exploration of the possibilities of difference. The attention she accords the other subverts the Hegelian model of subjectivity, desire, knowledge, where the other is mastered by the subject. Writing is always writing 'from' not to a point of synthesis: from something given by the other (Coming to Writing 43), moving away from 'Death, our double mother, through writing' (ibid. 38), writing as 'search/ in the fullness of life's 'terrible power of invention' (ibid. 41). These are qualities she responds to in the texts she admires and reads 'critically': Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Tsvetaeva, Kleist, Mandelshtam, and Lispector. Many are Jewish writers: the figure of 'juifemme' ('De la scene' 27) frames Cixous' concern with what she calls the 'modern tragedy' of banishment, exclusion and heterogeneity ('A Propos de Manne' 220). Conscious of the contradiction in exile, she wants it to be productive and focuses on the going beyond entailed in the symbolic, verbal assumption of loss. This involves a shift in focus in the Nietzschean paradigm from the orgies of dismemberment and suffering of the son to Demeter's joy in beginnings. (See *Nietzsche.) Unlike *Luce Irigaray, who uses *irony to expose the effect of the sacrifical social contract, or *Julia Kristeva, who analyses the aberrant subjectivities produced when women are forced into the contract against their will, Cixous explores the possibilities for transformation this breach opens. This 'denationalization' is a 'deterritorialization' like Kafka's 'litterature mineure,' the invention of a singular or 'nomadic' writing forged in the exile's condition of multiple languages (Deleuze). Her theory of translation as dialogic encounter recalls that of German Romanticism (Herman) and of *Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of *heteroglossia. (See theories of ""translation, *polyphony/dialogism.) It is this narrative of 'coming to writing' through the heterogeneity of her 'mother tongue' that informs Cixous' feminist theoretical/autobiographical texts of the 19705 in both their 'jewessness' ('jewoman'; La Jeune nee 101) and their 'jouissance' (orgasmic pleasure, textual freeplay; ibid. 90). It also shapes her reading of James Joyce, whose writing, she shows, in the shadow of Thoth's Book of the Dead, involves a disintegration of the subject which he goes beyond to make of language his 'reality.' There are, nonetheless, for Cixous, different modes (genres) of interrelating reading and writing - the 'critical' work more at-

Cixous tentive to the text of the other than is the creative - which have to do with their different work on time. Like Irigaray's, Cixous' theoretical contribution is a strategy and ethics of *symptomatic reading. However, her mode of reading is not that of ventriloquism, of quoting in a new context - displacement through repetition - but of inundation, of overwhelming a fragmentary quotation in the flow of her quasi-automatic writing or improvisational performance - of displacement through dissolution, of modulation. Her constant strategy is to work upon the signifier, making it 'vibrate' or slip from one phoneme to a homophone, developing a web of meanings through sound rather than semantics ('A Propos de Manne' 220), 'Soundsense' (Coming to Writing 58). 'Voter,' writing as 'stealing/ making signifiers 'fly' in new contexts (ibid. 46). (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Cixous wishes to expose the workings, and to move beyond the logic, of the proper, the principle of identity and *mimesis in the order of the Selfsame, which has limited the concept of difference in European thought exclusively to gendered difference, restricted to the maternal, which is figured as castration and death. This critical/theoretical work may be divided into three moments: Cixous' poststructuralist readings of English and German classics, her 'feminist' critiques of the Symbolic with its Law and retentive libidinal economy, and the readings of Lispector. Cixous' critical narrative of escape through exile and reinvention in languages structures her first book, L'Exil de James Joyce ou I'art du deplacement [The Exile of James Joyce 1968; trans. 1972]. Here Cixous delineates the textual unconscious in an approach that stresses the affinity between Joyce's work and the theory of *textuality and the decentred subject emerging as poststructuralism in Paris. There is no ""metalanguage, no application of theory to Joyce's text. Rather the text reads the theory and is read by it at the same time. Within Joyce criticism, Cixous innovates. Instead of explicating Joyce's texts in light of the earlier 'realistic' Dubliners, she confronts their unreadability to look at the textual mechanisms of infinite productivity in light of the *deconstruction of representation in Fiiuiegan's Wake. Prcnoms de persoune (1974) is an anagram of pere as per, pre that dismembers the paternal in a proliferation of first names. Such multi-

plying of the subject is undermined by the polysemy of 'personne' as nobody, as well as somebody. The title outlines Cixous' critical approach to reading as the process of loss of one's own name, the divisibility of the subject, and the merging of the I/you, as she engages in dialogue with texts from her personal *canon: Freud, Kleist, Joyce, Hoffman, Poe. Cixous like many other poststructuralists challenges the reigning paradigm of the subject and desire in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic (appropriation by the master and closure [death] to the slave other) in favour of a dispersed and mobile subjectivity, organized by the drives of the unconscious that produce transformation. Cixous also critiques Freud and *Jacques Lacan on the subject of desire born of lack, veil, separation, and death: she sees fiction (phantasm) as 'an action, having an efficacy' (Conley 16), opening new possibilities for life. In particular, she is concerned with elaborating an economy of exchange, of abundance, of limitlessness, as space of opening, possibility, change. (See *desire/lack.) Cixous began writing of symbolic exchange and libidinal economies, of a need in contemporary society for an economy of dissolution of the subject, of the *subversion of property, of the propre, law, logic, order, meaning. ""Literature in an economy of depense (expenditure) or loss would connect with the subversion of the German Romantics, Cixous writes, to destroy the bastions of Togocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of society, the structure of political and of subjective economy, the pillars of property,' the entire 'repressive machine' (Prenoms 10). (See *logocentrism.) Passion is political, the political is libidinal. In adapting this general deconstructive program, however, Cixous makes a distinction between masculine and feminine libidinal economies, the latter characterized as economies of loss, of contradiction and limitlessness because of the political constraints that have socialized and metaphorized the feminine as lack. This difference foregrounds the ""paradox of feminist deconstruction: the decentring of the Subject has a different meaning and political effect for those who have never been positioned as subject in mastery, who are always already other. The oscillation between deferral and affirmation is a contradiction Cixous makes productive especially in her autobiographical feminist texts of the 19705. Here, the valorization of

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Cixous laughter and the irrational as an economy of subversion and transformation receives its most extended development in what has become known as 'ecriture feminine' or 'writing the body' (Jones) for its work upon the improper (the excessive body) as "trace and the maternal metaphor in the institutions of philosophy and literature. Cixous herself uses the terminology 'ecriture dite feminine' ('writing said to be feminine': Limonade 147, 148) to describe her writing from the body: 'Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History/ love, violence, time, work, desire inscribe it in my body' (Coming to Writing 52). It is a contingency of a materially specific instance of enunciation. (See *enonciation/ enonce.) Such traces of bodily inscription are frequent in autobiographical texts such as 'Coming to Writing' in which she refers to writing as menstrual blood or as mother's milk. While these signifiers have most frequently been read by critics within a network of biological signifiers, they should also be read within a network of textual signifiers, as Cixous suggests, for they are reworked quotations of Symbolist poets (ibid. 52). Concretized in 'Coming to Writing' as women giving birth to themselves in writing, images of white ink echo their use in La Jeune nee [The Newly Born Woman 1975; trans. 1986], in which Cixous exposes the work of the maternal metaphor in Symbolist poetics through her puns. These are also allusions to Derrida's account of metaphor effaced but active within a text. Foregrounding or 'disseminating' the metaphor, as Cixous does, is 'blanching' (whitening). Through the self-reflexive deployment of the maternal metaphor, Cixous raises the question whether the literal can be divorced from the figurative, the sensible from the intelligible, the proper from the improper. The metaphor is contaminated by the referent of the female body. Indeed, the metaphor is not a metaphor, but a metonymy. (See *metonymy/metaphor.) Like Irigaray's, Cixous' exploration of a different libidinal economy is staged through work on the axis of contiguity, metonymy, not that of substitution or metaphor (Binhammer). This decipherable libidinal economy can be read in the texts of a male or a female, of Shakespeare or Lispector. In a historical moment when the masculine is the sole reigning *power over discourse, Cixous aims to subvert its *authority by putting the feminine into circulation, what has been called 'gynesis' (Jardine). (See *gynesis.)

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This theoretical aim is articulated in Cixous' work of the 19705 in different phases. 'Sorties/ her section of La jeune nee which includes much of 'Le Rire de la Meduse' ['The Laugh of the Medusa' 1975; trans. 1976] and 'Le Sexe ou la tete?' ['Castration or Decapitation?' 1976; trans. 1981], developed from Hegel and Bataille to focus on the moments of rupture, of break-out as the title 'Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/Forays' suggests. Beyond *phallocentrism, where women are constrained between Medusa and the abyss, she writes into the unknown, writing herself away from woman as object of desire, inventing the feminine future where subjectivity would be reciprocal desire without the exclusion or closure objectifying an other. (See *closure/disclosure.) La Venue a I 'ecriture [Coming to Writing 1977; trans. 1991] develops the work on the maternal metaphor in an autobiographical text to expose an original difference at work in her 'mother tongue/ 'ma lalemande' (22), an interlanguage of German crossed with French. This narrative unfolds the story of the one who, known as 'das Kind,' of neutral gender, tries unsuccessfully to make herself into 'a proper woman' in French according to the principle of non-contradiction. She is unable to do so because of the split, the foreignness of her relation to the French language, always used fraudulently since she had no 'ownership/ no 'mastery' over it. Throwing herself into 'languelait' (English, milk tongue) complicates the attempt to develop an 'object-language' by placing her at the 'intersection of languages.' Becoming the search, she risks all, moving from the abyss, through laughter, to music beyond. The engagement with the other, with alterity in language(s), is staged in Vivre I'orange (1979), as the autobiographical trajectory of a Jewish-woman-in-a-Spanish-and-Germanspeaking-household-in-an-Arab-speakingFrench-colony who 'does languages' as she 'makes languages' ('Je fais des langues': 21) to engage with a Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector (a 'flash' of light), author of a text 'The Apple in the Dark' that produces the call of the other to which Cixous must respond. But 'in the translation of the apple (into orange) I denounce myself (Vive I'orange 40). As a Jewish woman from Europe, writing in the Portuguese of Brazil, Lispector's hybridity matches that of Cixous. More specifically, however, in Lispector Cixous has found Kafka as a woman,

Cixous a writer of a 'minor literature/ an artist of the minimal whose generosity and respect for objects she celebrates. Since this discovery of the Brazilian writer, Cixous has focused her research and teaching on Lispector's writing. This has taken the form of extended oral meditations on details of Lispector's texts which have recently come into print, sometimes accompanied by seminar papers of students on Cixous' or other writers' texts, as in Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminars of Helens Cixous (1988). Cixous works on a number of questions related to an economy of loss such as poverty, innocence, the valorization of nothing, of silence in the scene of writing, non-possibility, unreadability. This format of presentation introduces additional questions of pedagogy, since the critical scene is that of the classroom. The dialogic nature of the presentation of Cixous' critical texts underlines what has been her common practice since the 19705, exchanges with other women. While Cixous has extensively theorized the exploded or heterogeneous subject, other within the self in both national and gendered identifications as the 'plus-je' ('L'Essor de Plus-je' 1973), she has also worked to produce the 'feminine plural' (Coming to Writing 48) in her editorial practices. The Newly Born Woman is composed of two essays and a debate involving Cixous and Catherine Clement; La Jeune nee contains meditations/manifestos on gender and language by Madeleine Gagnon and Annie Leclerc as well as Cixous; Vivre I'orange is both a reading of Lispector's texts introducing her language and an exercise in collaborative translation with two anglophones, Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell. This practice of multiplying authors and languages within the boundaries of a book is a strategy of overwhelming the economy of the book, not by the 'death of the author' and the rise of *discourse and the text, as *Michel Foucault and *Roland Barthes would have it, but by reinforcing the 'arguments' of the texts against sublimation, appropriation, fetishization, of a language-object, a process furthered by the active engagement of the reader on the textual surfaces. The performative and dialogic are extended in Cixous' theatrical work. The response to Cixous' work has been sharply polarized. On the one hand, there are critics, mostly outside France, who have embraced her mode of empathetic reading 'with' the texts of writers and responding in a poetic,

rather than demonstrative, mode. Cixous' influence in Quebec has been considerable, not confined to her collaboration with Madeleine Gagnon, but extending to a whole generation of writers whose predilection for the exploration of desire was stimulated by Cixous' teaching at the Universite de Montreal in the early 19705. While writers such as Nicole Brossard, France Theoret and Louise Cotnoir have adapted the theories of work on the Symbolic, exploded subjectivity and work on the signifier to develop a textuality demanding the reader's interaction, they have rejected the psychoanalytic theory underpinning Cixous' project, accepting only its deconstructionism. (See *feminist criticism, Quebec.) Cixous' opponents are equally forceful in manifesting their objections. This opposition was first clearly articulated in France in the context of the struggles within the women's movement over positions taken by Psych et Po. Cixous was grouped with Psych et Po, Irigaray, Kristeva and others working with psychoanalysis as 'cultural feminism,' feminism of 'difference' - and was denounced as 'neo-feminine' by 'radical' (materialist) feminists in the founding manifesto of Questions feministes. (See *materialist criticism.) Cixous' Utopian aim of inventing a transformed imaginary is in question, though she acknowledges the historical determination of the imaginary by the discourses of the present mode of domination, she does not enquire into the material history of the workings of discourse, but attempts to reach beyond to invent the future. Cixous is caught in the very contradiction she locates at the heart of Joyce's work: there is freedom only outside a culture in which one is imprisoned, though her texts have tried to acknowledge their contradictory nature by the multiplication of the possibilities of languages and meanings. The contradiction foregrounded in Cixous' work between psychoanalysis and politics or between poetics and politics has been the key point critics address, whether they view positively creative potentials of excess and rupture in her 'exorbitant texts' (Duren) or find this contradiction an impasse for the 'engaged' critic who wishes her theorizing to produce political action for social change. A contradiction between the writerly and the social is perceived in Cixous' work by materialist critics like Leslie Rabine, who notes how what is written is exceeded (contradicted) through

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Cixous metaphors of the scene of writing. (See *readerly/writerly text.) Substituted for the phallic metaphor of the book-fetish in Cixous' textual economy is a metaphor of the text as weaving, not the Freudian veiling producing the Unheimliche, but a non-fetishistic, non-representational textuality which binds women together in the unconscious. The Anglo-American rejection of the premises of French feminism has been so effective that one recent critic, referring to 'the decline of Cixous' version of "feminine" writing,' uses her as an exemplary case for 'assessing the difficulties ... of an oppositional reading of culture/ the (im)possibility of engaging in critique of dominant cultural practices in order to change the prevailing order (Davis 267). (See *feminist criticism, Anglo-American.) This is a more general dilemma, he suggests, for the socially engaged intellectual who wants his or her discourse to effect change, when the rupture is neutralized and appropriated by the dominant discourse as 'opposition' (275). That this may be a premature elegy is indicated by recent work on Cixous appearing in England. Barbara Freeman tackles the problem of *essentialism by attributing it to the 'presuppositions' of Cixous' critics who are caught up in the very problem of the Cartesian mind/body split Cixous challenges. Their vocabulary is based on the assumption that the body and the text, the sensible and the intelligible, are inevitably separate (Freeman 59-60). The body never has a referential status independent of linguistic or textual mediation in Cixous' work: feminine sexuality is always an effect of its inscription or representation (Freeman 64). Cixous' constant concern is with the mediation of the body through representations of literature and psychoanalysis in the context of political issues, 'the relation between categories of thought and structures of oppression' (Shiach 1989, 155). (See *psychoanalytic theory.) To shift attention away from Cixous' work as a 'feminine aesthetic' (155), Morag Shiach delineates the philosophical underpinnings of Cixous' concern with the Symbolic as the source of power and the generator of categories, narrative structures, 'that provide both the rationale for, and the means of, the oppression of women' (ibid. 154). Shiach reads the possibilities for a stategic alliance between the 'feminine' (textualized representations) and 'women' (historically situated agents) as best

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actualized in theatrical writing, which allows for a complex *intertexuality and temporality that questions the 'natural' bases for 'character' and 'identity' (ibid. 162-3). Interweaving 'theory' and 'theatre' as modes of 'spectacle,' this practice bridges the opposition between abstraction and action, between philosophy and politics which Cixous' critics have decried. BARBARA GODARD

Primary Sources Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. - 'Conversations.' In Readings from the Seminar of Helene Cixous. Ed. Susan Sellers. Milton Keynes: Open UP; New York: St. Martin's P, 1988, 141-54. - Dedans. Paris: Grasset, 1969. - Entre I'ecriture. Paris: des femmes, 1986. - 'L'Essor de Plus-je.' L'Arc 54 (1973): 46-52. - 'An Exchange.' In Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine by Verena Andermatt Conley. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984, 129-65. - L'Exil de James Joyce ou I'art du rernplacement. 1968. The Exil of James Joyce. Trans. Sally Purcell. New York: David Lewis, 1972. - L'Heure de Clarice Lispector. Paris: des femmes, 1989. - Ilia. Paris: des femmes, 1980. - 'Joyce, la ruse de I'ecriture.' Poetique 4 (1970). 'Joyce: The (R)use of Writing.' Trans. Judith Still. In Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984, 15—30. - Limonade tout etait si infini. Paris: des femmes, 1982. - Portrait dc Dora. Paris: des femmes, 1976. - Prenorns de personne. Paris: Seuil, 1974. - 'A Propos de Manne.' In Helene Cixous, chemins d'une ecriture. Ed. Francoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Diaz-Diacoretz. Amsterdam: Rodopi; Paris: PU Vincennes, 1990, 213-34. - Reading with Clarice Lispector. Ed. and trans. Verena Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. - 'Le Rire de la Meduse.' L'Arc 61 (1975): 39-54. 'The Laugh of the Medusa.' Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93. Repr. in New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980, 245-64. - 'De la scene de 1'Inconscient a la scene de 1'Histoire. Chemins d'une ecriture.' In Helene Cixous, chemins d'une ecriture. Ed. Francoise van RossumGuyon and Myriam Diaz-Diacoretz. Amsterdam: Rodopi; Paris: PU Vincennes, 1990, 15-34. 'From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of His-

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tory.' Trans. Deborah Carpenter. In The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. New York: Routledge, 1989, 1-18. 'Le Sexe ou la tete?' Cahiers du GRIP 13 (Oct. 1976): 1-15. 'Castration or Decapitation?' Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs 7.2 (1981): 41-55. Vivre I'orange. Bilingual ed. Trans. Helene Cixous with Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell. Paris: des femmes, 1979. with Catherine Clement. La feune nee, 1975. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. with Madeleine Gagnon and Annie Leclerc. La Venue a I'ecriture. Paris: UGE 10/18, 1977. 'Coming to Writing.' Trans, and ed. Deborah Jenson. In Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991, I-S8.

Secondary Sources Attridge, Derek, and Daniel Ferrer. Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Binhammer, Katherine. 'Metaphor or Metonymy? The Question of Essentialism in Cixous.' Tessera 10 (Summer 1991): 65-79. Conley, Verena Andermatt. Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Davis, Robert Con. 'Woman as Oppositional Reader: Cixous on Discourse.' Papers on Language and Literature 24.3 (Summer 1988): 265-82. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Pour line litterature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975. Duren, Brian. 'Cixous' Exorbitant Texts.' Sub-Stance 32 (1981): 30-51. Freeman, Barbara. '"Plus corps done plus ccriture": Helene Cixous and the Mind-Body Problem.' Paragraph 1 1 . 1 (March 1988): 58-70. Handelman, Susan. The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany: SUNY P, 1982. Jardine, Alice. Genesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980. Rabine, Leslie VV. 'Ecriture Feminine as Metaphor.' Cultural Critique 8 (Winter 1987-8): 19-44. Rossum-Guyon, Franchise van, and Myriam DiazDiacoretz, eds. Helene Cixous, chemins d'une ecriture. Amsterdam: Rodopi; Paris: PU Vincennes, 1990. Shiach, Morag. Helene Cixous: A Politics of Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. - '"Their 'Symbolic' Exists, It Holds Power - We, the Sowers of Disorder, Know It Only Too Well."' In Hetu'een Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Teresa Brennan. London: Routledge, 1989, 153-67. Questions fi'tninistcs Collective. 'Variations on Com-

mon Themes. Questions feministes i (Nov. 1977). Trans. Yvonne Rochette-Ozello. In New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U of Massachussetts P, 1980, 212-30. Wilcox, Helen, Keith McWatters, Ann Thompson and Linda R. Williams, eds. The Body and the Text: Helen Cixous, Reading and Teaching. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Crane, R(onald) S(almon) (b. U.S.A., t886-d. 1967) Literary scholar and critic. A 1908 graduate of the University of Michigan, R.S. Crane (as he preferred to be known) earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1911 with a dissertation on 'The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance during the English Renaissance.' Between 191 i and 1924 he taught at Northwestern University. He then moved to the University of Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 195-1. Crane subsequently taught as Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto (1952), at Cornell University (1952-3 and 1957), at Carleton College (1954-5), and at Indiana University (1955-6). Crane is best known as the leader of the Neo-Aristotelian School centred at the University of Chicago, but for the first 25 years of his academic career he busied himself with more conventional literary scholarship and teaching. (See *Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago Schoo.) He continued his work on the vogue of the medieval romance and developed a continuing interest in the "literature of the i8th century. Much of this work involved the history of ideas and bibliography. He wrote and edited textbooks and anthologies and published his doctoral dissertation and several articles. In 1926 he contributed the first of six annual bibliographies on the 18th century to Philological Quarterly. So impressive was this bibliographical work that the bibliography continued to feature Crane's name long after his active participation had ceased. In 1930 he assumed the editorship of Modern Philology, a position he held until 1952. It was from this matrix of literary history, scholarly precision, teaching responsibilities, and professional activities that Crane emerged in 1935 as an advocate of literary criticism and as a significant critical theorist.

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Crane Crane's 'History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature' ( 1 9 3 5 ) was his contribution to a controversy initiated by John Livingston Lowes who, as president of the Modern Language Association, had in 1933 formally advocated criticism as the goal of literary study. Lowes' address prompted a response from Howard Mumford Jones, who argued with equal vigour that the true concerns of literary scholarship were historical, not aesthetic. Crane unhesitatingly and - given his work up to this time - surprisingly favoured literary explication and aesthetics. Oddly too, Crane published little else on critical theory before the appearance of 'The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks' (1947-8) and 'I.A. Richards on the Art of Interpretation' (1949), both of which were reprinted in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952), the manifesto of the NeoAristotelians. (See *Cleanth Brooks, *I.A. Richards.) Crane edited the volume and outlined in his introduction the critical tenets of the group. A more elaborate statement of his critical theory was presented in the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1952, published the next year as The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, Crane's only book on the subject. Several previously unpublished papers on literary theory were printed in the eclectic collection The Idea of the Humanities (1967). Crane rightly perceived that literary criticism proceeds under a great variety of banners, with a variety of seemingly contradictory purposes and methods, and that some systematic response to these multitudinous approaches is necessary if criticism is to have an epistemological basis. He rejected both scepticism and dogmatism and postulated instead a critical *pluralism, which recognizes that different questions demand different frames of reference. A given critical system is an instrument of inquiry, valid in its own terms, and represents a choice the critic makes in response to the questions he chooses to ask. Since principles and terms function only within the context of a given *discourse, there can be no ultimate critical synthesis. Crane suggested in 'Questions and Answers on the Teaching of Literary Texts,' delivered in 1953 but not published until 1967, that there are five 'major distinguishable aspects' of a literary work which might serve as the bases of critical pluralism: the verbal composition, the structure or

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form, the traits of substance and expression, the historical circumstances of composition, and the function and value of the work. It is not difficult to see here a reflection of Aristotle's four causes; indeed, Crane and the Chicago critics followed the lead of their colleague Richard McKeon in finding in the Greek philosopher the most flexible and comprehensive method of critical analysis, a method, they believed, that was best able to take into account all the causes of poetic structure. As a theorist of criticism, then, Crane was a pluralist; as a critic he chose Aristotelianism. As a theorist he recognized that his Aristotelianism was one language among many; in practice he often wrote as though it were the only valid language. Crane's influence beyond his immediate colleagues and students has not been great. NeoAristotelianism was itself a short-lived phenomenon. The critical Tower of Babel that Crane and his colleagues confronted is still with us, the languages more numerous and diverse than ever. RONALD W. VINCE

Primary Sources Crane, R.S., ed. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952. - The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays, 2 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967. - The Language of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1953. Secondary Sources Bashford, Bruce W. The Humanistic Criticism of R.S. Crane.' Northwestern University dissertation. 1971.

Booth, Wayne C. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Davis, Walter A. 'Theories of Form in Modern Criticism: An Examination of the Theories of Kenneth Burke and R.S. Crane.' University of Chicago dissertation. 1969. Denham, Robert D. 'R.S. Crane's Critical Method and Theory of Poetic Form.' Connecticut Review 5.2 (1972): 46-56. Keast, W.R. 'R.S. Crane, Editor of Modern Philology, 1930-1952.' Modern Philology 50 (1952): 1-4. Lipking, Lawrence. 'R.S. Crane and the Idea of the Humanities.' Philological Quarterly 47 (1968): 455-/1Sherwood, John C. R.S. Crane: An Annotated Bibliography. New York and London: Garland, 1984.

Croce

Croce, Benedetto (b. Italy, i866-d. 1 9 5 2 ) Philosopher. F:rom about iq io to 1950 - that is, for most of his adult life - Benedetto Croce was one of the dominant intellectual figures in Italy. A philosopher by training and vocation, he engaged in and gave direction to many aspects of the culture of his country. His writings on history and historiograph}', on ""literature and literary criticism, on political, autobiographical and journalistic matters influenced Italian scholarship in an unprecedented way. Equally important, he was for many decades a public, visible presence. He served as minister of education in the years immediately following the First World War. Although he initially did not oppose Mussolini's ascent to power, he quickly became the rallying symbol of disaffection with Fascism and Fascist policies for those Italians who did not find leftist dissent either appealing or possible. So extensive and so acknowledged was Croce's authority that he played a major role in negotiating the conditions of the return to peace in Italy when the Second World W r ar was over. He also was instrumental in determining the mode of government that replaced Fascism. Croce's philosophical program was a very ambitious one, amounting to no less than the complete reassessment and revision of 19thcentury idealism. From 1900 to about 1910, in such works as Estetica conic scienza dell'espressione c linguistica generate [Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic], Filosofia della pratica: Econoinia ed etica [Philosophy of the Practical: Economy and Ethics], Eogica conic scienza del concetto puro [Logic as the Science of the Pure Concent], Croce outlined the amendments he would bring to the philosophy of spirit, the term he preferred to employ. Basically, these consisted in identifying more precisely the field upon which philosophy w'as to exercise itself, in describing its components and their place in the system. For Croce the manifestations of the spirit were of two kinds: theoretical (or cognitive) and practical (or volitional). Each manifestation could in turn be subdivided into moments or categories, best summarized by the discipline they give rise to, aesthetics and logic for the theoretical, economy and ethics for the practical domain. In addition, the categories and the disciplines followed an order of priority: aesthetics precedes and is presupposed by the other three.

This move is in many ways typically end-ofthe-century. By putting aesthetics first, Croce reversed positivist views and rejected those criteria which had reduced art to an after-effect of milieu or biography, hence to an enterprise valid only as a field of study and to the extent that it made itself available to the procedures and the perspectives of the natural sciences. Indeed, in Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic it is the most unscientific of qualities - intuition - that guarantees the privilege of aesthetics. Writers, painters and other creators of artistic works express feelings in an intuitive synthesis of content and form. Thus, for Croce intuition was a kind of knowledge, albeit a kind different from that afforded by general concepts. And it is knowledge that can exist without or in spite of logic or economics and ethics. The latter, instead, will not even come into being without some compelling, imaginative impulse and are, therefore, permeated by intuition. But Croce went further than his contemporaries. His practice as a militant critic (for four decades he was editor of La Critica, a journal he founded in 1903) forced him to confront and to reflect upon the more specific issues his philosophical allegiance entailed. Over the years he appended a number of corollaries and caveats to his original affirmation of the primacy of intuition. A lecture of 1908, 'LTntuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell'arte' ['Pure Intuition and the Lyrical Character of Art'], already identifies art with lyricism. Establishing the equivalence was to lead Croce to envisage longer pieces of literature as strings of lyrical moments held together by devices which in themselves belonged to the practical rather than to the aesthetic realm. On the other hand, by lyricism Croce did not mean autobiographical, confessional outpouring. The intuitive character of art, he maintained, accords well with a classicist outlook. As he pointed out in Tl Carattere di totalita dell'espressione artistica' [The Totality of Artistic Expression' 1918], if intuition is intuition of particular entities (of this tree, this face), great works of art are nonetheless endowed with universality, for in the concrete, particular images that compose them lie 'human destiny' (263), and 'the breath of the cosmos' (265). (See ""universal.) The peculiar ingredients that went into the making of Croce's definition of the aesthetic could not, evidently, be without strictly critical consequences. How does one accost items

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Croce which, while they may be about ethical or economic issues, are impervious to all proddings from the practical dimension and which, in so far as they are intuitively constituted, are at once universal in scope and adamantly unique? Croce had a simple answer: one admits that much of the 'toolery' criticism usually deploys in its attempt to deal with art the concepts of genre, movement, period, for example - satisfy practical needs, but one realizes that distinctions, rubrics and other abstract pigeon-holing provide little insight into the aesthetic reality of art. (See *genre criticism.) That reality - always singular, unrepeatable can be apprehended only by remaining firmly anchored to the work. In Croce's own criticism, perhaps best illustrated by the essays in Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille [Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille], the ultimate aim is to uncover the complex of images that recapitulate the text's unity. When the focus is a set of texts, an entire corpus, the critic's task is to portray properly what Croce called the author's poetic personality - the particular, individual, unshared feeling or state of mind that the works embody. (See *text.) All of this - the definitions of art, the critical strategy - resonates ambiguously in the history of the later decades of the century. Among the array of schools and movements, the most receptive to Croce was probably Anglo-American *New Criticism. *I.A. Richards and John Crowe Ramsom pay homage to him at several instances; *Rene Wellek, *W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and *Cleanth Brooks devoted articles to his aesthetics. Even then, the sympathy (which involved primarily the argument in favour of the autonomy of art) was more than matched by the incompatibilities. Croce did not have much faith in the study of formal structures and, just as he decried the increasing premium that the age seemed to lay on method, he would have questioned the value of the close reading or of the professionalization of criticism his British or American counterparts championed. His insistence on the priority of intuition, his idea that art is a synthesis of form and content, and therefore not accessible to technical know-how alone, still separate him from the greater portion of our present. Yet, in spite of the apparent anachronism, many of the challenges he voiced remain. The postulate of the singularity of texts continues to be a theoretical embarrassment in an age which denies singularity; and, given the decline of formalist approaches,

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we have become less certain that acquiring a methodology is the most crucial requisite for appreciating or for understanding literature. For this and other reasons, it is not surprising that some are now beginning to predict a 'return' of Croce. (See also *Jacques Maritain.) FRANCESCO LORIGGIO

Primary Sources Croce, Benedetto. 'Aesthetics.' Encyclopaedia Britannica. i4th ed. 1929, 263-5. - Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille. Bari: Laterza, 1920. Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille. Trans. D. Ainslie. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966. - 'II Carattere di totalita dell'espressione artistica.' La Critica 16 (1918): 129-40. Repr. in Filosofia, poesia, storia. Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1951, 236-47. - Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generate. 1902. loth ed. Bari: Laterza, 1958. Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. Trans. D. Ainslie. London: Macmillan and Co., 1909. - Filosofia della pratica: Economia ed etica. 1909. 8th ed. Bari: Laterza, 1957. - 'L'Intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell'arte.' In Problemi di estetica e contribute alia storia dell'estetica italiana. 1910. 5th ed. Bari: Laterza, 3-30.

- Logica come scienza del concetto puro. 1909. gth ed. Bari: Laterza, 1963. Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept. Trans. D. Ainslie. London: Macmillan, 1917.

- Philosophy, Poetry, History. Trans. C. Sprigge. London: Oxford UP, 1966. - 'The Totality of Artistic Expression.' In Philosophy, Poetry, History. Trans. C. Sprigge. London: Oxford UP, 1966, 261-73.

Secondary Sources Moss, M.E. Benedetto Croce Reconsidered. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1987. Orsini, Gian N.G. Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1961.

Ransom, J.C. 'Humanism at Chicago.' In Poems and Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Richards, I.A. Principles of Criticism. 1925. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, n.d. Tessitore, F., ed. L'Eredita di Croce. Napoli: Guida, 1985.

Wellek, Rene. Four Critics: Croce, Valery, Lukacs, and Ingarden. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1981. Wimsatt, W.K., Jr., and Cleanth Brooks. 'Expressionism: Benedetto Croce.' In Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Vintage Books, 1957, 499-521.

Culler

Culler, Jonathan Dwight (b. U.S.A. 1944-) Literary critic. Culler received his B.A. at Harvard (1966), then went to St. John's College, Oxford, where he received his B.Phil, in comparative literature (1968) and his D.Phil, in modern languages (1972). He has taught at Selwyn College, Cambridge (1973), and and at Brasenose College, Oxford (1974-7). Since 1977 he has been professor of English and comparative literature and director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Throughout his writings he has argued 'against interpretation': against the proliferation of readings of individual literary texts that mark the procedures of *New Criticism. Instead, he has attempted to articulate 'the conditions of meaning/ to systematize the conventions and institutional operations which enable textual 'intelligibility.' He is particularly known for introducing contemporary French theory to the American academy and for his abilities to elucidate its complex ideas and arguments in lucid and economical prose. Both Saussure (1976) and Barthes (1983) demonstrate this ability. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure, *Roland Barthes, "text.) Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974) utilizes contemporary French theory in a discussion of the works of one writer to call 'into question the notion that made literature a communication between author and reader' (13). (See "literature.) One year later, Culler published his best-known work, one which is credited as having 'practically single-handedly mediated (and constituted) our understanding of structuralism' (Lentricchia 104) in the American academy. (See *structuralism.) Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975), awarded the prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association in 1976, is divided into three parts. The first section introduces 'the linguistic model' by surveying the work of *Claude Levi-Strauss, *Roman Jakobson, *A.J. Greimas, *Vladimir Propp, and particularly Roland Barthes. Throughout this section, Culler draws attention to the theoretical limitations of each of these thinkers, limitations that he expands upon in the second and longest section of the book. Here he attempts to synthesize 'the linguistic model' deriving from European *semiotics and structuralism of the 19603, especially Saussure's concept of *langue. He then articulates a structuralist 'poetics,' an effective

model for reading literature whose 'task' it would be 'to make explicit the underlying system which makes literary effects possible' (118). This 'poetics' is predicated upon a notion of 'literary competence/ an extension of linguistic competence first formulated by *Noam Chomsky. (See "'competence/performance.) Culler's 'literary competence' is the possession or 'mastery' of the literary conventions which are required, in addition to linguistic competence, for either the writing or reading of literature. The last section consists of an attack on 'the theorists associated with the review Tel Quel,' particularly *Jacques Derrida and *Julia Kristeva. In particular, Culler reacts against poststructuralist procedures that produce meaning as open-ended and limitless: 'without restrictive rules there would be no meaning whatsoever ... Whatever type of freedom the members of the Tel Quel group secure for themselves will be based on convention and will consist of a set of interpretive procedures. There is a crucial difference between the production of meaning and arbitrary assignment of meaning, between plausible development and random association' (252). These assertions became the grounds of subsequent attacks on Culler. (See *poststructuralism.) Since Structuralist Poetics, Culler has incorporated poststructuralist perspectives into his work as he continues to attempt to analyse 'the conditions of meaning.' The Pursuit of Signs (1981) is a collection of essays that explores relations between semiotics and Reconstruction. As a sustained attempt simultaneously to introduce and to criticize deconstruction, On Deconstruction (1982) is described by the publisher as 'a sequel' to Structuralist Poetics. In it, Culler carefully positions himself in relation to 'deconstructive criticism/ defining it not as 'the application of philosophical lessons to literary studies but [as] an exploration of textual logic in texts called literary' (227). Culler's critics point out that his lucid and economical expository introductions are often simplistic reductions. He has been attacked for treating theoretical positions with little or no concern for the historical mediations that produce and inform them. Referring to Structuralist Poetics, Terry Eagleton has written of the 'violent depoliticization' of French theory in Culler's project of rendering 'Parisian radicalism safe for the Free World' (52). In the most

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de Beauvoir sustained and important of these criticisms, Frank Lentricchia argues that Culler does this by collapsing structuralism onto the presuppositions of New Criticism, a collapse made possible 'because his mediation rests on intellectual principles easily recognizable and very dear to the traditionalist American critical mind' (104). Culler's most recent work, explicitly connecting 'the Reagan administration' with the study of 'canonical authors' (Framing the Sign 33), suggests that he is moving to incorporate the historical and the political in more direct ways. (See *canon.) VICTOR SHEA

Primary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Barthes. Glasgow: Fontana, 1983. - On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. - Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974- Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988. - The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. - Saussure. Glasgow: Fontana, 1976. Rev. ed. Ferdinand de Saussure. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. - Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

Secondary Sources Bertonneau, Thomas F. 'An Interview with Jonathan Culler.' Paroles Jelees: UCLA French Studies 6 (1988): 1-14. Campa, Roman de la. 'Mainstreaming Poststructuralist and Feminist Thought: Jonathan Culler's Poetics.' The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 18 (1985): 20-7. Eagleton, Terry. The Idealism of American Criticism.' In Against the Grain. London: Verso, 1986. Finney, Kathe Davis. 'Crazy Jane Talks with Jonathan Culler: Using Structuralism to Teach Lyric Poetry.' CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association 43 (1981): 29-36. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Ray, William. Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

de Beauvoir, Simone (b. France, it)o8-d. 1986) Feminist, writer and philosopher. Simone de Beauvoir was born

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into a bourgeois Catholic family of a devoutly religious mother and an unbelieving, socially ambitious father. Her comfortable childhood was unsettled at adolescence by her family's financial misfortunes; she, however, took her future into her own hands by eagerly pursuing her studies and eventually succeeding, in 1929, at the Sorbonne's agregation de philosophic. De Beauvoir then taught philosophy until 1944, when she resigned from teaching and devoted the remainder of her professional life to writing, travel and political activism (she was most energetic in her opposition to the French colonial presence in Algeria and in her attempts to liberalize French abortion laws). In addition to many works in philosophical, literary and political analysis, de Beauvoir's publications include fiction, drama, autobiography, travel writing, journals, and letters; her influence is also pervasive in the writings of *Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifetime companion after they met at the Sorbonne in 1929. All of de Beauvoir's works are in some sense a reflection of her continual engagement with existentialist philosophy. The fiction depicts the ways in which philosophical problems involving freedom, choice and responsibility take complex forms in individual lives. She Came to Stay (1943) - based partly on the troubled relationships of de Beauvoir, Sartre and Olga Kosakiewicz, the young woman they 'adopted' from the provinces - recounts a woman's decision to murder her sexual rival; the act is presented as an existentialist triumph, an accomplishment by the protagonist of her own will. The Blood of Others (1945), set during the Second World War, dramatizes the ethical crisis of a French Resistance fighter when contemplating the German policy of killing civilians in retaliation for Resistance activities; the thinking behind his anguished decision can be summed up in the book's epigraph from Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov: 'everyone is responsible for everything.' In All Men Are Mortal (1946) a 13th-century Italian drinks an elixir that makes him immortal. Surviving for seven centuries, he finds himself increasingly indifferent to those around him. Here the philosophical question involves the moral status of indifference, which is finally viewed as an active denial of freedom to others. The later fiction continues to examine philosophical problems but contextualizes them in more fully detailed social worlds and explores them more specifically in the context of gen-

de Beauvoir der. I'hc Mandarins ( 1 9 5 4 ) depicts the intellectual and political confusion that marked the years immediately following the Second World War. The novel also explores some of the basic ideas in The Second Sex by comparing two pairs of lovers: in one pairing, the woman sacrifices all for her lover, who eventually leaves her; in the other pairing, the woman, knowing her present pleasures to be temporary and illusory, walks away from a love affair in order to return to her marriage and professional life. Lcs Belles images (1966) examines a woman's life played out in the social world of a capitalist consumer economy in which 'images' replace all concerns about moral responsibility. The Woman Destroyed (1968) is a collection of three stories outlining, as in The Mandarins, the cost to women of buying into a romantic ideal of love: emotional dependence on men leads in de Beauvoir's fiction, as in her analysis of gender relations more generally, to loss and alienation. De Beauvoir is best known for her treatise on sexual difference, The Second Sex (1949). A thorough analysis of the position of women in Western culture, it rejects a priori definitions of sexuality and challenges in particular the naturalness of femininity: 'the "true woman" is an artificial product that civilization makes, as formerly eunuchs were made' (The Second Sex 408). Woman's basic difficulty, according to de Beauvoir, is that she is 'a free and autonomous being' who 'nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other' (xxix). As man's Other, woman is doomed to immanence, while man is allowed - both in the sexual act and in life the possibility of transcendence. This means that man is potentially more free than woman, who is constricted by the contingencies that accompany the position of the Other. (See *self/other.) Rejecting *Freud for his 'sexual monism' and Engels for his 'economic monism/ de Beauvoir insists on 'an existentialist foundation' for her analysis of gender because it alone 'enables us to understand in its unity that particular form of being which we call human life' (The Second Sex 60). She thus concludes her study with a call for the 'free woman' who is 'just being born' and who will be educated to achieve intellectual, economic and emotional independence. This woman, according to de Beauvoir, will secure precisely the freedom that already belongs to men: 'it will be through a t t a i n i n g the same situation as

theirs that she will find emancipation' (The Second Sex 715). The autobiographical writings, which began to appear after de Beauvoir was an established novelist and thinker, use her own life to document and explore the practical and philosophical problems described in her fiction and in The Second Sex. De Beauvoir also produced a range of other works in various genres, including a drama, Les Bouches inutiles, first performed in 1945. De Beauvoir wrote two short philosophical treatises: Pyrrhus and Cine as (1944), in defending existentialism, argues for the possibility within particular situations of making free and responsible choices; The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), which presents a series of portraits of ethical types, summarizes the basic tenets of existentialism. There is also a collection, Existentialism and the Wisdom of Nations (1948), which reprints four essays that first appeared in Les Temps modernes, a journal founded by de Beauvoir and Sartre in 1945. In addition to the accounts of travel that appear in the autobiographical volumes, de Beauvoir wrote two travel books: America Day by Day (1948), a harsh criticism in diary form of American culture, and The Long March (1957), an attempt to make China understandable to a resistant West. An essay on Marat de Sade ('Must We Burn Sade?' 1950-51) considers de Sade's sexual practices as an existential choice and a defiance of bourgeois values; in 1955, it was collected, along with two other essays ('What the Right Is Thinking Today' and 'MerleauPonty and Pseudo-Sartrism') in a book entitled Privileges. (See *Merleau-Ponty.) Another essay, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1960), celebrates the French actress for her forthright expression of female sexuality, while Djamila Boupacha (1962) is an expose, focusing on the case of one girl, of torture in Algeria. In de Beauvoir's later years, both her autobiographical and her analytical writings focused on the predicament of the elderly and on the past. Employing the organizational structure and the thoroughness that had characterized The Second Sex, Old Age (1970) documents the situation of old people in Western culture. Coming after de Beauvoir's commitment to Marxism, however, Old Age dwells much more than her earlier analysis on economic contingencies. (See *Marxist criticism.) After the death of Sartre in 1980, de Beauvoir wrote Adieux: Farewell to Sartre (1981), an

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de Beauvoir account of the philosopher's last years. She also edited a two-volume edition of Sartre's letters, Letters to Castor and Others (1983). Since de Beauvoir's own death in 1986, two further volumes of her writings have been published: War Journal (1990) and Letters to Sartre (1990). The legacy of Simone de Beauvoir is rich but problematic. As an existentialist philosopher, she tends to be subordinated to Sartre. As a writer of fiction and autobiography, she is respected, but with the virtual displacement of existentialism by *structuralism and *poststructuralism, the interest in many of her writings has diminished. As a feminist, however, de Beauvoir continues to inspire admiration and controversy. Valued for a feminist stance that was bold and even revolutionary in 1949, she is now seen as representing contradictory positions: while anticipating poststructuralism by viewing gender as a social construction, she also clings to essentialist interpretations of woman as 'a "hysterical" body' with 'no distance between the psychic life and its physiological realization' (The Second Sex 332); while offering a valuable critique of Freud's theory of penis envy, she presents no rationale for her rejection of the important theory of the unconscious, except that it interferes with the existentialist notion of freedom; while asserting repeatedly that 'in human society nothing is natural' (The Second Sex 725), she insists on the naturalness of the heterosexual relationship and views the lesbian as 'a castrate' who is 'unfulfilled as a woman' and 'impotent as a man' (The Second Sex 412); while strongly criticizing man's position in Western society, she urges women to assume that same position, thus reinforcing the very tenets of bourgeois individualism that had originally placed them in the position of Other. The indisputable fact, however, is that the thinking and the presence of Simone de Beauvoir have profoundly affected the development of the feminist movement in the 20th century. (See *feminist criticism, *essentialism.) KRISTIN BRADY

Primary Sources de Beauvoir, Simone. L'Arnerique au jour le jour. Paris: Morihien, 1948. America Day by Day. Trans. Patrick Dudley. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1952. - Les Belles images. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Les Belles images. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Fontana, 1969.

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- Les Bouches inutiles. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Who Shall Die? Trans. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Florissant, Miss.: River P, 1983. - Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960. - La Ceremonie des adieux suivi de Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984. - Le Deuxieme sexe. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. The Second Sex. Trans, and ed. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953. - L'Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations. Paris: Nagel, 1948. - 'Faut-il bruler de Sade?' Les Temps modernes. Dec. 1950 and Jan. 1951. Must We Burn Sade? Trans. Annette Michelson. London: Peter Nevill, 1953. - La Femme rompue. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. The Woman Destroyed. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Collins, 1969. - La Force de I'age. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. The Prime of Life. Trans. Peter Green. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962. - La Force des choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Force of Circumstance. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965. - L'hwitee. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. She Came to Stay. Trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse. London: Penguin, 1966. - Journal de guerre. Ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. - Lettres a Sartre. Ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. - La Longue marche. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. The Long March. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958. - Les Mandarins. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. The Mandarins. Trans. Leonard M. Friedman. London: Collins, 1957. - Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Trans. James Kirkup. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959. - Une Mart ires douce. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. A Very Easy Death. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. - Pour une morale de I'ambigu'ite. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. - Privileges. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. - Pyrrhus et Cineas. Paris: Gallimard, 1944. 'Pyrrhus and Cineas.' Selections. Trans. Christopher Freemantle. Partisan Review 13 (1946): 330-7. - Quand prime le spirituel. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. When Things of the Spirit Come First. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. - Le Sang des autres. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. The Blood of Others. Trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger

de Beauvoir Senhouse. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1948. - Tons les homines sont mortels. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. All Men Are Mortal. Trans. Leonard M. Friedman. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1955. - Tout compte fait. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. All Said and Done. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. - La Vieillcsse. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Old Age. Trans. Patrick O'Brian. London: Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972. - in collaboration with Gisele Halimi. Djamila Boupacha. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Djamila Boupacha. Trans. Gisele Halimi. New York: Macmillan, 1962. - ed. Lcttres an Castor et a quelques autres. By JeanPaul Sartre. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Secondary Sources Appignanesi, Lisa. Sinione de Beauvoir. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Ascher, Carol. Sinione de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom. Boston: Beacon, 1 9 8 1 . Bair, Deirdre. 'In Summation: The Question of Conscious Feminism or Unconscious Misogyny in The Second Sex.' Simone de Beauvoir Studies i (1983): 56-67. - Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit, 1990. Bennett, Joy, and Gabriela Hochmann. Simone de Beauvoir: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1988. Bieber, Konrad. Simone de Beauvoir. Boston: Hall, 19/9. Cayron, Claire. La Nature chez Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Cottrell, Robert D. Sinione de Beauvoir. New York: Ungar, 1973. Dijkstra, Sandra. 'Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission.' Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 290—303. le Doeuff, Michele. 'Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism.' Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 227-89. Evans, Mary. Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin. London: Tavistock, 198^. Fallaize, Elizabeth. The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir. London: Routledge, 1988. Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. 'Seeing The Second Sex Through the Second Wave.' Feminist Studies 6 (1480): 244-76. Fitch, Brian T. Le Sentiment d'etrangete chez Malraux, Sartre, Camus et Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Minard, 1964. Fuchs, Jo A n n . 'Female Eroticism in The Second Sex.' Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 304-1 3. Gagnebin, Laurent. Simone de Beauvoir ou le refus dc {'indifference. Paris: Editions Fischbacher, 1968. Gennari, Genevieve. Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1958. Girard, Rene. 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Existentialist.' Yale French Studies 27 ( 1 9 ( 1 1 ) : 41-6.

Jardine, Alice. 'Interview with Simone de Beauvoir.' Signs 5 (1979): 224-36. Jeanson, Francis. Simone de Beauvoir ou I'entreprise de vivre (suivi de deux entretiens avec Simone de Beauvoir). Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. Julienne-Cafn'e, Serge. Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Kaufmann McCall, Dorothy. 'Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and Jean-Paul Sartre.' Signs 5 (1979): 209-23. Keefe, Terry. Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Her Writings. London: Harrap, 1983. Lasocki, Anne-Marie. Simone de Beauvoir ou I'Entreprise d'ecrire. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971. Leighton, Jean. Simone de Beauvoir on Woman. London: Associated UP, 1975. Lloyd, Genevieve. 'Masters, Slaves and Others.' Radical Philosophy 34 (1983): 2-9. Madsen, Axel. Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Morrow, 1977. Marks, Elaine. Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir. Boston: Hall, 1987. - Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with Death. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1973. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 'Le Roman et la metaphysique.' In Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel, 1948, 45-71Moi, Toril. Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Moorehead, Caroline. 'A Talk with Simone de Beauvoir.' New York Magazine, 2 June 1974, 16-34. Moubachir, Chantal. Simone de Beauvoir ou le souci de difference. Paris: Seghers, 1972. Nahas, Helene. La Femme dans la litterature cxistentielle. Paris: PUF, 1957. O'Brien, Mary. The Politics of Reproduction. London: Routledge, 1981. Patterson, Yolanda. Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. Radford, C.B. The Authenticity of Simone de Beauvoir.' Nottingham French Studies 4 (1965): 91-104. - 'Simone de Beauvoir: Feminism's Friend or Foe?' Part i. Nottingham French Studies 6 (1967): 87-102; Part 2. Nottingham French Studies 7 (1968): 39-53Schwarzer, Alice. Simone de Beauvoir Today: Conversations 1972-1982. Trans. Marianne Howarth. London: Chatto and Windus, 1984. Simons, Margaret A. 'The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What's Missing from The Second Sex.' Women's Studies International Forum 6 (1983): 559-64. - and Jessica Benjamin. 'Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview.' Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 330-45. Walters, Margaret. 'The Rights and Wrongs of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau and Simone de Beauvoir.' In The Rights and

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Deleuze Wrongs of Women. Let. Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Wenzel, Helene, ed. Simone dc Beauvoir: Witness to a Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Whitmarsh, Anne. Simone dc Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Zephir, Pierre. Le Neo-feminisme de Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Denoel Gonthier, 1982.

Deleuze, Gilles (b. France, 1925-) Deleuze was trained in philosophy at the Sorbonne under Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite, passing his agregation examination in 1948. He has taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, the University of Lyon and the University of Paris vmVincennes/St. Denis, from which he retired in 1987. Along with his younger contemporary *Jacques Derrida, Deleuze is the most influential proponent of the philosophy of 'difference' that, in the form of a critique of *essentialism, challenged Hegelian Marxism and *structuralism in the 19605. (See *Marxist criticism, *differance/difference.) Deleuze's first book, a study of Hume's empiricism entitled Empirisrne et subjectivite [Empiricism and Subjectivity 1953], inaugurated the first phase of his development, characterized by a focus on philosophers out of the mainstream of postwar Marxist phenomenology. (See *phenomenological criticism.) Studies of Bergson (1966) and Spinoza (1968 and 1970) followed, as well as an introduction to Kant's critical philosophy (1963) and a polemic against Platonism (1967), but the most important was his second book, Nietzsche et la philosophic [Nietzsche and Philosophy 1962]. In this influential work, one of the first in contemporary France to take *Nietzsche seriously as a thinker, Deleuze presents the concerns of his own philosophical itinerary in the course of a systematic explication of Nietzsche's rebuttal of the Hegelian dialectic. Deleuze's Nietzsche, like Deleuze himself, criticizes the reductive tyranny of the dialectic's polarized oppositions and the triumphant negation that synthesizes them, offering as nondialectical alternatives to these mechanisms the subtler differences/displacements of the will to *power and the affirmative linking of necessity and chance in the eternal return, not of the same, but of difference. Already present here are analyses of the unconscious as a process of production and of universal history as process

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of inscription that anticipate the critiques of *Freud and Marx underpinning L'Anti-Oedipe [Anti-Oedipus 1972]. In addition to these philosophical monographs, Deleuze also wrote two literary studies during this period. Marcel Proust et les signes [Marcel Proust and Signs 1964] develops the premise that A la recherche du temps perdu is a novel about Marcel's relation to and education in the interpretation of signs, while Presentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967; Masochism 1971) argues through a close reading of Venus in Furs that masochism is not inverted sadism but operates by another logic that allows the masochist to escape the traps of Oedipalized subjectivity. This argument prefigures the break with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that will be elaborated in I'Anti-Oedipe. (See *Lacan, *psychoanalytic theory, *sign.) Deleuze's thought entered a new phase with the publication of his principal doctoral thesis, Difference et repetition [Difference and Repetition 1968], a survey of the conceptions of difference-in-itself and repetition-for-itself in the history of philosophy, a survey that leads to the method of 'transcendental empiricism' which would allow a critical examination and 'disordering' of the a priori Kantian faculties. In it, Deleuze develops his alternative to the Platonic model of repetition (copies that refer to an original model or Form): the repetition of simulacra, without model or ideal, that causes a non-conceptual, non-representational idea of difference to emerge. This thesis was followed by Logique du sens [The Logic of Sense 1969], a set of 'series' or parallel meditations on the paradoxical foundations of linguistic meaning and subjectivity. Through analyses of Antonin Artaud, Lewis Carroll and the Stoic philosophers, Deleuze formulates a model of self and signification as restricted cases of delirium and nonsense, the ceaselessly shifting play of phantasmatic surface effects over the physical bodies of words and things. Linguistic meaning, like subjectivity, is founded in the double articulation of two series, signifier and signified, through a paradoxical element similar to Lacan's point de capiton. (See *self/other, *paradox, *signified/signifier/signification.) The third and most influential phase of Deleuze's career began after his meeting in 1969 with the psychoanalyst and political activist *Felix Guattari. Their intellectual partnership lasted through the 19705 and resulted in three books: L'Anti-Ocdipe: Capitalisme et schizo-

Deleuze phrenic [Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1972], Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure [Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature 1975] and Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrenic 2 [A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2 1980]. Initially conceived as an investigation of the French Communist party's failure to support the May 1968 student revolt in Paris, L'Anti-Oedipe became in execution a far-ranging critique of the Oedipal myth and the "Ideology of lack in psychoanalysis, as well as a reinterpretation of the Marxist struggle against capitalist exploitation. To psychoanalysis' 'holy trinity' of the law's prohibition, castration's lack and the signifier's structured absence in the production of subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari oppose the line of flight out of repression, the productivity of desire conceived as affirmation rather than lack, and the immanent relation of words and things that split the subject into multiplicities, a task they call 'schizoanalysis' in L'Anti-Oedipe and 'nomadology' in Mille Plateaux. (See *desire/ lack.) Deleuzean desire (in the form of 'desiring-machines,' modelled after Melanie Klein's part-objects and Freudian/Lacanian partial drives, operating through the Oedipally unorganized 'body without organs' that is opposed to the humanist subject) invests objects directly, rather than becoming enmeshed in forms of ideology and representation. Its affirmative and relational character attests to its origin in Nietzsche's will to power. This desire flows from a machinic unconscious, which is productive like a factory, rather than from a linguistic unconscious like Freud's and Lacan's, which is representational like a theatre. Deleuze's and Guattari's formulation, endorsed and later expanded by *Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, provides a perspective on the connection of desire to the social system that is similar in many ways to Wilhelm Reich's materialist psychiatry. The Oedipal stage codes and reduces the multiplicity of desiring-machines into a subject that is based on socially exploitable genital sexuality and that mirrors the authoritarian form of the State, but the decoding tendency of capitalism constantly opens new markets of desire that capitalism must rigidly control in order to survive. Deleuze's and Guattari's strategy is to push the capitalist process further, to remove the limits capitalism places on this decoding or 'deterritorialization' which will free the desiring-machines and dismantle the subject and the State;

Kafka's writing, they insist, is an important example of this decoding operation, rather than the desperate mysticism it is often taken to be. Mille Plateaux takes the completion of this task (deterritorialization, the scrambling of all codes, which subsumes the *deconstruction of metaphysics that Derrida undertakes) as its starting point, and proceeds to create concepts for a world free of hierarchy and dialectical opposition. Like the work of *Jean-Francois Lyotard, that of Deleuze and Guattari seeks an ethics for a postmodern, deconstructed society. (See *code, *postmodernism.) Since 1980 Deleuze has refused to confine himself to academic philosophy, preferring to create concepts for the understanding and practice of politics and the arts. He published a study of British painter Francis Bacon (1981), and produced the two volumes of a study of cinematic 'images' that relies on further Bergsonian meditations (1983, 1985). In the late 19805 he returned to the writing of monographs on individual philosophers, beginning with Foucault (1986). Deleuze sees Foucault as a philosopher and not as a historian because of what he considers to be Foucault's radical revision of the historian's task: Foucault's studies treat a two-fold object, the articulable and the visible (words and things, or statements and non-discursive objects of institutions), which interrelate to form the rigid historical strata or epistemes that constitute the apparatus of knowledge, the archive. (See *episteme.) Power, Foucault's often misunderstood preoccupation, becomes for Deleuze the fluid, strategic counterpart of knowledge that is manifested diagrammatically (as in the panopticism of Discipline and Punish). Deleuze's reading of this theory of power, which is often considered to be the most pessimistic facet of Foucault's work, stresses the dispersion of power throughout social space, a dispersion which can give rise to positioned subjects who resist centralized forms of domination. Thus Deleuze's Foucault, like his Nietzsche, becomes a figure of affirmation, as Deleuze himself has always been. TIMOTHY S. M U R P H Y

Primary Sources Deleuze. Gilles. Lc Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF, 1966. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1988.

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Deleuze - Cinema r. L'lmage-Mouvement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983. Cinema i: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. - Cinema 2: L'lmage-Ternps. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. - Difference et repetition. Paris: PUF, 1968. - Ernpirisme et subjectivite. Paris: PUF, 1953. Empiricism and Subjectivity. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. - Foucault. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986. Foucault. Trans, and ed. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. - Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Paris: Editions de la Differance, 1981. - Logique du sens. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. - Marcel Proust et les signes. Paris: PUF, 1964. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: George Braziller, 1972. - Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: PUF, 1962. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. - Pericles et Verdi: La Philosophie de Franqois Chatelet. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988. - La Philosophie critique de Kant. Paris: PUF, 1963. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. - Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988. - Pourparlers 1972-1990. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990. — Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967. Masochism. New York: George Braziller, 1971; Zone, 1989. - 'Renverser le Platonisme.' In Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 1967. 'Plato and the Simulacrum.' In The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. - Spinoza: Philosophie pratique. Paris: PUF, 1970. Rev. ed. Editions de Minuit, 1981. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. - Spinoza et le probleme de {'expression. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughlin. New York: Zone, 1990. - and Carmelo Bene. Superpositions. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. - and Michel Foucault. 'Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir.' In L'Arc 49 (1972). 'Intellectuals and Power.' In Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

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- and Felix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrenic 1: L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. - and Felix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrenic 2: Milles plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. - and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. - and Felix Guattari. Politique et psychanalyse. Alencon: des mots perdus, 1977. Partial Eng. trans, in Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris, eds., Language, Sexuality and Subversion. Trans. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Darlington, Australia: Feral P, 1978. - and Felix Guattari. Qu'est que-ce la philosophie? Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991. - and Felix Guattari. Rhizome. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976. 'Rhizome.' Trans. John Johnston. In On the Line. By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. - and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

secondary sources L'Arc 49 (1972, rev. 1980). Special Deleuze issue. Baudrillard, Jean. Oublier Foucault. Paris: Galilee, 1977. Forget Foucault. Trans. Nicole Dufresne. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge, 1989. Buydens, Mireille. Sahara: L'Esthetique de Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Vrin, 1990. Chassaguet-Smirgel, Janine, ed. Les Chemins de I'Anti-Oedipe. Toulouse: Privat, 1974. Cressole, Michel. Deleuze. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973. Descombes, Vincent. Le Meme et I'autre. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. Modern French Philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980, ch. 5-6. Foucault, Michel. 'Theatrum Philosophicurn.' 1970. In Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Frank, Manfred. Was ist Neostrukturalisrnus? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Lectures 20-25. What is Neostructuralism? Trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard T. Gray. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Girard, Rene. 'Systeme du delire.' 1972. 'Delirium as System.' In Girard, 'To double business bound': Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology.

della Volpe Trans. Paisley N. Livingston and Tobin Siebers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Guilmette, Armand. Gilles Dclcuzc ct la niodernitc. Trois Rivieres, Que.: Editions du Zephyr, 1984. Laruelle, Francois. Les Philosophies dc la difference. Paris: PUF, 1986. Lecercle, jean-Jacques. Philosophy Through the Looking Glass. La Salle: Open Court, 1985. Lendemains 14.52 (1989). Special Deleuze issue. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 'Capitalism energumene.' 1972. 'Energumen Capitalism.' Trans. James Leigh. Scmiotext(c) 2.3 (1977). Magazine litteraire 2^7 (Sept. 1988). Special Deleuze issue. Massumi, Brian. User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Perez, Rolando. On An(archi/) and Schizoanalysis. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1990. Semiotext(e) 2.3 (1977). Special Anti-Oedipus issue. Sub-Stance 8.3-4 09^4) and 20.3 (1991). Special Deleuze issues.

della Volpe, Galvano (b. Italy, iSqs-d. 1968) Philosopher. Born into an aristocratic family of modest means, Galvano della Volpe served as a junior officer in the First World War, then earned a degree from the University of Bologna in 1920. From 1925 to 1938 he taught history and philosphy at a liceo in Ravenna, then at Bologna. He also taught history of philosophy at the University of Bologna from 1929 until 1938, when he obtained the chair of history of philosophy at the University of Messina. He worked there until his retirement in 1965. Della Volpe joined the Italian Communist party after the liberation of Sicily and, when the publication of Logica come scicnza positive! [Logic as Positive Science 1910] brought him out of relative obscurity, he helped define its cultural policies, becoming an important contributor to party journals like So cieta. During the late 1930$ and early 19605 he was the focal point of a loosely knit group of Marxist intellectuals. (See *Marxist criticism.) Delia Volpe was briefly associated with the Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, whose attualisnw (which stresses the truth-value of spontaneous acts) was central to Fascist philosophy and *ideology, but soon became an ardent and effective critic of both Gentile and the Hegelian *Benedetto Croce. Delia Volpe's opposition to the two most powerful figures

in Italian philosophy between the wars was confirmed by Hegel romantico e mistico [Hegel the Romantic and Mystic 1929], La Filosofia dell'experienza di David Hume (2 vols., 1933-5) and by his more explicit critique of Romanticism: Critica del principii logici (1942). It was as a Marxist philosopher, however, during the 19405 and expecially after Stalin's death, that Della Volpe did his most original and influential work. Until the publication of Logica come scienza positiva (the definitive edition published posthumously as Logica come scienza storica) Italian Marxist thought was dominated by historicism. Rejecting the Hegelian tendencies in Marxism as well as 'dia-mat,' the vulgarized dialectical materialism of Stalinist theoreticians, della Volpe retrieved from obscurity Marx's now famous 1857 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Arguing against what he considered a contamination by Romanticism and idealism, he noted that starting with the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law Marx had begun a radical epistemological break with Hegel, and suggested that Marxism was both a form of historicism and a positive science. In opposition to the generic abstractions of idealism, della Volpe proposed determinate abstractions derived from empirical inquiry and a methodology (found in embryo in the 1857 Introduction but having an important precedent in Galileo's hypothetico-deductive method) that moves from concrete to abstract to concrete. In Rousseau e Marx (1957; final edition 1964) della Volpe applied his method in an attempt to show how socialism is the only road by which humankind can realize both the civil liberty of Locke and Kant and the egalitarian liberty of Rousseau, and that 'only by proceeding from a gnoseological [cognitive], experimental-historical criterion is it possible to transform the world' (99). Delia Volpe's aesthetics and poetics complemented his work in epistemology, representing both a development of his theses and a testing ground for them. (See Crisi dell'estetica romantica [1941], Poetica del Cinquecento [1954] and // Vcrosimile filmico e altri scritti di estetica [1954]). The final section of Critica dell'ideologia contemporanea (1967) has some important remarks on aesthetics and, with Schizzo di una storia del gusto estetica (1971), presents the final development of della Volpe's thought. His best known and most influential work on

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della Volpe aesthetics, Critica del gusto (1960) is typically anti-Romantic and materialist. Though it is in part a response to Crocean idealism, it is also and more explicitly a critique of Georgii V. Plekhanov and especially *Georg Lukacs. Though della Volpe agreed with the Marxian emphasis on the sociohistorical contextuality of art and was principally concerned with the relation of art to its social and historical 'humus/ stating that the greater the poetry the more it demands a concrete, sociological account of its style (46), he considered the use in aesthetics of sociopolitical criteria - criteria external to the work of art - as unjustified. The resulting choices, such as Lukacs' preference for Thomas Mann over Franz Kafka, are artificial because 'authentic poetry is always realist (sociological) truth' (243). Della Volpe insisted on the concrete reality of parole, the subjective speech-act, and langue, the historical and social institution without which communication would be impossible. (See *langue/parole.) He drew on Saussurean linguistics and Hjelmslev's glossomatics (empirical and deductive linguistics rather than grammar and phonology), affirming that the linguistic *sign is arbitrary with respect to the signified and that it is made up of pleremes, which contain meaning and thought, and cenemes, which do not. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure.) Contrary to the Romantic and postRomantic theories espoused by many Marxists, della Volpe considered that '"form" ... is to be identified with thought or concept, and not with ... abstract or mystical "images" ... which lack meaning/ while 'content' is to be identified 'with matter and multiplicity' (22). There is a 'gnoseological distinction between "form" as instrument and means of knowledge ... and form-end, or thought, of expressed value/ and it is necessary to give back 'its full gnoseological and philosophical meaning - synonymous with thought - to the term (poetic) form' (Critica dell'ideologia 136). In poetry as in science, thought is the end and language always the means. Poetry has a semantic-formal rigour different from but in no way inferior to scientific language. Both stand in opposition to ordinary language: the latter is equivocal, while scientific discourse is univocal and poetry is polysemic. Della Volpe's theory of the autonomy of poetic *discourse has its basis in the plurality of its meanings, which are indissociable from a determinate context; it is therefore a semantic and scientifically verifia-

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ble autonomy rather than a metaphysical one (124). But poetry has an artistic as well as a scientific specificity; this specificity is the essence of a historical phenomenon, but is concrete and characteristic rather than simply what is most common at a given historical moment. The differences between scientific and poetic discourse neither contradict their equal cognitive value nor affirm the traditional dichotomy between reason and feeling. There is no such thing as the ineffable, and all poetry worthy of the name is translatable. (See theories of ""translation.) In the last section of Critica del gusto, 'Laocoonte 1960,' della Volpe expands his inquiry to the other arts. Like Lessing before him, he maintains (against Horace) the plurality of means of expression and 'the peaceful co-existence of the arts on equal terms' (230). He also argues for the separation of the artistic genres, whose structural differences mean that one genre cannot be translated into another. (See *genre criticism.) In light of della Volpe's views on the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign and the rational essence, and hence translatability, of poetry these affirmations present difficulties which have been noted by some of his critics. Della Volpe's discussion of films made from literary works is generally convincing, but music especially presents problems which he did not fully resolve though he returned to the question several times before his death. He also left unresolved some confusions concerning the linguistic sign and its counterparts in the other arts. Della Volpe's theories have been variously criticized and praised for their perceived positivist or structuralist tendencies, positions which he explicitly rejected. Though his influence waned after the closing of Societa in 1962 and no 'school' continued to explore the specific lines of inquiry he had initiated, della Volpe's work was important for (especially but not exclusively) Marxian philosophy and aesthetics in and beyond Italy. His return to the 1857 Introduction proved decisive in the development of materialist epistemology. In 1974, for example, Colletti remarked that when he read *Louis Althusser's For Marx he found a 'convergence with classical theses of the della Volpean current in Italian Marxism' ('Interview'), while the methodology of the Introduction has been central to Lucien Seve's defence of dialectical materialism in France. Della Volpe's aesthetics represented a reappraisal

de Man and critique of the dominant trends in Marxian thought, helping distance Marxian aesthetics from Zhdanovist dogmatism and providing a materialist alternative to formalism and *structuralism. (See also *materialist criticism.) NICOLA VULPE

Primary Sources della Volpe, Galvano. Opere. Ed. Ignazio Ambrogio. 6 vols. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1972-3. - Crisi dell'estctica roinantica. Messina: D'Anna, 1941. - Critica del gusto. 1960. sth ed. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. Critique of Taste. Trans. M. Caesar. London: NLB, 1978.

- Critica dcll'ideologia contcmporanea: Saggi di tcoria dialettica. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967. Critique de I'ideologie contemporaine: Essais de theorie dialcctique. Trans. P. Methais. Paris: PUP, 1976. - Critica dci principii logici. Messina: G. d'Anna, 1942. - 'Discorso poetico e discorso scientifico.' In Marxisino e critica letteraria in Italia. Ed. F. Bettini and M. Bevilacqua. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975. - La Filosofia dell'experienza di David Hume. Firenze: G.C. Sansoni, 1933-5. - Hegel rotnantico e mistico. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1929. - Logica come scienza positiva. Messina: 6 d'Anno, 1950. Logic as Positive Science. Trans. J. Rothschild. London: NLB, 1980. La Logique comnie science historique. Trans. P. Methays. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1977. - Poetica del Cinquecento. Bari: Laterza, 1954. - Rousseau e Marx e altri saggi di critica materialistica. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964. Rousseau and Marx and Other Writings. Trans. ]. Fraser. Atlantic Highlands, Nj: Humanities, 1979. Rousseau et Marx ct autres essais de critique tnaterialiste. Trans. R. Paris. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1974. - Schizzo di una storia del gusto cstetica. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1 9 7 1 . - // Verosinnlc fihnico e altri scritti di cstetica. Rome: Filmcritica, 1954. Secondary Sources Ambrogio, Ignazio. 'Per un teoria letteraria marxista: Galvano della Volpe.' In Ideologic e tcchniche letterarie. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974, 183-208. Bettini, Filipo, et al., eds. Marxismo e structuralismo nella critica letteraria italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1974. Bettini, Filipo, and Mirko Bevilacqua, eds. Marxismo e critica letteraria in Italia. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975. Colletti, Lucio. 'A Political and Philosophical Interview.' New Left Review 86 (1974): 3-28.

Fraser, John. Introduction to the Thought of Galvano Delia Volpe. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. Guiducci, Armanda. Dallo zdanovisnw allo strutturalisnio. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1967. Howard, D., and K.E. Klare, eds. The Unknown Dimension. New York: Basic Books, 1972. 'Introduction to Delia Volpe.' New Left Review 59 (1970): 97-100. Montano, Mario. 'On the Methodology of Determinate Abstraction: Essay on Galvano della Volpe.' Tclos 7 (1971): 30-49. Musolino, Rocco. Marxismo ed estetica in Italia. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971. Rossi, Mario. 'Galvano della Volpe: Dalla gnoseologia critica alia logica storica.' Critica Marxista 4-5 (1968): 165-201 and 6 (1968): 89-124. Quaderni dell'Istituto Galvano della Volpe. Messina: La Libra, 1978-83. Tosel, Andre. Praxis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1984. Vacca, Giuseppe. Scienza stato e critica di classe: Galvano Della Volpe e il rnarxismo. Bari: De Donate, 1970.

de Man, Paul (b. Belgium, igig-d. 1983) Philologist and literary critic. Paul de Man was born in Antwerp in 1919 into an upper-middle-class Fleming family already intellectually and politically prominent. As a student of engineering at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, he wrote his first articles for two journals of the socialist Cercle du Libre Examen, dedicated to democratic free-thinking and hostile to dogmatism, Fascism and the clergy (Responses xii). In this spirit, he opposed war and opposed Hitlerism as an 'intra-European colonization,' the ultimate defeat of which, though desirable, would be useless without the rectification of the economic and social debacle which gave rise to Fascism in the first place (Wartime Journalism

8, 13). The invasion of Belgium by Germany (May 1940) brought publishing under the control of the Military Occupation's Propaganda Department. De Man continued to review books, lectures and musical occasions for Le Soir, Belgium's largest newspaper. These articles, discovered and reprinted only after his death, have given rise to charges of collaboration and anti-Semitism. In fact, de Man shows from the first perhaps an excessive confidence in a strategy of cooperative disrespect or solemn insolence (Derrida, 'Like the Sound' 602, 628) with regard to the censor. He urges upon his read-

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ers the example of Till Eulenspiegel, who victimized authority figures by pretending stupidity; his best weapons were 'mystification and language/ not arms (Wartime Journalism 232). The article from 4 March 1941, which some have found unequivocally anti-Semitic, claims that Jewish writers, because of their utter mediocrity, have had no pernicious effect on modern *literature at all (references to such 'perniciousness' were a commonplace of Nazi propaganda at the time). The same article celebrates Franz Kafka, a Jew, as a modern master of psychological realism. The piece also attacks 'vulgar anti-Semitism' as a conception that could lead to 'quite dangerous consequences' (Wartime Journalism 45). The second phase of de Man's literary career began after the war with his emigration to the U.S.A. in 1948. In 1952 he enrolled at Harvard to study comparative literature. His literary work from the period centres on the notion of 'inwardness/ a contemplative inwardness dissimilar to the anti-intellectual, ahistorical nihilism of writers like Jiinger, Malraux and Hemingway (Critical Writings 14, 16). Any positive inwardness must be a meditation on history as process and becoming (le devenir in Critical Writings 66). Positive inwardness embraces the consciousness of struggle (33) and accepts the painful dialectic of desire and sacrifice (85). Historical action, though always a defeat, and often degrading, is not in vain (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 36). Such defeat can be 'temporally productive/ allowing for the 'language of reflection to constitute itself (ibid. 57). The moment that action is seen as error, interpretive reflection can begin. So 'the coming-to-consciousness is in arrears vis-a-vis the actual act' (58). Titanic excess, after failure, turns back upon itself to be transformed into language (57, 63), into self-recollection (45), and thought 'whose law is that of an incessantly heightened concentration and rigor' (Critical Writings 75). Heroes of this pulsation to inwardness, of consciousness as mediated apprehension of being (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 40), are Wordsworth as disillusioned Girondist, the mature Holderlin and his character Hyperion, as well as Goethe's Faust. The publication of Blindness and Insight (1971) represents the principal monument of this second phase of de Man's work. The third and last phase is both better known and more obscure, involving an affiliation with Yale University (after 1970), a friend-

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ship with *Jacques Derrida (since 1966), and the controversial American extrapolation of *deconstruction, a continental philosophical practice deriving from *Martin Heidegger. The group of writers designated as the Yale Critics - including, aside from de Man, *Harold Bloom, *Geoffrey Hartman and *J. Hillis Miller - had primarily their university in common, but nevertheless achieved a certain critical hegemony between 1975 and de Man's death in 1983. The group's unfamiliar, 'un-American' vocabulary, as well as a gleeful vertiginousness of interpretation, aroused both widespread hostility as well as admiration. This part of de Man's production, culminating in the publication of Allegories of Reading (1979), is marked by increasingly radical meditations on the relationship of language to reality. If a tragic encounter with history was the starting-point of reflection in de Man's Holderlin period, reflection and the texts it generates now seem to be the starting-point of history. Not that reflection itself is an unproblematic process; it is never entirely under the control of the will. There is an intent to mean, to reflect in a certain way, but because we reflect in language, our meaning is subject to linguistic properties that are not subject to us, properties, devices that at times function in a purely mechanical way. Consequently, the effort made by Rousseau to make sense of his defamation of the servant Marion, an unbearable episode which he says motivated the entire Confessions, cannot obscure the fact that his false accusation of Marion has no rational connection to the interpersonal dynamics in the Comte de la Roque's household and nothing to do with either the play of desire or Rousseau's perverse need for self-exposure. Marion was simply 'the first object that offered itself; her subsequent fate, and Rousseau's, are the random results of anacoluthia, non-sequentiality (Allegories of Reading 289; Latimer 115). The disjunction between Rousseau's interests and his accusation could not be more complete. Similarly, in his Essay on the Origin of Language, Rousseau traces (in de Man's account) the very possibility of human society from two metaphoric distortions masquerading as straightforwardly literal moments of denomination (naming). When primitive man first encounters a fellow human, he designates the other as 'giant/ displacing his own inner fear, which then becomes the outward property of the other. Fear, the expression of a comparison

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between two entities, is figural, but when fear becomes the name 'giant/ hypothesis becomes definite and fiction is passed off as fact. Later, when primitive first impressions are modified by experience and 'giant' becomes 'man/ the new denomination relies on a numerical illusion of identity (the other is after all only one person of my own size) to obscure ontic difference (size and number have nothing to do with relative danger). (See *self/other.) But the circuitous invention of this word 'man' engenders 'men' and ultimately 'the sameness within difference of civil society' (Allegories of Reading 155; Sprinker 253). Passionate error is followed by deliberate error to provide the quaking foundation of the social contract. 'The political destiny of man ... is derived from a linguistic model' (Allegories of Reading 159). Such application of linguistic reality to natural reality is as inevitable as it is erroneous. When it happens, the aesthetic realm oversteps its proper bounds into natural life, into matters of ethics, into the empirical world. And 'nothing can be more destructive' (158). Language is referential, but its actual referent remains problematic (160). Because of these difficulties and dangers, we must try to assert some control over language's technical problems (The Resistance to Theory 121). Vigilant reading will discover the dangerous asymmetry between *text and world and refuse to suppress a text's discontinuities to produce illusory coherence or yield to the dissimulating harmony of the aesthetic (Critical Writings 222). It is de Man's persistent emphasis on the epistemological as against the rhetorical properties of language (Norris 71, 203) that associates his work with Ideologiekritik (The Resistance to Theory 121; Norris 155; Culler 130-5). For de Man, *ideology, or the pervasive intellectual ambiance in which we live our lives, would certainly include all tendencies on the part of the educational apparatus of universities and their professors to see the teaching of literature as a lesson on how to live properly or how to be a good citizen (The Resistance to Theory 24). What literature in such instances becomes is a solicitation or *interpellation by a given social order, the seduction or absorption of the student by his or her culture through Erziehung (The Resistance to Theory 24). De Man associates the aesthetic with precisely this attempt to manipulate others, to deprive them of their freedom through the machinery of persuasion and the luxuri-

ance of rhetoric. As an antidote to the aesthetic, de Man prescribes 'literariness' (The Resistance to Theory 9). Literariness breaks the Cratylian 'secular myth' (the belief in the coincidence of names and essences, in motivated signs) that the union of sound and meaning found in aesthetic objects, with their fusion of the sensuous and conceptual, the phenomenal and intelligible, can be anything more than a rhetorical effect, or can provide any warrant for responsible pronouncements about the nature of the world. The relationship between word and thing, says de Man, is purely conventional, not at all phenomenal. To forget this lesson of the literary is to fall into the trap of the aesthetic, to participate in an imaginative choreography which disguises its coercion and violence as 'the gracefulness of a dance' (The Rhetoric of Romanticism 290). Hostility to theory derives in part from theory's role in exposing ideological mystifications involved in the teaching of literature. It is not certain, says de Man, that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language (The Resistance to Theory 11). Furthermore, despite all vigilance, the randomness of linguistic operations can at times transcend the powers of the human will. The structures and tensions of language are independent of our intent to mean. Language 'does things ... so radically out of our control' that we must not say, as Schiller does, that language defines the human. Indeed, it cannot be said with confidence that language is a human thing at all (The Resistance to Theory 87, 101). DAN LATIMER

Primary Sources de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1979. - Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 1971. 2nd ed., rev., intro. by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. - Critical Writings, 1953-1978. Ed. and intro. by Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. - The Resistance to Theory. Foreword by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. - The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. - Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943. Ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz and Thomas Keenan. Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

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Derrida Secondary Sources Arac, Jonathan, Wlad Godzich and Wallace Martin, eds. The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Brooks, Peter, Shoshana Felman and ]. Hillis Miller, eds. 'The Lesson of Paul de Man, ' Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 132. Culler, Jonathan. 'De Man's Rhetoric,' In Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, 107-35. Derrida, Jacques. 'Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments.' Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989): 812-73. - 'Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War.' Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988): 590-652. - Memoires: For Paul de Man. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Hamacher, Werner, Neil Hertz and Thomas Keenan, eds. Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Latimer, Dan. 'Anxieties of Reading: Paul de Man and the Purloined Ribbon.' In Comparative Poetics. Ed. Claudio Guillen. New York: Garland, 1985, 113-20. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Norris, Christopher. Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology. New York/London: Routledge, 1988. Sprinker, Michael. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. London/New York: Verso, 1987. Waters, Lindsay, and Wlad Godzich, eds. Reading dc Man Reading. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Derrida, Jacques (b. Algeria, 1930-) Philosopher. Derrida studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris), taught philosophy at the Sorbonne (1960-4) and from 1965 was professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Founding director of the College International de Philosophie in Paris, he is now directeur d'etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. For over a decade beginning in 1975 Derrida taught a yearly seminar at Yale University and now has visiting appointments at the University of California at Irvine and Cornell University. A radical philosophical thinker, Derrida joins a polemic of tradition directed against metaphysics that extends from *Nietzsche to "Heidegger. His critique of metaphysics and of the

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'presence' of consciousness owes much to *Freud's discovery of the unconscious and theory of unconscious memory. His challenging of idealist conceptions of language is an extension of principles laid down by *Ferdinand de Saussure and his structuralist heirs. Derrida has, as well, French precursors, most notably *Maurice Blanchot who, like Derrida, celebrates the *trace of writing or ecriture as the originary play of presence and absence. (See ""metaphysics of presence, "structuralism, *text, *textuality.) Derrida's writings critique the Western metaphysical tradition, which he sees as dominated by a discourse of 'presence' in the assumption, for example, that truth is a function of the presence of consciousness to itself and to its object; or in the assumption that time is oriented to its end - the destruction of history as the advent of parousia or of a transcendental signified. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Derrida links such assumptions to the *logocentrism of the Western metaphysical tradition in which faith in 'presence' conspires with the privilege bestowed upon the spoken word or voice as opposed to the graphic sign or writing. He maintains that in the history of Western thought writing or graphic representation has been consistently devalued in favour of the proximity (or 'presence') of the voice or speech to thought and consciousness. The early part of Derrida's career was devoted to a demonstration of the dominance of these metaphysical presuppositions through the treatment of a great variety of writers and thinkers. What Derrida calls *deconstruction consists in an analysis which overturns these tenacious metaphysical foundations. But Derrida also showed an interest in those texts which 'deconstruct' their own traditional frameworks, which manage to test and force the logocentric boundaries within which they must operate: hence his interest in Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Genet, Ponge, Celan, and others. This double focus forms a pattern throughout Derrida's career. Just as important is Derrida's strategy of reading in the 'margins/ which strongly influenced the development of deconstruction in North America as a method for the analysis of literary texts. An apparently marginal aspect of the text, often located in a key word or series of cognate words, is isolated as the locus of a doubleness and contradiction undermining the text's coherence and intelligibility, a coherence

Dilthey and intelligibility that traditional interpretation has only been able to uphold by an act of suppression. A set of such double words (the supplement, the pharmakon, the hymen, the 'parergon') might be seen as intellectual milestones in Derrida's career. (See *margin, *supplementarity.) For Derrida, what all these effects have in common is their relationship to writing. They are images of writing and of its ambivalent doubleness in the history of metaphysics. On the negative side, writing appears as that which is merely secondary, external, a necessary but dangerous supplement to speech. Writing represents and reproduces a natural, living 'presence' only at the price of the becoming-absent and death of the subject and its meaning. The other face of writing is the one that the metaphysical tradition has been unable to consistently suppress, a general or 'arche-writing' which is the condition of signification in the first place. Derrida does not simply repeat the metaphysical opposition by championing writing in opposition to speech but attempts to show how both speech and writing share precisely the same features. The absence of the subject and the referent is a consequence of the possibility of signification in general, since the intelligibility of any *sign, whether spoken or written, depends on a differential network of signifiers. The subject is thus divided in its very constitution by the institution of the sign. By the same token the deferral of the signified or 'proper meaning' is endless. (See *subject/object, *reference/ referent.) Derrida's most programmatic statement can be found in DC la Grannnatologie [Of Grammatology 1967], the book for which he is best known in North America and one which resumes many of his central concerns. Equally seminal are a h a n d f u l of early essays, such as 'La Pharmacie de Platon' ('Plato's Pharmacy' 1968), 'La Mythologie blanche' ('White Mythology' 1 9 7 1 ) and 'Le Facteur de la verite' (197=;), as well as the essay devoted to the one term by which Derrida is perhaps best known: 'La Differance' (1968). (See *white mythology, *differance/difference,*grammatology.) Derrida's greatest influence has been in the U.S.A., where his work inspired a new critical scepticism initially associated with the socalled Yale School of deconstruction. This influence, especially as it concerns the reading strategy that he developed to deconstruct texts,

is prominent in the work of *Paul de Man, *J. Hillis Miller and Barbara Johnson, among others. Derrida's work has proven, in spite of the great controversy that has surrounded it, to be both remarkably consistent in the development of its original tenets and surprisingly various in its applications. JOSEPH ADAMSON

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1981. - Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, i988. - Glas. Paris: Galilee, 1974. - Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. - Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. - Signeponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. - Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. - Spurs. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. - D'un ton apocalyptique adopte naguere en philosophic. Paris: Galilee, 1983. - The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. - Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Hartman, Geoffey H. Saving the Text: Literature /Derrida/Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Harvey, Irene. Derrida and the Economy of Differance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Morris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen, 1982.

Dilthey, Wilhelm (b. Germany, 1833-d. 1911) Philosopher. After briefly studying theology, Dilthey transferred his interest to philosophy and history, receiving a doctorate from Berlin (1864) and

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Dilthey becoming Privat-Dozent in philosophy the next year. His outwardly uneventful life was marked by series of professorships: Basel (1867), Kiel (1868), Breslau (1871), and Berlin (1882). After retiring from teaching in 1905, he devoted himself to working on what was to have been his magnum opus, a Kantian 'Critique of Historical Reason.' Though prolific, he published in his lifetime only three books; the fact that two of these were initial parts of larger projects (never completed) led to the label 'Mann der ersten Bande' - a man of first volumes. But after his death, his study yielded many thousands of manuscript pages of works promised and previously unknown, now published as Gesammelte Schriften. Until recently his work was virtually unknown by English readers. A useful one-volume selection was published in 1976 and in 1985 a projected 6volume edition of major texts began to appear. Dilthey holds a pivotal position in the continuing debate over *hermeneutics and his work is an important influence in the thought of *Martin Heidegger, *Hans-Georg Gadamer and *Paul Ricoeur. As a philosopher Dilthey was indebted to both the Hegelians and neo-Kantians and also to British empiricism and French positivism. By rejecting the metaphysical apriorism of the former, however, and the bloodless mechanism of the latter, he elaborated a philosophy in which life is understood from the experience of life itself. Investigative methods based on mathematics and appropriate to the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), he argued, ignore the affective and volitional aspects of human experience and reduce knowledge - as Locke, Hume, Kant, and their various followers had done - to the a priori edicts of a legislative Reason. For Dilthey experience and cognition depend upon the complex interrelations of thought, feeling and will as these are revealed in life itself and in those records of life preserved (for example) in history and "literature. His enterprise therefore was to distinguish from the natural sciences and their methods a group of disciplines which he called the 'human studies' (Geisteswissenschaften). These comprise essentially what we would call the humanities and social sciences. Personal interest led Dilthey to explore especially psychology, history, literature, and music. The essence of Dilthey's epistemology may be summarized in the definition of two terms: lived experience (Erlebnis) and understanding

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(Verstehen). An Erlebnis is a coherent unit of immediate experience in which elements of feeling, will and desire are unified in a common meaning and rescued from temporal flux. Several trips to a gallery to view a particular painting, for example, form a single lived experience. Such Erlebnisse (plural) are prelogical and constitute the empirical ground on which consciousness is built, and it is axiomatic with the antimetaphysical Dilthey that human consciousness cannot go behind itself, that is to say, that Erlebnisse, its basic units, constitute the irreducible root of knowledge. Dilthey, then, is a psychological empiricist and relativist; but he is not a solipsist. While personal awareness is the primary reality, mental life also depends on the vicarious apprehension of the lived experiences of other minds. It is understanding (Verstehen) which makes possible a dynamic involvement in the not-self and Dilthey defines it as a rediscovery of the I in the Thou (das Verstehen ist ein Wiederfinden des Ich im Du). To understand is to relive or to reconstruct another's experience, to make his Erlebnis my own, and this is possible because human beings share the same mental structure. Understanding, then, which is fundamental to the Geisteswissenschaften, provides access to the human world beyond the parochial self. History and literature, for example, both demand imaginative participation in worlds outside the self - a dynamic interaction that involves a projection of I into the Thou and an assimilation of Thou to the I. They thus give breadth and depth (as well as objectivity) to experience and, since understanding implies self-discovery, they actualize the self's latent potential. In this way art and history, no less than science, are vehicles of truth. Central to Dilthey's method in the 'human studies' is his adaptation of the scheme for a general hermeneutics proposed by Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the subject of Dilthey's first major publication, Leben Schleiermachers (1870). In his Hermeneutik (1836) Schleiermacher distinguished between a grammatical (philological) and a psychological understanding of a text, the object of the latter being to reconstruct the living idea in an author's mind, of which his *text was the expression. Hermeneutics as an art of understanding (not a science of explanation) and Schleiermacher's 'divinatory' recovery of an author through his writings offered the possibility, as Dilthey saw, of employing psychology as the

Ducrot universal basis and theoretical, methodological vindication of the Geisteswissenschaften as a group. The interpretation of art furnished an analogy for the interpretation of life itself. As a poem or play (the educts of experiential imagination or Erlebnisphantasie) is an objectification of lived experience that mediates the living mind of the author himself and his Weltanschauung, so historical acts or even the gestures and facial expressions of those around us open outward and inward, through interpretive and reconstructive understanding, both to discovery and self-discovery. But as Ricoeur has pointed out, 'the counterpart of a hermeneutical theory founded on psychology is that psychology remains its ultimate justification' (51); and the central *aporia of Dilthey's method is that it deflects understanding away from the "text itself and onto the author, so that the text loses its autonomy and becomes, in fact, a pretext. After Dilthey. interest shifts from epistemology to ontology in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer and the presuppositions of psychological hermeneutics become themselves the object of investigation. Instead of asking 'How do I know?', the question of philosophic hermeneutics is 'What are the ontological conditions of my knowing?' - an approach with its own methodological difficulties and frustrations. JOHN SPENCER HILL

Primary Sources Dilthey, Wilhelm. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts of F.D.E. Schleiermacher. Ed. Heinz Kimmerle. Trans, lames Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars P, 1977. - Leben Schleierniachers. Vols. 13 and 14. In Gesammelte Schrifteti, 17 vols. (1914-74). Vols. 1-12, Stuttgart: B.C. Teubncr. Vols. 13-17. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. - Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society. Ed. H.P. Ricktnan. London: Allen and Unvvin, 1961; New York: Harper and Row, 1962. - Selected Works. Ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. - Selected Writings. Ed. H.P. Rickman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.

Secondary Sources Emarth, Michael. Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Hodges, Herbert Arthur. The Philosophy of Wilhelm

Dilthey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952. Repr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1974. - Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944. Repr. New York: Howard Fertig, 1969. Makkreel, Rudolf A. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1985. Palmer, Richard E. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1969. Plantinga, Theodore. Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980.

Rickman, H.P. Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Ricoeur, Paul. 'The Task of Hermeneutics.' (1975). In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981, 43-62.

Ducrot, Oswald (b. France, 1930-) Linguist and philosopher. Oswald Ducrot received his formal education in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Sorbonne. After teaching philosophy at various institutes of higher learning, he became a member of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique and now teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where he has been director since 1968. He has been honoured by the Universite de Geneve with a doctorate honoris causa for his work on the history of linguistics, the notion of enunciation and for his study of the marks and structures of argumentation in language. (See *enonciation/enonce.) Ducrot first concentrated on the history of linguistics and particularly that of *structuralism. He then turned to semantics and, together with Jean-Claude Anscombre, developed the linguistic current known as Nouvelle Linguistiijue. His theory moves beyond a narrow consideration of elements belonging to the language *code and integrates the concept of enunciation proceeding from English analytical philosophy (Peter Strawson, Bertrand Russell, *John Austin, and "John Searle) into linguistics. Ducrot understands enonciation, or 'enunciation,' as a sequence of sentences that is actualized, assumed by a particular speaker and hearer (called the interlocutor) in specific

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Ducrot temporal and spatial circumstances. By taking into account the specific circumstances of linguistic production, Ducrot institutes an opposition between language and logic that neither reduces one into the other nor proposes radically heterogeneous categories. He feels that the logic inherent in language cannot be enclosed within the syllogistic logic of formal, philosophical systems. While a formal logic seeks to prove a hypothesis, ordinary language by nature seeks to persuade or convince through argument. Nouvelle Linguistique examines integrated rhetoric or argumentation parting from this new logic of language and moves semantics beyond a study that is limited to the enunciation's explicitly transmitted information to include a consideration of its levels of implicit meaning as well. Ducrot's study of the relation between the explicit and implicit aspects of *discourse has shown that enunciations express different directions of argument as well as varying degrees of persuasive force. An enunciation can indicate (suggest, imply, promote, or presuppose) a conclusion which, although not explicitly stated, a speaker wants her or his partner in a dialogue to draw. An enunciation's argumentative 'direction' toward this implied conclusion does not depend only on the explicitly transmitted information. It also depends on words with a grammatical function or morphemes such as 'and,' 'or/ 'no,' or 'but.' When presenting two propositions coordinated by 'but/ for example, the first proposition may suggest a conclusion that is invalidated by the second. This second proposition, then, opposes the first in its direction or orientation of argument. In addition to the argumentative direction, enunciations carry different degrees of argumentative force. Once again the force of argument does not depend only on explicitly transmitted information but also on morphemes such as 'no' or 'but.' In the example cited above, the proposition following 'but' would carry greater force because it can invalidate the conclusion suggested by the proposition preceding it. Ducrot proposes a hierarchy or gradation of levels of force brought to bear in arguing a point. In this way certain enunciations can be characterized in terms of both their orientation and force on a graduated scale, that is, by the type of conclusions they suggest and by the weight they are given. For Ducrot an enunciation's sense must be

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understood as both this reflective commentary on the saying itself and as an allusion to the historical event of its appearance. The sense (what is said) lies between the nature of the saying and the relationships that arise among the participants in discourse. Rather than one 'speaking subject/ Ducrot proposes polyphonic levels that bring the interaction and antagonism of different 'voices' to the fore. One can speak of an addresser or locuteur and an utterer or enonciateur as well as of an addressee or allocutaire and an utteree or destinataire, depending on the multiple relationships possible between speaker and audience. In the case of a political speech, for example, the allocutaircs would be all those who listen; while the destinataire are those particular members of the public that can be regarded as the object of the illocutionary act. Thus, Ducrot's concept of polyphonic levels points to an area of discourse where what is said by an enunciation (the sense) reflects a plurality of subjects. Ducrot's study of enunciations' implicit and explicit aspects, together with the ever-changing role of the participants in discourse, is consequential not only for current linguistic theory but also for contemporary philosophy and literary criticism. Philosophical positions such as that represented by Chaim Perelman's Nowvelle rhetorique can find a significant complement in Ducrot's analysis of argumentative morphemes. Ducrot's elucidation of argumentative direction and force also enhances literary theories that examine the reader's role of interpreting implicit meaning from a text's explicit indications. Thus, by examining the relation between participants, discourse and context, Ducrot's NouveUe Linguisticjuc moves beyond the concept of a 'self-sufficient' sentence to offer an important perspective from which to explore the interaction of philosophy, language and "literature. DANIEL CHAMBERLAIN

Primary Sources Anscombre, Jean-Claude, and Oswald Ducrot. L'Argumentation dans la langue. Bruxelles: P Mardaga, 1983. Ducrot, Oswald. Lc Dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit, 1984. - Dire ct ne pas dire: Principes dc semantique linguistique. Paris: Hermann, 1972. - Les Echelles arguntentatives. Paris: Minuit, 1980. - Lagique, structure, enunciation: Lectures sur le Iangage. Paris: Minuit, 1989.

Eagleton - Li's .Vlcifs Jn (//.scold's. Paris: M i n u i t , 1480.

- Lu Prcuvc cl h' litre: Lan^a^t' ft higtijiif. Paris: Manu 1 , i ^ 7 v

Secondary Sources Meyer, Michel. Lcgitnic, lan^ii^c cl ar^uiiu'iitatioii, Paris: l l a r h e t t c , mS2. Diiorot, Oswald, et T / v e t a n Tculorov. Dictionnain' c»r!/(/o/K'i/n/iif [/c> M irm I 1 * :/» hiii^ngc. Paris: Seuil, 11.172.

Eagleton, Terry (b. England, 1443-) Literary critic. Educated at De La Salle College, Pendleton, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under *Raymond Williams, in 1464 Terry Eagleton became a Fellow in English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and since 1464 a Fellow and Tutor at Wadham College, Oxford. Eagleton was one of the founders of the Catholic left j o u r n a l Slant in the 19 bos and his early work included a number of books and essays on the political theology of the Catholic left.' Eagleton s critical writings fall into three distinct categories: theoretical studies, practical criticism and 'popularizing' works. The latter two kinds grow directly out of the former because, as he argues in The Function of Criticism, one of the primary tasks of the socialist intellectual is to work toward the creation of a 'counterpublk sphere' — socialist institutions of intellectual and mass culture. This goal is to be achieved in part through 'the resolute popularization of complex ideas ... [in] works which make socialist theory intelligible to a mass audience' ( 1 1 1 ) . Thus, some of Eagleton's writings are s i g n i f i c a n t l y more concrete and less complex than others, though they are all united by a cluster of recurring themes and theoretical concerns. One of these is the complex relation between "literature and "Ideology. Eagleton rejects the 'vulgar Marxist' notion that literary works, as an element in the 'superstructure' of society, are simply a passive reflection of the economic 'base.' Drawing on but also modifying theories developed by *l.ouis Althusser and *Pierre Macherey, he argues in Criticism and Ideology that the literary "text is neither a slavish expression of a d o m i n a n t ideology nor a wholly autonomous element. The text displays its precise relation to the ideology it 'produces' by the

degree of internal dissonance, displacement or self-contradiction that it yields up. Literature constitutes the most revealing mode of experiential access to ideology available, more immediate than science (by which Eagleton means a 'Marxist science' capable of revealing ideological distortion) and more coherent than lived experience. Eagleton's conception of the critic's role follows logically from his analysis of literature's relation to ideology. The critic must break through the literary work's seeming unity and naturalness to reveal its hidden knowledge the conditions and contradictions of its making that it cannot itself express. He or she must seek out the source of the work's conflict of meanings, a conflict produced by the work's problematic relation to ideology, which reduces the work at certain points to silence. To do this, criticism must situate itself outside the text and its enveloping ideology, bringing to bear its 'scientific' knowledge of ideologies, their modes of operation and their relation to history. Implicit in this critical program is a view of literary form that emphasizes the text as 'open' - a locus of conflicting languages, symbols and genres - rather than 'closed/ resolved or completed. (See *genre criticism.) Here Eagleton rejects *Lukacs, whom he regards as overemphasizing art's capacity to draw together the contradictions and alienations of daily life in an overarching totality, embracing instead Brecht's modernist conception of art as a relentlessly dislocating, demystifying force (Walter Benjamin 81-93). (See * totalization, *defamiliarization.) In his more recent work, Eagleton has questioned the institution of literary criticism as a whole. (See "literary institution.) He argues in The Function of Criticism that criticism today lacks any real social function. Employing as his guiding concept *Jurgen Habermas' notion of the 'public sphere' (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1962), he maintains that modern criticism's beginnings in the early i8th century served a genuine social and political need for a cultural "discourse independent of the absolutist state. Contemporary criticism, by contrast, has become marginalized by its loss of a sense of purpose and audience. Eagleton seeks to recall criticism to what he regards as its traditional cultural role, namely, a concern with the symbolic processes of social life through which political power is deployed, reinforced and resisted. Through its renewed

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Eagleton participation in public discourse, particularly the 'counterpublic sphere' which is emerging out of the women's movement and other previously repressed voices, criticism can revive itself as a culturally and politically relevant voice. One of criticism's important tasks, according to Eagleton, is to question the existence and purpose of the institutions that organize our lives and knowledge. In his most popular book, Literary Theory: An Introduction, he questions the academic institutionalization of literature as a discrete field of study and confronts the recent emergence of literary theory as a new subdiscipline. After surveying virtually all major critical approaches of this century from *New Criticism and phenomenology to *poststructuralism and psychoanalysis - Eagleton concludes that neither literature nor literary theory really exists as an unalterable object or method of inquiry. (See *phenomenological criticism, *psychoanalytic theory.) Literature is simply those writings that are highly valued by a particular dominant culture at a particular time; yet the academic appropriation of literature as a field of study has cripplingly narrowed the range of texts previously considered literary. Literary theory, for its part, fails to achieve intellectual coherence, whether one attempts to define it in terms of its evanescent object (literature) or in terms of its methods, which are various and have more in common with other intellectual disciplines than with each other. Eagleton does not advocate that literary theory be abandoned but that its insights be harnessed in the service of a new enterprise, namely, the cultural politics and discourse theory that he also argues for in The Function of Criticism - theory as a politicized rhetorical study, which would consider 'the various sign-systems and signifying practices in our own society, all the way from Moby Dick to the Muppet show, from Dryden and Jean-Luc Godard to the portrayal of women in advertisements and the rhetorical techniques of government reports' (207). The rationale for this systematic investigation of discursive practices is the recognition that all texts are 'interested/ grounded in a particular ideology. (See also 'discourse analysis theory, "rhetorical criticism, 'signifying practice.) Eagleton's more recent Walter Benjamin: or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism represents in part a movement away from the abstractions of Althusserian theory and towards a more ex-

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periential and political approach to literary texts which involves such concerns as feminism, humour, the 'carnivalesque,' the body, and cultural practices. (See 'feminist criticism, 'carnival.) He argues that 'Benjamin prefigures some of the central developments in poststructuralist theory, a claim that is designed not so much to make him 'relevant' to present-day readers as to prevent his work from being coopted and domesticated by the mainstream critical establishment. Indeed, Eagleton sees Benjamin's texts as a battleground of rival interpretive strategies, a field of contention in which *deconstruction appears as the latest challenger. The tone of his critical encounter with Benjamin, highly partisan and polemical, is representative of his approach to theory generally and exemplifies his sense of the kind of 'engagement' that a literary critic should practise. FRANS DE BRUYN

Primary Sources Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975-1985. London: Verso/New Left Books, 1986. - The Body as Language: Outline of a 'New Left' Theology. London and Sydney: Sheed and Ward, 1970. - Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary. London: Verso/New Left Books, 1976. - Exiles and Emigres: Studies in Modern Literature. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. - The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism. London: Verso/New Left Books, 1984. - The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. - Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. - Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1976. - Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes. London: Macmillan; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975.

- 'Nationalism: Irony and Commitment.' In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990, 23-39. - The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. — Walter Benjamin or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London and New York: Verso, 1981.

Secondary Sources Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen, 1979.

Eco Burns, Wayne. 'Marxism, Criticism, and the Disappearing I n d i v i d u a l . ' Recovering Literature 12 (1984): 7-28. Craib, Ian. 'Criticism and Ideology: Theory and Experience.' Contemporary Literature 22 (1981): 489-509. Frow, John. 'Marxism after Structuralism.' Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays 17 (1984): 33-50. - Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986, passim. - 'Structuralist Marxism.' Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays 15 (1982): 208-17. Norris, Christopher. 'Image and Parable: Readings of Walter Benjamin.' Philosophy and Literature 7 (1983): 13-31. Poole, Roger. 'Generating Believable Entities: PostMarxism as a Theological Enterprise.' Comparative Criticism 7 ( 1 9 8 3 ) : 49-71.

Eco, Umberto (b. Italy, 1932-). Professor of *semiotics, critic, novelist, journalist. Son of a railway worker, Umberto Eco attended the University of Turin, where in 1954 he completed a doctoral thesis on the aesthetics of St. Thomas Aquinas. Before joining the editorial staff of the Bompiani Publishing House in 1959 he worked for the RAI (the Italian national TV) and began collaborating with some of the most prestigious journals and newspapers (both academic and popular) in Italy. The journalistic activities promoted and intensified his interests in modern culture, mass media, communication, and semiotics. In 1963 Eco played a key role in the formation (and in the later dissolution) of the Gruppo M' - Italian neo-avant-garde writers and critics who shared some views with their French counterpart, the Tel Quel group. Eco's academic career began in the early i 9605 at the University of Florence. He later taught at the universities of Turin and Milan and, from 1966, abroad in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at NYU and Northwestern, and at many other American and Canadian universities. From 1971 he has been teaching semiotics at the University of Bologna and currently edits the international semiotic journal VS. The fundamental influence of the Middle Ages on Eco dates back to his doctoral dissertation and is particularly apparent in his novel The Name of the Rose (\ 980), as well as in The Aesthetics of Thomas Atjuinas, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (195(1), and The Aesthetics of

Chaosrnos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (1982). The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, an exposition of Aquinas' notions of allegory and of the meaning of beauty related to goodness, wholeness, proportion, and splendour, also documents the way diachronic linguistic and semiotic preoccupations are at the centre of Eco's studies. Opera aperta [The Open Work 1962], which gave Eco instant popularity, became the primary work with which, for many years, critics associated him. Eco revised his poetic of the 'open work' four times as he developed and modified his theories on the intentionally ambiguous and plurivocal meanings in texts and on the multiple (but not endless) interpretations that the reader may derive from them. (See "text.) The shifts in his theory of texts, meaning, readers, and interpretation can be charted from The Open Work to La Struttura assente [The Absent Structure], The Role of the Reader, and The Limits of Interpretation, as structuralist theories in vogue in the 19605 give way to reader response and theories of interpretation of the 19705 and 19805, particularly *hermeneutics and *deconstruction. (See *structuralism, ""reader-response criticism.) Eco constantly affirmed that meaning and interpretation have contextual, historical and sociological roots; moreover, in the act of writing, the author foresees the role of the reader as 'model,' 'ideal' or 'real'. Thus, the reader indirectly plays a collaborative role in the writing of the text in so far as he or she is one of the textual strategies planned by the author. In the same way the author plans 'inferential walks' and intertextual allusions which take the reader outside the text in order to draw on his verbal, textual and extratextual experiences in short, on his cultural competence - for interpretation. In The Limits of Interpretation, Eco insists on a distinction between interpreting and using a literary text (open or closed) by showing why there must be some limits to the power of an interpreter/reader. In essence, one can make an intentionally ambiguous text say many things, but one cannot (should not?) make a text say what it was not meant to say. The Limits of Interpretation does not negate or contradict The Open Work, rather it confirms the dangers of unlimited *intertextuality and interpretation. In addition to such questions, *kitsch, high and pop culture, and the role of mass media

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Eco have interested Eco from the early n-)6os, as illustrated by his numerous essays and journalistic writings (a selection appears in Travels in Hyper Reality) on such topics as James Joyce, J. Luis Borges, Superman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Woody Allen, popular movies, TV serials, Disney characters, and comic books. These essays indicate how Eco the semiotician and critic is never divorced from Eco the observer of cultural phenomena, or from the novelist. Often showing affinities with the writings of "Leslie A. Fiedler, *Roland Barthes and "Marshall McLuhan, Eco prefers a postmodern 'integrated' writer/intellectual to an 'apocalyptic' one who, with his elite notions of art, snubs mass media and popular culture. (See *postmodernism.) Eco's semiotic works show the same type of development and revisions which accompany his theoretical studies on constructing, reading and interpreting texts. Beginning with // Segno and moving on to the larger studies La Struttura assente (1968), A Theory of Semiotics (1979) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), Eco's fascination grows with "Charles S. Peirce's theories on signs and unlimited *semiosis and with his own overall view of semiotics as a science pertaining to communication and to the reading and interpreting of all social and cultural aspects of life. From Saussurean notions of *langue/parole and Jakobsonian concerns with the relations of sender-signs-codes-messages-receiver/interpreter, Eco has moved to a wider area of the production and interpretation of signs: to the encyclopedia of culture - where all signs (information) and meaning can ultimately be interconnected through networks of rhizomes, depending on the level of verbal and general cultural competence of both the sender and the receiver of messages. (See *Saussure, "Jakobson, "communication theory, "code, "sign.) His novels presented Eco with international fame. The Name of the Rose sold over 8 million copies throughout the world and was made into a popular film; and the more difficult Foucault's Pendulum at times resembles a small encyclopedia of esoteric literature. Amusing and instructive, both novels are well engineered pastiches of intertextual allusions which send readers to both Eco's and other authors' texts (particularly to those of C.S. Peirce, Karl Popper, "Michel Foucault, and "Harold Bloom). ROCCO CAPOZZI

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Primary Sources Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. 1965. Tulsa, Okla.: U of Tulsa, 1982. - The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. 1956; 1970. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. - Apocalittici e integrati. Milano: Bompiani, 1964. - Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. - II Costume di casa. Milano: Bompiani, 1973. - Dalla periferia all'impero. Milano: Bompiani, 1977. - La Definizione dell'arte. Milano: Mursia, 1973. - Diario minima. Milano: Mondadori, 1963; 1990. - Diario minima U. Milano: Bompiani, 1992. - Le Forme del contenuto. Milano: Bompiani, 1971. - Foucault's Pendulum. 1988. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. - The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. - The Name of the Rose. 1980. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. - The Open Work. 1962; 1966; 1971; 1976. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP 1989. - Postscript to the Name of the Rose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. - The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. - // Segno. Milano: Isedi, 1973. - Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. - Sette anni di desiderio. Milano: Bompiani, 1983. - La Struttura assente. Milano: Bompiani, 1968. - Sugli specchi e altri saggi. Milano: Bompiani, 1985. - /( Superuomo di massa. Milano: Cooperativa scrittori, 1976; 1978. - A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. - Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Secondary Sources Cannon, JoAnn. Postmodern Italian Fiction. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson P, 1989. Capozzi, Rocco. 'Palimpsests and Laughter: The Dialogical Pleasure of Unlimited Semiosis in The Name of the Rose.' Italica (Winter 1989): 412-28. Coletti, Theresa. Naming the Rose. Jackson: U Presses of Mississippi, 1988. de Lauretis, Teresa. Umberto Eco. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1981. Giovannoli, Kenato, ed. Saggi sul Nome della rasa. Milano: Bompiani, 1985. Inge, Thomas M. Naming the Rose: Essays on The Name of the Rose. Jackson: U Presses of Mississippi, 1988. Robey, David. 'Umberto Eco.' In Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy. Ed. Michel Caesar and Peter Hainsworth. Warwickshire: Berg Publishers, 1984.

Eikhenbaum Stauder, Thomas. Umberta t'cos 'Dcr Name dcr Rose.' Erlangen: Palm and Enke, iyHy. 'Umberto Eco. Du Semiologue an romancier.' Monographic issue of Magazine littcraire 262 (Feb. 1989),

Eikhenbaum, Boris Mikhailovich (b. Russia, i886-d. 1959) Russian formalist scholar. After studying at the Military Medical Academy, Eikhenbaum switched to the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University. Graduating in 1912, he taught in a private gymnasium, and from 1918 to 1949 he was a professor at Leningrad University. He joined OPO1AZ (acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and became a spokesman for the formalists at all important debates and discussions in the early 19205. Teoriia "formalnogo metoda"' [The Theory of the Formal Method' 1926] is a classic exposition. Following the suppression of formalism, Eikhenbaum concentrated on the problems of literary history, writing numerous studies on Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy. In 1949 he was dismissed from the university for his 'eclecticism and cosmopolitanism.' Reinstated in 1956 at the Institute of Russian I iterature, he published two more monographs on Lermontov and Tolstoy. (See *formalism, Russian.) Eikhenbaum, one of the most productive formalist scholars (he published more than 300 works), focused on the questions of narrative fiction and poetics. In both areas he combined theoretical analysis with literary history. His most important contribution to the theory of prose was his concept of skaz, developed in 'Kak sdelana "Shine!" Gogolia' ['How Gogol's "The Overcoat" Is Made' 1919], 'Illiuziia skaza' [The Illusion of Skaz' 1924] and 'Leskov i sovremennaia proza' ['Leskov and Modern Prose' 1925]. Eikhenbaum defined skaz as a special type of written *discourse oriented toward the oral speech of the *narrator and demonstrated its importance in the works of such writers as Gogol, Leskov, Remizov, and Zoshchenko. Eikhenbaum's major statement was his monograph Melodika russkogft liricheskogo stikha [Melody of Russian Lyric Verse 1922] on the importance of phrase melody in Russian lyric poetry. In it he introduced the concept of

the dominanta, a focusing element, which orders all other components of the literary work and guarantees the integrity of its structure. The dominauta of lyric poetry, according to Eikhenbaum, is intonation since it deforms all other aspects, including syntax, word order and verse division. Among formalists, Eikhenbaum was unique in his keen interest in literary history and the interaction between "literature and milieu. While not disputing the notion of the uniqueness of literature, he always maintained that literature should not be studied in isolation from other spheres of life. His most explicit argument for this approach was 'Literarurnyi byt' ['Literary Environment' 1927], against a narrow formalism that excluded the possibility of interaction between literature and life and against vulgar sociology that tried to explain literary phenomena exclusively in terms of socio-economic factors. Eikhenbaum successfully applied his theory in his own studies of Lermontov and Tolstoy, analysing their literary evolution against the background of historical and social changes. His recognition of the importance of extraliterary factors in the development of literature brought him closer to the Soviet ideological mainstream and saved him from losing his job in the 19308. As a professor at the Leningrad University, he taught several generations of Soviet scholars, among them G.A. Bialyi and B.S. Meilakh. He also played an important role in stimulating research in poetics carried out by scholars associated with the Tartu-Moscow School. (See Tartu School.) NINA KOI.ESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Eikhenbaum, B.M. 'Illiuziia skaza.' Skvoz' literatury. Leningrad, 1924. 'The Illusion of "Skaz."' Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (1977): 233-6. - 'Kak sdelana "Shinel" Gogolia.' Poetika. Sborniki po teiirii poeticheskogo iazyka. Petrograd, 1919, 151-65. 'How Gogol's "The Overcoat" Is Made.' Russian Review 20 (1963): 377-99. - 'Leskov i sovremennaia proza.' Literatures, teoriia, kritika, polemika. Leningrad, 1927. 'Leskov and Modern Prose.' Russian Literature Triquarterlif 11 (1975): 211-29. - 'Literature i literaturnyi byt.' Na lileraturnom postu 9 (1927): 47-52, 'Literary Environment.' In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1971, 56-65.

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Eliade - Mclodika russkogo liricheskogo stikha. Leningrad, 1922. - 'Teoriia formal'nogo metoda.' Chervonii shliakh 7-8 (1926). 'The Theory of the Formal Method.' In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. L. Lemon and M. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965, 91-144.

Secondary Sources Any, C. 'Boris Eikhenbaum in OPOIAZ: Testing the Limits of the Work-Centered Poetics.' Slavic Review 49.3 (1990): 409-26. Jakobson, R. 'Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum.' International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 6 (1963): 160-7. Rice, M. 'On "Skaz."' Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (i975) : 4°9~ 2 4Steiner, P. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. Striedter, J. 'The Russian Formalist Theory of Prose.' PTL: A journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 2 (1977): 429-70.

Eliade, Mircea (b. Romania, igoy-d. U.S.A., 1986) Historian of religions, phenomenologist of religion, novelist. Mircea Eliade obtained his master's degree at the University of Bucharest in philosophy (1928) with a thesis on Italian Renaissance philosophy. He studied for three years in India under Surendranath Dasgupta and returned to Bucharest, completing a doctoral dissertation on a comparative history of techniques of yoga (1933). During the 19303, Eliade gained fame as an influential and controversial literary figure in his native Romania. He was a member of the faculty of the University of Bucharest until he became a cultural attache with the Royal Legation of Romania in London (1940) and Lisbon (1941-5). In the decade following the war, while living in Paris, Eliade established his international scholarly reputation as a historian of religions. He became a permanent member of the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1957, where he taught history of religions until his retirement in 1983. (See *phenomenological criticism.) A prolific writer, Eliade had a remarkable career, first as a major literary figure in Romania, especially following the publication of his hugely successful novel Maitreyi (1933), and later as a historian and phenomenologist of religion, starting with the publication of

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Traite d'histoirc des religions [Patterns in Comparative Religion] and Le Mi/the de I'etemel retour [The Myth of the Eternal Return and Cosmos and History 1949] and continuing through Le Chamanisme [Shamanism] and Le Yoga [Yoga 1954]. Romanian was his literary language, while his major scholarly works, culminating with the three-volume Histoire des croyances et des, idees religieuses [A History of Religious Ideas, 1976, 1978, 1983; trans. 1979, 1982, 1985], were written in French. Approximately 35 of his books have been published in English. It is difficult to place Eliade's works because he was a generalist, comparativist and synthesizer, drawing on texts reflecting spiritual and cultural experiences from the entire history of humankind. Especially influenced by his encounter with Indian spirituality, which revealed to him much of his understanding of symbol and *myth and of the nature of religious experience, he often focused on 'archaic spirituality,' privileging an 'archaic ontology' with its nonhistorical, nontemporal, repetitive, eternal, archetypal structures of meaning, and on an antihistorical, nature-oriented 'cosmic religiosity' of Romanian and other peasants. (See *archetype, *archetypal criticism.) Often citing Goethe as his literary and scholarly model, Eliade was critical of many modern, post-Enlightenment scholarly assumptions and approaches: an overemphasis on the conceptual and rational, faith in scientific progress, historicism, and secular reductionism of spiritual meanings. Much closer to a tradition of German Romanticism and metaphysical idealism in his interpretation of meaning, Eliade may be placed within a structural, synchronic, hermeneutical, and phenomenological tradition, going back at least to Schleiermacher and sharing many characteristics with more recent existential phenomenologists, such as *Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and hermeneutical phenomenologists, such as *Paul Ricoeur. (See *structuralism, *hermeneutics.) Eliade often discusses his 'dual vocation' as fiction writer and scholar. At times, he emphasizes that each is autonomous and separate; at others, he emphasizes that literary and scholarly concerns are complementary, necessary for his 'spiritual equilibrium,' separate but interdependent parts of the same universal cultural creativity. The basic assumptions, methods and concerns defining his scholarly work in the history and phenomenology of religion

Eliade also define his attitude and approach to "literature. Eliade views literature as an autonomous creation of the literary imagination, interpreted on its 'own plane of reference/ with its own structures and meanings, and not devalued or reduced to any one of its 'elements' or to any secular, scientific, rational, economic, psychological, or historical perspective. Such claims for the autonomy of the literary might seem to identify Eliade with the New Critics; however, he invariably reduces the literary to some religious plane of reference. (See *New Criticism.) According to Eliade, literature, through the universal structure of the 'dialectic of the sacred' and through nonhistorical mythic and symbolic structures, is capable of revealing the sacred - permanent, universal, dynamic structures of transcendence, expressing what is transhistorical, paradigmatic, meaningful. The sacred is always mediated in a 'paradoxical' manner, not contained within the secular but expressed through that which is ordinarily finite, limited, temporal, natural, historical, 'profane.' (See *paradox.). Especially in modern, Western, secular culture, the sacred, as a structure of human consciousness, as a 'mode of being,' is 'camouflaged' and 'concealed': the transhistorical is 'hidden' and 'unrecognized' in the historical, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the fantastic and supernatural in the banal and mundane. Literature, through the creative functioning of the imagination, discovers camouflaged sacred dimensions of reality, inexhaustible 'ciphers' and hidden languages and meanings, 'polyvalent' structures capable of being 'revalorized' and reconstituted as new literary creations. Eliade emphasizes the importance of narrative, sometimes submitting that narrative is constitutive of 'the human condition,' and he views both oral and written literature as an offspring of mythology and fulfilling the same mythic functions. Literature plays an essential role in a desperately needed 'cultural renewal' and 'new humanism,' in which we overcome our 'provincialism' and begin to define ourselves as planetary beings. Various literarv critics and theorists use Eliade routinely, often in a phenomenological vein. For the most part, Eliade's influence on literary criticism is thematic rather than methodological or theoretical, with the adoption of certain Eliadean ideas such as the 'sacred and the profane/ the m y t h of the eternal return/

and the 'nostalgia for a mythic paradise' (or premodern ahistorical time when the sacred was more humanly accessible). (See "theme.) Although Eliade was sometimes described as the most popular and influential contemporary historian of religions and as the foremost interpreter of myth and symbol, he was controversial and not without his critics. Many felt that he was an 'old-fashioned' generalist, who was methodologically uncritical, arbitrary and subjective, 'read' all sorts of 'profound' nonhistorical meanings into his documents, and ignored the historical and cultural boundaries and specificity of his texts. DOUGLAS ALLEN Primary Sources Eliade, Mircea. Autobiography. Vol. i: 1907-1937. Trans. ML. Ricketts. New York: Harper and Row, 1981; Autobiography. Vol. 2: 19)7—1960. Trans. M.L. Ricketts. New York: Harper and Row; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. - The Forbidden Forest. Trans. M.L. Ricketts and M.P. Stevenson. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1978. - The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Ed. with ). Kitagawa. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1959. - Journal I, 3945-1955. Trans. M.L. Ricketts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990; No Souvenirs: Journal 1957-3069. Trans. F.H. Johnson. New York: Harper and Row, 1977 (also pub. as Journal II, 19571969. U of Chicago P); Journal III, 1970-1975. Trans. T.L. Fagan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989; Journal IV, 3979-1985. Trans. M.L. Ricketts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. - The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. VV.R. Trask. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954. (Pub. as Cosmos and History, Harper Torchbook ed., and by Princeton UP.) - Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with ClaudeHenri Racquet. Trans. D. Coltman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. - Patterns in Comparative Religion. Trans. R. Sheed. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958. - The Sacred and the Profane. Trans. VV.R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1959. - Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts. New York: Crossroad, 1986. Secondary Sources Allen. D. Structure and Creativity in Religion. The Hague: Mouton, 1978. Allen, D., and D. Doeing. Mircea Eliade: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1980. Girardot, N.J., and M.L. Ricketts, eds. Imagination

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Eliot and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea EHade. New York: Scabury, 1982. Kitagawa, ]., and C. Long, eels. Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969. Marino, A. L'Hermeneutique dc Mircea Eliade. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Tacou, C., ed. Mircea Eliade. Paris: L'Herne, 1978.

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (b. U.S.A., i888-d. England, 1965) Poet, playwright and literary critic. T.S. Eliot entered Harvard University in 1906 and studied languages and ""literature - especially Elizabethan literature, metaphysical poetry and literature of the Italian Renaissance. He also studied philosophy under George Santayana. Emerging with an M.A. (1910), he travelled to the University of Paris and attended the lectures of Henri Bergson. Returning to Harvard in 1911, he studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy. In 1914 he went abroad again, studying philosophy for a year at Oxford and eventually completing his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. In 1925 he began a long association with the publishing company now known as Faber and Faber, eventually becoming one of its directors. In 1927 he was confirmed in the Church of England and became a British subject. From that point on, he described himself as 'a royalist in politics, a classicist in literature, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.' Throughout his productive career, he published a substantial amount of poetry, seven plays and innumerable essays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Eliot's ideas of tradition, impersonality and objectivity - along with his Coleridgean insistence that the literary work be regarded as 'autotelic,' as an autonomous and unified object that contains its purpose within itself - set the agenda for British critics such as *F.R. Leavis as well as for American New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom, *Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate. (See *New Criticism.) 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919) is Eliot's earliest articulation of his position. Rebelling against the Romantic cult of originality and novelty, Eliot argues in favour of tradition. 'The historical sense,' he maintains, 'involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the histor-

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ical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order ... The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered' (Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot 38). For Eliot then the significance and value of writers must be appreciated and understood in terms of their relation to the past. One cannot value writers alone. Aligned with this idea of tradition is a deliberately anti-Romantic conception of the poetic personality. According to Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry, 'the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates ... The poet has not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium ... in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways ... Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality' (Selected Prose 41-3). It follows from this that 'the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked' (Selected Prose 48). This notion of the objective correlative comes from Eliot's famous essay on why Hamlet is a failure. According to Eliot, Hamlet's intensely subjective feelings and, by extension, Shakespeare's - are not objectified in the play. Because these feelings are in excess of anything that the play can concretely dramatize, they lack an adequate objective correlative; consequently the play fails to communicate any particular emotion. For Eliot, artistic integrity, the sense of inevitability that a formally perfect work of art enshrines, Ties in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion' (Selected Prose 48). Significant emotion, he maintains, has its life in the work of art and not in the history of the artist.

Eliot Eliot's ideas were part of a larger strategy for revising the *canon of English literature. The revaluation of 17th-century metaphysical poetry and the accompanying devaluation of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and the Romantics, however temporary, were in large measure due to the persuasive power of Eliot's authoritative rhetoric and to its impact on F.R. Leavis, *I.A. Richards, *William Empson, the American New Critics, and others (which is not to say that any of these critics accepted Eliot's judgments en masse). In 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), Eliot sets out his reasons for this revaluation. He commends these poets for their elaboration of a figure of speech to the end of the line, their telescoping of images, their multiplied associations, and their ability to compel a heterogeneity of material into unity. 'When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ... The poets of the 17th century, the successors of the dramatists of the i7th, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience ... In the i7th century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered' (Selected Prose 64). According to Eliot, then, the lyth-century poets who escaped being influenced by Milton - poets such as Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, and Marvell had unified sensibilities; they found objective correlatives for their subjective thoughts and feelings, thereby transmuting their ideas into sensations. Since the time of Milton, however, thought has been divorced from feeling and as the former became more refined and subtle, the latter became cruder. The Romantics were no better; they merely exalted feeling at the expense of thought. Eliot believes that this dissociation of sensibility is a linguistic and cultural malaise from which English literature and society have never recovered. In order to combat this dissociation, the modern poet 'must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning' (Selected Prose 65). Thus, Eliot's critical theory is a rationalization not only of his own poetic practice but also of literary modernism in general. Tradition, it would seem, is always tradition-making, a way of understanding the past that makes room for oneself in the present. 'Manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Eliot writes, 'is simplv a way of controlling, of or-

dering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history' (Selected Prose 177). Eliot brought to modern literary criticism an attitude of imperious objectivity. Vehemently opposed to any sort of impressionistic criticism that seeks to convey what the critic subjectively feels and thinks about a work of art, Eliot argues that the perfect critic seeks to transcend his personal impressions and to make objective statements about the work, using the tools of comparison, contrast and analysis. Criticism, he writes, is 'the disinterested exercise of intelligence' (Selected Prose 56), not 'the satisfaction of a suppressed creative urge' (Selected Prose 53); it should devote itself to 'the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste ... the common pursuit of true judgment' (Selected Prose 69). The difference between objective classicism and subjective romanticism is the difference between 'the complete and the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and chaotic' (Selected Prose 70). After his conversion to AngloCatholicism Eliot tended more and more to identify classicism with 'unquestioned spiritual authority outside the individual' and romanticism with the 'inner voice' (Selected Prose 70). In his later literary criticism and in his social and religious criticism, Eliot contends that valid criticism must be solidly anchored in ethical, political and theological doctrine. The doctrine expressed in these later works, especially in such works as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934) and The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), is conservative if not reactionary, ethnocentric if not racist. Eliot's ideas of a homogeneous Christian culture and society purged of religious and racial impurities, along with his hysterical animadversions against such allegedly heretical writers such as *D.H. Lawrence, were in sinister congruence with the fascist and totalitarian tendencies of the times. And this, finally, is the *paradox of T.S. Eliot - eloquent champion of the radical innovations of literary modernism, dogmatic defender of the reactionary politics of ultraconservativism and Christian orthodoxy. Despite the above Eliot has influenced *postmodernism. Eliot's literary strategies juxtaposition of images without explanation, eliminination of logical transitions, manipulation of a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, allusion, quotation,

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Eliot *parody, pastiche, indirection, dislocation, *irony, and so forth - are as much a part of the postmodernist arsenal as they were of the modernist arsenal. Also, there is enough inconsistency in Eliot's criticism to justify the claim that he not only inspires New Critical formalism but also anticipates the antiformalism that was to replace it. For all of his insistence that the literary work is a self-sufficient and autotelic object, Eliot sees all of literature as having a simultaneous existence and as composing a simultaneous order. Works do not signify in a vacuum; they are part of a system of relations and cannot acquire their complete meaning alone. True, Eliot is committed to the idea of canonicity - his ideal order consists of classical male texts - but we also see an adumbration of what *Julia Kristeva calls *intertextuality, the sum of knowledge that makes it possible for texts to have meaning. For both Eliot and Kristeva, a text can be read only in relation to other texts. In a similar vein, *Harold Bloom's notion of the *anxiety of influence - his claim that strong writers make literary history by misreading and misinterpreting their predecessors so as to clear imaginative space for themselves - is an anxietyridden post-Romantic counterpart to Eliot's benign classical view of literary influence. Although Bloom's theory of the genesis of poems has a self-admitted pyschoanalytical resonance, Freud's Oedipal scenario being used as an analogy for the relationship between poet and predecessor, both he and Eliot, their severe ideological incompatibility notwithstanding, are akin in their assumption that every text is a response to and interpretation of other texts. (See *Freud, *psychoanalytic theory.) Since 1980 readers of Eliot's dissertation ('Knowledge and Experience') such as Bechler, Michaels and Shusterman have highlighted the semiotic and antimetaphysical dimensions of his early work in philosophy and are re-examining his poetry and criticism as an unacknowledged 'discourse of difference' prescient of the poststructural world. (See *semiotics, *semiosis, *poststructuralism, *discourse.) It is clear that Eliot does not now have the pre-eminence he once had in the first half of this century. But whether one sees his work as an integral part of the theory and practice of modernism and *formalism, or as a cautionary tale about the dangers and temptations of reactionary politics, or as a precursor of postmodernist strategies and ideas, or as a com-

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bination of all three, one cannot escape the lingering presence of his influence. GREIG HENDERSON

Primary Sources Eliot, T.S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. - The Classics and the Man of Letters. London: Oxford UP, 1942. - Dante. London: Faber and Faber, 1931. - Elizabethan Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. - Essays Ancient and Modern. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. - For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928. - Homage to John Dry den: Three Essays on the Poetry of the ijth Century. London: Hogarth P, 1924. - The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber and Faber, 1939. - John Dryden. The Poet. The Dramatist. The Critic. New York: Terence and Elsa Holliday, 1932. - Milton. London: Oxford UP, 1947. - The Music of Poetry. Glasgow: Jackson, 1942. - Notes toward the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1948. - OH Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. - Poetry and Drama. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. - The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920. - Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932. A new edition containing the author's choice among all the prose he wrote since 1917 was published by Faber in 1951. - Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. - Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca. London: Oxford UP, 1927. - The Three Voices of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953. - To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. - The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber, 1933. - What Is a Classic? London: Faber and Faber, 1945.

Secondary Sources Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot. London: Hamilton, 1984. Bechler, Michael. T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987. Bergonzi, Bernard. T.S. Eliot. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Chace, William M. The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1973. Dale, Alzina Stone. The Philosopher Poet. Wheaton, 111.: H. Shaw, 1988.

Empson Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S, Eliot. London: Cresset P, 1949. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot's Early Years. Oxford and New York: 1977. - Eliot's New Eife. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988. Jay, Gregory. T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the $oth Anniversary of the 'Waste Land.' Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. Lucy, Sean. T.S. Eliot and the Idea of a Tradition. London: Cohen and West, 1960. Martin, Graham, ed. Eliot in Perspective. London: Macmillan, 1970. Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Michaels, Walter Benn. 'Philosophy in KinKanja: Eliot's Pragmatism.' Glyph 8: 170-202. Newton-de Molina, David, ed. The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot: New Essays. London: Athlone P, 1977. Rajan, B., ed. T.S. Eliot: A Study of His Writings by Several Hands. New York: Haskell House, 1964. Ricks, Christopher B. T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber, 1988. Shusterman, Richard. T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. London: Duckworth, 1988. Tamplin, Ronald. A Preface to T.S. Eliot. London: Longman, 1988. Tate, Allen, ed. Eliot: The Man and His Work. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Empson, (Sir) William (b. England, 1906-0!. 1984) Poet and literary critic. Born into the landed gentry in Yorkshire, Empson went to preparatory school in Folkestone, then entered Winchester College (1920) and Cambridge (1925), where he first studied mathematics, then English. He began to publish his poems at Cambridge and became co-editor of the literary magazine Experiment. His Seven Types of Ambiguity, which began as an essay for his tutor *I.A. Richards, appeared in 1930 when Empson was only 24. In 1931 he was appointed professor of English literature at the Tokyo University of Literature and Science. Empson returned to England in 1934 and his Poems and Some Versions of Pastoral appeared in 1935. In 1937 he became a professor at Peking National University. Returning to England in 1940, Empson worked during the war for the BBC'S Ear Eastern sec-

tion, where one of his colleagues was George Orwell. After another four years at Peking National University, Empson returned permanently to England in 1952. He became professor of English "literature in 1953 at Sheffield University, where he worked until his retirement in 1971. He was knighted in 1978. Empson's importance in Anglo-American literary criticism during the middle decades of the 2oth century lies in his introduction of methods for analysing and attempting to classify ambiguities in literary works. This work, presented in Seven Types of Ambiguity, became important in the close analysis of texts undertaken by scholars using the *New Criticism, though it must be remembered that Empson never accepted the 'intentional fallacy' to which he always referred disdainfully as 'the Wimsatt Law' (Using Biography 225). (See *W.K. Wimsatt, Jr.) The Royal Beasts (1986) contains an outline discovered among Empson's papers (now in Harvard's Houghton Library): 'The seven classes of ambiguity, i. Mere richness; (a metaphor valid from many points of view). 2. Two different meanings conveying the same point. 3. Two unconnected meanings, both wanted but not illuminating one another. 4. Irony: two apparently opposite meanings combined into a judgment. 5. Transition of meaning; (a metaphor applying halfway between two comparisons). 6. Tautology or contradiction, allowing of a variety of guesses as to its meaning. 7. Two meanings that are the two opposites created by the context' (113-14). Apart from items 4 and 5, these definitions agree quite closely with the sentence-long definitions that Empson offers on the 'Contents' pages of the book. (See also *metonymy/metaphor, *irony.) In his Preface to the Second Edition (1961) Empson admits that some critics have viewed Seven Types of Ambiguity as 'an awful warning against taking verbal analysis too far' (vii). Empson's analysis of ambiguity proceeds from the assumption that 'good poetry is usually written from a background of conflict' (xiii). Therefore, 'the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry' (3). The usefulness of literary criticism for Empson is that 'the more one understands one's own reactions the less one is at their mercy' (15). Attempting to describe the book's method in conclusion, Empson argues: T have continually employed a method of analysis which jumps the gap between two ways of thinking; which produces a

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Empson possible set of alternative meanings with some ingenuity, and then says it is grasped in the preconsciousness of the reader by a native effort of the mind' (239). Empson's most controversial analyses are of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, Hopkins' 'The Windhover' and George Herbert's 'The Sacrifice.' His emphasis on the importance of perceiving ambiguity in literary works is clearly original and in 1930 was ground-breaking. What is less satisfactory is the pseudo-scientific attempt at classification into types that proceeds, perhaps, from his training in mathematics. Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) is essentially a discussion of the pastoral mode undertaken from a Marxist and, in the final chapter on Alice in Wonderland, from a Freudian standpoint. (See *Marxist criticism, *Sigmund Freud, *psychoanalytic theory.) Empson seeks 'to show, roughly in historical order, the ways in which the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple ... and the resulting social ideas have been used in English literature' (25). The introductory chapter, 'Proletarian Literature,' appeared originally in Leavis' Scrutiny. (See *F.R. Leavis.) Empson's interest in double plots leads him to explore the juxtaposition of heroic and pastoral which he sees as attempting to maintain the social bond in a divided society. Empson's first collection of poems appeared in the same year. While poems like To an Old Lady,' 'Villanelle' and 'Arachne' are deeply moving, some of the more obscure pieces constitute an eighth type of ambiguity. The Structure of Complex Words (1951) returns to the analysis of language that characterized Seven Types of Ambiguity. Here Empson located his work 'on the borderland of linguistics and literary criticism' (i). His central argument, that words have implications beyond their literal meanings that are determined by their context, is persuasive. Less convincing is the use of equations and formulae derived again, perhaps, from Empson's early work in mathematics. As before, Empson is preoccupied with what he calls 'literary double meanings.' Particularly impressive is his consideration of the change in meaning of the word 'sense' through works as widely different in time and in kind as Measure for Measure, Sense and Sensibility and The Prelude. Milton's God (1961) is a different sort of study of literary ambiguity, in this case of Mil-

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ton's failure to 'justify the ways of God to men.' For Empson, whose anti-'neo-Christian' polemic grew into an obsession in his later career, it is impossible to justify the Christian God. Empson shares Blake's and Shelley's view that 'the reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad' (13, 275). He argues that 'the picture of God in the poem, including perhaps even the high moments when he speaks of the end, is astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin' (146). Although Empson did not publish another book of criticism in his lifetime, it is a measure of his importance as a critic as well as of his continuous activity that four books of criticism have appeared since his death: Using Biography (1984), Essays on Shakespeare (1986), Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-book and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1987), and Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (1987). A further book of essays on Renaissance literature is anticipated. These posthumously published books illustrate the depth and range of Empson's critical engagement. Using Biography, which gathers essays written between 1958 and 1982, reveals Empson's distance from 'the Wimsatt Law' and the strength of his commitment to literary history. His work on Marvell shows his capacity for scholarly speculation, which is also evident in Faustus and the Censor and in his work on the Globe Theatre in Essays on Shakespeare. Argufying, which gathers Empson's reviews and previously uncollected pieces, reveals the vigour of his less formal writing as well as the diversity of his critical interests. The title, 'argufying,' a favourite term of Empson's, captures well his life-long engagement in critical dispute. In his introduction to Argufying (1987), John Haffenden argues that Empson's 'career has popularly been reckoned to fall into roughly two halves, the first ending with The Structure of Complex Words (1951), the second appearing to forsake semantic interests in favour of chastising the aberrant morality of what Empson himself styled the "Neo-Christian school of critics" ' (3). Empson's chief targets apart from the Neo-Christian school were imagism, symbolism and the intentional fallacy. The NeoChristian school (spearheaded by *T.S. Eliot) provided in Empson's view a falsely medieval emphasis in Renaissance studies, succumbed too readily to Milton's theology and presented

Fiedler falsely Christian readings of modern authors like Joyce. Counting himself a son of 'the freethinking Enlightenment' (Essays on Shakespeare 243) and a Benthamite rationalist, Empson found imagism and symbolism full of mystification. Works of literature, he believed, were for the most part capable of rational explanation. The idea posited by VVimsatt's intentional fallacy, that we could never know an author's intent, Empson also resisted. He argued in favour of 'the old custom of placing a poem in its milieu, and remembering the circumstances in which it was written. This does seem a basic need; having some grasp of the mind of the author is more of a luxury though I don't believe you can have real criticism without it' (Argufying 58). Empson's importance in modern literary criticism will always be connected with his development of the work I.A. Richards in Seven Types of Ambiguity, a book that contributed to the New Criticism. Despite his mathematical background and his penchant for classifications and equations he did not have a strong interest in theory. 'The English have not the American theoretical drive,' he wrote, 'but this does not keep them pure' (Using Biography 34). An old-fashioned liberal, Empson believed that the purpose of studying literature was to increase our awareness of others and our understanding of ourselves. On more than one occasion he wrote that 'the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own' (Milton's God 261; Using Biography 142). Critical judgment was of final importance to him. He believed that 'as the author claims to be judging a real situation, important to himself, the critic is committed to judging it too' (Milton's God 328). With Henry Fielding he believed that we should be 'prepared in literature as in life, to handle and judge any situation' (Using Biography 157). Empson's early work, especially Seven Types of Ambiguity, was regarded as important and original. It has even been argued recently that he is a herald of *deconstruction. His later work, however, especially his anti-'neo-Christian' polemic, has been viewed as obsessive and as a falling-off (Haffenden, Argufying 50, 29). JOHN FERNS

Primary Sources Empson, William. Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ed. John Haffenden. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1987- Collected Poems. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962. - Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. David B. Pirie. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. - Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-book and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Ed. John Henry Jones. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. - The Gathering Storm. London: Faber and Faber, 1940. - Milton's God. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. - Poems. London: Chatto and Windus, 1935. - The Royal Beasts and Other Works. Ed. John Haffenden. London: Chatto and Windus, 1986. - Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. - Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus, 1935. - The Structure of Complex Words. London: Chatto and Windus, 1951. - Using Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1984. - and David B. Pirie. Coleridge's Verse: A Selection. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Secondary Sources Day Frank. Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography. New York and London: Garland, 1984. Fry, Paul H. William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Gardner, Philip, and Averil Gardener. The God Approached: A Commentary on the Poems of William Empson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. Gill, Roma, Ed. William Empson: The Man and His Work. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Norris, Christopher. William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. London: Athlone P, 1978. The Review: A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism. Special issue devoted to Empson. June 1963. Willis, J.H., Jr. William Empson. New York and London: Columbia UP, 1969.

Fiedler, Leslie A. (b. U.S.A., 1917-) Literary and social critic, novelist, storywriter, poet. Leslie A. Fiedler received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, taught in the English department at Montana State University from 1941 to 1965,

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Fish then moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo. As a literary critic, Fiedler attained recognition, first, for his indictments of the *New Criticism of *I.A. Richards and *Cleanth Brooks; second, for his studies of the way in which marginal groups (Negro, native Indian, Jewish, and homosexual) are represented in American *literature; and third, for his promotion of the study of popular or what he calls 'majority' texts. His most important theoretical essays, 'Archetype and Signature' (1952) and 'In the Beginning was the Word: Logos or MythosT (1958), refute the New Critical notion of the literary *text as aesthetic mechanism and argue instead for its status as a tissue of universal myths. (See *myth.) Fiedler's interest in literature as a purveyor of archetypes is at the heart of his 'Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey]' (1948), though his emphasis here is on specific cultural rather than universal mythologies. (See *archetype.) Still known for its daring thesis, this essay argues outright that the interracial friendships of Huck and Jim in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Ishmael and Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are innocent displays of homoerotic desire. That such friendships are a feature of America's most cherished novels suggests to Fiedler a sentimental need on the part of the white American male to be accepted by the minorities whom he regularly offends and exploits. In Fiedler's most famous work of criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 1966), this thesis is expanded to account for what Fiedler sees as the American novel's 'obsession with violence and embarrassment before love': its rejection of domestic forms and figures and its preference instead for the gothic. White America's guilt over the exploitation of its land and native people, over its treatment of the Negro, over its own perpetually revolutionary flight from civilization, have produced a literature preoccupied with death and psychological horror. In this study, as elsewhere, Fiedler's method, referred to by many as 'anthropological,' involves the reading of popular as well as 'high-brow' literatures, a strategy which leads him in his later work to argue for the expansion of the American *canon. What Was Literature? (1982) under-

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stands the domestic American novel, beginning with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, as part of a national counter-tradition, a feminine obverse to the homocentric culture Fiedler had explored in Love and Death. In its tendency to understand American literary history in terms of the paradigms of psychosexual conflict, Fiedler's criticism owes much to the work of *Sigmund Freud. His studies may also be understood as part of a larger mid-20th-century attempt to describe and define the uniquely American author as an 'outsider' and the uniquely American novel as essentially gothic, antirealistic, antihistorical, and antifeminine. Such ideas have been challenged by American feminist and New Historicist critics but even among these Fiedler remains important for his abiding emphasis on the role of minorities and 'minor' literatures in the development of a white American consciousness. (See *feminist criticism, *New Historicism.) SANDRA TOMC

Primary Sources Fiedler, Leslie. 'Archetype and Signature.' In No/ in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature. Boston: Beacon P, 1960, 309-28. - 'Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!' Partisan Review 15 (1948): 664-71. - 'In the Beginning Was the Word: Logos or Mythos?' In No.' in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature, 295-308. - Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. - What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Fish, Stanley (b. U.S.A., 1938-) Literary critic and theoretician. Fish received his B.A. (1959) from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1962) from Yale University. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1962-74), the Johns Hopkins University (1974-84), and Duke University (1984-). Fish first attained prominence as a leading American practitioner of ""reader-response criticism and as the originator of *affective stylistics. Later he gained notoriety for his view that meaning is determined entirely by the inter-

Fish pretive strategies which regulate its perception by readers rather than by any formal architecture within texts. Although he develops his theories for the most part independently of continental philosophy, Fish's concept of reading as a dialectical experience of reversals, as well as his scepticism with respect to the possibility of objective meaning or formal autonomy, place him in the tradition of *poststructuralism. The critical practice of 'affective stylistics' for which Fish initially gained prominence grew out of his innovative readings of 17th-century English "literature. In Surprised by Sin: The Reader in 'Paradise Lost' (1967) and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of lyth Century Literature (1972), Fish argued that the meaning of works from this period was not to be found in their formal configuration or in any objective reality to which they referred but in the experience of the reader attempting to make sense of them. According to Fish these works tempt their readers into various erroneous conclusions, poor judgments and ill-conceived analytical partitions, thereby compelling them to abandon their discursive, reason-based ways of thinking and acknowledge the primacy of divine revelation. Because this transcendence of discursive selfhood also involves a transcendence of the literary *discourse which occasions it, Fish refers to the works he treats in this period as 'self-consuming artifacts.' During a second period, in a series of articles commencing with 'Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics' (1970) and collected in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Fish shifted his emphasis from practice to theory and from the experiences which texts elicit in their readers - from what texts 'do' to the reader - to the way in which readers shape texts and textual meaning through their interpretive conventions. (See *text.) Reversing his own earlier tendency to portray the textual units as modulating the reading experience, he postulated that readers actually shape texts. Fish argued that literary meaning, like 'ordinary' linguistic meaning more generally, derives from the practical context of its production. Even the most fundamental determination of meaning is always already informed by its historical situation, which includes the motives, cultural background, belief system, and disciplinary allegiances of the perceiver. What

is 'in' the text is therefore not intrinsic to the text but is the product of the reader's unconscious interpretive decisions. These decisions are in turn regulated by collective standards and beliefs which limit the range of what the text can mean. Thus, while the meaning of texts may change over time, some meanings will always appear more 'obvious' or 'literal' than others. This accounts for critical consensus. In his most recent collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally (1989), Fish extends his analysis to the debates surrounding poststructural theoreticians and their adversaries in literary and legal studies. He argues that theorizing, like any professional activity, entails interpretive decisions which always reflect the belief systems and current protocols of a profession and are therefore both self-interested and political yet constrained in their range. Thus, the hope that theory could provide a disinterested understanding of meaning apart from its instantiation in a particular case is, Fish argues, as deluded as the fear that theory could somehow subvert the discipline. Similarly, he demonstrates that attacks on professionalism during the 19805 are based on the untenable assumption that there could be viable academic behaviour that was not contingent on and enabled by disciplinary protocols. Ultimately Fish's work leads to an understanding of literary criticism as a series of shifting beliefs and practices in an ongoing process of change, the mechanisms of which provide an insight into the structure of history itself. WILLIAM RAY

Primary Sources Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. - Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980. - John Skelton's Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965. - The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. - Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of ijihCentury Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. - Surprised by Sin: The Reader in 'Paradise Lost.' New York: Macmillan, 1967.

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Forster Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. 'Stanley Fish and the Righting of the Reader.' In The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. 'Accounting for the Changing Certainties of Interpretive Communities.' MLN 101.5 (1986): 1022-41. Goodheart, Eugene. The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Mailloux, Steven. 'Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-Response Criticism.' In Victor A. Kramer, ed. American Critics at Work: Examinations of Contemporary Literary Theory. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1984, 296-315. Ray, William. 'Stanley Fish: Supersession and Transcendence.' In Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, 152-69.

Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (b. England, 1879-0!. 1970) Novelist and critic. After his father's early death, E.M. Forster was raised from infancy by his mother and his paternal aunts. Though the time he spent as a day-boy at Tonbridge School, Kent, was not happy and was the basis for much of his later criticism of the English public school system, Forster was fortunate enough to receive an inheritance which made it possible for him to attend King's College, Cambridge, an institution that liberated his spirit, freeing him to follow his own intellectual inclinations. Financial security also meant that Forster could devote his life to his writing. His three-year sojourn in Egypt during the First World War and his early visits to India were of great importance in the development of his writing career. Between 1905 and 1924 he achieved renown as a novelist; however, his fifth novel, A Passage to India (1924), was to be the last published during his lifetime. After A Passage he continued to be known and respected as an essayist and as a spokesman for the committed intellectuals of the period. In 1946 his former college gave him an honorary fellowship, and he became one of the most celebrated figures at the university. Forster contributed over 500 articles to periodicals and newspapers during a career that spanned half a century. Three anthologies contain the best of these: Pharos and Pharillon (1923), Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers

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for Democracy (1951). He was a liberal humanist, who felt as well that he was something of an anachronism, belonging as he did to an era that had been overwhelmed by modernism, an era that 'practised benevolence and philanthropy, was humane and intellectually curious, upheld free speech, had little colour-prejudice, believed that individuals are and should be different, and entertained a sincere faith in the progress of society' (Two Cheers for Democracy 54)By far the most important of Forster's writings of literary criticism is Aspects of the Novel (1927). The chapters making up this book were originally delivered as a part of Cambridge University's Clark Lectures series, perhaps the best-known of all such series in the field of English "literature. Forster was the first novelist to be honoured with an invitation to deliver the lectures. Aspects is divided into chapters (originally individual lectures) on story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, and pattern and rhythm. (See *story/plot, *narratology.) Though it does not articulate what would now be considered a complete theory of the novel, it addresses the questions of form, point of view and the relationship of art and life that are crucial in discussions of literature today. After its publication it was for a quarter of a century the most widely read English critical work on the novel. Central to Aspects of the Novel is Forster's notion that 'there are in the novel two forces: human beings and a bundle of various things not human beings, and it is the novelist's business to adjust these two forces and conciliate their claims' (73). Forster believes in the primacy of people over form, of life over art, in the novel (indeed 'people' is the only subject to which Forster devotes two chapters in Aspects). He consistently praises novels which convey a sense of the 'inner life' and the 'unseen,' those elements of life which resist attempts to describe them in words. For Forster, the novelist's task is 'to reveal the hidden life at its source' (31). In his introductory chapter Forster insists on an ahistorical or synchronic approach which conceives of all English novelists 'writing their novels at once' (8). Forster's approach, which favours comparison over analysis, freed him to look at the novel from a perspective unencumbered by considerations of tradition and influence, and likely contributed to the general tendency towards studying the novel in terms

F;orster divorced from traditional theories of literary history. Aspects was conceived at least in part as a response to *Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, a study of form in the novels of *Henry James, which argues for the primacy of point of view in the novel. While Lubbock fears that readers and writers will disregard the novel's art and examine it solely as a representation of life, Forster is concerned that they might focus on the artistry to the extent that life is forgotten. Point of view is discussed in Forster's second chapter on 'people' only as a secondary 'aspect' of the novel. For Forster, the question of the novelist's method is resolved not in the question of point of view but in 'the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says' (^4). By discussing point of view so briefly, Forster attempts to right the balance which he feels is upset by critics' 'overstressing' the problem in the interest of discovering concerns peculiar to the novel. For Forster, point of view is not as important as 'a proper mixture of characters' (55). This interest in the proper mixture of characters is behind what has become Forster's most important contribution to the aesthetic of the novel: the distinction between 'flat' and 'round' characters. Flat characters are 'constructed round a single idea or quality' (47) and can be expressed in a single sentence; round characters are multi-faceted and unpredictable. For Forster, the 'test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way' (^4). Both flat and round characters can coexist in the same novel. While 'it is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any feelings except humour and appropriateness' (50-1), flat characters have the advantage of being easily recognized and convenient for their creators. The use of volume to describe character may derive from the criticism of *Charles Mauron, the modern French aesthetician to whom Aspects is dedicated. Mauron's essay 'Beauty in Literature/ which Forster could easily have read before it was published, attempts to show how postimpressionist aesthetic theory can be used to discuss literary beauty and suggests how postimpressionism may have influenced Forster in the writing of Aspects of the Novel. Forster's distinction between flat and round characters is still important because it demonstrates that art and life do not operate on the same princi-

ples and that elements of the novel need not necessarily be 'lifelike' to be effective. Aspects examines as well the distinction between story and plot and emphasizes the importance of temporality in the novel, thereby moving novel criticism away from James' conception of *spatial form. Forster's discussion of endings as nearly always 'feeble' anticipates later work on the subject. (See *closure/disclosure.) Subsequent chapters on fantasy, prophecy, and pattern and rhythm introduce subjects that show Forster refusing to restrict himself to what can easily be analysed in the novel and give credence to the place of imagination and creativity in criticism. Forster's most important work of literary criticism has what would now be seen as serious shortcomings. He is not entirely clear and consistent in his use of terms (""Virginia Woolf, for example, had serious reservations about Forster's use of 'life' in a novel as an indicator of its merit). He does not examine form and technique in enough detail and does not consider language or ideas at all. At times Forster's evaluations of writers are little more than eccentric and highly personal statements of his own likes and dislikes. However, the artistry of Aspects of the Novel itself and the power of its most memorable discussions have ensured its place in the criticism of the English novel. KELLY ST-JACQUES

Primary Sources Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Repub. as Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. Abinger edition. London: Edward Arnold, 1974. - Two Cheers for Democracy. 1951. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. Abinger ed. London: Edward Arnold, 1972.

Secondary Sources Advani, Rukun. E.M. Forster as Critic. London: Croom Helm, 1984. Brander, Laurence. E.M. Forster: A Critical Study. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1970. Gardner, Philip, ed. E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Herz, Judith Scherer, and Robert K. Martin, eds. E.M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1982. Kirkpatrick, B.J. A Bibliography of E.M. Forster. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965. 2nd ed. 1968. The Soho Bibliographies xix.

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Foucault Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London: Cape, 1921. McDowell, Frederick P.W. EM. Forster. TEAS 89. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Schwarz, Daniel R. 'The Importance of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel.' South Atlantic Quarterly 82.2 (1983): 189-205. Stallybrass, Oliver, ed. Aspects of E.M. Forster: Essays and Recollections Written for his Ninetieth Birthday ist January 1969. London: Edward Arnold, 1969. Stone, Wilfred. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966.

Foucault, Michel (b. France, 1926-0!. 1984) Historian and philosopher. The son of a medical professor and prominent surgeon, Paul-Michel Foucault began his education in Poitiers but soon left for Paris, where he studied philosophy with Jean Hyppolite at the Lycee Henri IV. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1946 and after receiving degrees there in philosophy and psychology, he was awarded the Diplome de psycho-pathologie from the Institut de Psychologie of Paris in 1952. Foucault taught at the ENS and the Universite de Lille for several years but he left France in 1955 to teach in Sweden, Poland and then Germany. In 1961 he returned to France for a postion at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Following the social and political turmoil of 1968, Foucault became head of the department of philosophy at the new experimental campus of the Universite de Paris at Vincennes. The next year he was elected to the College de France, where he remained until his death. Shortly before his death, Michel Foucault observed that his earliest personal memories were all associated with the political turmoil in France during the 19305 and this connection between public and private experience interested him throughout his career. His earliest books dealt with the history of medical knowledge and practice. Folie et deraison [Madness and Civilization 1961] described changes in the concept and treatment of madness from the Middle Ages through the igth century. Naissance de la clinique [Birth of the Clinic 1963] traced the emergence of clinical medicine at the end of the i8th century. The importance of these works lies in Foucault's claim that madness and disease are not simple, empirical facts but are always conceived in relation to the

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social norms and specific forms of *discourse current at particular historical moments. In his next book, Les Mots et les choses [The Order of Things 1966], Foucault described the combination of discourses, assumptions and values that distinguish historical periods as the 'episteme' or epistemological paradigm governing what is considered truth or knowledge at the time. (See *episteme.) In his conclusion, he claimed that one of the most important truths of the 19th-century episteme, the philosophical concept of 'Man/ was being replaced by language in the modern human sciences. This elevation of language over 'mind' or 'consciousness' as the determining principle of human experience resembled the priority granted to linguistic analysis in *structuralism, but it was Foucault's prediction of the 'death of Man' that most directly challenged the traditions of Western humanism and generated a bitter controversy about his work. His 'anti-humanism' was condemned as a deterministic system that discounted the role of human agency in the discovery and dissemination of knowledge, and historians objected that the concept of the episteme could not account for changes from one period to another. As Foucault continued to explore the link between language and society, his emphasis shifted from the abstract structural parallels of the episteme to the specific social rituals that determine who gets to say what to whom. The analysis of language at this concrete, material level of discourse was termed 'archaeology,' and in L'Archeolgie du savoir [Archaeology of Knowledge 1969] and 'L'Ordre du discours' [The Discourse on Language' 1971], Foucault described the array of institutional constraints and political practices that regulate different forms of discourse. Those regulations join the production of knowledge in the discourse of a particular field to the exercise of *power in society as a whole. This link between power and knowledge, Foucault claimed, characterizes the 'disciplinary' character of all modern political organizations. In Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison [Discipline and Punish 1975], Foucault argued that the disciplinary techniques underlying the development of the modern prison pervade contemporary society and govern even the minute details of everyday life. This 'microphysics of power' reaches past the limits of law and repression actually to produce the individual as a subject in, as well as subject to,

Foucault the disciplinary mechanisms of the state. Power thus regulates not only speech but also the most intimate recesses of the speaker's 'self.' (See *self/other.) Rather than being something that one group possesses or uses over individuals, however, power is for Foucault a network of relations that encompasses the rulers as well as those they rule in a vast web of discrete, local conflicts. So while Foucault rejected the notion of a single, centralized Tower' in the hands of a few, he also concluded that there is no 'outside' of power, no disengaged point from which power can be exercised or even studied without implicating the subject in the very forces he or she would escape. Once again, Foucault's critics attacked the deterministic and monolithic character of his social model, claiming that such a pervasive notion of power left no room for freedom or even resistance to oppressive practices of the State. But Foucault insisted that relations constituted through the exercise of power 'define innumerable points of confrontation, forces of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations' (Discipline 27). Possibilities for resistance therefore inhere in every exercise of power. So instead of trying to escape into some abstract realm of scholarly objectivity or academic freedom, Foucault argued that it was the job of the 'specific intellectual' to struggle against power on the very site that he or she occupies in its network, using the specificity of that site to challenge 'the politics of truth in our societies.' The notion that power produces knowledge rather than merely repressing behaviour enabled Foucault to extend his analysis of discipline across the border that separates private experience from public regulation. In the introductory volume to his Histoire Ac la sexualite, La Volonte de savoir [History of Sexuality I: An Introduction 1976], Foucault explored the disciplinary structure of the private sphere through what he called 'technologies of the self/ the various techniques through which human beings come to know who they are and what they should do. Rather than repressing some hidden 'truth' of sex, Foucault says, institutional rituals such as the confessional and psychoanalysis constitute an administrative 'apparatus.' This apparatus produces sexuality as a form of discourse in which the 'will to know' one's desires serves as the primary

mechanism through which individuals are subjected to control in the disciplinary state of the modern age. The second and third volumes of the Histoire, L'Usage des plaisirs [The Use of Pleasure 1984] and Le Souci de soi [The Care of the Self 1984], focus on the complex social hierarchies and moral discriminations that regulated sexual behaviour in ancient Greece and Rome. At the time of his death Foucault was working on a fourth volume devoted to sexual ethics in the context of Christian theology. With the publication of Les Mots et les choses, Foucault emerged as one of the prominent intellectuals in France. Because of his profound scepticism towards many concepts and values of Western culture, Foucault's work was often linked with that of *Jacques Derrida, *Jacques Lacan, *Louis Althusser, and *Roland Barthes in what later became known as *poststructuralism. Foucault's attacks on such humanist shibboleths as Reason, the individual, Truth, and freedom were not based on general philosophical principles, however. They usually grew out of detailed historical analyses of a range of texts. His work attracted readers from the fields of intellectual history, the history of medicine, psychiatry, law, the social or 'human' sciences, and literary studies, where his work on discursive regulation eventually served as the basis for the *New Historicism. Despite the often arcane nature of Foucault's scholarship and despite attacks on his generalizing and poetic style, his works aspired to a broader political critique of contemporary social practices that immediately appealed to a wide audience. With the regular translation of his books, essays and even interviews into English and most other European languages, Foucault's impact had extended throughout Europe and North America by the early 19705, and 20 years later he remains an influential writer of our time. (See also *psychoanalytic theory.) MICHAEL CLARK

Primary Sources Foucault, Michel. L'Archeologie du savoir. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969. Trans. A.M. SheridanSmith. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972. - Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a I'age classique. Paris: Plon, 1961. Trans. Richard Howard. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Pantheon, 1965; London: Tavistock, 1967.

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Freud - The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Random House, 1984. - Histoire de la sexualite, I: La Volatile de savoir. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 1978; London: Tavistock, 1979. - Histoire de la sexualite, 11: L'Usage des plaisirs. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984. Trans. Robert Hurley. The Use of Pleasure. New York: Random House, 1985. - Histoire de la sexualite, III: Le Souci de soi. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984. Trans. Robert Hurley. The Care of the Self. New York: Random House, 1986. - Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. - Les Mots et les chases: Une Archeologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966. Trans, anon. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970. - Naissance de la clinique: Une Archeologie du regard medical. Paris: PUF, 1963. Trans. A.M. SheridanSmith. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage, 1973. - L'Ordre du discours: Leqon inaugurale au College de France. 1971. Trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith. 'The Discourse on Language.' In The Archaeology of Knowledge. - Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Trans. Alan Sheridan et al. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. - Power /Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. - Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1977. Secondary Sources Baudrillard, Jean. Oublier Foucault. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Trans. Nicole Dufresne. 'Forgetting Foucault.' Humanities in Society 3 (Winter 1980): 87-111. Carroll, David. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York: Methuen, 1987. Clark, Michael. Michel Foucault, An Annotated Bibliography: Tool Kit from a New Age. New York: Garland Publishing, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986. Trans. Sean Hand. Foucault. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Dreyfus, Hubert L. Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Paris: Flammarion,

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1989. Trans. Betsy Wing. Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Lemert, Charles C., and Garth Gillan. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988. Poster, Mark. Foucault, Marxism, and History. Cambridge: Polity P, 1984. Racevskis, Karlis. Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Rajchman, John. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Sheridan, Alan. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Tavistock, 1980. Smart, Barry. Foucault, Marxism, and Critique. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

Freud, Sigmund (b. Moravia, i856-d. England, 1939) Founder of psychoanalysis. After graduation from gymnasium in Vienna at the head of his class, Freud began his medical studies in 1873 a* the University of Vienna, where he was influenced by the physiologist Ernst Briicke. In Briicke's laboratory he absorbed thoroughly the view that all human thought and action could be understood by an analysis of chemical and physical forces. The need to make a living and to afford marriage compelled him to abandon his plans for a career in research, to complete his medical studies (1881) and to train for private practice at the General Hospital in Vienna. In 1886 he began private practice as a neurologist. As early as 1882, he had heard from his older friend Josef Breuer, the physician, of the patient later to be called Anna O. In 1885-6 he worked in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot. Both of these events aroused his interest in hysteria. During the 18905, he gradually developed the basic ideas of psychoanalysis. This development involved a gradual shift from physiological to psychological explanations of the mind and can be seen in Studies on Hysteria (1895), co-published with Breuer. From 1897 to 1900, when Freud combined his own selfanalysis with the continuing treatment of neurotic patients, psychoanalysis as a new term and a new science of the mind emerged. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Jokes and

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Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' (1905) established the basic principles of psychoanalysis, which include the idea of repressed unconscious mental processes, the meaning of dreams, the significance of infantile sexuality (especially the Oedipus complex) in normal and neurotic human experience, and the role of transference in the therapeutic process - that is, the patient's unconscious projection onto the analyst of feelings and fantasies derived from other, usually childhood, relationships. (See *psychoanalytic theory.) Up to 1923, Freud worked with the 'topographical' model of the mind involving three levels of mental experience - conscious, preconscious (unconscious but not repressed) and repressed unconscious. In his view the repressed unconscious was inaccessible to consciousness except indirectly through parapraxes (slips of the tongue or pen, errors of memory and so on), dreams, neurotic symptoms, and jokes. He understood each of these mental phenomena as a compromise formation between an unconscious impulse or desire and a conscious or unconscious attempt to defend against, to deny that impulse. (See also *desire/lack.) His therapeutic goal in the case of neurosis was to infer the unconscious impulse through the process of free association (uncensored talking) on the part of the patient, to interpret this impulse to the patient, and thereby to make it conscious. In this way, neurotic symptoms could be cured. The Ego and the Id (1923) set forth a structural model of psychic process - a modification of the earlier layered model - and introduced a new set of terms - ego, id, superego - into psychoanalysis. It focused on the way in which the conscious and unconscious (defensive) ego mediates among the demands of external reality, the id (the repressed unconscious) and the superego (conscience). Freud's therapeutic goal became not merely the uncovering of repressed unconscious material but the extension of the control of the ego over the id. With this new view there developed out of Freud's later psychoanalytic theory an ego psychology which was to emphasize ego defence and ego adaptation as a central concern of psychoanalysis and which received definitive expression in Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) and Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939).

The development of psychoanalytic criticism parallels this two-stage evolution of Freud's work. Like psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic criticism begins with Freud. Freud wrote most of his essays on art during the period when the topographical model dominated his thought (1900-23), with the one exception, 'Dostoevsky and Parricide' (1928). His aesthetic ideas reflect his primary interest in the interpretation of dreams and other forms of unconscious fantasy life and in the significance of infantile sexuality (especially the Oedipus complex) in human experience and human neurosis. In his comments on Sophocles' Oedipus the King in The Interpretation of Dreams, he sees the unconscious Oedipal fantasy rather than the conscious intellectual themes as the central fact. The literary *text - like the dream - is a compromise formation between unconscious and conscious intent. The unconscious fantasy, moreover, exists not only in the text but also in the author's and the reader's mind - a view which opens the way to psychobiography and to reader-response theory. (See *reader-response criticism.) In such works as 'Delusions and Dream's in Jensen's Gradiva' (1907), 'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming' (1908) and Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), Freud further discusses his views on the relationship between fantasy and creativity, the unconscious content of literary works, and the importance of unconscious infantile experience in adult creativity. Though they were primarily concerned with illustrating his theories, Freud's essays and comments on art strongly affected the initial development of psychoanalytic criticism, as Claudia C. Morrison (1968) has shown. From F.C. Prescott's Poetry and Dreams (1912) to Maud Bodkin's 'Literary Criticism and the Study of the Unconscious' (1927), two theoretical issues were central: first, the neurosis of the artist; and second, the relationship between art and dream. (See *Maud Bodkin.) The first led to the psychobiography, as in Marie Bonaparte's Edgar Poe (1933), the second to textual criticism, as in Ernest Jones' Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Freud's structural theory changed psychoanalytic criticism. Its emphasis on ego defence and adaptation allowed critics to rethink the nature of the artist. Instead of being dominated by the unconscious, the artist was understood as endowed with an ability to use unconscious material for artistic purposes.

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Freud Moreover, critics now had a theoretical basis with which to appreciate the role of artistic form (largely neglected in the earlier phase) as an aspect of the defensive and adaptive function of art. In this respect, Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious received renewed study as a disguised treatise on aesthetics because of his emphasis on the role of the ego in shaping unconscious material into the communicable form of the joke, or, as *E.H. Gombrich (1966) would say, the work of art. By 1952 in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, Ernst Kris was able to add to the already established view of the work of art as the expression of disguised unconscious fantasy the idea of the defensive function of the ego in controlling and shaping repressed unconscious material into art. Two literary critics - Simon O. Lesser in Fiction and the Unconscious (1957) and *Norman N. Holland in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) - elaborated the related ideas of the repressed unconscious as the source of literary meaning and the defensive ego as the source of literary form into fullscale psychoanalytic theories of ""literature. In The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (1981), Meredith Anne Skura has provided a valuable study of the several psychoanalytic approaches to literature - as case history, fantasy, dream, and transference experience. In the last twenty years, both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism have continued to develop. Psychoanalysis has produced a number of models of the mind in addition to Freud's: self psychology (Heinz Kohut), object relations theory (Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott) and Lacanian theory. (See *Jacques Lacan). Each has influenced psychoanalytic criticism, as have also feminist theory and cognitive psychology (Holland 1990). (See *feminist criticism.) Although these developments have roots in Freud's thought, they are not directly related to his life and work. They belong to the ongoing history of psychoanalysis. For Freud, applied psychoanalysis was a field that could and should take all of culture as its province. Thus in Totem and Taboo (1913), he studied the origin of society, religion and human morality. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he examined group psychology as an extension of individual psychology. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he undertook an analysis of the nature of aggression and its effect on civilization. And in The Future of an Illusion (1927)

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and Moses and Monotheism (1939), he turned again to the study of religion. Freud and psychoanalysis have always attracted controversy and criticism. In particular, Freud has been accused of an overemphasis on sexuality, of an overly mechanistic and deterministic view of the importance of early experience in shaping adult character, and of creating an unscientific, speculative and untestable system of psychology. Feminist work in the humanities has incorporated psychoanalytic ideas, though often ambivalently. His insistence that sexuality and aggression were the two basic instincts which influence human motivation has always been rejected by psychologists who believe in no inherited human predispositions. Psychoanalytic criticism has always had critics who have accused it of reducing literary texts to two or three unconscious, usually infantile, themes (such as the Oedipus complex). (See *theme.) Yet, with all the criticism, Freud's influence in the 20th century is pervasive. His goals for psychoanalysis - that it develop as a medical technique for the treatment of the neuroses; that it make important contributions to general psychology; and that it reach beyond psychology to other disciplines - have all been met. Psychoanalysis is central to dynamic psychiatry and clinical psychology, and it has also remained as a separate professional area in its own right. Many of its ideas (such as the dynamic unconscious, the importance of infantile experience, the nature of ego defence mechanisms, and the structure of inner conflict) have entered into general psychology. Beyond these two areas, psychoanalysis has touched almost every aspect of modern culture - painting, drama, poetry, film, biography, and fiction, as well as history, philosophy, anthropology, and the social sciences in general. James Joyce, *D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, ""Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and W.H. Auden are only a few of the numerous modern writers who have been directly influenced by Freud. Among literary critics, psychoanalytic criticism has become one of the essential elements of modern critical theory and practice. The range and continuity of this influence, combined with the prevalence of Freud's name and ideas at all levels of contemporary society, indicate that he is one of the supreme makers of the modern mind. RICHARD W. NOLAND

Freud Primary Sources Note: All references to Freud are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans, from German under the general editorship of James Strachey. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Standard Edition 2 1 : 64-145. London: Hogarth P, 1961. - 'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.' 1908. Standard Edition 9: 141-=; 3. London: Hogarth P, 1957. - 'Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva.' 1907. Standard Edition 9: 3-95. London: Hogarth P, 1959. - 'Dostoevsky and Parricide.' 1928. Standard Edition 2 1 : 175-96. London: Hogarth P, 1961. - The Ego and the hi. 1923. Standard Edition 19: 12-66. London: Hogarth P, 1961. - 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.' 1905. Standard Edition 7: 7-122. London: Hogarth P, K)S3. - The Future of an I l l u s i o n . 1927. Standard Edition 2 1 : 5-56. London: Hogarth P, 1961. - Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921. Standard Edition 18: 69-143. London: Hogarth P, 1955. - Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. Standard Edition 4 and 5. London: Hogarth P, 1953. - Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Standard Edition 8. London: Hogarth P, 1960. - Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. 1910. Standard Edition \ i : ^9-137. London: Hogarth P, i 957. - Moses and Monotheism. 1939. Standard Edition 23: 7-137. London: Hogarth P, 1964. - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 1901. Standard Edition 6. London: Hogarth P, 1960. - Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality. 1905. Standard Edition 9: 125-243. London: Hogarth P, 1953. - Totem and Faboo. i 9 i 3. Standard Edition 13: 1-161. London: Hogarth P, u j s v

Secondary Sources Bocock, Robert. Freud and Modern Society. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978. Bodkin, Maud. 'Literary Criticism and the Study of the Unconscious.' The Monist 37 (July 1927): 44S-68. Bonaparte, Marie. Edgar Poe, etude psychoanalytique. Paris: Denoel and Steele, 1933. Eagle, Morris N. Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation. New York: McGraw-Hill, ,984. Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Hidden Order of Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: L1 of California P, 1971. Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Development of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 11)70.

Fine, Reuben. The Development of Freud's Thought. New York: Jacob Aronson, 1973. - A History of Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia UP, 1979. Freud, Anna. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Rev. ed. NY: International Universities P, 1966. Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988. Gombrich, E.H. 'Freud's Aesthetics/ Encounter 26 (Jan. 1966): 30-40. Hartmann, Heinz. Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: International Universities P, 1958Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford UP, 1968. - Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976. Kris, Ernst. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: Schocken Books, 1952. Kurzwell, Edith. The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989. Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. McGrath, William J. Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1986. Morrison, Claudia C. Freud and the Critic: The Early Use of Depth Psychology in Literary Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1968. Munroe, Ruth L. Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1955. Nelson, Benjamin, ed. Freud and the zoth Century. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. Prescott, Frederick C. 'Poetry and Dreams.' The Journal of Abnormal Psychology 7 (April-May 1912): 17-46; (June-July 1912): 104-43. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986. Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1961. Roazen, Paul. Freud: Political and Social Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. - Freud and His Followers. New York: New American Library, 1971. Rothenberg, Albert. Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Rothstein, Arnold, ed. Models of the Mind: Their Relationships to Clinical Work. New York: International Universities P, 1985. Rycroft, Charles. Psychoanalysis and Beyond. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Skura, Meredith Anne. The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1981.

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Frye Spector, Jack J. The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Wallace, Edwin R. Freud and Anthropology: A History and a Reappraisal. New York: International Universities P, 1985. Wollheim, Richard. Sigmund Freud. New York: Viking, 1971.

Frye, Northrop (b. Canada, igii-d. 1991) Literary critic and theoretician. Frye grew up in a Methodist family, studied philosophy and English at Victoria College, the Bible and Protestant theology at Emmanuel College (both in the University of Toronto) and English at Merton College, Oxford. Although ordained a minister in the United Church of Canada (1936), aside from one summer's work as a student pastor in rural Saskatchewan, he never held a pastoral charge. In his early years Frye was strongly influenced by Blake, *Jung, Spengler, *Freud, and Frazer. Especially important influences on him later were Ruskin, Graves and Vico. From 1939 for more than 50 years Frye taught in the Department of English, Victoria College, University of Toronto. From this Canadian base, he wrote and lectured for both national and international publics on the whole range of ""literature in the English language and on European and world literature. His major concern was with the theory and practice of literary criticism and with the role of the creative imagination in human culture. Frye postulated the whole realm of literature as a self-contained verbal universe, a massive, complex and intricate product of human imagining which is a kind of 'second nature.' This imagined order of words constantly grows and expands through new works of literature even as it continues to use its essential archetypes. (See *archetype, *archetypal criticism.) Since in Frye's view literature develops from literature, criticism should be based upon 'what the whole of literature actually does' (Anatomy 6). According to Frye, literature projects an organized *myth of human experience. Human beings encounter the world through their imaginations, shaping and reshaping that world in accord with their desires and anxieties or confronting it dispassionately and objectively in a multitude of attempts to describe it clearly. The verbal expression of this whole

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encounter is the domain of literature, both fictional and non-fictional. The resultant universe of words is describable by criticism, provided that critics are not determined by non-literary questions (historical, biographical, psychological, political, ideological, religious) and concentrate on what literature is and does. Such concentration implies an attitude in the critic that will permit criticism to develop some of the characteristics of a science, that is, a kind of study that facilitates scrutiny of literature as an object of study not as a subject and that proceeds systematically to describe what is there, in a manner similar to what is done in any science that progressively builds an expanding body of knowledge. Frye's prodigious output includes two books on the Bible, four on Shakespeare's plays, one on Milton's epics, and one on *T.S. Eliot, as well as books on English Romanticism, the structure of romance, the social uses of literature and criticism, and Canadian literature and culture. Most of this output and something of the response to it are recorded in the 2500 entries of Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography (1987). Much of Frye's work is concerned with constructing a taxonomy or anatomy of literature. It is the encylopedic Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) that sets out most fully Frye's theoretical account of the whole of literature. The 'First Essay' of Anatomy characterizes literary works by focusing on the relative powers of action of the protagonist. From this perspective there emerge five primary modes (mythical, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic) all of which take both thematic and fictional forms. The thematic forms are either encyclopedic or episodic, the fictional ones tragic or comic, giving a total of 20 broad categories. Frye demonstrates that, historically, Western literature has constantly used the same narrative structural principles but, through the centuries, has moved from undisplaced myth toward realism. The 'Second Essay' is an analysis of symbolic meaning in terms of five phases (literal, descriptive, formal, mythic, and anagogic), each involving a particular kind of literary work and inviting a particular kind of critical analysis: the literal level is best understood by rhetorical or textural analysis, the techniques of *New Criticism. The descriptive level lends itself to historical and biographical criticism, the formal to allegorical commentary,

Frye and the mythic and anagogic levels to archetypal criticism. The 'Third Essay' of Anatomy is an account of the structure of archetypal imagery considered both as meaning (dianoia) and narrative (mythos) and gives extended analyses of the four basic narrative patterns (romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire and *irony), each of these having six distinguishable phases. The 'Fourth Essay' defines four genres (drama, epos, fiction, and lyric) according to their forms and rhythms, but differentiates a wide range of variants within each genre. (See *genre criticism.) Anatomy is widely viewed as a significant and influential work of Anglo-American critical theory. It has been recognized and used by many as a clear introduction to the structural principles of literature and as a defence or justification of criticism as a systematic and coherent body of knowledge. It has provided critical terms and vocabulary for much of the literary discourse of recent decades and in its dominance took the place of the pronouncements made by Eliot, Pound and *Richards in the 19205 and 19305. Anatomy has been extensively admired and criticized for its attempt to remove matters of taste and value judgment from the structure of criticism. It has been seen as overly theoretical and schematic, as engaging in terminological buccaneering and 'as a work of criticism that has turned into literature' (Kermode 323). At once formidably theoretical and securely rooted in a wide-ranging literary experience and knowledge, Anatomy should be seen in the context of Frye's total production where it has many companion volumes and essays of practical criticism. In addition to Anatomy, three other books by Frye loom especially large in his total output: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947); The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982); and Words with Power, Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (1990). In the book on Blake, Frye articulated his conception of the human imagination which underlies all his own theoretical formulations. The imagination is the 'creative force in the mind' from which comes 'everything that we call culture and civilization. It is the power of transforming a sub-human physical world into a world with a human shape and meaning' (The Imaginative and the Imaginary' 152). The Great Code, translated into more than 20 languages, is about the Bible in its 'centripetal' or internal aspect: its language, myths, meta-

phors, and typology. (See also *metonymy/ metaphor.) The unity of 'this huge, sprawling, tactless book' that sits 'inscrutably' (The Great Code xviii) in the middle of our culture proceeds through seven phases of revelation Creation, Exodus, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Gospel, and Apocalypse - each phase being the type or partially concealed form of the following phase and also the antitype or realized form of the preceding one. This progressive revelation, moving vertically as well as horizontally, assumes creative, imaginative or revolutionary forms according to the principle expressed in the text 'Behold I make all things new,' and has the energy and power to invoke the kind of human imaginative responses that we find in literature and the arts, where language is purely imaginative and hence hypothetical, 'where the limit is the conceivable and not the actual' (The Great Code 232). Words with Power has an outward or 'centrifugal' reference and is meant to show 'the extent to which the canonical unity of the Bible indicates or symbolizes a much wider imaginative unity in secular European literature' (Words with Power x). Like The Great Code, Words with Power is entirely free of faith or doctrine as these terms are usually understood. It is not primarily a book about religion, however many implications it has for Bible-based religions and for other religions and ideologies. Its main intended readership is students of literature, including literary theorists and critics. The first half sets out, in a kind of Viconian sequence in reverse, the different idioms of linguistic expression - descriptive, conceptual, ideological, imaginative - and approaches the question, 'what is the basis of the poet's authority, if he has any?' (ibid., xx). This leads to a restatement of Frye's lifelong fundamental idea, developed here with the help of four major metaphorical images (the mountain, the garden, the cave, and the furnace), that mythological thinking, with its language of myth and metaphor, is 'the framework and context for all thinking' (ibid., xvi). Every human society possesses a mythology (the Bible in the Western world) which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature. The central structural principles of literature are derived from myth and it is these that 'give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes' (ibid., xiii). ALVIN A. LEE

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Gadamer Primary Sources Denham, Robert D., ed. Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Frye, H. Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957. - The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. - Creation and Recreation. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980. - The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971. - The Double Vision. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. - The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. - T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. - Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. - Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. - Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1967. - The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. - 'The Imaginative and the Imaginary.' In Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. - The Modern Century: The Whidden Lectures at McMaster University 1967. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1967. - The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983- A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia UP, 1965. - The Rviurn of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. - The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976. - Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. - The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970. - A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. - The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963. - Words with Power, Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. Markham, Ont.: Penguin Books Canada; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. - Sheridan Baker and George W. Perkins. The Harper Handbook to Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Kermode, Frank. [Review of Anatomy of Criticism.} Review of English Studies 10 (1959): 317-23. Polk, James, ed. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.

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Sandier, Robert, ed. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1986. Secondary Sources Arye, John. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Bate, Walter Jackson. 'Northrop Frye.' In Criticism: The Major Texts. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, 597-601, 609, 615-17. Cook, Eleanor, Chaviva Hosek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker and Julian Patrick, eds. Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983. Denham, Robert D. Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987. Hamilton, A.C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. Krieger, Murray, ed. Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Incl. a checklist by John E. Grant of writings by and about Frye. New York: Columbia UP, 1966.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg (b. Germany, 1900-) Philosopher. Gadamer studied philosophy and classics in Marburg. Awarded the doctorate at the age of 22, he did not begin teaching until he was 29. Named professor in 1937, he taught at Leipzig (193847) and at Frankfurt (1947-9). From 1949 until his retirement in 1968 he was professor at Heidelberg. Gadamer enjoyed a lifelong friendship with *Martin Heidegger, especially from 1923 when Heidegger was named professor at Marburg until 1928 when Heidegger left Marburg to take up *Edmund Husserl's chair of philosophy at Freiburg. From the outset of his career Gadamer combined his interests in "literature and poetry with philosophy. Gadamer's role in the development of *hermeneutics in the poststructuralist era cannot be overestimated. (See *poststructuralism.) Not only has his work been the starting-point of reader-response theory and *phenomenological criticism, but his major work Truth and Method (1960) has brought about a phenomenological development of hermeneutics. (See *readerresponse criticism.) Gadamer took Heidegger's brilliant but often cryptic and hermetic thought, expanded it, and gave a new ground to the human sciences. In his own work he responded to the major philosophers of his tra-

Gadamer dition: Heidegger, Husserl, *Dilthey, and Bultmann. He also eagerly engaged in dialogue and debate with the next generation of philosophers: *Paul Ricoeur, *Jurgen Habermas and "Jacques Derrida. Five major areas of Gadamer's thought are subjectivity, play, interpretation, tradition, and truth. Truth and Method reconsiders Dilthey's impasse in the subject-object dualism of knowing the world. (See "subject/object.) The question of how we know the world is examined through the phenomenology of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit [Being and Time 1927]. In brief, Gadamer insists that the entire problem of how the subject can know the object is the result of a metaphysical error of Western philosophy since Descartes. Before the knowing subject is aware of subjectivity, before the subject can encounter objects, before there is a knowing consciousness of self-identity, the subject already belongs to the language-speaking community to which the subject by chance was born. Participation precedes awareness of one's self and of others; thus all problems of communication and of knowing the world are aspects of the self's participation within the language community. Similarly, Gadamer insists that all language usage is laden with values and value judgments. The idea of objectivity or an objective use of language is nothing more that an artificial abstraction which can be functionally expedient but is possible only because it is surrounded by real intersubjective communication. Thus prejudgments are an essential part of all natural language usage. When a writer or a speaker attempts to hide his or her prejudice, the context will make the prejudices even more pronounced because they have been suppressed. Gadamer explains communication through the paradigm of dialogue. The dialogical situation is explained as Spiel [play], as in the sense of putting an idea in play or playing a position in a game like football or playing one's part in an activity. Dialogue is the interaction between players in a rule-governed activity, but it is above all the interaction of language, that is, participation in communication. Language usage, Gadamer argues, demands that certain rules be observed but allows for individual expression in the creative use of the system; furthermore, just as in a real game, in language use, especially in the dialogical situation, the outcome is not and cannot be anti-

cipated. The outcome is the result of playing the game following the rules but playing creatively as well. Two teams meet to play a game of hockey and they both must abide by the rules; both teams are made up of various players, each of whom has an identical style of playing; neither team, however, can know how the game will turn out until it is played. Also, as in a game, in the dialogical situation there is an element of risk. The more the individual puts into the playing the more there will be at stake. This explanation of dialogue can be expanded to cover all modes of communication wherein language is the game, dialogue is playing and a gain in meaning for the individual is the outcome of participation. (See theories of *play/freeplay and *game theory.) Gadamer describes the interpretation of texts through another striking metaphor: the fusion of horizons. (See *metonymy/metaphor.) The *text is always historical, that is, it was written by someone at a given time in a specific language. Thus the historicity of the text is an essential part of any consideration of it. But the reader who is interpreting the text is also grounded in his or her own historicity. The historical vantage point from which the reader approaches the text is a significant part of all interpretation. As the reader engages the text, the difference and distance between the two historicities is at its greatest at the outset. The reading experience is an engagement of the two poles. The text, which is the work of another person and reflects this historicity, resists attempts by the reader to make it over into something more familiar to his or her perspective. The breakthrough in interpretation comes when the two historicities are transcended in the fusion of the two different viewpoints into one experience. The text as human composition projects purpose as meaningful action; it has intentionality but so does the reader have his or her own historical projection and his or her own values to maintain. (See *intention/ intentionality.) When these two viewpoints come together in the encounter of reading there can be a fusion of these two horizons which creates meaning. This meaning does not belong either to the text or to the reader but is the outcome of the interaction between the two. Distance therefore can become the bridge rather than the barrier to understanding. (See also ""horizon of expectation, *ideological horizon.) One of the most controversial aspects of 327

Gadamer Gadamer's thought is his insistence on participation within a tradition - a target of criticism by German Marxist thinkers, especially Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. (See *Marxist criticism.) Habermas' review of Truth and Method and Gadamer's response have become a classical debate on the ideological distortions of communication. Gadamer insists that interpretation is always situated within a community of readers; significantly, this community is not limited to the contemporary readership of the interpreter/critic, but is a historically constituted community, that is, a tradition of commentators. To speak of a tradition of literary authors is commonplace, but Gadamer argues that authors are the landmarks and not the full scope, for surrounding texts from the past is a tradition of commentary that constantly renews the works of the past as present. Habermas claims that there can be no free engagement in the dialogical situation as long as readers are unknowingly prisoners of ideologies, that they cannot openly interact with texts because of the uncritical acceptance of the institutional bias of vested interests. The system of beliefs that are the institutional means of maintaining political power precludes all dialogical engagement until the reader can learn to cut through these screens. Gadamer responds that critical reflection cannot lead to any clear view free of prejudice; he argues that because we have our basis in language usage, which is subjective and intersubjective, and there are no universal norms, we cannot overthrow tradition; we must debate within it. (See *universals, "Ideology.) Some critics of Truth and Method claim with some justification that it is ironic that in a book about truth there is no systematic development of a theory of truth but only numerous statements equating truth with selfknowledge. An explanation for this apparent lacuna is that Gadamer has ruled out any univeral and coherent theory of truth as untenable because of the nature of the linguistic make-up of man as belonging to a community. A further response to such critics as *Richard Rorty is that there is no specific discussion of truth because the entire book is about truth as self-knowledge. Gadamer argues that, because we are what we have made of ourselves within the linguistically constituted world to which we belong, what we know in the last analysis is ourselves. Gadamer presents the self as participating in the Being-in-the-world

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that can be understood and that being is language. (See *self/other.) Falsehood to Gadamer is self-deception, muddled thought about who we are and a non-reflective acceptance of the social order of the world, and truth is the revelation that the human sciences can offer us about how we have constituted our world and our place in it and how we participate in it. The human sciences are a dialogue in which the participants must always presuppose some shared meaning and concern if they are to engage in it. Speaking in this dialogue is playing the language game of world-making wherein the outcome of the game is knowing ourselves as players and knowing how we play the game. MARIO J. VALDES

Primary Sources Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. - Hegel's Dialectic. Five Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. - 'Hermeneutik.' In Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophic. Vol. 3. Ed. J. Ritter. Darmstadt: Wissenshaftl. Buchgesellschaft, 1974, 1061-73. - Kleine Schriften. 3 vols. i: Philosophic und Hermeneutik. 2: Interprctationen. y. Idee und Sprachc. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1967-72. - 'On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection.' Trans. G.B. Hess and R.E. Palmer. In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 277-99. - Philosophical Apprenticeships. Trans. Robert G. Sullivan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1985. - Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. - Poetica: Ausgewahlte Essays. Frankfurt: Insel, 1977. - Reason in the Age of Science. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1981. - 'Text and Interpretation.' Trans. Dennis J. Schmidt. In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 377-96. - Text und Interpretat (with a response by Jacques Derrida). Munich: Fink Verlag, 1984. - Theorie Diskussion: Hermeneutik und Ideologierkritik. (Discussion with Jurgen Habermas.) Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. - Truth and Method. Trans. Garret Barden and William G. Doerpel. New York: Seabury, 1975. Wahrheit und Mcthode: Grundzuke einer pliilosophischen Hermeneutik. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960; 2nd ed. 1965.

Gates Secondary Sources Apel, Karl-Otto. Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental Pragmatic Perspective. Trans. Georgia Warnke. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1985. Bernstein, Richard J. 'What Is the Difference that Makes a Difference? Gadamer, Habermas and Rorty.' In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 343-76. Bliecher, Josef. Contemporary Hernieneutics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Dallmayr, Fred R. 'Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Gadamer and Derrida in Dialogue.' In Critical Encounters. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1987. Habermas, Jurgen. 'A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method.' In Hernieneutics and Modern Philosophi/. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 24^-76. Hans, James S. 'Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hermeneutic Phenomenology.' Philosophy Today 22 (1978): 3-19. Haw, Alan R. 'Dialogue as Productive Limitation in Social Theory: The Habermas-Gadamer Debate.' Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology i i (19811): i 3 1-43. Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967. Howard, Roy T. Three Faces of Hernieneutics: An Introduction to Current Theories of Understanding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Hoy, David Couzens. The Critical Circle: Literature and History in Contemporary Hermeneutics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Jay, Martin. 'Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the HabermasGadamer Debate.' In Modern European Intellectual History. Ed. Dominick LaCapra and Stephen L. Kaplan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Johnson, Patricia. 'The Task of the Philosopher: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Gadamer.' Philosophy Today 28 ( 1984): 3-1 9. Kisiel, Theodore. 'The Happening of Tradition: The Hermeneutics of Gadamer and Heidegger.' Man and World 2 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 358-8^. Knapke, Margaret Lee. The Hermeneutical Focus of Heidegger and Gadamer: The Nullity of Understanding.' Kinesis 12 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 3-18. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt. 'Introduction.' In The Hermeneutics Reader. Ed. K. Mueller-Vollmer. New York: Continuum, 19^, i - S 3 . Palmer, Richard. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969. Ricoeur, Paul. 'The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.' In Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981, 131-44.

- 'Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology.' In Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 67-100. - 'The Task of Hermeneutics.' In Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 43-62. Wachterhauser, Brice R. 'Must We Be What We Say? Gadamer on Truth in the Human Sciences.' In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 219-42. Warnke, Georgia. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. Weinsheimer, Joel C. Gadamer's Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. Westphal, Merold. 'Hegel and Gadamer.' In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 65-86. Wright, Kathleen. 'Gadamer: The Speculative Structure of Language.' In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: SUNY P, 1986, 193-218.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (b. U.S.A., 1950-) Critic, theorist and editor. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., graduated with a B.A. in history from Yale in 1973 and then entered Clare College, Cambridge (on a Mellon Fellowship), where friendship with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka resulted in a switch to African American "literature. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1979 with a thesis on the critical reception of black literature during the Enlightenment. Returning to Yale as assistant professor of English and Afro-American Studies, in 1981 Gates was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for 'exceptionally talented individuals.' In 1985 he became a full professor at Cornell, where an endowed chair, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professorship of Literature, was created for him. In 1990 Gates moved to Duke, to become John Spencer Bassett Professor of English, and in 1991 to Harvard University. As an editor Gates has been at the forefront of the reconstruction of a *canon of African American literature. In 1982 he 'rediscovered' the first novel published by a black American, Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859. Other significant projects he has edited include the 30-volume Schomburg Library of lyth-Century Black Women Writers; the Black Periodical Fiction Project, of which he is director and which has unearthed thousands of short sto-

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Gates ries, poems, book reviews, and notices published between 1827 and 1940; The Works of Zora Neale Hurst on; and the Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature. All of these projects constitute part of Gates' attempt to decentre the humanities by revising and expanding the literary/intellectual canon to include works by members of non-European ethnic minorities and by women. (See *centre/decentre.) He has fought hard to have African and African American culture included in university curricula by insisting both on the legitimacy of black studies programs and on the necessity for such programs to be closely linked to traditional departments. Gates has also edited a number of important collections of essays, including Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), 'Race,' Writing, and Difference (1985-6), Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990), and the first special issue of PML4 on African and African American literature (1990). Again, his insistence on the importance of race and gender to academic inquiry is apparent, along with his raising of such important questions as the relationship between African cultural traditions and Western/mainstream cultural traditions, the relationship between the black vernacular tradition and the black formal tradition, and the applicability of contemporary literary theory - particularly *poststructuralism - to the reading of black texts. (See *text.) Gates claims that 'the challenge of black literary criticism is to derive principles of literary criticism from the black tradition itself, as defined in the idiom of critical theory but also in the idiom which constitutes the "language of blackness" ... The sign of the successful negotiation of this precipice of indenture, of slavish imitation, is that the black critical essay refers to two contexts, two traditions - the Western and the black' (Black Literature and Literary Theory 8). To explore black cultural difference, critics must redefine 'theory' - which is not colour-blind or neutral - by turning to the black vernacular tradition for models. This contentious relationship has been a major preoccupation of Gates' three books, which he views as a trilogy. The first, Figures in Black (1987), makes 'use of contemporary criticism to read black texts [from the i8th century to the present], but [is] a use designed to critique the theory implicitly' (xxix). The second, The Signifying Monkey (1988), traces the relationship between African and African American vernacular traditions and

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cultural forms, focusing on the practice of 'signifying),' a subversive rhetorical strategy and a figure for black intertexual revision, what Gates calls the African American tradition's 'trope of tropes.' (See *trope, *intertextuality.) He thus builds a theory of black literature from within the tradition itself. The third book, Black Letters in the Enlightenment, is a study of the history of the reception of black texts during the first 100 years of the tradition; it critiques the Eurocentric bias of such criticism and demonstrates its effect on subsequent black writers. Gates has moved from being a staunch 'reconstructionist' - a member of a group of critics who, in the mid-1970s, attacked the dominant notion that black literature must be approached as social realism, calling instead for attention to the formal elements, the language, of black texts - to being a theorist/critic who balances emphasis on close reading of formal figures and tropes with attention 'to the "social text" as well ... the larger dynamics of subjection and incorporation through which the subject is produced' (PML4 21). He has championed the concept that 'race' is a social construct (with 'blackness' as a subject position in relation to the cultural dominant) rather than a biological or essential category. His theoretical, critical and editorial work has had great influence on issues of race, gender, literary history, and canon formation in African American studies. (See also *black criticism.) DONALD C. GOELLNICHT

Primary Sources Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. - The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. - ed. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984. - ed. Black Literature, 1827-1940. Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1990. - ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: NAL, 1987. - ed. In the House of Osubgo: Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. - ed. Our Nig, by Harriet E. Wilson. New York: Random House, 1983. - ed. PMLA 105 (Jan. 1990). Special issue on African and African American Literature. - ed. 'Race,' Writing, and Difference. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985-6. - ed. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. New York: Meridian, 1990.

Geertz - ed. The Scharnburg Library of iyth Century Black Women Writers. 30 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. - ed. Three Classic African-American Novels. New York: Random House, 1990.

Geertz, Clifford (b. U.S.A., 1926-) Cultural anthropologist. Geertz is a leading authority on Bali, Java and Morocco and is best known outside his own discipline as the foremost theorist of cultural or interpretive anthropology. He has sought to transform ethnographic study by proceeding from a semiotic concept of culture, thus making cultural analysis 'not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' (Interpretation of Cultures 3). (See *semiotics.) Geertz received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and carried out most of his fieldwork in Bali and Java during the 19505. During his decade at the University of Chicago (1960-70) he pioneered what became known as the 'symbolic anthropology' movement, serving as professor of anthropology and later chairman of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations. These were also the years of most of his fieldwork in Morocco. Since 1970 he has been professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Geertz's semiotic approach to ethnographic analysis construes culture as a *text, something to be read and interpreted. Also present in this rendering of social action as a document is the primordial meaning of 'text' as something woven, the idea of culture as an intricate 'fabric of meaning' (Interpretation of Cultures 145). Continuing with this analogy, culture as a whole consists of interwoven strands of various symbol systems, defined according to general issues such as aesthetics, religion, law, or even common sense. Each symbol system is in turn composed of individual symbolic forms or signs, meaning 'any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for conception' Interpretation of Cultures 91). (See *sign.) Culture, as the accumulated body of symbolic forms and systems, is socially constituted and historically transmitted. It enables individuals not only to comprehend and interpret

their experience but also to express themselves and direct their behaviour on the basis of such judgments. As a theory of human subjectivity, Geertz's concept of culture is thus a dialectical one: culture is both 'a [historically evolving] product and a determinant of social interaction' (Interpretation of Cultures 250). In relation specifically to aesthetic theory, this dialectical definition of culture emphasizes the interactive rather than the mimetic aspect of art forms, which are understood to function as 'positive agents in the creation and maintenance of [cultural sensibilities]' (Interpretation of Cultures 451). (See *mimesis.) A common interest in semiotics would initially appear to align Geertz with the structural anthropologist *Claude Levi-Strauss, who first applied semiotic theory to anthropological analysis. However, Geertz situates his work firmly in opposition to *structuralism and other brands of *formalism, whose laws and static paradigms run the risk of reifying cultures and of obstructing the analysis of change within a given society. Geertz insists that culture is above all a public rather than a merely conceptual phenomenon. It is therefore most accurately understood through the various symbolic forms by which people make interpretive sense of themselves to themselves. Geertz has designated the practice of 'thick description' as the methodology of cultural analysis and hence the essence of ethnography. His essay 'Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight' (Interpretation of Cultures) remains the best-known demonstration of this practice. Thick description often begins with what might be called 'thin' description, the detailed but essentially superficial presentation of a specific cultural artefact: perhaps an anecdote, a local custom, an incident, an institution, or a historical episode. This description is 'thickened' when it gives way to analysis and interpretation, when the cultural artefact becomes a text to be read. In an elaborately meticulous fashion the ethnographer proceeds to 'unpack' this text by examining the symbol systems that inform it, working through the layers of conceptual structures, social institutions, local conventions, and individual motives which make that isolated artefact - now viewed as a text - meaningful. In short, the ethnographer endeavours to set particular events within the circumstances of their significance, the contexts which give them resonance. Notwithstanding such analytical

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Geertz scrutiny, Geertz willingly acknowledges that all cultural interpretation is 'essentially contestable/ not only because such analysis is 'intrinsically incomplete' (Interpretation of Cultures 29), but also because meaning and interpretation are themselves indeterminate. Although the intimate encounter with a cultural artefact and its specific contexts, what Geertz calls 'local knowledge,' receives particular attention in his essays, he emphasizes that thick description should also yield a more comprehensive view of the culture under study. His overall method of analysis is therefore a version of the *hermeneutic circle: in his words, 'a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view ... [and to turn them] into explications of one another' (Local Knowledge 69). Finally, Geertz believes that the most productive generalizations are those which provide a new vocabulary or conceptual framework for interpreting the symbol systems of any culture. The guiding objective of his theoretical work has been to articulate such a vocabulary, to move 'toward an interpretive theory of culture' (Interpretation of Cultures 3). Geertz's theoretical formulations are more often scattered throughout his work rather than systematized in individual essays. The most important of these are collected in The Interpretation of Cultures and Local Knowledge, His work has been open to challenge for its lack of historical content and inattentiveness to social change, and some critics have observed his reluctance to acknowledge the subjectivity of the ethnographer as an important element in cultural interpretation. Nonetheless, within the social sciences the impact of his hermeneutic approach to cultural analysis has been great; while in the first collection of essays he labours to make a case for interpretive anthropology, the later book reveals his methodology as fully established. (See *hermeneutics.) Geertz's concept of culture and his practice of thick description have influenced work in fields as diverse as literary criticism, social and political theory, intellectual history, and the history of art. In literary criticism, Geertz's work has been most frequently cited and employed by New Historicists, who apply his 'thick description' in their study of literature and culture. Intent on dissolving the boundaries between literature and other, especially

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historical, discourses, New Historicists presuppose both 'the historicity of texts' and 'the textuality of history' (Montrose 8). Like Geertz, they move dialectically between the 'local' and the 'general,' although their work has been subject to many of the same criticisms as those levelled at Geertz himself. (See *New Historicism, *discourse.) JULIA M. GARRETT

Primary Sources Geertz, Clifford. Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley: U of California P, 1963. - The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. - Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968. - Local Knoivledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983. - Negara: The Theater State in iyth Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. - Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963. - The Religion of Java. New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1960. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. - The Social History of an Indonesian Town. Cambridge: MIT P, 1965. - Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

Secondary Sources Geertz, Clifford, Hildred Geertz and Lawrence Rosen. Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis. New York: Cambridge UP, 1979. Geertz, Clifford, ed. and introd. Myth, Symbol and Culture. New York: Norton, 1971. - ed. Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1963. Geertz, Hildred, and Clifford Geertz. Kinship in Bali. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975. Gunn, Giles. 'The Semiotics of Culture and the Diagnostics of Criticism: Clifford Geertz and the Moral Imagination.' In The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1987, 93-115. Lieberson, Jonathan. 'Interpreting the Interpreter.' Rev. of Local Knowledge, by Clifford Geertz. New York Review of Books 15 Mar. 1984: 39-46. Montrose, Louis. 'Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History.' English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 5-12. Morgan, John H., ed. Understanding Religion and Culture: Anthropological and Theological Perspec-

Genette f/z'rs. Washington: UP of America, 1979 [essays in honour of Clifford Geertz]. Peacock, James. The Third Stream: Weber, Parsons, and Geert/..' Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 12 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : i 22-9. Pecora, Vincent P. The Limits of Local Knowledge.' In The New Historicisni. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989, 243-76. Rice, Kenneth A. Geertz and Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1980. Roseberry, William. 'Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology.' Social Research 49 (1982): 1013-28. Shankman, Paul. The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Program of Clifford Geert/' [with Current Anthropology comment]. Current Anthropology 25 ( 1 9 8 4 ) : 261-79. Walters, Ronald G. 'Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and the Historians.' Social Research 47 (1980): S37-S6.

Genette, Gerard (b. France 1930-) Literary theoretician and structuralist critic. Gerard Genette studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He taught at lycees in Amiens and du Mans, at the Sorbonne (1963-7), and since then has directed a seminar on poetics and aesthetics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Although renowned for his studies on narrative *cliscourse, which provided the foundations of *narratology, Genette's ongoing interest in poetics and rhetoric characterizes all of his works. His most recent studies, less narratological in focus, deal with *genre criticism, forms of *textuality, mimologism, and literariness. (See also *structuralism, *rhetorical criticism.) Genette's earliest books, Figures I (1966) and Figures II (1969) are collections of essays with a structuralist, semiotic and linguistic orientation, dealing with a variety of literary and theoretical issues. (See *semiotics.) Despite their diversity in subject and scope, these essays can be grouped together in terms of several common themes. Certain essays present a discussion of critical works, such as Richard's Unwcrs imaginaire de Mallannc, Matore's L'Espace liuiuain, Cohen's Structure du lajigage poeth]ue, and *Mauron's theories on the psychology of reading. While certain articles focus on specific authors (such as Robbe-Grillet and Valery) and their works, a number of essays study baroque poetry and prose to elucidate

particular characteristics of the baroque imagination and universe by means of an emphasis on rhetorical figures such as antithesis, the oxymoron and catachresis. Other studies deal with methods of literary criticism, some of which feature early work on the structure of narrative discourse, introducing distinctions which will be systematized and elaborated in Figures III. In his influential 'Discours du recit,' Figures III [Narrative Discourse 1972; trans. 1980], Genette describes the major forms and characteristics of narrative discourse, distinctions which have determined all subsequent research in narratology. Some of these categories are discussed and developed further in Nouveau discours du recit [Narrative Discourse Revisited 1983; trans. 1988], in which Genette responds to the comments of other narratological critics (Cohn; Bal; Prince; Lintvelt; Rimmon-Kenan). 'Discours du recit' is not merely a discourse on narrative and an erudite study of the poetics of narrative discourse, but it is also an intricate analysis of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and how it exemplifies and transforms basic narrative categories. Genette begins the study by distinguishing between story (histoire - the set of narrated events, or narrative content), narrative (recit - the narrative *text itself) and narrating (narration - the act of narrative enonciation which produces the text). (See *enonciation/enonce.') The remainder of the essay is an analysis of the various relationships existing between these three concepts and is based on the premise that a narrative is a linguistic production, the expansion of a verb. Drawing upon the grammatical categories of the verb, Genette describes three major classes relevant to the study of narrative discourse: tense, which deals with temporal relations between narrative and story; mood, or the types of discourse used by the *narrator to recount the story, and the forms and degrees (modalities) of narrative representation; and voice, which refers to the relationships between narrating and narrative, and narrating and story. (See also *story/plot.) Order, the first subcategory of tense, deals with the relations between the temporal succession of events in the story and their actual arrangement in the narrative: here, two types of discordance are noted (analepsis, or the narration of an event at a point in the story after more recent events have already been recounted, and prolepsis, or the narration

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Genette of an event at a point in the text prior to the narration of earlier events). A second temporal category, duration, which Genette later proposes to rebaptize as 'speed' (Nouveau discours du recit 23), pertains to the pace of narrative events, that is, the relationship between the duration of events in the story and the length of text devoted to narrating these events. The four different types of duration outlined, in terms of increasing acceleration, are the pause, the scene, the summary, and the ellipsis. The final temporal category is frequency, related to the verbal aspect, which studies the relationship between the number of times an event takes place in the story and the number of times this event is narrated in the text: an event may occur x times and be narrated the same number of times (singulative frequency); an event may only occur once but be narrated several times (repetitive) or an event may occur many times but be recounted only once (iterative). In his discussion of mood, Genette distinguishes between narrative perspective (who 'sees' the story) and narrative voice (who recounts the story), claiming that only the latter belongs to the category of voice. The category of mood is thus restricted to problems of distance (which involves various types of discourse in the narrative of events and the narrative of words or dialogue), and perspective or point of view: here, Genette develops his theory of the forms of narrative focalization in terms of the narrator's versus the characters' vision and knowledge of events, and the variations of these focalizations. The final category, voice, deals with the act of narrating and the traces it has imprinted in the narrative, in terms of the time of this act (subsequent, prior, simultaneous, or interpolated) in relation to the events depicted; narrative levels (extra-, intra- and metadiegetic); and person, that is, the relationships between the narrator, the *narratee, and the story. In the subcategory of person, Genette distinguishes between the heterodiegetic narrator, who is absent from the story she recounts, and the homodiegetic narrator, who is present as a character in her own story. In Nouveau discours du recit, Genette develops the category of person further, adding more detailed commentary on the use of the present tense, examining the correlations between mood and voice in terms of narrative situation, and elaborating on the notion of the narratee in response to the

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work of *Gerald Prince (1973). (See also *diegesis.) In his next work, Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie [Mimologies: Voyage to Cratylus 1976], Genette draws upon an extensive interdisciplinary corpus of Western texts (from the history of ideas, the philosophy of language, linguistics, and so on) to trace the history, forms and transformation of a persistent desire that has characterized discourse concerning the origin and nature of language throughout the centuries: the reverie of mimologism. Using Plato's Cratylus as the founding instance of this debate, Genette notes two opposing positions, as outlined by Cratylus and Hermogenes. While Cratylus advocates the mimetic, mimological thesis that proposes a motivated, natural relationship of analogy or imitation between word and thing (hence the appropriateness of the word chosen), the Hermogenist doctrine outlines an artificial, arbitrary correspondence between a thing and its name: here, the accuracy of the name is a matter of agreement and convention between speakers. Mimological theories frequently include the doctrine of a natural, universal language, and an emphasis on its onomatopoeic nature and origins, eliminate the social dimension of language, and privilege the power of naming. Genette distinguishes between phonic mimologism (as in Augustine's De origine verbi and Nodier's notion of correspondence between the vocal organs, sounds, colours, and objects) and graphic mimologism, as in *Ferdinand de Saussure's anagrams and Ponge's writings. Mimologiques, with its thorough treatment of graphic cratylism, could well be read as a companion to *Jacques Derrida's *deconstruction of phonocentrism. (See also *logocentrism.) In his Introduction a I'architexte [Architext 1979], Genette undertakes a detailed history of the theory of genres, demonstrating the historical error of attributing the three fundamental genres (lyric, epic and dramatic) to Plato and Aristotle, and examining the roles of ""mimesis, representation, thematic content, and modes of enonciation in the classificiation of genres over the centuries. (See also *theme.) This study concludes with a consideration of archigenres, complex categories in which the intersection of thematic classes and modal/submodal classes determines a considerable number of existing or possible genres. Architextuality refers to the relation of inclusion uniting all texts in terms of generic, formal and thematic features and is,

Genette for Genette, the true subject of poetics, as it constitutes the literariness of literature. The notion of textuality, introduced at the conclusion of Introduction a I'architexte, is further developed in Genette's encyclopedic Palimpsestes (1982), which presents five different types of transtextuality or textual transcendence (that is, 'everything which puts the text in explicit or implicit relationship with other texts') (7). These forms are discussed in terms of an increasing degree of abstraction and globality. The first such form, *intertextuality, is defined in a narrower manner than is *Michael Riffaterre's understanding of the concept: for Genette, intertextuality is 'the demonstrable presence of one text within another' (8) and its forms include citation, plagiarism and allusion. The following two forms of transtextuality are paratextuality (investigated in Seuils 1987) and metatextuality, or the relationship of commentary or discussion that one text may have with another, the most obvious example being that of literary criticism. While the fifth, most abstract and implicit form of textuality, architextuality, was discussed in Introduction a I'architexte, it is the fourth form, hypertextuality, which constitutes the subject of Palimpscstes. Hypertextuality denotes any relationship, excluding that of commentary, that links a later text (a hypertext) with an earlier text (its hypotext). Using the image of the palimpsest, where one text is superimposed upon another that it does not completely conceal, Genette embarks upon a massive study of hypertextual genres, producing a detailed, formal categorization. The two major types of hypertextual derivations noted are the transformation of a text according to a particular formal constraint or semantic intention; and imitation, which necessitates a model of the imitated text in order to produce the hypertext (89-90). Genette's thorough discussion of transformative hypertextual practices (which includes the burlesque travesty/ translation, versification, and prosification, among many other forms) is best known for its study of literary *parody, which has made Palimpsestes a canonical text on this genre (see also Hutcheon; Rose; Thomson and Pages). Genette defines parody structurally, as a minimal transformation of a text (33), focuses on short texts (such as puns, titles, proverbs, and the lipograms of the Oulipo group), denying the possibility of the parody of a genre. As for i m i t a t i v e hypertextual practices, Genette cites the pastiche (a ludic genre),

the satirical pastiche or charge (with the principal function of mockery), and forgery or serious imitation, which serves to extend or continue a previous literary work in one of several ways. Paratextuality, Genette's second major category of transtextuality as introduced in Palimpscstes, is the subject of Seuils (1987), which is a study of the auxiliary texts (such as the title, preface or epigraph) accompanying or surrounding the main body of a text. These shorter texts introduce, frame and present a text, may lengthen and comment upon it, and ensure and affect its reception. The paratext forms an indistinct threshold between the inside and outside (the discourse of the world on the text) of the text and is a transitional zone without strict boundaries. The two types of paratexts in terms of spatial categories are the peritext, located within the same volume as the main text (such as the indication of the text's genre, the preface, dedication, epigraph, footnotes, chapter titles, and the author's name), and the epitext, which refers to all messages concerning the text that are located outside of the text itself (such as interviews, colloquia, debates, advance publication notices, and private communication, as, for example, diaries, correspondence and verbal commentary regarding the text). Genette's most recent work, Fiction et diction (1991), focuses on the criteria of literariness, the pragmatic status of fiction, and the forms of factual versus fictive narration. The influence of Genette's extensive contributions to narratology, poetics, textuality, and various other areas of literary theory cannot be overestimated. Countless analyses of particular literary texts (for example, Bishop; Concalon; De Vos; Hebert; Reid) have been based on Genette's narratological theories; and numerous studies of cinematographic texts and narration in the cinema (see Gaudreault; Gaudreault and Jost; Jost; Simon) have featured the development, modification and application of Genette's theories to the medium of film. While certain analyses of A la recherche du temps perdu (de Man 57-78; Wimmers 89-120) have responded to Genette's detailed study of Proust's work (in Figures III), other studies have made use of Genette's work on intertextality (Morgan 239-79), paratextuality (Calin), and mimology (Cappello). BARBARA HAVERCROFT

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Gilbert and Gubar Primary Sources Genette, Gerard. Fiction et diction. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991. - Figures 1. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. - Figures 11. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969. - Figures 111. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. - Figures of Literary Discourse. [Selections from Figures 1966-72]. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. - Introduction a I'architexte. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979. - Mhnologiques: Voyage en Cratylie. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976. - 'Modern Mimology: The Dream of a Poetic Language.' [Translation of excerpt of ch. 12, Mimologiques]. Trans. Thais E. Morgan. PMLA 104.2 (March 1989): 202-14. - Narrative Discourse. [Translation of 'Discours du recit,' Figures III]. Trans, jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. - Nouveau discours du recit. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. - Palimpsestes: La litterature an second degre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982. - Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987. - Hans Robert Jauss, et al. Theorie des genres. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986. Secondary Sources Bal, Mieke. 'The Laughing Mice or: On Focalization.' Poetics Today 2.2 (Winter 1981): 202-10. - Narratologie. Paris: Klincksieck, 1977. Bishop, Neil B. 'Distance, point de vue, voix et ideologie dans Les Fous de Bassan d'Anne Hebert.' Voix et Images 9.2 (1984): 113-29. Calin, Francoise. 'Une Occultation revelatrice: Le Paratexte de Paludes.' Australian Journal of French Studies 25.3 (1988): 247-60. Cappello, Sergio. 'Onomatopees fictionnelles.' Francofonia 7.12 (Spring 1987): 85-94. Cohn, Dorrit. 'The Encirclement of Narrative: on Franz Stanzel's Theorie des Erzahlens.' Poetics Today 2.2 (Winter 1981): 157-82. - Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Concalon, Elaine D. 'La Porte etroite: Ou le triomphe du metadiegetique.' French Literature Series 17 (1990): 69-78. - (intro.) and Gerald Prince (comment). 'Gide a la lumiere de Genette.' Bulletin des Amis d'Andre Gide 13 |i8].68 (1985): 11-55. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. De Vos, Wim. 'La Narration est-delle un acte libre? Le Metalepse dans Jacques le Fatalistc.' Lcs Lcttres Romanes 44.1-2 (1990): 3-13.

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Gaudreault, Andre. Du litteraire an filmique. Systems du recit. Quebec: Les Presses de 1'Universite Laval; Paris: Klincksieck, 1988. - and Francois Jost. Le Recit cinernatographique. Paris: Nathan, 1980. Hebert, Pierre. 'La Technique du "retour en arriere" dans le nouveau roman au Quebec et en France.' Neohelicon 12.2 (1985): 265-86. - 'Vers une typologie des analepses.' Voix et Images 8.1 (1982): 97-109. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Jost, Francois. 'Narration(s): En deca et au-dela.' Communications 38 (1983): 192-212. Lintvelt, Jaap. Essai de typologie narrative: Le point de vue. Paris: Corti, 1981. Morgan, Thais. 'The Space of Intertextuality.' In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989, 239-79. Prince, Gerald. 'Introduction a 1'etude du narrataire.' Poetique 14 (avril 1973): 178-96. - Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. The Hague: Mouton, 1982. Reid, Ian. 'The Death of the Implied Author? Voice, Sequence, and Control in Flaubert's Trois Conies.' Australian Journal of French Studies 23.2 (1986): 195-211. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 'A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative: G. Genette's Figures III and the Structuralist Study of Fiction.' PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1.1 (January 1976): 33-62. - Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983. - 'Problems of Voice in V. Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.' PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1.3 (Oct. 1976): 489-512. Rose, Margaret. Parody/Metafiction. London: Croom Helm, 1979. Simon, Jean-Paul. 'Enonciation et narration. Gnarus, auctor et Protee.' Communications 38 (1983): 155-91. Thomson, Clive, and Alain Pages, eds. Dire la parodie. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1989. Wimmers, Inge Crosman. Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

Gilbert, Sandra Mortola, and Susan David Gubar (Gilbert b. U.S.A., 1936-; Gubar b. U.S.A., 1944-) Feminist literary critics. Sandra Gilbert studied at Columbia University and received her Ph.D. in 1968; her thesis, '"Acts of Atten-

Gilbert and Gubar tion": The Major Poems of D.H. Lawrence/ was published in 1973. ($ee *D-H. Lawrence.) She taught English at Hayward, St. Mary's College, Moraga, Indiana University, Bloomington, and the University of California, Davis; in 1985 she took up the position she currently holds in the Department of English at Princeton University. In addition to her work in literary criticism, she has published four books of poetry and contributed poems to a number of anthologies. Susan Gubar studied at the University of Iowa and in 1972 gained her Ph.D. with a thesis entitled 'Tudor Romance and i8th Century Fiction.' She taught English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, before taking up her current post in the Department of English at Indiana, Bloomington, in 1973. Gilbert and Gubar began their collaborative work at Indiana in 1974 when they co-taught a course in literature by women. Gilbert and Gubar helped bring about the shift in Anglo-American feminism from 'images of women' criticism to what has been called a 'woman-centred' approach. (See *feminist criticism, Anglo-American.) In the former practice, images of women in texts by men and women are judged on the basis of their fidelity to the reality of women's lives and their capacity to provide positive role models. In the latter approach, the critic reads texts by women for patterns that define a distinctive feminine literary imagination and that aim to provide the historical continuity that the writers themselves were denied. Towards these ends Gilbert and Gubar co-edited The Norton Anthology of Literature In/ Women (1985), a text that has shaped the curricula of women's studies in literature. In addition to publishing widely as individuals in such major American journals as Critical Inquiry, New Literary History and Signs, Gilbert and Gubar have provided opportunities for collaborative work by women critics in such collections as Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1979) and The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic, a special issue of Women's Studies (1986). In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar analyse the implications for women writers of the metaphor of literary paternity 'the notion that the writer "fathers" his text just as God fathered the world' (Madwoman 4). (See *metonymy/metaphor.) According to the logic of this metaphor, a woman who writes defies the bounds of nature; she is a figure of

montrous unwomanliness. Gilbert and Gubar suggest that this monstrous unwomanliness lies beneath the veneer of social convention and lurks behind the 'proper' ladies of texts by 19th-century women writers. Palimpsestic texts, hidden madwomen and other doublings allow these writers to achieve 'true female authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards' (73). (See *authority.) Gilbert and Gubar take *Harold Bloom's theory of the '*anxiety of influence' both as an example of the patrilinearity of literary history and as a point of departure for a theory of women's literary creativity. Bloom suggests that each writer stands in the shadow of his predecessor/father and faces the anxiety of not being the origin of his words. The 'strong' writer overcomes his anxiety by creatively misreading his predecessor and assimilating that work to his own. Gilbert and Gubar find Bloom's model useful as a way of understanding the intertextual and revisionary relation of women's writing to the writing that precedes it. (See *intertextuality.) However, they note that the igth-century woman writer needs to find her female predecessors rather than do battle with them; anxiety here is more an issue of legitimizing claims to authorship than one of influence. Gilbert and Gubar go on to argue in No Man's Land (1988, 1990), a multivolume study of women writers and modernism, that the case of the 20th-century woman writer differs even more significantly from Bloom's model. She has a multiplicity of affiliative possibilities: matrilineal inheritance, patrilineal inheritance or alienation from both and a turning to other contemporary women writers - as in the case of lesbian expatriates in early 20th-century Paris. No Man's Land emphasizes the interrelations of social history and literary history more than does Madwoman. Gilbert and Gubar take issue with poststructuralist theorists who 'claim that all accounts of history are arbitrary fictions' or who 'deny the reality of the author,' insisting instead that 'texts are as marked by the maker's gender as they are by the historical moment in which they were produced' (i:xiv). (See *poststructuralism.) They analyse this gender difference through the metaphor of the battle of the sexes and claim that modernist writers divide along gender lines on such issues as the languages writers imagine for themselves and the representation of women's

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Girard entry into the public sphere. Gilbert and Gubar argue that whereas men seek to mystify or usurp the power of ordinary language - the 'mother tongue' - women dream of languages that predate the patronymics of culture, that play with puns, verb tenses, neologisms, archaisms, and nonsense, and that celebrate the role of the mother in the process of language acquisition. Such languages, Gilbert and Gubar believe, answer the 'female need to achieve a command over language' (1:237). Gilbert and Gubar's approach differs from French feminist approaches in its unproblematized use of the oppositional male-female sex identities and in its view of the writer as a coherent subject capable of controlling meaning in a text. (See *feminist criticism, French.) Their approach has been criticized along these lines in the Anglo-American context. *Toril Moi suggests that rather than simply replacing God the father/author with the woman author, Gilbert and Gubar need to question the critical practice that relies on the author as guarantor of meaning. Mary Jacobus calls for greater recognition of the discontinuities between writer and text and of the complex relation between dominant text and feminist revision. And Janet Todd insists that any search for a continuous 'female tradition' must not lose sight of the particular historical moment in which each woman writes. Gilbert and Gubar's work is nevertheless important for its attention to the ways in which gender inflects the dominant tropes of literary production and to the ways in which women writers creatively misread these tropes. (See *trope.) L I A N N E MOVES

Primary Sources Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan D. Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the lyth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. - No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century. 2 vols. to date. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988, 1989. - eds. The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic. Special issue of Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13.1-2 (1986). - eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: Norton and Co., 1985. - eds. Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

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Secondary Sources jacobus, Mary. 'Review of The Madwoman in the Attic.' Signs 6.3 (1981): 517-23. Moi, Toril. Sexual /Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1985. Todd, Janet. Feminist Literary History. London: Routledge, 1988.

Girard, Rene Noel (b. France, 1923-) Cultural theoretician. Rene Girard studied archival sciences and paleography at the Ecole Nationale des Chartes. He received a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1950 and held teaching positions at Indiana, Duke, Bryn Mawr, SUNY Buffalo, and Johns Hopkins. Since 1981, he has been Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford. Although most of Girard's professional career has been spent in the U.S.A., where he is a citizen, many of his books were originally published in France and later translated into English and other languages. In the early part of his career, Girard published literary studies of Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, and others. Already in these works he displayed broad, extraliterary interests in psychology and theology. Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque [Deceit, Desire, and the Novel 1961] examines the lie or self-deceit - the romantic's belief that his or her desire is original and creative, whereas in fact the desire springs from a wish to appropriate something that is already desired by another. The romantic lie stands in contrast to the truth (verite romanesque) of what Girard later comes to call 'mimetic desire,' a desire that is based on rivalry, appropriation and violence. According to Girard, the truth about desire is revealed in the works of great writers like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, the subject of Girard's recent works. (For Girard, the literary *canon is a useful embodiment of a non-Platonic, because acquisitive, *mimesis: the canon contains representations of mimetic desire as the hidden motor of violence and the greatest literary works are agents of demystification that bear on what is hidden in human interactions.) Girard calls desire 'triangular' because there is no straight line between the desire of a subject for an object; one desires only what is given value by an other, who becomes part of the process of mimetic rivalry as both rival

Girard and double of the subject. This mimetic desire leads to violence, which, as Girard explains in La Violence et le sacrc [Violence and the Sacred 1972], may be traced anthropologically to the scapegoat mechanism - originally the murder of an innocent victim sacrificed ('made sacred') to establish order and community. Violence is thus double-faced; it destroys but it also gives significance to human events and institutions. From this founding event, civilization is marked by a cycle of order, desire or antagonistic mimesis, crisis, the all-against-one of collective violence, and the temporary reestablishment of order. In De Choses cachees depuis la fondatwn tin monde [Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World 1978] Girard most clearly discusses the alternative to this cycle - a logic of love revealed in a non-sacrificial interpretation of Biblical texts. Girard is sometimes criticized for a reductionism through which all violence is traced to the scapegoat mechanism, or all *literature viewed as a revelation of - or a false concealing of - mimetic desire. Some criticize Girard for arguing that Christian symbolism alone is ""universal, and others for adopting a too secular, materialist view of the sacred or a too restricted view of the Gospel as a expose of sacrificial violence, without need for ritual or grace. Girard has also excited opposition through his frequent critiques of Freudianism, of various postmodern theorists like *Claude Levi-Strauss, *Gilles Deleuze and *Felix Guattari, and of some varieties of *deconstruction. (See *Sigmund Freud, *postmodernism, *materialist criticism, *psychoanalytic theory.) He argues that failure of all dogmatic methodologies, when fully acknowledged, will lead not to a cognitive nihilism, which is erroneous, but to a new scientific knowledge not tied to empirical evidence or to intuition but to verification of hypotheses through a wide variety of data, including the anthropological and literary data of his studies. In Girard's system the skandalon (or 'stumbling-block') is the obstacle and model of mimetic rivalry; it is a scandal or offence that seductively stands in the way of the truth by sowing rivalry and violence. Girard's aim is to move the reader and society 'beyond scandal' to a recognition of victims and to the elimination of violence. But his ideas themselves and his spirited analyses of his opponents' positions sometimes themselves prove to be scandalous, evoking an energetic opposition from widely diverse positions.

Nonetheless, even his opponents often concede the power of his analysis of desire and violence, and his readings of texts and social phenomena - including Biblical narratives, African and Greek myths, and medieval antiSemitism - are admired by many who do not wholly adopt what Girard considers to be a scientifically based system. His ideas have wide-ranging implications well beyond literary or anthropological studies. Jean-Michel Oughourlian has, for example, applied some of Girard's ideas to the field of psychotherapy, Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy to economics, and Raymund Schwager to theology. (See also *myth, *text, *desire/lack.) DAVID MCCRACKEN

Primary Sources Girard, Rene. Le Bouc enhssaire. Paris: Grasset, 1982. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. - De Choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Grasset, 1978. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. - Critique dans un souterrain. Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976. - Dostoievski: Du double a I'unite. Paris: Plon, 1963. - Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque. Paris: Grasset, 1961. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. - La Route antique des homines pervers. Paris: Grasset, 1985. Job: The Victim of His People. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. - A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. — 'Theory and Its Terrors.' In The Limits of Theory. Ed. Thomas M. Kavanagh. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989, 225-54. - To double business bound': Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. [Some of these essays also publ. in Critique dans un souterrain.] - La Violence et le sacre. Paris: Grasset, 1972. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - Walter Burkert and Jonathan Z. Smith. Violent Origins: On Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. Secondary Sources Chirpaz, Francois. Enjeux de la violence: Essais sur Rene Girard. Paris: Cerf, 1980. Deguy, Michel, and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, eds. Rene

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Goldmann Girard et le problente du mal. Paris: Grasset, 1982. Dumouchel, Paul, and Jean-Pierre Dupuy. L'Enfer des chases: Rene Girard et la logique de I'economie. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Dumouchel, Paul, ed. Violence et verite: Autour dc Rene Girard. Paris: Grasset, 1985. Selections publ. in Violence and Truth: On the Work of Rene Girard. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Johnsen, William. 'Myth, Ritual, and Literature after Girard.' In Literary Theory's Future(s). Ed. Joseph Natoli. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989, 116-48. Orsini, Christine. La Pensee de Rene Girard. Paris: Retz, 1986. Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. Un Mime nomine desir. Paris: Grasset, 1982. The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession and Hypnosis. Trans. Eugene Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 'Rene Girard and Biblical Studies.' Semeia 33 (1985). Special issue. Schwager, Raymund. Brauchen Wzr Einen Sundenbockl Munich: Kosel, 1978. Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible. Trans. Maria L. Assad. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Special Issue on the Work of Rene Girard. Diacritics 8 (Spring 1978). To Honor Rene Girard. Stanford French and Italian Studies. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1986. (Also publ. as Stanford French Review 10 [1986].) Webb, Eugene. Philosophers of Consciousness. Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1988, 183-225.

Goldmann, Lucien (b. Romania 1913-d. France, 1970) Philosopher and literary sociologist. Lucien Goldmann studied in Bucharest, Vienna and Paris. Driven from France by the war, he worked with Piaget in Geneva before returning to Paris to work at the CNRS until 1959, when he was elected director of studies at the vith section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He founded the Centre de Sociologie de la Litterature at the Free University of Brussels in 1961. Goldmann's work, which develops a sociology of thought based upon the teachings of Kant, Marx and *Lukacs, covers the epistemology of the social sciences as well as "literature. His work on the relationship between philosophy, seen as a coherent system, and sociology, which he regarded as the science of social dynamics, led him to formulate what he called genetic structuralism. (See also *structuralism,

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*genetic criticism.) This theoretical and methodological approach is based on the idea that all thought tends systematically to create a link between the person as the thinking subject, the world and the absolute. Yet Goldmann insisted that such formulations are insufficient for the framing of what he termed a worldview unless they arise from a social force (such as a group or class). Therefore the philosopher or artist cannot but supply the most adequate form to a thought, since its structure is necessarily tied to the coherence of the practices of a social group and is thus beyond the individual's capacity to formulate it. Goldmann simultaneously studied the positions of these groups in the evolution of societies and the peculiarities, conceptual (in the case of philosophy) and textual (in the case of literature), within the framework of a global theory which facilitates an interpretation of the coherence of literary works and their explanation by examining the context of the social dynamics in which they were written. Goldmann developed his theory in Le Dieu cache [The Hidden God], a work which analyses Pascal's Pensees and Racine's tragedies in light of the ideological evolution of the French Jansenists and the noblesse de robe of 17th-century France. Here he demonstrates how the concept of a tragic world-view can only be understood in light of the loss of *power by this segment of nobility, which occurred when Louis xiv reorganized the State. It is important to note, however, that what Goldmann calls world-view constitutes as a form a historically determined process of crystallization of structural principles which are in turn independent of the vagaries of history. The influence of Piaget's constructivist epistemology is evident here, along with a certain Kantianism of a priori forms of human thought, though reformulated according to the dialectical tradition inherited from Hegel and Marx. (See *constructivism.) Sciences humaines et philosophie (1952) and Recherches dialectiques (1959) established the theoretical groundwork for the genetic-structuralist method, which Goldmann had started to explore in his Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (1945). Goldmann always stressed his indebtedness to Georg Lukacs who greatly influenced all his works, particularly Pour une sociologie du roman (1964). In that work, Goldmann explains the evolution of the romanesque form from

Gombrich Malraux to the nouveau roman by the homologous structure: between the position of the romanesque character in terms of values and the position of the individual subject in a society producing for the market. Although based upon a more deterministic theory than Le Dieu cache, this very influential and suggestive work occasioned much debate. Undoubtedly because of his gradual loss of faith in the leading role of the proletariat, already evident in the late 19505, Goldmann abandoned his theory of culture as an expression of the state of social consciousness, replacing it with a theory based on homologous structure, in which the economic infrastructure played a key role. Later, he would return, in part, to his earlier views. Marginalized by academic institutions, as well as by the rigidity of the Marxism espoused by the French communist movement in the 19505 and 19605, Goldmann was closer to Austrian-Marxism and to the *Frankfurt School (especially *Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), although he did not fully share in the pessimism of the latter group. Goldmann contributed precision and intellectual rigour to the social analysis of intellectual and artistic phenomena. His studies on Lumiere, Valery, Robbe-Grillet and Genet attempted to define the social role of an artistic creation on the premise that an important work of art does not reflect the actual state of social consciousness but rather its potential development of it - called possible consciousness - within the framework of an evolutionary view of thought and society. (See *sociocritidsm, ^Marxist criticism.) IACQUHS I.EENHARDT

Prinian/ Sources Goldmann, Lucien. La Creation culturelle dans la socicte inodcrne. Paris: Denoel, 1971. - Le Dieu cache. Etude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensees de Pascal et dans le theatre de Racine. Paris: Gallimard, i q s s , 1976. - Epistemologie et philosophic politique. Paris: Denoel, 1979. - Lukacs et Heidegger: Fragments postlntmcs etablis et prescntes par Youssef Jshaghpour. Paris: Denoel, '973- Marxistne et sciences huttiaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. - Mensch, Geineinschaft und Welt in der Philosophic linnianuel Kants. Studien zur Geschichte der Dialektik. Zurich/New York: Europa Verlag, 1945. - Pour line sociologie tin roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1964, U)bT, i q S b .

- Rccherches dialectiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. - Sciences hutnaines et philosophic. Paris: PUF, 1952, 1966, 1971. - Structures incntalcs et creation culturelle. Paris: Anthropos, 1970.

Gombrich, (Sir) Ernst Hans Josef (b. Austria, 1909-) Art historian and theorist. E.H. Gombrich studied with Julius von Schlosser, Emil Reich and Emanuel Loewy at Vienna University (1928-33) where he received his Ph.D. In 1936 Gombrich left Austria and settled in England in order to work on the papers of Aby Warburg. He later became the director of the Warburg Institute. During the Second World War he worked for the Monitoring Service of the BBC. Gombrich has held numerous chairs; he has been Durning Lawrence Professor at University College (London), Slade Professor of Fine Art (Oxford and Cambridge) and Andrew D. White Professor (Cornell). He was knighted in 1972 and received the Order of Merit in 1988. Gombrich's concern with theory arose from problems in art history, particularly the question of why representation is always within a style. (See also *mimesis.) Art and Illusion, his most important work, 'is largely concerned with the reason for the collapse of a theory of art which concentrated on the need to copy the phenomenal world' (The Image and the Eye 164) and thus implicitly denied the inevitable presence of style in all representation. The copy theory of representation was at the centre of the 'Greek revolution' in visual art (Art and Illusion ch. 4), a revolution which was revived in the Renaissance and continued to dominate the course of art history through the igth century. Gombrich's theoretical work is best viewed as an effort to criticize this theory and at the same time to protect the notion of representation itself from radical relativism - the belief that no way of representing the world is cognitively better than any other. Gombrich tries to accomplish this task by substituting the idea of visual discovery for the idea of accuracy in his theory of visual illusion. This substitution permits him to conceive of the history of art as a series of experiments (conducted in pictures) whose aim is 'the discovery of new aspects of the outer and inner world' (Tributes 206). Gombrich compares these visual experi341

Gombrich ments to the efforts of scientists to improve their theories of the natural world by testing hypotheses. At the centre of Gombrich's theories about how to write the history of representational art is a contrast between 'conceptual' and 'illusionistic' images. (It should be made clear that Gombrich does not identify art with either representation or expression; witness The Sense of Order, his monumental study of decorative art.) He claims that 'the wish to turn the beholder into an imaginary eyewitness of the mythical events' (The Image and the Eye 220) initiated the revolution in image-making which made a history of art possible. Conceptual images do not make eyewitnesses of viewers and thus do not encourage audiences to scan the image for forms of coherence appropriate to our perception of the actual world. A modern tourist map and a medieval picture of a town are conceptual images to which we do not apply illusionistic criteria. But once artists began to make images which tried to mimic our ordinary perception they revolutionized imagemaking. Now artist and audience were not only using images for some purpose but were also exploring the nature of the image and thus the nature of visual effects. It is this exploration, Gombrich argues, that makes a history of art possible. 'Images may indeed teach us to recognize and specify a visual and emotional effect which has always been present in our experience. The search for these effects is much older than the science of psychology. It is known as the history of art' (The Image and the Eye 214). As this passage implies, Gombrich also adapts his theory of visual discovery to the concept of expression, for the artist inherits an expressive as well as a representational vocabulary. Just as Gombrich criticizes the copy theory for its claim to unmediated access to the outer world, so he criticizes the theory of selfexpression which is, in effect, the 'inner' version of the copy theory. Expression, like representation, depends upon conventions (Art and Illusion 310-20) and the artist, like the person, learns what is expressive through feedback (Tributes 196-200). Most versions of the mimetic and expressive theories of art, which until recently dominated aesthetics, hold that the true artist should free himself from habit, convention and tradition in order to see with an 'innocent eye' (Ruskin's phrase) or express an unmediated self. Gom-

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brich agrees with the sceptics that this is not possible and he introduces the notion of the 'schema' in order to explain what does in fact happen. He claims that an artist starts with an inherited or 'found' schema (it can even be his own doodle) which he then modifies as he tests it against the 'motif,' that is, the actual scene to be portrayed. This is what Gombrich calls 'making' and 'matching.' He later alters 'making and matching' to 'recall and recognition' (The Image and the Eye 12) because instead of matching the image against some motif the artist and his audience test its adequacy as a coded translation of what an eyewitness might see. To say that one picture is more realistic than another does not mean that it better matches some external reality but that it meets this test. The presence of a schema in all representation means that there can be no 'neutral naturalism' (Art and Illusion 75), for the schema always leaves its traces. That is why style is an inevitable aspect of image-making. The concern with the image is closely tied to the development of distinctive skills and the ability to conceive experiments in image-making that are rooted in tradition. The idea that artists always build on traditions which they modify and criticize is based on Karl Popper's theory that accepted scientific ideas are not to be understood as true statements about the world but as unfalsified hypotheses that remain in place until they are shown to be wrong. Gombrich repeatedly compares this notion of science to what occurs in perception. What we see is not what is simply there nor is it something which we conjure out of mere sense data. It is a guess, a hypothesis, about what the world out there is really like and it can be disconfirmed. In ordinary life our perceptual guesses are almost always adequate because they have biological foundations (The Sense of Order 1-4) but there are moments when our visual hypotheses are stymied and that is when we become aware that perception is an interpretive process. The way that perceptual habits and expectations based upon knowledge of the actual world influence how we read images Gombrich calls 'the beholder's share.' He emphasizes the role of the beholder in the making of images, since what the artist does is dependent upon what he (the first beholder) perceives as he confronts what he does. The issue here is how much of what we see is the contribution

Gombrich of our knowledge and habits and how much is due to what is 'really' there. What we see is often determined by what we know, what we expect and by the potent force of what psychologists call 'constancy/ 'our relative imperviousness to the dizzy variations that go on in the world around us' (Art and Illusion 47). We automatically correct for foreshortening so that a hand thrust toward us from a few feet away does not appear weirdly large, as it does in a photograph. The crucial role of constancy in perception rules out both the copy theory (because we actively keep the world constant) and relativism (since the need for constancy implies a real world). In Art and Illusion Gombrich tries to establish the theoretical basis for the existence of a history of art which will understand imagemaking as a critical process. He opposes this view to many contemporary intellectual currents but principally to the Hegelian 'historicism' (Popper's term) that he believes wrongly governed much writing in art history. Hegelian 'exegesis' assumes that artists, as well as all others, are not self-conscious and critical persons, but vehicles for the expression of worldhistorical eras (Ideals and Idols 24-59). At the same time Gombrich opposes the 'empiricism' of an art history which ignores theory and confines itself to cataloguing the archive. Gombrich's ideas have been discussed primarily by philosophers interested in the 'controversy over conventionalism' (Blinder) but also by literary critics who have taken up his views on representation, perception and, especially, the 'beholder's share.' (See *horizon of expectation.) Gombrich's view of perception as a form of interpretation and his concern with the viewer's role in the 'reading' of images is closely related to reader-response theory, and F.W. Bateson's notion of the semantic gap (a good poem challenges our capacity to interpret but does not defeat it) is not unlike Gombrich's claim that 'we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion' (The Sense of Order 9). (See *reader-response criticism.) Gombrich's reputation is built upon a union of great erudition, a talent for theory and a lucid style that makes his work available to the educated public. He has developed a cognitive, biologically grounded theory of the visual arts that has unusual scope and power and can be

extended to other arts as well. Gombrich is also an eloquent spokesman for the tradition of liberal humanism to which the theory is a major contribution. Often expressing a debt to Popper's ideas about society, Gombrich has repeatedly stated his commitment to critical reason, which he believes should be at the core of intellectual, artistic and political life. ROGER SEAMON

Primary Sources Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1960. sth ed. 1977. - The Heritage of Appelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1978. - Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1979. - The linage and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. - Means and Ends: Reflections on the History of Frescoe Painting. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. - Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London: Phaidon P, 1963. - New Light on Old Masters. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1986. - Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews. Ed. Richard Woodfield. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1987. - The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. London: Phaidon P, 1979. - The Story of Art. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1950. i s t h ed. 1984. - Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1978. - Tributes: Interpretations of Our Cultural Tradition, Oxford: Phaidon P, 1984.

Secondary Sources Blinder, David. 'The Controversy over Conventionalism.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1983): 253-64. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1983. Carrier, David. 'Gombrich on Art Historical Explanations.' Leonardo 16 (1983): 91-6. - 'Perspective as a Convention: On the Views of Nelson Goodman and Ernst Gombrich.' Leonardo 13 (1980): 283-7. - 'Theoretical Perspectives on the Arts, Science and Technology. Part I: An Introduction to the Semiotic Theory of Art.' Leonardo 17 (1984): 288-94. Donnell-Kotroza, Carol. 'Representation and Expression: A False Antinomy.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1980): 161-73.

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Gramsci Gablick, Suzi. 'On the Logic of Artistic Discovery: Art as Mimetic Conjecture.' Studio 186 (1973): 6s—8. Reply: John Stezaker, 'Towards Nihilism.' 169-70. Hansen, Robert. 'This Curving World: Hyperbolic Linear Perspective.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32 (1973): 147-61. Lycan, William G. 'Gombrich, Wittgenstein, and the Dick-Rabbit.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (1971): 229-37. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1986. Novitz, David. 'Conventions and the Growth of Pictorial Style.' British Journal of Aesthetics 16 (1976): 324-37Wilkinson, Terence. 'Representation, Illusion and Aspects.' British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (1978): 45-58. Wollheim, Richard. 'Art and Illusion.' In Aesthetics in the Modern World. Ed. Harold Osborne. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968, 235-63.

Gramsci, Antonio (b. Italy iSgi-d. 1937) Marxist critic. Antonio Gramsci studied in Turin, where he became active within the Socialist party, and was one of the founders of the journal L'Or dine Nuovo [The New Order]. He left the party to help found the Italian Communist party (1921), of which he became leader in 1924, and was subsequently elected to parliament. Gramsci was arrested by Mussolini's Fascists in 1926 and condemned, in 1928, to over 20 years of prison. While in prison he maintained a voluminous correspondence (mostly with his wife's sister, Tatiana Schucht) and filled 32 notebooks with 2848 pages of writings; these constitute the basis of his reputation today as the 'greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century' (Joll). Gramsci was given conditional liberty in 1937 as the result of an international campaign (led by French writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse and Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa), but he died in that year, his health having been destroyed. His major contribution to Marxist thought was his notion of the 'materiality' of ideas, his theorizing of the role of the intellectual within political *praxis, and his development of the concept of *hegemony. His contemporary influence is felt throughout the field of cultural studies. (See ""materialist criticism, *Marxist criticism, *cultural materialism.) As a meridionale - a Southerner - Gramsci

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was acutely aware of the way in which the industrial North of Italy had colonized the agrarian and impoverished South, and this led him to formulate a theory of politics which modified Marx's notion of class struggle with that of the confrontation between centre and ""margin. (See also *post-colonial theory.) Like *Ferdinand de Saussure, Gramsci insisted on the material importance of language as a social constructor, as he suggests in his most sustained piece of literary criticism (most of these pieces being short ones, often written for journals), on the tenth canto of Dante's Inferno. He may also be linked to *Mikhail Bakhtin in his insistence on language as a dramatic, active agent of social relations, as well as in his belief that language comprises the social and political history of a people. The core of Gramsci's thought concerns the material role which ideas play within social relations, and this constitutes his major contribution to Marxist thought, which had tended to grant prime consideration to the material and economic bases of society and to see the superstructure (ideas) as products of these forces. For Gramsci, however, history could be influenced by ideas, and by individuals; it was not preordained. This position also represented his debt to and distance from the major Italian intellectual of his time, *Benedetto Croce, for whom history was the working out of certain universal ideas. Gramsci, however, materialized these ideas in place and time. The major concept in Gramsci's writing is hegemony, which represents the set of values and beliefs through which the ruling class exercises its *power over the masses, including religion, education and the media (cf. ""ideology). In elaborating this concept, he follows Lenin's emphasis on the consent of subordinate groups to the leadership or hegemony of the proletariat. Hegemonic ideas are the 'common sense' or 'myths' (in *Roland Barthes' sense of the term) that govern a society and to which the masses freely consent; this consent would likewise have to be accorded to any new ruling group. (See also *myth.) Hegemony thus defined is a dynamic process, since the hegemonic group must continually make compromises in order to incorporate as many elements of society as possible. Power for Gramsci is relational, in that social relations are also relations of power. Thus power is present everywhere in society and not just in the state. Revolution would thus

Greimas have to extend throughout society, and could not be achieved simply by seizing control of the apparatus of state power (as the Fascists had done). Gramsci had hoped to develop a theory of power for his own (fascist) times along the lines of those developed by Machiavelli in the Renaissance, though where Machiavelli posited the Prince, Gramsci placed the collectivity. His central insight was that power was exercised not only economically and physically but also through ideas, and that ideas were not purely products of economic forces. Thus, a revolution in which the holders of power simply changed hands was insufficient, since power would still be indirectly applied hegemonically - indeed, Gramsci constructed a theory of 'passive revolution/ in which reforms were carried out while hegemony remained intact among the ruling elite. As well, the working (or subaltern) class need no longer be theorized as the sole agent of revolution; subalternity was seen to exist elsewhere (for example, among women, people of colour and gays). Given that ideas were themselves the sites of power relations (knowledge as a function of power), the intellectual, for Gramsci, took on an important role as a political organizer (as opposed to the more traditional roles of writer and academic, for example). Thus pedagogy emerged as a major aspect of Gramsci's 'revolutionary' thought: only if subaltern groups had an awareness of how they were repressed hegemonically could they react to that repression by constructing their own systems of ideas, their agency being enacted through intellectual leadership. The role of cultural studies becomes the exposition of these repressive myths of hegeinonv (cf. *Walter Benjamin). RICHARD CAVELL

Primary Sources Adamson, Walter L Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Fiori, Giuseppe. Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary. Trans. T. Nairn. London: Verso, 1990 [1965]. Gramsci., Antonio. The Modern Prince and Other Writings. Trans. L. Marks. New York: International Publishers, 1957. - Lettere dal carcerc. Ed. S. Caprioglio and E. Fubini. Torino: Einaudi, i q 6 s . - Letters from Prison. Trans. I,. Lavvner. New York: Harper and Row, n>~^.

- Quaderni del carcere. 4 vols. Ed. V. Gerratana. Torino: Einaudi, 1975. - Selections from Cultural Writings. Ed. D. Forgacs and G. Nowell-Smith. Trans. W. Boelhower. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. - Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920. Ed. J. Mathews and Q. Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1978. - Selections from Political Writings, 1921-1926. Ed. and trans. Q. Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1978. - Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Joll, James. Gramsci. London: Fontana/Collins, 1977. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Trans. W. Moore and P. Cammack. London: Verso, 1985. Landy, Marcia. 'Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci.' boundary 2 [Special Gramsci issue] 14.3 (Spring 1986): 49-70. Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Special Gramsci issue, boundary 2 14.3 (Spring 1986).

Secondary Sources Bocock, Robert. Hegemony. London: Tavistock, 1986. Eley, G. 'Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-Speaking World 1957-1982.' European History Quarterly 14 (1984): 441-78. Hobsbawn, Eric. 'The Great Gramsci.' New York Revieiv of Books, 4 April 1974, 39-44. Mauro, Walter. Invito alia lettura di Gramsci. Milano: Mursia, 1981. Morera, Esteve. Gramsci's Historicism: A Realist Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1990. Simon, Roger. Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982.

Greimas, A(lgirdas) J(ulien) (b. Russia, 191 y-d. France, 1992) Semiotician. After his baccalaureat (1934), AJ. Greimas studied law in Kaunas (Lithuania) before enrolling at the University of Grenoble, France, where, from 1936 to 1939, he developed an interest in the language and "literature of the Middle Ages. He obtained the degree of licence es lettres with a specialization in FrancoProvengal dialectology. After he returned to Lithuania for his military service, his country was invaded, first by the Soviets (1940), then the Germans (1941), and was finally occupied

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Greimas again by the Soviets (1944). Greimas escaped to France where he obtained his doctorat d'etat in 1948 with a primary thesis on fashion in 1830, a lexicological study of the vocabulary of dress according to the journals of the times, and a secondary thesis, based on a synchronic model of analysis, on various aspects of social life in 1830. Greimas began his university career teaching the history of the French language at Alexandria, Egypt, where he met *Roland Barthes. He abandoned lexicology, which he considered inadequate to describe semantic fields and in 1958 he took up the chair of French language and grammar at the University of Ankara, Turkey. After appointments at the Universities of Istanbul and Poitiers, he was elected in 1965 to the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where he directed a seminar in *semiotics that attracted a large number of students and professors from France and abroad, subsequently evolving into the Paris school of semiotics. Greimas' semiotics must be understood within the intellectual context of the structuralist and poststructuralist movements that flourished in the latter half of this century (at one time or other in their training, *Julia Kristeva, *Tzvetan Todorov and *Oswald Ducrot were his assistants). (See *structuralism, *poststructuralism.) Greimas was influenced by pioneering work undertaken in anthropology (*Claude Levi-Strauss), folklore (*Vladimir Propp), linguistics (*Ferdinand de Saussure and especially Louis Hjelmslev), mythology (Georges Dumezil), and phenomenology (*Maurice MerleauPonty), as well as by research in the social sciences and humanities stemming directly from Saussurean advances in theoretical linguistics, which focused on the synchronic (the state of language at a given moment in time) rather than the diachronic (elements of the system belonging to different states of development) dimension of language (Roland Barthes, *Emile Benveniste, *Michel Foucault, *Roman Jakobson, *Jacques Lacan, and Hans Reichenbach). (See *phenomenological criticism.) All of these had an impact on the methodological and theoretical reframing of Greimas' work after the late 19505. In this context Greimas envisaged his project of establishing semiotics on a 'scientific' or at least systematic basis (The Social Sciences: A Semiotic View 1970). The concept of a semantic universe, borrowed from Hjelmslev and the Danish School of Glossomatics, and defined as the sum of all

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possible significations that can be produced by the systems of values that are co-extensive with the entire culture of an ethnolinguistic community, is fundamental to Greimas' semiotics (Structural Semantics 1966). However, since the semantic universe cannot be conceived of in its entirety, Greimas had to introduce the concepts of semantic micro-universe and discourse universe. The semantic microuniverse, which can be grasped only if it is deployed at its most abstract level by semantic categories such as life/death (the individual universe) or nature/culture (the collective universe), appears in the form of the discourse universe that it generates. The notion of discourse universe that has its origin in logic contains both syntactic implications and presuppositions, whereas that of micro-universe contains only the semantic component of discourse. The semantic micro-universe can be established by reconstituting isotopies (recurring semantic features) and basic axiologies (value systems); it is self-contained, whereas the discourse universe includes references to the 'exterior' world (Semiotics and Language 1979). (See *isotopy.) From this perspective, literary *discourse is defined as a specific realization of the discourse universe and thus of the semantic micro-universe that brings together and deploys the 'semiotics of language and of the natural world, which are considered as vast reservoirs of signs themselves containing numerous sign systems. (See *sign.) Although scientific or philosophical discourses also interrelate with both of these semiotic domains, what distinguishes them from literary discourse is that the latter is figurative in nature, as opposed to the former which is not (Semiotics and Language). For Greimas a literary *text can be considered as a specific actualization of literary discourse encompassing several semiotic systems (linguistic, natural and rhythmic). To analyse such a text one has, first of all, to consider it as the result of a presupposed act of enunciation (speech act) and show how it incorporates the various sign systems constituting it by establishing descriptive procedures and constructing a ""metalanguage (an artificial language using the same terms as the natural language it describes, that is, grammatical language). (See *enonciation/enonce.) Hence, to come to grips with the problem of signification or the production of meaning in a literary text, one must transpose one level of language (the

Greimas text) into a different level of language (the metalanguage) and work out adequate techniques of transposition (On Meaning 1970). The next step is to work out a rigorous descriptive language containing its own rules and constituting a semiotic system made up of a hierarchy of definitions. (See Greimas' 28o-page Maupassant [1976], which analyses a 6-page short story.) In addition, the concepts making up the system are established as postulates and are integrated into a network of inter-definitions, thereby ensuring its internal coherence. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The notion of narrativity and the descriptive procedures of *narratology are at the very core of Greimassian semiotics. In much the same way, Benveniste and *Gerard Genette identified two autonomous discursive levels: narrative, what is related, and discourse, the way of narrating the narrative. Greimas adopted similar distinctions: the discursive level that is part of enunciation (speech act) and the narrative level corresponding to the utterance (the state resulting from enunciation). Narrative analyses undertaken by Propp, Dumezil and LeviStrauss made it possible to analyse texts by describing the transformations of connected actions. Under the appearance of figurative narratives, these also attest to the existence of abstract and deep (semio-narrative) structures that govern the production and reading of this kind of discourse. The concept of narrativity, which is the transformation of the semio-narrative structures identified in the first instance as figurative discourse, was extended and considered as the organizing principle of all other types of discourse, whether narrative or nonnarrative. In working out his theoretical model Greimas took the 31 functions that were initially developed by Propp to account for the structure of the folktale and reformulated them in terms of actants, defined as beings or things that participate in processes in any form whatsoever (*subject/object, sender/receiver), actantial structures (subject —> object; sender —» object —> receiver) and a canonical narrative schema. This schema is a formal framework made up of three successive sequences in which two communication sequences (a mandate sequence [how the sender manipulates the subject either pragmatically or cognitively] and an evaluation sequence [passing judgment on self or others]) encompass an action sequence (how competence is acquired to carry

out performance). (See '"competence/performance.) The narrative schema is considered as recording 'life meaning' through its three essential domains: the qualification of the subject (mandate sequence), which introduces it into life; its realization by means of which it acts (action sequence); and finally the sanction (evaluation sequence) - at one and the same time retribution and recognition - which alone confirms the meaning of its actions and installs it as a subject (Semiotics and Language). The next step was to construct a narrative grammar and work out a syntax of narrative programs in which subjects are joined up with, or separated from, objects of value (desire), for example, wealth, a loved one or goodness, and thereby transformed. The subjects' changes of state are accounted for by simple operations such as conjunctions, disjunctions and transformations. The principle of confrontation between two subjects is interpreted as an elementary polemico-contractual relation. Whether engaged in conversation or in argumentation or actually fighting, the subjects in question are involved in a relation either of trust or of conflict. A series of modalizations is then postulated, two virtualizing (wanting and having to virtualize the process) and two actualizing ones (being able and knowing how to actualize it) that account for the subjects' modal competence, existence and performance, thereby establishing a semiotic syntax freed from Proppian constraints. This modal semiotics, concerned with defining the manipulating and sanctioning subject, is developed, opening the way to a semiotics of passions that studies both how passions modify pragmatic and cognitive performances and how epistemic categories, such as knowing and believing, modify the subject's competence and performance (Greimassian Semiotics 1989; 'Cognitive Dimension'). In short, Greimassian semiotics evolves from a semiotics of actions to a semiotics of cognition and passions and the challenge ahead lies in working out adequate and necessary descriptive procedures not only of the modal but also of the aspectual features of discourse: for example, aspects such as inchoativity (the beginning of an action), durativity (the unravelling of an action) and terminativity (the end of an action), that allow for the representation of temporalization as processes in texts. To analyse texts in this way is to construct models that can account, on the one hand, for the trajectory of the lives of subjects (the can-

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Greimas onical narrative schema) and, on the other, come to grips with both the problem of objects of value sought after by subjects and the organization of values into specific axiological discourse sequences. Generally, critics who disagree with Greimas' theory have either rejected the whole by denying the possibility of any theory in the human and social sciences ever attaining 'scientificity' or have attempted to demonstrate its internal insufficiencies and incoherences by examining problems related to semiotic and narratological modelling (the relationship between explanation and comprehension); and questions of immanence (the bracketing off of the referent), conversion (the relationship between the semiotic square, which is logically oriented - actional - and the cognitive and passional dimension of texts), stratificational models in general, and the generative trajectory (that is, should one proceed from deep structures to surface or the other way around). (See also *reference/referent.) PAUL PERRON Primary Sources Greimas, AJ. 'The Cognitive Dimension of Narrative Discourse.' Trans. Michael Rengstorf. New Literary History 7 (1976): 433-47. - Greimassian Semiotics. Trans, and ed. P. Perron and F. Collins. New Literary History 20.3 (1989). - 'The Interpretation of Myth: Theory and Practice.' 1971. Trans. Kipnis Clougher. In Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition. Ed. Pierre Maranda and Elli K. Maranda. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1971, 81-121. 'Elements pour une theorie du recit mythique.' Communications 8 (1966): 28-59. - Maupassant. The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises. Trans. P. Perron. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1988. La Semiotique du texte: Exercise Pratiques. Paris: Seuil, 1976. - 'Narrative Grammar: Units and Levels.' Trans. Phillip Bodrock. In Modern Language Notes 86 (1971): 793-807. 'Elements d'une grammaire narrative.' In Du Sens. Paris: Seuil, 1970, 157-83. - On Gods and Men. Trans. Milda Newman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Des Dieux et des hommes. Paris: PUF, 1985. - On Imperfection. Trans. Teresa Keane. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1992. De L'lrnperfection. Perigueux: Pierre Fanlac, 1987. - On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Trans. P. Perron and F. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Texts from Du Sens and Du Sens z. Paris: Seuil, 1970, 1983.

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- The Social Sciences: A Semiotic View. Trans. P. Perron and F. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Texts from Du Sens, Du Sens 2 and Semiotique et sciences sociales. Paris: Seuil, 1970, 1976, 1983. - Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Trans. A. Velie, D. McDowell, and R. Schleifer. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. Semantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. - and J. Courtes. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Trans. L. Crist, D. Patte et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Semiotique: Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie du langage. Paris: Hachette, 1979. - and J. Fontanille. The Semiotics of Passions. Trans. P. Perron and F. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Semiotique des passions. Paris: Seuil, 1991. - and Francois Rastier. 'The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints.' Yale French Studies (1968): 86-105. In Du Sens. Paris: Seuil, 1970, 135-55. Secondary Sources Calloud, J. Structural Analysis of Narrative. Philadelphia: Fortress P, 1976. Collins, F. 'More on Greimas in the Realm of Arthur.' Structuralist Review 2.2 (1981): 61-7. Culler, J. Structural Poetics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Fabbri, P., and P. Perron. Foreword to The Social Sciences: A Semiotic View. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. - Foreword to The Semiotics of Passions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Hawkes, T. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Jameson, F. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. - Foreword to On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Maddox, D. The Semiotics of Deceit: The Pathelin Era. London and Toronto: Bucknell UP, 1984. Parret, H. Discussing Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1974-

- Introduction to Paris School Semiotics I: Theory. Ed. P. Perron and F. Collins. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989. Patte, D., and A. Patte. Structural Exegesis: From Theory to Practice. Philadelphia: Fortress P, 1978. Perron, P. Introduction to On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. - Foreword to Maupassant. The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1988. - Introduction to Greimassian Semiotics. New Literary History 20.3 (1989).

Grivel - and \'. Collins, edv Paris School Semiotics: I Theory, II Practice. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, i q N g . Schleifer, R. A.j. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Grivel, Charles (b. Switzerland, 1936-) Literary critic and theorist. After completing his undergraduate studies in literature and philosophy (1960) at the University of Geneva under Marcel Raymond, *]ean Rousset and *jean Starobinski, Charles Grivel continued his multidisciplinary studies at Dakar (Senegal) in anthropology and the history of art. Returning to Europe in 1961, Grivel became assistant professor in Giessen (Germany) where he had close contact with *Hans Robert Jauss. Since then he has held a number of academic posts in the Netherlands and in Germany. Grivel's major work, Production de I'interet romanesque (1973), i g based on a theory of texts which is linked to cultural Communication theory. Other theoretical publications explore the manifold directions opened up by this book and lead him to analyse different types of discourses ranging from print media to photography. (See *sociocriticism, *discourse analysis theory, *text, *discourse.) Grivel's theory focuses on the novel, the textual effect of which he regards as a chain of significations themselves displaced by manifold readings in an evolving ideological framework. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Aspects of Kristevan research (Le Textc du roman) and of Derridean '*trace' (Of Grammatolo#i/) reappear in his theory, especially in its preoccupation with *intertextuality, the absence of beginnings and the problem of authenticity. (See *Julia Kristeva, *Jacques Derrida.) Given the inherent *indeterminacy of the novel as a form of discourse within a sociological ensemble (a General Textual Ideological Ensemble), its intention to stability and identity necessarily remains unrealized ('Theses preparatoires sur les intertextes' 1983). The cardinal fact for Grivel is that every novel is written in conformity to its context sociological, ideological, psychological, cultural. This leads him to speculate that a particular text or group of texts generates thematic or material differences which are inscribed in the general ideological production of the

novel. (See *theme, *materialist criticism.) Thus the narrative series perpetuates the chain of signifiers and masks its contradictions. The unveiling of the contradictions inherent in the diffusion of the novel (or of any broad and disseminated type of discourse) would ultimately rest on a theory which analyses both the production of meanings and readings in context, and which reveals the contradictions of the self-perpetuation of ideological universals ('Les Universaux du texte' 1978). (See ""universal.) Like *A.J. Greimas, Grivel analyses narrative structures as series of actions connected on the surface level but resting, at a deeper level, on a semantic paradigm congruent with the traditional square of contradiction. Narrative necessarily transforms because, as Greimas argues, it normally concludes with an inversion of its initial semantic content. The novel's norm, though, is stability, which is realized in a semantic redundancy justifying the established, cultural order. Thus, in these conclusions linked to a dialectical and somewhat Marxian perspective on the production of texts, Grivel, while inspired by the method of *Vladimir Propp and Greimas, is on the whole deeply opposed to their conclusions, be it only because they view the text of the novel as generating ahistoricity, a kind of eternal return of immutable 'nature': The tactic of the novel consists in imitating the overturning of the rule in order to reaffirm its final invulnerability' (Production de I'interet romanesque 201). Grivel thus demonstrates that the narrative in the novel produces affirmation through negation and arouses interest by temporarily suspending 'archetypal' significations. (See also *Marxist criticism, *archetype.) Grivel's global ideological research, which uncovers the dynamics of process, allows him to go beyond the framework of his narrow historical data (1870-80) and to enter into both general and precise considerations about the relationship between *margin and centre, literature and society. (See *centre/decentre.) The novel and every literary endeavour, except that which is (at a certain period) considered unreadable (but which will become readable later, thanks to its forced inclusion into an acceptable series), obscure daily contradictions and reduce class conflicts to individual and personal psychological problems: 'The novel renders unreal a conflict already silenced' (Production de I'interet romanesque 227).

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Grivel Analysing the main argumentative networks of the novel seen as an infinite series included in the General Text and also the framework of the constant recourse to fiction, Grivel underlines the fact that 'this is never it/ that one never reads what one thinks one reads. He shares this point of view with writers like Edmond Jabes (Du Desert au livre) who refers to a particular Jewish tradition (Midrash) of producing significations. This conception, with its far-reaching impact for hermeneutic criticism, is directly opposed to the generalized literary 'stock of beliefs' (fonds de creance) concerning the origin, stability, and authenticity of texts and concerning the possibility of establishing definitive interpretations. (See *hermeneutics.) Grivel's exploration of types of argumentation goes well beyond the novel and opens into the 'Societe des textes' (Litterature 63) linked to a semiotic-sociology of the *sign. (See *semiotics.) The different types of discourses and their arguments intermingle in various intertextual tactics and strategic games temporarily displacing paradigmatic categories (interior/exterior, heterogene/homogene, centre/margin), but always in order to reassert the same permanent archetypal discursive order. (See *game theory.) In all his writings Grivel considers the ways in which the building of closed narrative structures from a series of cultural/semantic elements is linked to a clashing of epistemologies. This violence in turn is linked to the imposition of beliefs in the return of the same in a cycle which a French writer like Philippe Sellers tries to deconstruct in his fictions (Femrne and Paradis). (See *deconstruction.) Grivel, also a writer of fiction, participates in this endeavour in texts such as Precipite d'une fouille and Le Grand et le petit Albert. This is why he regularly participates with other theoreticians and writers, like Toma Pavel, in the Noesis Foundation in Calaceite (Spain), dedicated to the exploration of the numerous aspects of fictionality. PATRICKIMBERT

Primary Sources Grivel, Charles. 'L'Appareil de representation naturaliste, ce qu'il s'y marque. Le corps, le nu.' In Le naturalisms 10—18: 197—228. - 'Appareils et machines a representation: J'introduis aux machines.' MAN A 8 (1989): 11-17. - 'La Communication de texte. Cadrage semiotique de la theorie de 1'information.' Neohelicon, IV 3-4 (1970): 29-64.

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- 'Dejets. La Poussee sur le cadre.' In Texte-Image. Bild-Text. Ed. Sybil Dumchen and Michael Nerlich. Colloquium Berlin 2-4. XII, 1988, TU Berlin, 55-69. - 'Le Discours du sexe.' (Fin de siecle en litterature). In Die Modernisierung des Ich. Ed. M. Pfister. Passau: Wissenschaftverlag R. Rothe, 1989, 96-107. - 'Esquisse d'une theorie des systemes doxiques.' Degres 24-25 (1980-1): di-d23. - Le Fantastique. MANA i (1989). - Tdee du texte.' Romantische Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte / Cahiers d'histoire des litteratures romanes 1-2 (1985): 162-80. - 'Inscription des codes, mesure de 1'information textuelle, degres d'actes de correspondance: Le compliment, la lettre.' Universita di Urbino, Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Documents de travail 52, mars 1976. - Production de I'interet romanesque. Un Etat du texte (1870-1880). Un Essai de constitution de sa theorie. La Haye-Paris: Mouton, 1973. - Production de I'interet romanesque. Vol. complementaire. Hoofddorp-Amstelveen. Hoekstra Offset, 1973. - 'Le Retournement parodique des discours a leurres constants.' In Dire la parodie. Colloque de Cerisy. Ed. Clive Thomson and Alain Pages. New York: Lang, 1989. American University Studies II 16: 1-34. - 'Semiotique des representations.' In Semiotique en jeu. Ed. Michel Arrive and Jean-Claude Coquet. Hades-Benjamins, 1987, 193-211. - 'La Societe des textes. Mediation mediatique en 13 points.' Litterature 63 (1986): 3-23. For a more complete version see Degres 46-7 (1986): e.i-e.2g. - 'The Society of Texts. A Mediation on Media in 13 Points.' Sociocriticism i (1985): 153-78. - 'Le Sujet de 1'ecole et de la litterature.' In Litterature, enseignement, societe. Revue de I'lnstitut de sociologie. Ed. R. Heyndels. Bruxelles: Universite libre de Bruxelles, nos. 3-4, 461-79. - 'Theses preparatoires sur les intertextes.' In Dialogizitat. Herausgegeben von Renate Lachmann. Miinchen, Fink, 1983, 237-48. (Actes du Symposium Dialogizitat in Prozessen der literarischen Kommunikation, 8-11 juillet 1980, Universite de Constance). - 'Les Universaux de texte.' Litterature 30 (1978): 25-50. - 'Vingt-deux theses preparatoires sur la doxa, le reel et le vrai.' Revue des sciences humaines 201 (1986): 49-55. Spivak, Gayatri C. 'Reading the World: Literary Studies in the 19805.' In Writing and Reading Differently. Ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1985.

Guattari

Guattari, (Pierre) Felix (b. France, 1910-) Psychoanalyst, political activist and theorist. Educated in philosophy and pharmacy, Felix Guattari has since 1953 been an analyst at the Clinique de la Bord a CourCheverny, where he has engaged in alternative psychoanalytic praxis. The Clinique de la Borde has been a key institution in the socalled antipsychiatric movement inspired in part by the *psychoanalytic theory of *Jacques Lacan. In the 19^0$ and 196115 Guattari attended Lacan's seminars, underwent analysis with Lacan from 1962 to 1969 and in 1969 joined Lacan's Hcole Freudienne. From the mid-1950s Guattari published essays in psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially on the issues of the institution and the group. These essays were collected in Psychanalyse ct transversalite [Psychoanalysis and Transversality 1972]. However, Guattari was also engaged in Marxist politics, at first in a strained relationship with the French Communist party, and later completely outside the party, which he increasingly came to see as restrictive and reactionary. He founded or was a member of numerous political and research groups and took an active role in the events of May 1968. In 1969 he met the philosopher *Gilles Deleuze and they began to work together. (See also *Marxist criticism.) Guattari is known for his collaborations with Deleuze, especially for his work on the two volumes of Capitalisme ct schizophrenic [Capitalism and Schizophrenia], L'Anti-Oedipe [AntiOedipus 1972] and Mille plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus 1980]. L'Anti-Oedipe is a critique of the capitalist era as a time when the tyrannical state and the oedipalized individual have been fostered by political and psychiatric institutions to the detriment of the more liberatory group and 'sub-individual' (the human as a body of variant and unorganized desires). Mille plateaux uses the terms of this critique to extend the analysis into various pre-capitalist pasts and a post-capitalist future, thereby working to displace and marginalize the present capitalist and oedipalized era. Although it is impossible to separate the contributions of the two men to this project, the two key terms of the work, capitalism and schizophrenia, indicate an alignment with the basic interests of Guattari's work from the 19505 onwards: the critique of capitalism and of institutional psychiatric practice. Guattari's own work, however, is much

less concerned than Deleuze's with a reading of sympathetic literary and philosophical figures of the Western tradition, such as Spinoza, *Nietzsche and Proust. Guattari has produced a substantial body of work independent of Deleuze as well as in collaboration with a number of others, including jean Oury (the founder of the Clinique de la Borde), the Italian Marxist Toni Negri and the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik. An elaboration and application of earlier concepts developed with Deleuze such as schizoanalysis, the micropolitics of desire, molecular revolution, and the importance of understanding human activity as machinic, these works reveal Guattari's search for 'new spaces of freedom' outside of the restrictions of Western capitalism and East Bloc socialism. Guattari's reconfiguration of psychoanalysis and Marxism, especially in his work with Deleuze, has yet to receive adequate evaluation, which would work through its many insights and limitations. Although the specifically literary is not Guattari's overriding concern, his work could be made use of in any politically or psychoanalytically informed literary theory, critique or practice, and has influenced, for instance, the writings of German dramatist and theorist Heiner Muller. MARK FORTIER

Primary Sources Guattari, Felix. Les Annees d'hiver. 1980-1985. Paris: Barrault, 1986. - Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris: Galilee, 1989. - L'Inconscient machinique: Essais dc schizo-anali/sc. Paris: Recherches, 1979. - Psychanalyse ct transversalite. Paris: Maspero, 1972. - La Revolution nwleculaire. Paris: Recherches, 1977. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin, 7984. - Les Trois ecologies. Paris: Galilee, 1989. - and Gilles Deleuze. Capitalisme et schizophrenic i. L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977. - and Gilles Deleuze. Kafka: Pour une litterature mineur. Paris: Minuit, 1975. Kafka: For a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. - and Gilles Deleuze. Capitalisme et schizophrenic 2: Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian

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Habermas Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. - Eugenio Miccini and Luigi Serravalli. Sarenco. Paris: Veyrier H., 1988. - and Toni Negri. Lcs Noui'eaux cspaccs de libcrte. Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985. Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance. Trans. Michael Ryan. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. - Jean Oury and Jean Tosquelles. Pratique de I'institutionnel et politique. Paris: Matrice, 1986. - and Suely Rolnik. Micropolitica: Cartografias do Desejo. Petropolis, Brazil: Vozes, 1986.

Gubar, Susan David: see Gilbert, Sandra Mortola, and Susan David Gubar.

Habermas, Jurgen (b. Germany, 1929-) Philosopher. Having received his doctorate at the University of Bonn, Habermas worked as an assistant to *Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. (See *Frankfurt School.) In 1961 he received the Habilitation degree from the University of Mainz and began teaching in Heidelberg where he was a colleague of *Hans-Georg Gadamer. Three years later he was named professor of philosophy at Frankfurt. His stay there was cut short when he was censured for having supported the German student protests of 1967-9. Since 1971 Habermas has been a member of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, where he is now co-director and visiting professor in Frankfurt. His first important book was Communication and the Evolution of Society (1962). Knowledge and Human Interests, his first philosophical work (1968), marked the beginning of his still growing influence in the Englishspeaking world. In these two books he displays a mastery of and participation in the hermeneutic tradition. His. work, together with that of *Paul Ricoeur, has been influential in bringing together humanities and social sciences under the scrutiny of a philosophical interpretation. (See *hermeneutics.) To understand Habermas' complex philosophy of communication one must begin with his fundamental premise that the two essential types of human action are work and communication. Work is the purposeful, rational use of tools for the satisfaction of human needs; communication is interaction through which 352

the knowing subject comes to know himself or herself through the eyes of others. The separation is essential since it is commonplace to be liberated from material want and still be enslaved in the ideological prison of institutional language. The major contribution Habermas has made to hermeneutics must be put into the context of his debate with Gadamer, which begins with his 1967 review of Truth and Method but continues through his constant re-elaboration of his own work in response to Gadamer's powerful argument. The differences between the two thinkers come down to one essential point: Gadamer holds that there are no privileged positions which can be construed as being outside of history since there can be no interpreter without language. The aim of phenomenological hermeneutics is not to bring a certain aspect of the world under theoretical control or to clear away institutional propaganda of vested interests through a critique of *ideology. (See also *phenomenological criticism.) Rather, phenomenological hermeneutics hopes to arrive at understanding through dialogue, first with others in one's own culture but also with others from other cultures and from the past. Habermas retorts that it is impossible to have a dialogue with someone who is trapped in the ideological webs of social institutions and whose only function is selfaggrandizement. In order to have a dialogue both partners must be free of institutional ideology in the domain of communication. To pursue the challenge posed by Gadamerian hermeneutics, Habermas developed an ever more comprehensive and ambitious program of ideological critique, his Universal Pragmatics. This program has five main points: (i) that the very act of dialogue implicitly makes truthclaims; (2) that all speakers who are communicatively competent operate on the basis of pragmatic universals; (3) that in order to study communication the philosopher has to construct an ideal speech situation but that this construct is present in everyday speech as a pragmatic assumption; (4) that truth is a truthclaim which can be rationally judged to have validity in the *discourse of the ideal speech situation; and (5) that human vested interests when institutionalized become social belief systems or ideologies which preclude social interaction. (See universal.) A closer look at these five basic points brings out the fundamental agreement and disagreement between Gadamer and Habermas

Habermas and reveals the grounds for Ricoeur's mediation in the debate. The first point about the implicit truth-claims of speaking to another person in dialogue can be summed up this way. When two persons have a successful spoken interchange, it is because a relation has been established in which they have come to an understanding about something. This relationship can be explained only through the recognition that some things have been said as implicit truth-claims and that these have been recognized by both partners. The fundamental assumption is that understanding is the basic aim of communication. The second aim of Habermas' program is that of the pragmatic universals of dialogue. Habermas argues that for two persons to engage in dialogue both speakers must be aware of each other as subjects, must be aware of the world around them and, third, must be able to distinguish between the two. The two speakers draw upon the linguistic tools available to establish this recognition and distinction. Habermas claims that these are universals of communication which are pragmatically established. A third aim is the establishment of the ideal speech situation. Dialogue assumes that it is possible and desirable for the two speakers to come to some agreement. To come to an agreement does not mean that one speaker overpowers or intimidates the other but that the agreement is based exclusively on reason. This ideal situation, however, is impossible if there are any external or internal constraints such as fear, timidity or ignorance. The aim of the ideal situation is to serve as a goal toward which a systematic critique might strive. The fourth aim is to establish truth. The truth-claim, which can be explicit or implicit, must be judged as to its validity on the basis of a rational consensus among all the speakers. This consensus can only be arrived at through free dialogue. The fifth aim is to establish a systematic critique of ideology that would enhance the possibilities of speakers to solve human problems and differences through dialogue. Gadamer insists that there is no philosophical justification for the assertion that by means of a systematic critique it is possible to combat the effects of ideology. Since all speakers can only speak through language which is made through the values and value systems of the community of speakers, any critique does not rise above ideology; it revises, supplants and adjusts ideologies. Habermas' response is that

Gadamer has not considered the institutional formation of ideology which supports the vested economic and political interests of these institutions. Not personal belief systems but institutionally devised ones are the impediment to communication. Therefore, a systematic study of social communication must be aimed at removing the barriers of ideology operating under the pretence of truth. In literary theory Habermas' philosophy provides a powerful attack on what *Fredric Jameson has called the 'political unconscious'; Habermas' argument also conforms with Ricoeur's view that the final aim of interpretation is to redescribe the world of action of both critic and readers. (See also *speech act theory, *communication theory.) MARIO J. VALDES

Primary Sources Habermas, Jiirgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon P, 1979. - 'Habermas Talking: An Interview.' By Boris Frankel. In Theory and Society I (1974): 37-5. - Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. J.J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon P, 1975. - Legitimation Crisis. Trans. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon P, 1975. - The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1987. - 'A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method.' 1967. In Understanding and Social Inquiry. Ed. F. Dallmayr and T. McCarthy. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame UP, 1977, 335-63. - Theory and Practice. Trans. J. Viertel. Boston: Beacon P, 1973. - Toward a Rational Society: Student Protests, Science and Politics. Trans. J.J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon P, 1970.

Secondary Sources Bernstein, Richard. The Restructuring of Social and Political Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976. Giddens, Anthony. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Guess, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge UP, 1981. Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory. Horkheimer to Habermas. London: Hutchinson, 1980. McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1978.

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Hartman O'Neil, John, ed. 0?; Critical Theory. New York: Seabury, 1976. Ricoeur, Paul. 'Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology.' In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981, 63-100. - Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia UP, 1986, 216-53. Thompson, John B. Critical Hermeneutics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. - and David Held. Habermas: Critical Debates. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1982.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. (b. Germany, 1929-) Author, editor, literary critic, and educator. The Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D., Hartman has published widely on biblical texts, contemporary "literature, cultural criticism, and Holocaust studies, though his chief contributions to criticism have been in the areas of Romanticism and literary theory. Since the publication of his first book, The Unmediated Vision (1954), Hartman has been known best for his work on the poetry of William Wordsworth. At the centre of Hartman's approach to the study of literature is his conception of the interpreter or reader who stands not in a subservient relation to the literary work, merely illuminating or explicating it, but who rather engages the *text in a dialogue that also reveals the creativity of the reader. Interpretive commentary itself thus becomes a text that legitimately can be regarded as a form of creative writing. While Hartman is a close reader of texts, he is never content with merely local explication, but rather always seeks to make his reading address larger issues of literary history, genre, the nature of literary language, or the practice of criticism itself. For Hartman, conventional academic prose style needs to be liberated to offer the critic the same range of rhetorical and stylistic freedoms that the literary author possesses. Specifically, this more adventurous style of Hartman's results in a greater degree of playfulness, punning and rhetorical brilliance than is traditionally found in Anglo-American literary criticism. Hartman's method tends to operate on the level of the signifier, exercising the associative, echoic or sylleptic resources of lan-

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guage. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Yet stabilizing the verbal ingenuity is the ground of scholarly argument, the close reading thoroughly informed by literary history or by the implicit acknowledgment of critical decorum. As a comparatist, Hartman has always been attuned to traditions and developments in Continental criticism and theory. His approach has shifted from phenomenological modes of criticism in the 19505 and 19605 toward the more linguistically oriented methodologies of the 19705 and 19805, finding a genial spirit in the emergence of *Jacques Derrida and *poststructuralism, and producing some of his best essays in response to the new wave of theory. (See *phenomenological criticism.) Despite his close association with *deconstruction and the 'Yale School' of criticism, Hartman was never dogmatic in his adoption of poststructuralist principles, never truly an adherent, maintaining rather a Blakean scepticism of systems. There were, however, many aspects of poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in particular that attracted Hartman: greater interpretive freedom for commentary and the commentator, legitimation of a creative critical style, new techniques for understanding literary language and, perhaps above all, the necessity of theory itself. Though Hartman's interest in theory predates the rise of poststructuralism - even his earliest works reveal considerable theoretical preoccupations - there is no doubt that the rise of theory as a discipline was felt by Hartman as both necessary and liberating in the history of literary studies. In Wordsworth's Poetry ijSj-iSiq. (1964), which won the Christian Gauss Award, Hartman presents an influential reading of Wordsworth in which Nature and Imagination engage each other in a 'drama of consciousness.' Proceeding from the definition that Wordsworthian imagination is 'consciousness of self raised to apocalyptic pitch/ Hartman traces the development of Wordsworth's fearful understanding that Nature would lead the poet beyond Nature; the drama that is played out in Wordsworth's poetry thus necessitates what Hartman calls the 'humanizing of imagination,' the conversion of a mighty apocalyptic vision into a poetry of earth. Yet the struggle of conversion, as Hartman demonstrates, is problematic and never completely successful; Wordsworth's visionary imagination remains

Heidegger in conflict with and in excess of any exquisite fitting to the world. Hartman's book introduced a new level of theoretical sophistication to Wordsworth studies and made the 'apocalyptic' Wordsworth the centre of critical discussion for decades. It also argued for placing Wordsworth and Romanticism in the larger context of classical, Renaissance and 18th-century literary traditions. Though Hartman did not emphasize theory itself in Wordsworth's Poetry, preferring instead to subordinate psychology and phenomenology to his close reading of the theme of consciousness, he prepared the way for Romantic literature and Wordsworth especially to emerge as a proving ground for newer theories. His recent book The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), a collection of his essays on Wordsworth written since the appearance of Wordsworth's Poetry in 1964, demonstrates a number of such theoretical approaches to the study of Wordsworth, including *structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and *semiotics. (See also *psychoanalytic theory.) The one element that has informed all of Hartman's work from the beginning, first as a mode of thought, and more recently as an explicit *theme, is his interest in Judaic studies, particularly Holocaust education and the practice of Midrash, a form of interpretation of sacred Jewish texts that focuses on narrative gaps or discontinuities. As cofounder and director of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Hartman has acted as adviser to many projects on Holocaust education and remembrance, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He has also written essays and edited volumes on social and political aspects of the Holocaust and on Midrashic readings of biblical and other literary texts. I. DOUGLAS KNEALE

Primary Sources Hartman, Geoffrey H. Andre Malraux. London: Bowes and Bowes; Now York: Hilary House, 1960. - Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970. New Haven: Yale UP, i 970, - Criticism in the Wilderness: I h e Study of Literature Today. Yale UP, u>Hn. - Easy Pieces. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. - The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, i 97 s. - Minor Prophecies: Ihe Literary Essay in the Culture War^. Cambridge: H a r v a r d UP, 1 9 9 1 .

- Saving the Text: Literature/Denida/Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. - The Unmediated Vision. An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valery. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954- The Unremarkable Wordsworth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. - Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814.. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964; 2nd ed. 1967; 3rd ed. 1971; Harvard Paperbound, 1987. - Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. - Canon and Commentary. With Moshe Idel. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. - Hopkins: A Selection of Critical Essays. PrenticeHall, 1966. - Midrash and Literature. With Sanford Budick. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. - New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth. New York: Columbia UP, 1972. - Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. - Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities. With David Thorburn. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973. - Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. With Patricia Parker. London: Methuen, 1985. - Shapes of Memory. London: Blackwell, 1992. - Wordsworth: Selected Poetry and Prose. New York: Signet, 1970.

Heidegger, Martin (b. Germany, iSSg-d. 1976) Philosopher. A student of *Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger emerged from and transformed the phenomenological movement and the hermeneutic tradition of continental philosophy. He taught at Marburg (1923-8) and Freiburg im Breisgau (1928-44) and was briefly rector of Freiburg University (1933-4). Heidegger's work has influenced much contemporary thought: existentialists (*Jean-Paul Sartre), Marxists and poststructuralists (""Jacques Derrida, *Jean Baudrillard) have taken up his critique of modern society, technology and the '*logocentrism' of metaphysics. Ontological *hermeneutics (*Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Paul Ricoeur) owes much to Heidegger's understanding of language and history. (See also *phenomenological criticism, *Marxist criticism, *poststructuralism.) Heidegger's first studies were theological and through many transformations the question of the relation of the logos to the divine remained central to all his work. By his own account, the central question of Heidegger's

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Heidegger thought is the question of being: what does it mean to say that a human being, a thing, a work is, each in its own way, in being? Heidegger's investigation of this question - which is both 'systematic' and 'historical' - calls for the radical dismantling and recovery on a more primordial ground of the entire metaphysical tradition, from its Greek beginnings to its consummation in and dissolution into the technological practices and metadiscourses of our time. The question of art, in turn, is implicated in the being-question and Heidegger thus calls for the abandonment of the metaphysical premises of aesthetics. One may distinguish at least six major phases in his thought directly or indirectly pertinent to an exploration of the arts: (i) Sein und Zeit [Being and Time 1927] and the lectures on mood - Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929-30) - the first remains the starting point for any reflection on a 'Heideggerian' literary theory; (2) 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1936) and the Beitrage zur Philosophic (Vom Ereignis 1936-8), its systematic context; (3) the Holderlin lectures (volumes 39, 52 and 53 in the complete edition); (4) Heidegger's recovery of *Friedrich Nietzsche's aesthetics (The Will to Power as Art 1936-7); (5) the late essays on language and poetry collected in On the Way to Language (1959); (6) essays on technology and the fate of art and thought in the technological era (Discourse on Thinking 1959; 'The Question Concerning Technology' 1953). The question of art as it is posed within the horizon of technology is the essential source of Heidegger's reflection on art. The arts, in Heidegger's estimation, have the potential of bringing to light and 'in-corporating' the dynamic event of the arrival and departure of beings into being in the face of a technological modelling of all that is as static, 'finished' products on line and on call. Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger's first major work, has as its goal the analysis of the structure of human being taken as a clue to the investigation of the meaning - the different possible senses - of being. Human being, or Da-sein, is understood as openness-to-being: Dasein is the site where beings manifest themselves. The analysis of language, truth and 'emotion' carried out in this work, while far removed from the specific concerns of literary theory, nonetheless offers the basis for a radical reappraisal of "literature (Corngold; Marshall). The language of poetry has traditionally

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been regarded as being without 'truth value.' In the formulation of *I.A. Richards, it is composed of 'pseudo-statements' which are parasitical (*J.L. Austin) upon 'normal' language use: given that poetic devices have a merely decorative function without cognitive insight, the chief 'value' of poetry finally resolves itself into its ability to communicate sincerely the emotion of the speaker. This account rests on the assumptions that the pre-eminent form of language use is the prepositional schema of the statement and that truth is a property of the proposition. In deconstructing this metaphysical doctrine, Heidegger allows that the origin of truth is not the proposition but the disclosure of the things themselves. (See *deconstruction.) For in order for a statement to say truely or falsely about something, thus corresponding or failing to correspond to it, the things must already be manifest. Truth as the openness of manifestation, as the 'unhiddenness' of beings (the Greek aletheia), is the condition of the 'truth' of the statement. The statement, moreover, is just one, derivative way in which things can be disclosed and thus become meaningful. What Heidegger calls *discourse (die Rede) understood as the articulation or 'jointedness' of the meaningfulness of Dasein's being in the world - articulates itself more primordially in other forms of disclosure - for example, in action, in silence and in art works. The power of literature to disclose, therefore, cannot be judged by the criterion of the proposition. The truth of the artwork ultimately rests on its power to found a structure of meaning or 'world.' Propositional language-use makes statements about aspects of the already founded and is in this sense less primordial than the linguistic work. Inasmuch as Heidegger deconstructs the metaphysics of subjectivity he also distances himself from the long-standing aesthetic problems associated with the concept of 'aesthetic emotions' and attempts to ground the nature of 'emotion' in the fundamental structure of Dasein. Human being is always open - and at the same time closed - to beings; we are always already prereflectively disposed to our being in the world as a whole. Disposition (die Befindlichkeit), which opens the whole of what is to us to disclose and conceal our world, expresses itself through different ways of being attuned (die Stimrnung) to and at one with things. Emotions arise out of our being-attuned, out of

Heidegger the rhythm of our involvement with things. Heidegger argues that the 'subject' in its selfconsciousness and the 'objective' world of 'facts' are equally derivative abstractions from the unitary structure of a given rhythm. In Heidegger's estimation, literary works (as well as other art forms) play an essential role in communicating attunements or moods. The work discloses the meaningful whole of a set of relations. In effect, it manifests the possibilities for being of a fictional world by giving expression to the governing moods which modulate the work to attune the different modes of being presented in it - the being of humans, of nature, of the divinities - to each other. The modes of attunement of the 'chain of being/ as presented in a literary work, would correspond in some respect to the traditional plot forms which developed in the course of literary history. By the same measure, tropes articulate the interconnectedness and mutual sympathy of different modes of being on the microlevel of the work: hence, Dylan Thomas' 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,/ Drives my green age' gathers the human, organic and inorganic into one articulated whole. In later works (in his Holderlin lectures), Heidegger argues that artworks have the potential to inaugurate, as well as to structure and communicate, fundamental attunements; their disclosive power is therefore more primordial than that of rational discourse, for reason always operates within a horizon of disclosure opened up by an attunement. Every attunement is historical, not merely in that a certain 'Zeitgeist' agitates an era, but that the basic, prereflective understanding inherent in an attunement establishes the rhythm of the interrelatedness of beings, the how of their manifestation, and that this rhythm of manifestation inaugurates what we call a 'period' of history. 'Renaissance melancholy/ 'Romantic agony/ and the stylistic periods of art history, for example, may thus be read as conceptualizations of an attunement to beings as a whole. The same goes for current attempts to define *postmodernism by describing its characteristic mood (is it boredom? or panic?). Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art' (1936), his first major essay dedicated entirely to the question of art, is central to his development of the question of being, die Seinsfrage. While the 'Origin' does not deal with the issue of the meaning of technology, it is within the

horizon of this question that the essay has to be understood to be made fruitful for us. Two key questions are posed: (i) Why art? What necessity for this kind of event and this kind of being in the technological epoch?; (2) Why the artwork? What 'originates' the work and in what sense is the work itself an origin? In his analysis of 'world' in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger begins with a consideration of equipment and its use. The being of equipment, of a tool such as a hammer, for example, is circumscribed by its servicability and fulfils this being when it unobtrusively 'disappears' into the work-context where it is serviceable. The particular world, moreover, which gives the use of the tool in its immediate work-context its 'rationale/ also withdraws from view as long as tools function without breakdown. As Heidegger's late discussions of technology will propose, the smooth frictionless functioning of equipment totalities is the telos of the technological ordering of the modern 'world/ By 'world/ however, Heidegger ultimately understands the event, the open horizon of meaningfulness which constitutes the wherefore and why of technological mastery. 'World' in this dynamic sense is dissimulated by the functioning of the system of production because it aims at presenting all that is as available (or unavailable) stock. Whereas equipment disappears into its functioning, and becomes the function of an equipmental context, art has the power to 'save' the phenomena by allowing each thing to come into its own and shine forth as that which it is. The artwork acts as a kind of midwife to manifestation, which is to say, to the emergence of truth; its truth-potential is greater than that of equipment in the rank order of beings because it allows the things to be - to come into their own - more fully. In the late essays collected in On the Wai/ to Language Heidegger allows that it is ultimately the essence of language as 'saying' (die Sage) which calls upon things to show, to 'own' themselves as that which they are. The structure of the artwork, moreover, manifests the world-as-event, bringing it out of the concealment into which it is cast by the opacity of technological functioning. In this way, by bringing a world to light, and by saving the phenomena from becoming transparent functions and weightless simulacra of themselves, art becomes necessary to the manifestation of the being of beings.

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Heidegger The artwork comprehends the structure of an event which includes the artist (who comes into being through the work) and the 'audience' (die Beivahrenden - the 'preservers') which 'preserves' the work by letting the work happen, put itself to work, in their lives. Only in a derivative sense, therefore, is the work an object of aesthetic contemplation defined by its formal qualities. In Heidegger's estimation, the object-being of art, which is inscribed by cultural critique, institutionalization and the economics of the art industry, is a relatively static representation and derivation of its workbeing. But neither is the literary work, for example, a '*text' understood as a subsystem of signifiers fading away at the edges, as it were, into the context of 'writing in general.' (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The work has its own, unique self-subsistence and shines forth within the limits set by its form. The self-subsistence of the work, which withdraws it from the grasp of conceptuality, is what Heidegger calls 'earth.' The work unites in a fruitful strife the intelligibility of a world and the self-seclusion and withdrawal of earth. The way in which a historical earth and world are attuned to each other gives the work its unique structure. It is precisely as this unique 'thing' that the work works and it works by enacting and incorporating the event of the emergence of beings. But emergence into manifestation is itself the primordial sense of 'truth.' Hence the origin of the work is the happening of truth, inasmuch as it incorporates itself in a being. With this incorporation, the work itself becomes an origin: for just as a sculpture, one of Henry Moore's 'Reclining Figures' for example, creates its own space, so the work opens up a new site, and new possibilities for being emerge from the rhythm it establishes in the midst of beings. The work 'legislates' by setting the measure for beings by overthrowing conventional ways of seeing to found a new law. Broadly speaking, Heidegger's explication and 'mystical' reflections on Holderlin may be considered as a more concrete working out of the conditions of authentic community and historicity first broached in Being in Time. The lectures devoted to this poet mark a crucial turning in Heidegger's thought: for example, the potential of art will be unrealized and the work remain a truncated fragment as long as the earth does not become a homeland (Heimat) to its peoples. The homeland has nothing

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to do with the modern nation-state, for this collective entity is conditioned by the metaphysical tradition beyond which Heidegger seeks to go. The homeland rather is as the healing whole of the mutual attunement of a people and their earth. This attunement realizes itself in the festival when the wholeness of the homeland sends itself to humanity in the guise of the messengers (the gods) of the holy. The poet receives these messengers and incorporates their message in the work ('Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry'). The seemingly hermetic character of Heidegger's encounter with Holderlin apparently offers no way, no methodology, which might guide us toward the 'same' goal or insight. Hence the frustration of many commentators (de Man, Fynsk). Yet Heidegger would argue that his approach to Holderlin is as rigorously phenomenological (although in a transformed sense) as his description of Dasein in Sein und Zeit. In fact, it can be argued that Heidegger's way to the things themselves, including the poem, cannot be a methodology. In section 77 of the Beitrage, entitled 'Satze uber "die Wissenschaft"' ('Statements concerning "Science" '), Heidegger takes issue with the premises of the modern sciences (die Wissenschaft includes the human as well as the natural sciences). Heidegger does not consider science - and thus also literary theory and criticism to the extent they aspire to formulate a methodology and become systematic - as a form of knowledge, but rather as the derivative institutionalization of a knowledge of the truth (the manifestation) of beings. Hence every attempt to formulate a methodological approach to poetry would exclude itself from the truth of poetry (which does not mean that a methodology could not ascertain much that is correct). Literary theory predetermines the totality of its object area or field as already known in advance. Its investigations amount to determinations of the correctness or incorrectness of statements within the field of the given. It is precisely this presupposition, that poetry belongs to the already-given, which Heidegger questions (poetry is rather the radical overthrow of the given if it 'is' - in being [as origin] - at all). Confirmed in its objectbeing, on the other hand, poetry ceases to be poetry and becomes 'literature'; but with the progressive triumph and pre-eminence of methodology ('theory') over its subject area,

Heidegger even the object-being of the work implodes it becomes 'text.' Defined as a cultural object or an ideological structure, as an expression of the artist or a formal system, the work is not in being as a work but merely makes itself available in some derivative objectification or function of itself and the general economy which circumscribes it. A 'reform' of method, moreover, cannot change this state of affairs, because what counts methodologically is the production of results, not the essential truth of its subject. A turn in our relation to poetry, Heidegger maintains, is only possible within the horizon of a fundamentally new attunement to the whole of what is: only when we cease to think primarily in categories of production and consumption can poetry come into its own again. While we cannot icill such a turn to come about, a turn in our attunement to beings can 'overcome' us insofar as we are open to the mystery of the withdrawal of beings - which postmodernism experiences as the implosion of phenomena - from the vicegrip of technological calculation. BERNHARDRADLOFF

Primary Sources Heidegger, Martin. Beitrage zur Philosophic (Vom Ereignis). Gesamtausgabe (GA), vol. 65. Frankfurt/ Main: Klostermann, 1989. - 'Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens.' In Zur Sachc des Denkens. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1969. Trans. The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.' In Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Knell. New York: Harper, 1977, 364-9^. - 'Die Frage nach der Technik.' In Vortragc und Aufsatze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1954. Trans. 'The Question Concerning Technology.' In Basic Writings, 283-317. - Gelassenhcit. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. Trans. John M. Anderson, E . H . Freund. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper, 1966, 43—57. - Die Gntndbegriffe der Mctaphusik. Welt-Endliclikeit-Einsainkeit. GA vols. 29-30, 1983. - 'Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens.' In Denkerfahrungcn. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1983. - Holderlins Hi/inne 'Andenken.' GA vol. 52, 1982. - Holderlins Hi/mnen 'Gennanien' und 'Der Rhein.' GA vol. 39, 1980. - Holderlins Hi/nine 'Der Ister.' GA vols. 53, 1984. - 'Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung.' In Erlautcrungen :u Hoderlins Dichtung. GA vols. 4, 33-49. Trans. Douglas Scott. 'Holderlin and the Essence

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of Poetry.' In Existence and Being. Ed. Werner Brock. Chicago: Regnery, 1949, 291-315. Nietzsche I: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Trans. David Farrell Krell. Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art. New York: Harper, 1979. Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie, Edward Robinson. Being in Time. London: SCM, 1962. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Tubingen: Neske, 1959. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. On the Way to Language. New York: Harper, 1971. 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.' In Holzwege. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1950. Trans. Albert Hofstadler. 'The Origin of the Work of Art.' In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper, 1971, 17-87. 'Wozu Dichter.' In Holzwege, 265-316. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. 'What Are Poets For?' In Poetry, Language, Thought, 89-142.

Secondary Works Bruns, Gerald L. Heidegger's Estrangements. Language, Truth and Poetry in the Later Writings. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Corngold, Stanley. 'Sein und Zeit: Implications for Poetics.' boundary 2 4 (Winter 1976): 439-55. Fynsk, Christopher. Heidegger: Thought and Historicity. Ithaca: Cornell, 1986. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Herrneneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. Haar, Michel. 'Le Primat de la Stimmung sur la corporeite du Dasein.' Heidegger Studies 2 (1986): 67-79. Halliburton, David. Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. von Herrmann, F.W. Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1980. Kockelmans, Joseph J. Heidegger and Science. Washington: UP of America, 1985. - Heidegger on Art and Art Works. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985. Levin, David Michael. 'Logos and Psyche: A Herrneneutics of Breathing.' Research in Phenomenology 14 (1984): 121-47. de Man, Paul. 'Heidegger's Exegesis of Holderlin.' Trans. Wlad Godzich. In Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983, 246-66. Marshall, Donald. The Ontology of the Literary Sign: Notes Toward a Heideggerian Revision of Semiology.' In Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature. Ed. William V. Spanos. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. McCormick, Peter. Heidegger and the Language of the World. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1976. Metha, J.L. The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. New York: Harper, 1971.

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Hirsch Palmier, Jean Michel. Les Ecrits politiqucs dc Heidegger. Paris: Editions de 1'Herne, 1968. Vycinas, Vincent. Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969.

Hirsch, E(ric) D(onald), Jr. (b. U.S.A., 1928-) Literary critic, educator. Educated at Cornell (B.A. 1950) and Yale (MA. 1953; Ph.D. 1957), E.D. Hirsch taught in the English departments of Yale (1956-60) and the University of Virginia (1966-) where he was named William R. Kenan Professor in 1973. Although he has written substantial works on a variety of topics, including Wordsworth, Blake and the principles of teaching composition, his two major contributions are both ultimately hermeneutical in the broad sense of that term. (See *hermeneutics.) The first, with which Hirsch's name was primarily identified from the moment 'Objective Interpretation' appeared until the publication of Cultural Literacy (1987), is the argument for the possibility and, in general, the necessity of reconstructing an author's intended meaning ('Objective Interpretation' 1960). The second, presented in Cultural Literacy, is that to understand even simple texts the reader must necessarily possess a minimum knowledge of the culture the knowledge that authors assume to be shared by their intended readers. (See *text.) 'Objective Interpretation' is a direct challenge to two approaches to the interpretation of ""literature that were powerful at the time of writing. First, it denies what was widely understood to be an essential dogma of *New Criticism, that literary texts are to be understood without regard to authorial intention, the historical circumstances surrounding their composition, or biographical information about the author. Second, Hirsch's essay denies the doctrine of the school of hermeneutics (deriving primarily from *Hans-Georg Gadamer) that it is impossible to recover the historical situation of a text sufficiently to understand the author's intended meaning. Hirsch's thesis is elaborated in Validity in Interpretation (1967) in which he distinguishes between 'verbal meaning'- the object of 'understanding' - and 'significance' - the object of 'criticism.' 'Verbal meaning is whatever someone has willed to convey by a particular sequence of linguistic signs and which can be

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conveyed (shared) by means of those linguistic signs' (31). (See *sign.) 'Understanding' is the reader's construction of verbal meaning, that is, of the author's intention as embodied in the text. 'Interpretation' is the explanation of such meaning. 'Significance' results from the reader's judgment about the text's relationship to his or her view of the world, theoretical assumptions, individual interests, and personal experience. The meaning of a work is always synonymous with the author's intention; significance alters with historical change and personal predilection. The argument is not that one can be certain of an author's intended meaning as it is embodied in the text, but rather that nothing forbids the possibility of a correct understanding. 'It is a logical mistake to confuse the impossibility of certainty in understanding with the impossibility of understanding' (17). In other words, a reader's understanding can never be more than probable, but careful attention to genre, authorship, date of composition, external context, and internal structure can greatly increase the probability. (See also *genre criticism, *genetic criticism.) 'Validation' of an interpreation is achieved by demonstrating that one's construction of the meaning is the most probable in the light of all one can discover. Hirsch never denies that criticism, the seeking of significance, is valuable and indeed often the primary source of our interest in literature. However, he insists that understanding of the author's intended meaning is logically and psychologically prior to consideration of significance. The Aims of Interpretation (1976) clarifies and develops these positions, while taking into account the assertions of Continental philosophy concerning the ""indeterminacy of textual meaning and the separation of the text from the question of authorial intention. (See *intention/intentionality.) The Aims of Interpretation is therefore directed against *Martin Heidegger and *Jacques Derrida as much as against the New Critics. Here Hirsch pursues the concept of understanding and interpretation as based on 'corrigible schema' (a phrase from Jean Piaget) as an alternative to that of the *hermeneutic circle. He reiterates more fully that literary studies, and the humanities generally, provide both knowledge through understanding and the valuable application of that knowledge through criticism. Turning from the interpretation of literature

Hirsch to addressing writing skills in The Philosophy of Composition (1977), Hirsch surveys the results of various types of research into the relation between oral and written language, changes in the English language in recent centuries, and the ease with which various syntactic and semantic choices are understood. He develops an argument for emphasizing 'relative readability' or 'intrinsic effectiveness' in composition instruction. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. What Every American Needs to Know focuses on the problem of competence in reading. (See '"competence/performance.) In particular it stresses the importance of a basic level of shared knowledge of historical, scientific and aesthetic meanings, allusions to which the educated reader is expected to understand. Readers who do not share common, basic information are able neither to understand texts nor to participate adequately as members of society. The first half of Cultural Literacy makes the argument, the second consists of a list of 5000 names and words illustrating the kind of knowledge readers are expected to have. Cultural Literacy was followed in 1988 by The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, edited by Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett (professor of history), and James Trefil (professor of physics), and in 1989 by A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, edited by Hirsch, William G. Rowland, Jr., and Michael Stanford as associated editors. All these works have been the subjects of substantial controversy. The concepts of cultural literacy and of lists have been attacked for: ( i ) favouring mainstream rather than minority cultures, the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat; (2) including much more than can be reasonably taught in the average high school; and (3) omitting too much that the educated reader should know and encouraging superficial knowledge. The central responses of those who agree with Hirsch's position are that we actually don't know how much solid information students can absorb and relate since many schools no longer try very hard to impart more than bare mechanical literacy; that the acquisition of new knowledge requires a minimum base of existing knowledge; and that to deny students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds access to central cultural traditions and basic scientific knowledge is to deny them a substantial portion of what is needed to achieve equality in our society. In order to f u r t h e r the kind of educational

reform for which Cultural Literacy calls, Hirsch has created the Cultural Literacy Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. To encourage the teaching of a core of general knowledge, the Foundation has prepared General Knowledge Lists and Cultural Literacy Tests judged appropriate for various primary and secondary grades. (See also *theory and pedagogy.) WENDELL V. HARRIS

Primary Sources Hirsch, E.D. The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. - 'Cultural Literacy.' The American Scholar 52 (Spring 1983): 159-69. - Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964. - 'Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted.' Critical Inquiry n (Dec. ig84): 202-24. - 'Objective Criticism.' PMLA 75 (Sept. 1960): 463-79. Repr. with slight changes as Appendix I in Validity in Interpretation. - 'Past Intentions and Present Significance.' Essays in Criticism 33 (April 1983): 79-98. - The Philosophy of Composition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977. - 'Truth and Method in Interpretation.' The Review of Metaphysics 18 (March 1965): 488-507. Repr. as Appendix 2: 'Gadamer's Theory of Interpretation.' In Validity in Interpretation. - Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967. - 'What Isn't Literature?' In What is Literature? Ed. Paul Hernadi. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. - Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1960. - Joseph Kett and James Trefil. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. - with Joseph Kett and James Trefil. The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. - with William G. Rowland, Jr., and Michael Stanford. A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Knoiv. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Secondary Sources Cain, William E. 'Authority, "Cognitive Atheism," and the Aims of Interpretation.' College English 39 (1977). Repr. in The Crisis in Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Caraher, Brian G. 'E.D. Hirsch, Jr.' In Dictionary of Literan/ Biography 67. Detroit: Gale, 1988, 151-61. Lentricchia, Frank. 'E.D. Hirsch: The Hermeneutics of Innocence.' In After the Neic Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

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Holland

Holland, Norman N. (b. U.S.A., 1927-) Literary theorist. Currently Milbauer Professor of English at the University of Florida, Norman N. Holland founded the Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1970. After publishing two books on Shakespeare and developing an interest is psychoanalysis, Holland produced a major theoretical work, The Dynamics of Literary Response, in 1968. The central question Holland poses is 'What is our emotional response to a literary work?' Psychoanalysis offers him a theoretical tool for comprehending the role of the unconscious as a determining factor in the way we read texts and what we find in them. (See *text.) He is thus one of the founders of ""reader-response criticism. As an orthodox Freudian, Holland generates a five-level pattern of fantasy affecting writers and readers: oral, anal, urethral, phallic, and Oedipal. (See *Sigmund Freud.) Realists, he argues, such as Ben Jonson, 'tend to be anal writers' (40) while 'most of the greatest literature - Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov and the like builds from an Oedipal phantasy' (47). In the first section of the book, Holland develops a *psychoanalytic theory of meaning; in the second section, he applies it to a wide range of literary texts. In Poems in Persons (1973) and 5 Readers Reading (1975), Holland modified much of his earlier thinking in response to actual case studies of how readers read. By looking closely at the American poet H.D.'s account of her analysis with Freud and at the way his own students actually read literary texts, Holland concluded that readers, not texts, produce meaning. His subsequent work has focused more and more on the individuality of human subjectivity and the complexity of transactions between reader and text. In 'UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF' (1975) and 'Human Identity' (1978), Holland began to explore the importance of a reader's personal identity *theme as a force at work in the act of reading. In The 1 (1985), Holland has produced an entire theory of subjectivity. The book is divided into four long sections: 'The Aesthetics of I/ 'A Psychology of I,' 'A History of I,' and 'A Science of I.' Just as reading is a transaction between reader and text, so subjectivity for Holland suggests a reciprocity between self as originating agent and

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self as consequence of determining, external facts. (See *self/other.) The shift into language is mediated by a number of psychoanalytic factors, including expectation, defence, fantasy, and representation, though by this stage in his career Holland has left behind the orthodoxies of the American psychoanalytic establishment, 'moving psychoanalytic criticism in the opposite direction from that in which psychoanalysis itself is moving - toward the ego instead of toward the id' (Kaplan and Kloss 274). Strictly speaking, The I is not a work of literary theory, except insofar as poststructuralist theories of subjectivity have come to dominate current literary theory. (See "'poststructuralism.) Holland's next book, The Brain of Robert Frost (1988), tests his theories of subjectivity in the context of Frost as author/ subject/reader. Chapter 6 is a hypothetical examination of the way academics read and argue about poetry. The book is also informed by Holland's interest in cognitive psychology. His most recent book, Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology (1990), an introductory handbook to both psychoanalytic and psychological interpretation, is clearly designed to stimulate a wide range of research methodologies and interdisciplinary uses. Holland's work has suffered the misfortune of being overshadowed by the psychoanalytic revisions of *Jacques Lacan, whose theories of subjectivity and language have been highly influential. By moving away from the text and towards the individual reader, Holland has restricted the very possibility of theorizing literary language and *textuality. As Elizabeth Wright has pointed out, 'the oddity of Holland's transaction is that he leaves out in theory what he takes account of in practice, the influence of the text on the reader' (Psychoanalytic Criticism 67). Holland has remained hostile to poststructuralist attempts to expand the domains of textuality. In a response to Lacan's seminar on Poe's 'The Purloined Letter,' he reminisces about the boyhood copy of the text he still holds in his hand; his transaction with the text is intensely personal: 'Is not a transactive criticism truer to the human dynamics of literary response than the linguistic glides of a Lacan or the deconstructions of a Derrida? Is it not better to have a literary and especially a psychoanalytic criticism that is grounded in the body and the family?' ('Re-

Husserl covering "The Purloined Letter'" 317). (See *deconstruction, *Jacques Derrida.) Holland's transactive criticism opens a window to what actually goes on in the reading and teaching of literature but, it can be argued, a criticism 'grounded in the body' is in danger of losing sight of the text altogether. GREGOR CAMPBELL

Primary Sources Holland, Norman N. The Brain of Robert Frost. New York: Routledge, 1988. - The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford UP, 1968. - 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. - 'Hamlet - My Greatest Creation.' Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975): 419-27. - Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psifchology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. - 'Human Identity.' Critical Inquiry 4 (Spring 1978): 451-69. - The I. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. - 'I-ing Film.' Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 654-71. - Laughing: A Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. - 'Literature as Transaction.' In What is Literature? Ed. Paul Hernadi. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978, 206-18. - Poems in Persons: An Introduction to The Psychoanalysis of Literature. New York: Norton, 1973. - Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966. — 'Re-covering "The Purloined Letter": Reading as a Personal Transaction.' In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, 307—22. - The Shakespearean Imagination. New York: Macmillan, 1964. - 'UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF.' PMLA 90.s (Oct. 1975): 813-22.

Secondary Sources Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Trans, and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth P, 1953-74. Kaplan, Morton, and Robert Kloss. The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. New York: Free P, 1973. Suleiman, Susan, and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralist Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. London: Methuen, 1984.

Husserl, Edmund (b. Moravia, i859-d. 1938) Philosopher. Edmund Husserl studied mathematics at Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna. After a brief period as assistant to the distinguished mathematician Karl Theodor Weierstrass in Berlin, Husserl returned to Vienna to work under Franz Brentano, a prominent empirical psychologist. Like many mathematicians of his day, Husserl sought an adequate theoretical grounding for mathematics and he looked to the new psychological science for that foundation. Brentano introduced him to the British empiricists, particularly to David Hume and John Stuart Mill, who, together with Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, had a profound influence on Husserl's philosophical development. After deciding on a career in philosophy, he taught at the Universities of Halle (1887-1901), Gottingen (1901-16) and Freiburg (1916-29). Few important intellectual movements in recent European thought from existentialism to *poststructuralism have not been influenced to some extent by Husserl's ideas. Most recently, Husserl has become of considerable interest to language theorists, who look to him to resolve some of the most pressing problems in meaning theory. Husserl's central insight is that consciousness is essentially intentional, that is, in relationship with an object, and hence it is unnecessary to inquire about objects outside of a relation to consciousness or about consciousness without an object of which it is conscious. (See *intention/intentionality, *subject/object.) Husserl devoted the first volume of his first truly phenomenological work, Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations 1900], to dismembering the position he had espoused in the Philosophie der Arithmetik [Philosophy of Arithmetic 1891]. He still searched for the theoretical foundations of mathematics and of science, but realized that one cannot understand the nature of pure mathematics without developing a theory of thought itself, specifically of logical thought. Thereafter he concerned himself with basic questions concerning the nature

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Husserl of knowledge and of science. Investigations is best described as a phenomenological study in which ordinary metaphysical commitments (for example, about the existence of non-conscious entities) are set out of action, allowing the data, the phenomena, to be attended to without being distorted by the beliefs and circumstances of the investigator, that is, by psychological data. In this respect Husserl's phenomenology is 'transcendental': the results of such an approach will be valid for all possible instances rather than just for a limited set of concrete cases. The achievement of the Investigations is a sketch of a 'pure logic,' a descriptive analytic account of basic cognitive activities (intentionality, understanding, perception, memory) and of fundamental cognitive objects (meaning, truth, proposition), particularly those involved in scientific thinking. (See *phenomenological criticism.) The central *text of phenomenology is Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophic [Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy 1913]. In it Husserl further articulates his method for analysing intentional structures. Also, much to the dismay of some of his admirers, he makes of phenomenology a 'transcendental idealism,' which seems to declare transcendental consciousness (the conditions for the possibility of experience) the chief datum investigated by the phenomenologist. In fact, Husserl made a much weaker but more tenable claim resting on the insight that all understanding, including understanding about the existence or non-existence of things in addition to one's consciousness, originates in the immediate experience of the individual possessing that understanding and declaring that this can be investigated in a way that transcends the practical limits within which the psychologist must proceed. By insisting that phenomenology is an idealism Husserl is merely declaring his intent to restrict the scope of the discipline to a concern with ideas (which he variously equates with essences, meanings, the structural laws of categories of possible objects). This is not to deny the existence of real as opposed to ideal objects; it simply avoids the complex of insoluble problems involved in justifying truth claims about objects considered outside of a relationship to consciousness. Husserl's late works introduce some significant modifications and some changed em-

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phases. In the Cartesianische Mcditationen [Cartesian Meditations 1931], he counters the charge that a philosophy centring on the notion of transcendental consciousness must be incapable of dealing with one of the most important aspects of experience - the social or intersubjective dimension. In form ale und transzendentale Logik [Formal and Transcendental Logic 1929] and Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaft und die transzendentale Phanomenologie [The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology 1936] he stresses much more than he had done previously the 'constitutive' function of consciousness. That is, although he is not a 'subjective idealist' who reduces reality to ideas, he insists that consciousness contributes to sense. Consciousness has its own characteristics and it always has a determinate perspective from which it interrelates with things and that influences the character of the ideas which a determinate consciousness has. Philosophical analysis now has as its aim to retrace the genesis of concepts and networks of concepts from their origins in pre-theoretical experience. This seems to bring Husserl very far away from the concerns of earlier phenomenology. Another important late idea developed in the Krisis is 'lived experience' (*Lebenswelt). Husserl never forgot that the point of theorizing is to better understand experience. The notion of lived experience contains the idea of the primacy of pre-theoretical experience, an idea that *Martin Heidegger and *Maurice Merleau-Ponty put at the centre of their philosophies. Although Husserl was too engaged with shoring up the foundations of all thought to attend directly to the nature of art or *literature or to the specific forms of intentionality at work in literary experience, many theorists have found much in Husserl's philosophy that is peculiarly apt for literary thinking. For example, his restricted consideration of ideal (or purely possible) objects may be related to literature, which also contains ideal objects (possible worlds or components of them). His method of describing and analysing them suggests the possibility of an analogous literary critical procedure. Imagination plays a major role in the phenomenologist's method which, for purposes of analysis, transforms the material of ordinary belief into fictions. A description of that role elucidates the process of literary production. Finally, Husserl's insights

Ingarden into temporality - specifically into the retentional and protentional nature of consciousness help clarify the 'time arts/ music and literature. Many contemporary literary theorists are indebted to Husserl, perhaps none more selfconsciously than *Roman Ingarden. Ingarden makes critical use of the notions of intentionality and meaning and of the theory of meaning constitution. He sees the phenomenological method as peculiarly apt for the description of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects and has used it to considerable effect in the contentious cause of a scientific understanding of literature and literary cognition. Mikel Dufrenne, also deeply influenced by Husserl's late works, believes that his own phenomenology or aesthetic experience rectifies false moves made by Husserl and Ingarden, particularly their prejudice in f a v o u r of the cognitive at the expense of the sensuous and affective dimensions of the aesthetic. *E.D. Hirsch's thesis that an interpretation of a text is a reconstitution of the author's intended sense rests on the assumption that texts are Husserlian intentional objects. F i n a l l y , *Paul Ricoeur's work on time and narrative rests squarely on Husserl's phenomenology of time consciousness, a theory which Ricoeur both supplements and supplants. MARGARET VAN DE PITTE

Primary Sources Husserl, E d m u n d . Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. New York: H u m a n i t i e s P, u)bd. - I he Crisis of Litropean Sciences and transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: N o r t h w e s t e r n UP, 147 v - 'Formate und t r a n s / e n d e n t a l e I.ogik: Versuch einer K r i t i k der logischen V e r n u n f t . ' In Jahrhuch I D ( i M 2 9 ) : i - 2 q N . Trans. Dorion Cairns. Formal and transcendental Logic. The Hague: M a r t i n u s Nijhoff. iqfn). - The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. W.P. Alston and C. N a k h n i k i a n . The Hague: M a r t i n u s N i j h o f f , K)K>.

- Ideen :n einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologis(.hen Philosophic i. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1 9 1 v Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and tii a Plicnemcnologual Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. Hague, Boston, Lancaster: M a r t i n u s N i j h o f f , K)Sv - Logiuil Investigations. Trans. |.N. F i n d l a y . 2 vols. New York: H u m a n i t i e s P, 1 4 7 0 .

- The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans. J.S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1966.

Secondary Sources Elliston, Frederick, and Peter McCormick, eds. Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. Notre Dame/London: U of Notre Dame P, 1977. Natanson, Maurice. Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. Ricoeur, Paul. Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967. Sokolowski, Robert. Husserlian Meditations. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1974.

Zaner, Richard M. The Way of Phenomenology: Criticism as a Philosophical Discipline. Indianapolis: Bohhs-Merrill, 1970.

Ingarden, Roman (b. Poland, i893-d. 1970) Philosopher and literary theorist. Born in Cracow, Ingarden studied in Lvov under Twardowski before becoming a student of *Edmund Husserl at Gottingen. He later followed Husserl to Freiburg where he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Henri Bergson (1918). Returning to Poland, Ingarden became a Privatdozent at Lvov in 1924, professor in 1933. While at Lvov he published his two major works in aesthetics, The Literary Work of Art (1931) and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1937). During the German occupation Ingarden taught German "literature and literary theory at the University of Lvov (1940-1) and mathematics at the secondary school level. He also finished his major work in ontology, Spor o istnienie siviata [The Controversy over the Existence of the World 1947-8]. In 1945 Ingarden was expelled from eastern Poland after the Soviet annexation. Settling in Cracow, he was afterwards (1949-56) forbidden to teach by the Polish government because of the 'idealist' direction of his philosophy. Reinstated in 1956, Ingarden became professor emeritus in 1963. Ingarden's work is a contribution to the development of phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition. (See *phenomenological criticism.) In reaction against psychologism and positivism, Husserl undertook to establish the principles and methodology of a science of phenomena, allowing the things themselves to show themselves to the observer. The goal of phenomenology is to describe the structures of

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Ingarden different kinds of objects, in each case identifying the ways in which they give themselves to consciousness. While Ingarden shares this enterprise with Husserl, he broke with him as early as 1918 in consequence of Husserl's transcendental turn, which led the founder of phenomenology to concentrate on the analysis of the structures of pure consciousness. For his part, Ingarden insisted on the necessity of establishing the existence of the material world as independent of consciousness. This disagreement remained decisive for Ingarden's philosophical path. Since Ingarden's interest in aesthetics grew out of his attempt to develop his ontological position, his investigation of the work of art serves as an ontology of one kind of object and attempts to determine the common features of this class. The artwork, moreover, is particularly suited to Ingarden's central concern - to show the existence of the real as independent of the ideal - because it is a heteronomous structure, neither simply real (in the world) nor ideal (universals, for example). The work of art, Ingarden proposes, is an intentional structure; it is 'a purely intentional formation which has the source of its being in the creative acts of consciousness of its author and its physical foundation in the text set down in writing ... By virtue of the dual stratum of its language the work is both intersubjectively accessible and reproducible, so that it becomes an intersubjective intentional object, related to a community of readers. (See *intention/intentionality.) As such it is not a psychological phenomenon and is transcendent to all experiences of consciousness, those of the author as well as those of the reader' (The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art 14). The literary work, then, has its origin in the intentional acts of its author who creates a linguistic model of real objects and the real world. While the work, as intentional, has no independent existence in relation to the concrete reality of which it is a model, it is nonetheless autonomous of that reality and mere subjective experience by virtue of 'two entirely heterogeneous objectivities.' For it has the basis of its existence, on the one hand, in 'ideal concepts and ideal qualities (essences), and, on the other hand ... in real "word signs'" (The Literary Work of Art 361). (See *sign.) The work of art therefore has three on tic foundations: (i) the material thing, (2) acts of consciousness, and (3) ideal entities. The ideal meanings are

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actualized by acts of consciousness in sentence formation and these intended meanings bring the work into being. In The Literary Work of Art, Ingarden develops this threefold heterogenous foundation of the work in terms of four strata which in their polyphonic harmony allow the aesthetic object to be produced. Simply put, the first two strata refer respectively to the levels of 'sound' and of 'sense.' The third stratum refers to the fact that the work presents us with aspects, or views, of the objects intended. Hence, just as we never perceive an object in the real world whole but only as a succession of partial views, so the work allows us, by means of a series of 'schemata' organized temporally by its sentences, to constitute an object. The fourth refers to the objects represented in the work and can best be understood by the way of essential distinctions between represented objects and objects experienced in the real world. Objects represented differ from real objects in at least these respects: (i) every real object is absolutely individual, but the represented object is always somewhat general; (2) real objects are completely determined, but 'literary objects' are given by nominal expressions having multiple interpretations. Literary works leave represented objects underdetermined - they present schemata. The work's nominal expressions set the limits of interpretation; but the represented object can never be fully determined because the limits set by nominal expressions allow for 'spaces of indeterminacy.' The notion of lacunae or indeterminacies has proven especially fruitful in subsequent reflections on the structure of the literary work deriving from Ingarden. (See ""indeterminacy.) The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art supplements this investigation by explicating the ways in which the work, given its internal structure, can be apprehended. The distinction Ingarden makes between the work itself and the work as aesthetic object can illuminate his main concern in this *text. The pre-aesthetic cognition of the work implicates the apprehension of its structure prior to *concretization, hence knowledge of the work in itself. This kind of cognition, as well as other forms, is determined by the intention according to which the work is apprehended. While the pre-aesthetic attitude reflects a scholarly mode of cognition, the natural attitude of the reader tends toward an aesthetic concretization of the

Ingarden work. The concreti/ation fills in the places of indeterminacy we have noted, whereas the pre-aesthetic attitude attempts to leave these lacunae open in order to establish the structure of the work in and for itself. The aesthetic objectification of the work brings all of the four strata of the text into play and intends their unity. This is one way in which the literary work is distinguished from the scientific because in the latter only the stratum of meanings is developed to the exclusion of the others. The aesthetic object thus intended calls forth an explicitly aesthetic emotion generated by the quality of the representation itself rather than by what is represented. The value of the work is determined by its ability to call for concretizations and aesthetic emotions of complexity and intensity. Ingarden's aesthetics have entered the mainstream of the Anglo-American tradition through *Rene W'ellek and Austin Warren's influential Theory of Literature, which draws heavily on Ingarden. His most direct and decisive influence to elate, however, has been on practitioners of ""reader-response criticism, especially as developed by the *Constance School of Reception Aesthetics (*Wolfgang Iser, *Hans Robert Jauss). In The Act of Reading, Iser draws on Ingarden's concept of the structural indeterminacy of the text to develop his own position. Given t h a t intentional objects are to simulate the determinateness of real objects (as Iser interprets Ingarden's argument), then their concretization tends towards a determinateness which actualizes the preaesthetically inherent structure of the work. Iser argues that the gaps allow for a range of concretizations - one cannot judge some false, others true, especially because, as Iser proposes, closing one set of indeterminacies gives rise to another. This is particularly borne out by examples from modern literature. Ingarden's development of the concept of indeterminacy is still tied to classical aesthetics and the notion of the closure of the work. (See *closure/clis-closure.) This also becomes evident by the priority Ingarden gives to the concept of aesthetic emotion. The 'original' emotion, described as a kind of hunger for completion generated by the work, allows it to be transformed into a specifically aesthetic object. In Iser's reading of Ingarden, this emotion guides the concretization ot the work in a way more fundamental than the indeterminacies, now relegated to the status ot secondary ef-

fects. Consequently, Iser calls for a more systematic development of the role of indeterminacies in our reading of the literary text. While these and other questions are raised by Ingarden's work, there is no doubt as to the seminal role which the systematic investigations he initiated have played and continue to play. BERNHARD RADLOFF

Primary Sources Ingarden, Roman. Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert. Vortrage zur Aesthetik 1937-67. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969. - Das Literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grcnzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturivissenschaft. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1931. The Literary Work of Art. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and the Theory of Literature. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. - O poznawaniu dziela literackiego. Lvov: Ossolineum, 1937. Rev. German trans. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Trans. Ruth Ann Crowly and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. - Selected Papers in Aesthetics. Ed. Peter J. McCormick. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1985. - Spor o istnienie swiata [The Controversy over the Existence of the World]. Vols. 1-2. Krakow: PAU, 1947-8. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1964. Partial English trans. Helen R. Michejda, Time and Modes of Being. Springfield: American Lectures in Philosophy, 1964. - Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk, Bild, Architektur, Film. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1962.

Secondary Sources Falk, E.H. The Poetics of Roman Ingarden. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981. fielder, T. Taking Ingarden Seriously: Critical Reflections on The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art.' Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2 (1975): 131-40. Graff, P., and S. Krzemien-Ojak, eds. Roman Ingarden and Contemporary Polish Aesthetics. Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1975. Hamm, V. 'The Ontology of the Literary Work of Art: Roman Ingarden's Das Literarische Kunstwerk.' In The Critical Matrix. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1961, 171-209. Hamrick, W.S. 'Ingarden on Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object.' Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology \ (1974): 71-80.

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Irigaray Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt dcs Lesens. Theorie asthctischer Wirkung. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. McCormick, P., and B. Dziemidok, eds. OH the Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989. Rudnick, H.H. 'Roman Ingarden's Literary Theory.' In Ingardeniana, Analecta Husserliana, IV (1976): 105-19. Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1956.

Irigaray, Luce (b. Belgium, c. 1934-) Feminist theorist, philosopher, psychoanalyst, linguist. After completing a Licence en philosophie et lettres (1954), Irigaray wrote a thesis at the Universite de Louvain (Belgium) on 'La Notion de purete chez Paul Valery, le mot pur, la pensee pure, la poesie pure' (1955) and prepared for secondary school teaching (1956). She taught in Brussels (1956-9), then studied for a Licence de psychologie at the Universite de Paris (1961), completing a Diploma in Psychopathology the following year. In 1962, she joined FNRS (Belgian scientific research), moving in 1964 to its French counterpart (CNRS) where, since 1982, she has been Maitre de recherches. With her doctorat de 3eme cycle (Universite de Paris x-Nanterre 1968), Irigaray switched to linguistics, publishing her thesis, Le Langage des dements (1973), on the ways schizophrenia and other mental disturbances can be discerned in the syntax of language. From 1969 to 1974, Irigaray taught at the Universite de Paris vm-Vincennes where she was attached to the Ecole freudienne de Paris of *Jacques Lacan. Speculum de I'autre femrne, her thesis for the doctorat d'etat es lettres (Paris vm, 1974), developed a feminist critique of psychoanalysis and philosophy and sparked controversy about the politicizing of psychoanalysis. Irigaray was subsequently expelled from the Ecole freudienne, lost her teaching position, continuing, though, with her psychoanalytic practice. In recent years Irigaray has been a visiting professor in a number of countries including Holland, Denmark, the U.S.A., Canada, and Italy. (See *Sigmund Freud, *psychoanalytic theory.) Reputed to be the most difficult of French feminists for her 'sibylline prose' (Whitford n), Irigaray challenges through her densely

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allusive approach and disciplinary range, drawing on the history of classical and Continental philosophy as reworked by contemporary French theorists. (See French *feminist criticism.) Her work encompasses several fields. In linguistics, it has been largely empirical. Noting in the analytic session the tendency of women to hysterical and of men to obsessional *discourse, Irigaray modified the tests administered to the mentally ill for Le Language des dements so as to test for gender differences in syntactic structures. Drawing on the *semiotics of *Emile Benveniste, especially his work on deictics (shifters) where subjectivity is constituted in and by language, Irigaray's empirical research demonstrates how women, in contrast to men, fail to assume a subject position in language, effacing themselves in favour of men or of the world of objects through shifts in syntax. (See *subject/object.) The theoretical work on sexual markers in discourse is published in Parler n'est jamais neutre (1985), while the conclusions of her research are reported in 'Le Sexe linguistique' (1987) and Sexes et genres a travers les langues (1990). The development of psychoanalytic theory is the best known aspect of Irigaray's work on the ways language and culture position men and women differently through the Oedipal configuration of the symbolic. (See *imaginary/symbolic/real.) Using a deconstructive approach, she critiques psychoanalysis from within, using psychoanalytic theory against itself to expose its contradictions and its gendered presuppositions. (See *deconstruction.) Crucial here is her demonstration in Speculum de I'autre femrne (1974) of the 'blind spot of an old dream of symmetry' (n), how Freud's argument about the construction of female sexuality is predicated on the norm of development of the boy and assumes that a similar model applies to the girl. Subsumed under similarity, the Selfsame, sexual difference is indifference. Irigaray's critique of Freud is not a rejection of psychoanalysis. On the contrary, her use of psychoanalysis marks a major divergence between her theorization of sexual difference and that of *Simone de Beauvoir, whose idea of Woman as Other she develops. (See *self/other.) Irigaray posits an otherness for women that is self-defined, a difference not to be transcended but to be given symbolic and social representation by and for women. Each sex could then be the 'other' for the

Irigaray other sex in the reciprocity of exchange whose absence de Beauvoir analysed. To theorize this exchange, Irigaray adapts Lacanian psychoanalysis and its concern with the Oedipal configuration of the Symbolic, of the unconscious as a semiotic system in which libidinal economies orchestrate the signifier in excess of the signified so that meaning always evades the subject, never rational or fully selfpresent. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Psychoanalysis nonetheless is a discourse fixed by a transcendent signified, the Phallus. Irigaray critiques Lacan's metaphorization of psychoanalysis as a masculine body and his unexamined presupposition of prior sexual difference. She challenges his focus on the subject's cathexis, on the Other as object, on definitions of terms rather than on relations between them; that is, the privileging of metaphor over metonymy. (See "'metonymy/metaphor.) In contrast to the Lacanian lack, Irigaray posits contiguity, the metonymy of two lips touching, what moves and destabilizes the Lacanian system that attempts to pin woman down, immobilize and domesticate her within a system containing her within the maternal function as a resource for the masculine subject. This dominant fantasy of the mother as 'not-all' is a volume, a closed container, a 'receptacle for the (re)production of sameness' and the support of all forms of (re)production, particularly discourse. The symbolic, she charges, is the masculine imaginary transformed into the social. Postulated as a virtuality, as a becoming, not a being, a fluid heterogeneity, 'awoman' hints at the Utopian possibility for women's desire to be represented foritself in a non-completable process of becoming form. This would open the possibility for a feminine symbolic, representations of the feminine for-itself, structures of mediation for relations between women and reciprocal intercourse between maternal and paternal genealogies. Irigaray's strategy is to deploy Lacan's theory of discourse against itself, through quotation, repetition, interrogation, exposing its contradictions, that it is not the discourse of analysis, but the discourse of mastery. Tracing the discourse of various masters, she turns it through *irony from Truth to ambiguity to suggest the possibilities of an other discourse, 'speaking (as) woman/ attempting 'to provide a place for the 'other' as feminine' (This Sex

135). Miming alterity, Irigaray stages a dialogue with the dominant discourse that is not a dialectic collapsing difference into the same. She employs this discursive strategy and theorizes it in her attempt to 'psychoanalyze philosophy/ her major project which, until very recently, has received little critical attention. Speculum is Irigaray's summum. Like *Jacques Derrida, she engages in a critique of metaphysics in the tradition of Western philosophy which, privileging analogy and the gaze, has valorized identity and the same (both words translate as rneme). (See ""metaphysics of presence.) However, Irigaray diverges from Derrida, to critique his work for being implicated in a gendered discourse of closure. (See *closure/dis-closure.) At the founding moment of philosophical discourse is an act of matricide, not one of parricide, Irigaray counters Freud (Le Corps-a-corps 81), a matricide in which Derrida with his focus on the sun/son is implicated. Her interpretive re-reading of Plato for the 'grammar' of his metaphors focuses on the allegory of the cave, a cave that is not a cave but an enceinte (enclosure/pregnant womb). The philosophical project is one of giving birth that denies 'sensible' origins in favour of 'intelligible' or created origins (Godard). While Plato ironically uses a mimetic mode to denounce ""mimesis, Irigaray's exposure of this double bind occurs in repetition not representation, as 'mimetism' or 'mimicry/ that is, as staged re-presentation. That she refuses mimesis, with its logic of the same, is signalled in her title, which holds not a mirror up to truth as likeness but the concave speculum, whose curved surface, folded back on itself, explores female birthing passages in a delusion of interiority. This intervention to 'disturb the staging of representation' is addressed in more detail in Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un [This Sex Which Is Not One 1977; 1985, 155], a series of essays and talks that expand and clarify the theoretical work of Speculum. Framed as the repetition of a repetition of a repetition (Souter's Alice Through the Looking Glass as viewed by *Gilles Deleuze), the *text enacts the topological logic it discerns, eschewing 'ownership and property/ but not the 'proximate' or contiguity, in decentring the 'logic of meaning' from the 'logic of the Selfsame/ (See *centre/decentre.) This logic of the recursive paradigm is a logic of non-sense, ""paradox, where binary distinctions between inside/outside, surface/depth, and word/

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Irigaray meaning no longer operate. (See "binary opposition.) While some of the texts address specific audiences and clarify Irigaray's concern with gender and the symbolic ('Questions'), and others reiterate her concern with the power relations mediated by discourse and the problems for a women's politics in a phallocratic order ('The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine'), many of the texts in Ce Sexe elaborate Irigaray's theory of an economy organized by metonymic relations of exchange. Particularly important is her linking of models of semiotic exchange with those of economic production and exchange. In 'Women on the Market' and 'Commodities Among Themselves/ Irigaray challenges Marxism for its failure to theorize the gendered organization of the social contract where exogamy functions as endogamy among men, as unexamined 'hom(m)osexuality,' excluding women from participating in exchange among themselves. (See *Marxist criticism.) This attempt to figure a feminine imaginary as an assumed fiction, in what Jane Gallop calls Irigaray's 'vulvomorphic display' (96), was more generally termed 'writing the body' and condemned by Anglo-American feminists as essentialist (Jones 367; Moi 139). (See feminist criticism, *Anglo-American; *essentialism.) Irigaray explained that these sections (and her other lyrical texts Et I'une ne bouge pas sans I'autre [1979], Corps-a-corps avec la mere [1981], and Passions elementaires [1982]) do 'not imply a regressive retreat to the anatomical' for 'women have two lips several times over]' Rather this is a deliberately assumed metonymy, borrowed from *Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Ethiques de la difference sexuelle 156), to break out of the 'tautological systems of discourse' through another 'morphologic' (Irigaray Reader 97), one without closure, an economy of loss, not sexualized only by the phallic function as the maternal metaphor. It is, moreover, a questioning of bisexuality which Irigaray, in contrast to *Helene Cixous and *Julia Kristeva, sees as a way of evading the question of 'relations with the same body or the same sex' (ibid. 100). This question of women's relations to other women is a major one for Irigaray. It is not a metaphysical project of identities but an ethical one of relations, of the ways in which the gendered socio-symbolic order produced by exogamy has failed to constitute women as a group, has no symbology for the 'feminine plural.'

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For Irigaray, it matters who is speaking, since relations of material and historical contingency - prior to and in excess of - mediate signification. This is evident in her later work, still in the process of translation into English, in which she engages in a kind of 'amorous relations' between the sexes (Sexes et parentes 191) that has supplemented the model of psychoanalytic dialogue where the question of transference is as central as that of desire. Irigaray's philosophical discourse aims to expose the provisionality of the truth claims of all philosophical discourse and to open the possibility for the circulation of other discourses, undermining the singularity of power. Her engagement is with philosophers who advance her own aim, as in the case of *Nietzsche's critique of truth as 'unveiling.' However, his focus on repetition as the 'eternal return' is yet another murder of the maternal, a strategic turning away from the unrepeatable moment of birth. Nietzsche's feminine asserts the 'being of becoming.' Is this also the 'becoming of being,' Irigaray asks? Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body privileges the visible and a scopic economy of sight, insight, truth, over the tangible, touching, contiguity, and assemblage, and so participates in philosophy's paternal genealogy. (See *phenomenological criticism.) So too does Emmanuel Levinas whose phenomenology of the caress provides openings for Irigaray's theorization of the 'lovhers" dialogue as exchange between irreducible others, while the feminine functions as horizon for the masculine's transcendent project; there is no horizon, no symbology for women. Following her work on the ethics of radical alterity, Irigaray turned, in Sexes et parentes (1987), to theories of exchange as these engage the sacred and the primal violence of the female sacrifice analysed by *Rene Girard. Irigaray reiterates the necessity of a feminine symbolic in order to mediate relations between women, whose death drives are not deflected, with the result that there is only violence and a lack of respect among them or they are buried alive in the culture. Social-symbolic forms are needed to construct a feminine genealogy. In essays such as Divine Women (1986), Irigaray argues for the necessity of a spiritual and divine dimension for the maternal as a horizon of possibility. Other forms of representation also need to be constructed and disseminated. Among the forms of representation

Irigaray requiring redistribution is language. Beginning in Parlcr n'cst jamais neutre (198^), Irigaray returned to the issues of her early research in psycholinguistics to outline the difficulties of and necessity for women to represent themselves as subjects in language. Discourse is not the only mode of representation that requires transformation. All forms of socio-symbolic mediation need to be radically realigned to allow feminine alterity. Unlike *Michel Foucault, Irigaray's attention is not directed at the institutions fixing discourse into hierarchical relations of power. She analyses systems of representation to show how their truths are contingent on the interests of those constructing them. This is an epistemological and ethical project, not the identity politics of much feminism. Irigaray's influence as a feminist theorist has been considerable in Europe, where German and Italian feminists have responded to her concern to establish a symbolic order for women (Ecker, Bono). She has also had a significant impact in Quebec, where feminist writer/theorists such as Nicole Brossard and France Theoret have engaged in ecriture au feminin, that is, writing that works upon discourse and the symbolic (Theoret 143). (See *feminist criticism, Quebec.) In France, however, Irigaray was grouped with Cixous, Kristeva and others working with psychoanalysis as 'cultural feminism,' feminism of 'difference': 'a new attack with the good old rhetoric on sex differences but this time uttered by women, which eliminates historical and dialectical materialism in order to give voice to the naked truth of women's eternal bodies' (Questions feministes 22=,, 218). This 'neo-femininity' was denounced by radical materialist feminists in their founding manifesto of Questions feministes, where they attacked the focus on a 'woman's language' and advocated an analysis of the 'history of our oppression' (223) and the institutions, laws, and socio-economic structures oppressing women (217). The specific arguments against Irigaray are rehearsed by Monique Plaza in a later issue of the periodical, where she charges Irigaray to be guilty of the logic of the same: her '"new" concept of woman' is merely the return of 'the eternal feminine' in what is the 'patriarchal vicious circle' - women's 'anti-feminism' that allows 'the perpetuation of patriarchy' (Plaza 94, 98, 90). Irigaray is concerned with 'oppressive theory,' with '"woman" of masculine dis-

course' not with a 'theory of oppression,' with describing 'women' as they are under patriarchy (Plaza 90). Although Irigaray states that a political questioning of psychoanalysis should be carried out through an investigation of 'the historical determinations of this destiny' (Ce Sexe 62; Plaza 82), she does not undertake it, carrying out a psychological reduction and generalization to position the 'womb' in the realm of the 'tangible' and make its concealment the foundation of 'the Western Logos' (Plaza 78). Woman is concealed by discourse. Constructing her is, Plaza affirms, 'a question of projecting her in a conditional perspective.' Irigaray has done so, she suggests, by searching for woman before the process of 'transformation-deformation,' that is, to posit a 'feminine "essence"' 'outside of [prior to] the oppressive social framework, that is to say, in the body of woman' (Plaza 73). This critical assessment overlooks the question of Irigaray's quotation of philosophers' metaphors of the female body to expose their sexism. Irigaray's reception in anglophone milieux has been mixed. Three short lyric texts appeared in English translation in Signs almost simultaneously with the French materialist critiques of her work in the English version of the periodical Feminist Issues. Divorced from the analysis of the institution of philosophy in Irigaray's longer works, these lyrical effusions imaging two lips seemed to support the description of 'writing the body' and lend credence to the attacks. This has been the orthodox Anglo-American feminist response to Irigaray's work despite the defence of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of the method of Asymptomatic reading' for contradictions. *Toril Moi criticizes Irigaray for not exploring the political context of women's oppression in the domestic economy alongside the specular discursive economy (Moi 147). Moreover, Moi writes, Irigaray enters into the binary logic of the same to figure 'fluidity as a positive alternative,' thus 'fallfing] into the very essentialist trap of defining woman that she set out to avoid' (Moi 142), developing idealist categories when the historical determinants are not made precise, and the quotation marks in her mockery of patriarchal constructions are not visible. What Moi addresses here is the problem of irony in feminist discourse and the potential for divergent readings it entails. A number of recent studies by feminist phi-

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Irigaray losophers examine the full range of Irigaray's texts within a tradition of philosophical discourse. Elizabeth Grosz reads Irigaray's work as concerned with creativity and production, with 'what is new, what remains unthought, the space for the projection of possible futures' (Grosz 162), the space for forging social transformations. This is to read Irigaray's construction of women in a conditional perspective, not as a retreat into an atemporal past, but as the Utopian horizon of feminist change. Such an interpretation of Irigaray finds support in the work of Rosi Braidotti, who underlines the conditional tense of women's becoming that entails a constant process of recreation (Braidotti 257, 263), and in that of Judith Butler, who argues for the importance of masquerade and miming as engagements with the cultural inscription of gender in a project to renew cultural history as a possibility that includes never becoming 'woman.' Gender here is a 'performative' (Butler 141). This development in philosophy rereads materialism to include the embodiment of the subject as a 'critique of dualism as a form of violence' (Braidotti 264), a direction in which Irigaray has taken the lead. Since most of her work is only now appearing in translation, Irigaray's significance as a feminist theorist is in constant mutation. (See also ""materialist criticism, *desire/lack.) BARBARA GODARD

Primary Sources Irigaray, Luce. Amante marine. De Friedrich Nietzsche. 1980. Marine Lover. Trans. Gillian Gill. New York: Columbia, 1991. - Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un. 1977. This Sex Which Isn't One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 'When Our Lips Speak Together.' Trans. Carolyn Burke. Signs 6.1 (Autumn 1980): 69-79. 'This Sex Which Is Not One.' 'When the Goods Get Together.' Trans. Claudia Reeder. New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980, 99-106, 107-10. - Le Corps-a-corps avec la mere. Montreal: La Pleine Lune, 1981. - La Croyance meme. Paris: Galilee, 1983. - 'Egales ou differentes?' 1986. Repr. in Je, tu, nous. 1990. 'Equal or Different?' Trans. David Macey. In The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, 30-3. - Ethiques de la difference sexuelle. Paris: Minuit, 1984. - Et I'une ne bouge pas sans I'autre. 1979. 'And the One Doesn't Stir Without the Other.' Trans.

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Helene Wenzel. Signs 7.1 (Autumn 1981): 56-67. - 'Femmes divines.' Critique 454 (March 1985): 294-308. Repr. in Sexes et parentes, 67-85. Divine Women. Trans. Stephen Muecke. Sydney: Local Consumption, 1986. - The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. - Je, tu, nous: Pour une culture de la difference. Paris: Grasset, 1990. - Le Langage des dements. Paris: Mouton, 1973. - L'Oubli de I'air chez Martin Heidegger. Paris: Minuit, 1983. - Parler n'est jamais neutre. Paris: Minuit, 1985. - Passions elementaires. Paris: Minuit, 1982. - 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas.' Trans. Margaret Whitford. In Rereading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. - Sexes et genres a trovers les langues. Paris: Grasset, 1990. - Sexes et parentes. Paris: Minuit, 1987. - Speculum de I'autre femme. 1974. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. - Le Temps de la difference. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1989. - 'Le Sexe linguistique.' Langages 89 (March 1987). Secondary Sources Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Braidotti, Rosi. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Trans. Elizabeth Guild. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brossard, Nicole. L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite. Montreal: Quinze, 1977. These Our Mothers. Trans. Barbara Godard. Toronto: Coach House, 1983. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Ecker, Gisela, ed. Feminist Aesthetics. London: Women's P, 1985. Gallop, Jane. 'The Body Politic.' 1982, 1983. In Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, 91-118. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. P. Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. Godard, Barbara. 'Translating (With) the Speculum.' Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 4.2 (Winter 1991), 85-121. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Moi, Toril. Sexual /Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Plaza, Monique. ' "Phallomorphic" Power and the Psychology of "Woman."' Feminist Issues (Summer 1980): 71-102. Questions feministes Collective. 'Variations on Common Themes.' Questions feministes i (Nov. 1977).

Iser Trans. Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello. In New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980, 2 1 2-31).

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 'French Feminism in an International Frame.' Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 154-84. Theoret, France. 'Le Deplacement du symbolique.' Entre raison et deraison. Montreal: Les Herbes Rouges, 1987. Whitford, Margaret. Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge, 1 9 9 1 .

Iser, Wolfgang (b. Germany, 1926-) Literary theorist and professor of English and comparative literature. Iser studied at the University of Heidelberg and has taught there and at Wurzburg, Cologne, Constance (since 1967) and the University of California, Irvine (since 1978). He has also held various visiting professorships and fellowships. One of the central figures of the "Constance School of Reception Aesthetics, he is best known for his work on reader reception theory, strongly influenced by the phenomenology of *Roman Ingarden and *Edmund Husserl and by the *hermeneutics of *Hans-Georg Gadamer. (See "reader-response criticism, *phenomenological criticism.) Iser's earlier work focuses on English literature, including an examination of the aesthetics of Walter Pater and a study of Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. His inaugural lecture at the University of Constance was subsequently published under the title Die Appellstruktur der Texte. llnbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literanscher Prosa [Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response 1970]. Textual "indeterminacy and reader response also stand at the centre of his Theorie asthetischer Wirkung [Theory of Aesthetic Response 1976], subsequently developed in Der implizite Leser [The Implied Reader 1972] and Der Akt des Lesens [The Act of Reading 1976]. The Implied Reader outlines a phenomenological approach to the reading process. Iser here conceives of the "text as an intentional object whose communicatory effect can be brought about only by the reader's active assumption of a role designated by the text itself. (See "intention/intentionality.) This role is mapped out by strategies that act as instructions enabling the real reader to fulfil the in-

tention of the text. This role is characterized by Iser as that of an '"implied reader/ which he conceives of as a construct that can be applied in both a synchronic and diachronic framework, thus accommodating both thematically and historically conditioned changes and variations in reader response. In the terms of "communication theory, to which Iser repeatedly refers, the model presupposes a sender and a receiver sharing the same linguistic and cultural "code, the deformations of which in the text perform their communicatory functions by their allusion to the normative functions of these codes. During the reading process the reader's activity is bent on realizing the communicative potential of the text, which consists of determinate or given elements surrounded by blanks or gaps, which must be filled in by the reader according to the instructions encoded in the text. This process of "concretization, achieved by the elimination of indeterminacy (blanks or gaps), permits the consistency-building which ultimately leads to the constitution of meaning. In contrast to the traditional quest for a meaning presumed to be hidden in the text, the constitution of meaning is seen as an experience resulting from the interaction between text and reader throughout the entire reading process. It is precisely in the reader's activity and participation, necessitated by the indeterminacies of the text, that Iser situates the aesthetic, or the text as a work of art. He defines the aesthetic as an empty principle, a potential effect, which is realized by a structuring of outside realities that enables the reader to construct a world no longer exclusively determined by the hitherto familiar. In contrast to Ingarden's 'place of indeterminacy/ which implies a textual deficiency, Iser's use of the term designates not only the selectivity and segmentation inevitable in the representation of the fictional world of the text; it is also a vacancy in the overall system of the text which must be occupied to bring about the interaction of textual patterns necessary for the text to achieve its effect. Indeterminacy in the Iserian sense is thus the ideational impulse that both enables and drives the reader to interact with the text. The reader does so by filling in gaps, occupying vacancies, connecting segments, and negating the given according to the 'instructions' encoded in the text, which can be intersubjectively agreed upon.

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Iser While Iser's theory of aesthetic effect places less emphasis on Rezeptionsgeschichte [history of reception] than does the work of *Hans Robert Jauss, Iser also insists on a cumulative approach to non-contemporary literature, maintaining that past interpretations form a part of the contemporary response to a text. Iser demonstrates changes in reader response to historical texts in The Implied Reader, which includes a number of essays on individual prose works from Bunyan to Beckett. Here Iser also develops a typology of perspectival relationships, identifying the paradigms predominating during a given historical period. This typology, further refined in The Act of Reading, has a synchronic as well as a diachronic dimension as it permits the identification and description of particular strategies in creating certain kinds of effects. Iser's work on norm repertoires and perspectivization, which accommodates 'affirmative' as well as 'negative' or critical texts more easily than Jauss' model and insists on negativity as a principle of aesthetic effect, has had considerable impact on various aspects of socioliterary study, including periodization and *sociocriticism. Although discussions of Iserian theory have centred on his notion of indeterminacy, Iser himself has been focusing increasingly on the sociological and anthropological implications of his model. The appeal of Iser's work is often seen in its emancipatory potential, in its highly refined exposure and articulation of the interaction between subject and world as it occurs in the processing of a fictive text. His theory of indeterminacy offers a solution to the unresolved issue of interpretative validation by accounting for deviant readings (by acknowledging that different readers will fill up the schematically outlined Gestalten in various ways), while misreadings can be excluded owing to intersubjectively agreed upon 'instructions' encoded as strategies in the text. While it is Iser's work on indeterminacy that has been in large part responsible for his theoretical appeal, it is also an issue on which he has been challenged, notably by *Stanley Fish, who contests Iser's distinction between the determinate and the indeterminate. Since the publication of his initial theoretical position, Iser has become a central figure in international theoretical debate. As with his Constance colleague Jauss, his influence in

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Germany was initially due perhaps as much to his acknowledgment of the crisis in which the *literary institution - indeed the academic institution as a whole - found itself in the late 19605 as it was to the theoretical model by which he proposed to seek a way out of this impasse. The early recognition of the importance of his work in English-speaking countries was facilitated by the rapid appearance of good-quality English translations. The French response to Iser's work (and to German reception theory as a whole) was somewhat belated, in part owing to the lack of ready accessibility to modern German hermeneutics in which reception theory is largely grounded, as witnessed in the lateness, lack, or, in some cases, problematic nature of French translations of seminal German works. The importance of Iser's contribution to literary theory is generally seen in his construction of a model that permits acknowledgment of both textual intentionality and the diversity of individual reader response and in his meticulous description of the act of reading as a consciousness-altering, socially formative and hence historically formative event. ROSMARIN HEIDENREICH

Primary Sources Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie asthetischer Wirkung. Munich: Fink, 1976. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. - Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestitnmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa. Konstanz: Universitatsverlag, 1970. 'Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response.' In Aspects of Narrative. Ed. J. Hillis Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1971, 1-45. - Das Fiktive und das Imaginare. Grundzuge finer Literaturanthropologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. - Der implizite Leser. Konnnunikationsforrnen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Munich: Fink, 1972. The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. - Lawrence Sterne: Tristram Shandy. Cambridge UP, 1988. - Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. - Walter Pater. Die Autonornie des asthetischen. Tubingen: 1960. Walter Pater. The Aesthetic Moment. Cambridge UP, 1987.

Jakobson

Jakobson, Roman Osipovich (b. Russia, 1896-11 U.S.A., 1982) Linguist, literary scholar, semiotician. In 1914 Jakobson entered Moscow University where he took his first degree; he moved to Czechoslovakia in 1920 and completed his studies at the University of Prague where he received his doctorate, teaching at Masaryk University from 1935 until the Nazi occupation in 1939, when he fled to Scandinavia. He emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1941, and subsequently taught at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York (19426), Columbia (1946), Harvard (1949) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1957). He was a founding member of the Moscow Circle in 1915 and the Prague Linguistic Circle (1926). (See Russian *formalism, *Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School.) His work is based on the principles of the linguistics of *Ferdinand de Saussure, on the phenomenology of *Edmund Husserl, and on the extension and application of the *semiotics of *Charles Sanders Peirce. (See also *phenomenological criticism.) Jakobson's best-known achievements in linguistics are closely allied to his lifelong work in literary research; he argued that these two disciplines should be studied in conjunction. The founding of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915 provided an unprecedented forum for research into the relations of literature and language, since such research had remained outside the scope of the Neogrammarian linguistics then dominating language studies. The work of the Circle promoted research into prosody, *myth and both traditional and contemporary folklore ('Retrospect,' Selected Writings i: 631; SW s: 169; Toward the History of the Moscow Linguistic Circle,' SW 7: 279-82). Jakobson counted among his collaborators and friends many leading avant-garde poets and painters, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Kasimir Malevich, whom he would often credit for their formative influence on his work. The close affiliation of the Circle with the Petrograd-based OPOIAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) provided a context in which scholarly and historical research proceeded hand in hand with contemporary literature. De Saussure's linguistics ('Retrospect,' SW i: 631) provided Jakobson from the beginning of the 19208 with a model for the systematic investigation of language in terms of relational

concepts such as synchrony/diachrony, *\angue/parole and signans/signatum. Throughout his career, however, Jakobson sought to replace Saussure's notion of the synchrony/ diachrony relation with a permanently dynamic synchrony and with a diachrony containing static invariants. Jakobson would thus investigate language as a structural network of dynamic relations and, as if to reiterate the intersemiotic and creative aspects of this work, Jakobson often quoted the Cubist painter Georges Braque, who claimed himself not to believe in things, but only in the relations between things ('Retrospect,' SW i: 631). Modern painting, in Jakobson's view, in its exploration of abstraction and of multiple temporal and visual perspectives, stresses the relation of signans and signatum (see *signifier/signified/signification), forcing one to discriminate more clearly between the signatum and the designatum (see *sign). Such painting, and poetic work in general, focus not on the object of reference, but on the relations of the signifying elements in the sign itself. In thus emphasizing the set (Einstellung) towards the message itself, poetry foregrounds the *code, or the Saussurean langue, at the expense of the object of reference ('Futurizm/ 717-22; 'On the Relation between Visual and Auditory Signs,' 338-44). (See *reference/referent.) As early as 1919 Jakobson proposed the notion of 'literariness' (literaturnosf) to characterize the literary fact, making 'literariness,' and not literature itself, the proper focus of research' (see Noveishaia russkaia poeziia [Modern Russian Poetry] and 'Retrospect,' SW 3: 766). In formalist terms, the artistic work was seen as an agglomeration of self-focusing or autotelic 'devices.' (See *Shklovskii.) Primary among the devices is *defamiliarization or the 'making strange' (ostranenie) that results from the marking of previously unmarked signs. Jakobson would further refine the notion of the device by arguing that the work is a system of devices organized into a hierarchy forming a global sign, with one device serving as the 'dominant' within a relational network. The model of the constellation of devices could thus include not only individual works, but also poetic genres and their dynamic changes in diachrony ('The Dominant/ 751-6). The notion of the dominant moves the emphasis from the materiality of the individual device to the function of that device within a network of related elements. This in turn corresponds to a

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Jakobson shift from a formalist emphasis on the immanence of the poetic work to a structuralist understanding of the work as an autonomous structure that is in turn necessarily linked in a hierarchy to other signifying structures and codes (with lurii Tynianov, Troblemy skumania literatury i iazyka/ 3-6). (See *Tynianov.) His studies in language acquisition and aphasia, the first of which were presented in the late 19305 ('Les Lois phoniques du langage enfantin et leur place dans la phonologie generale,' SW i: 317-27; 'Kindersprache Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze' ['Children's Language, Aphasia, and General Phonology'] SW i: 328-96) led to his formulation of the notion of the metaphoric and metonymic poles of linguistic ('Two Aspects of Language,' 229-59). (See *metonymy/metaphor.) Building upon the Saussurean doctrine of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language, Jakobson argued that the operations of selection and combination should be understood in terms of the rhetorical categories of metaphor and metonymy. Language loss and language acquisition, which mirror each other, are thus related to the subject's ability to manage selection and combination, or similarity and contiguity. In the terms of this model, metaphor and metonymy are intrinsic to the working of language at every level, and are not simply a consciously wrought ornamentation subordinate to the referential function. Jakobson extended his argument to claim that a typology of individual literary works, the corpus of a given author, and the stylistic conventions of periods and genres could be given as a function of the frequency of metaphoric or metonymic figures. The model is thus an ambitious attempt to link together literary, neurolinguistic and psychopathological materials. In the 19505 Jakobson's work in distinctive feature analysis developed into a comprehensive structural description of the ultimate constituents of phonemes and phonological systems, based on the notion of binary oppositions. (See *binary opposition.) During that same decade he also brought together the mathematical theory of communication and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce with his own work in poetics and ""communication theory in two important papers: 'Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,' from 1950-7, and 'Linguistics and Poetics,' originally delivered as the closing statement to a scholarly conference in 1958. The 'closing 376

statement' includes not only a full working out of the factors and functions of his communication model, but also the formulation of the poetic function: 'The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination' (27). To each of the six factors that must be present in order for communication to take place (addresser, addressee, code, message, contact, context) there corresponds one of six functions that describe the orientation of the speech act (emotive, conative, metalingual, poetic, referential, and phatic). As the poetic function is oriented to the message itself, similarity at the level of the code becomes the constitutive principle of the sequence. The referential function, in contrast, is oriented to the context and to the relation of the code to the designation. In expository prose, therefore, although the referential function would be the dominant, the poetic function could be an important subdominant in the hierarchy of functions; whereas in verse, where similarity at the level of the code predominates, the order of the dominants would be inverted. Similarity, stemming from congruities in the various paradigms at the level of the code, may encompass phonological, semantic or syntactic likeness. These in turn may all be described as parallelisms, whether on the sound level as rhyme and paronomasia, on the semantic level as synonymy and antynomy, or on the syntactic level as parallel and antithetical sequences and rhythm. The 'grammar of poetry' consists in the foregrounding of similarities intrinsic to the code or language itself, that is, in the 'poetry of grammar.' Lyric poetry, which is tightly bound to languagespecific parallelism, is more difficult, if not impossible, to translate, than is expository prose in which the referential function is the dominant. Jakobson's later theoretical contributions are accompanied by a very rich body of short studies of poems from many languages and periods, including works by Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Khlebnikov, Maiakovskii, Pushkin, Klee, Brecht, Holderlin, Pessoa, Dante, Du Bellay, and Baudelaire. These 'readings,' many of which are collected in the third volume of the Selected Works, constitute a repertoire of the critical art as he formulates it in such essays as 'Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry,' 'Language in Operation' and 'Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry/ in which he develops Gerard Manley Hopkins' insight con-

Jakobson cerning the primary role of repetition and parallelism in the poetic work. Jakobson's work has also been the centre of controversy. *Michael Riffaterre, responding to Jakobson's and *Levi-Strauss' analysis of Baudelaire's 'Les Chats/ touched off a protracted and at times heated controversy about the role that linguistic knowledge might properly play in the interpretation of a literary work. *Jonathan Culler has also engaged in a polemic with Jakobson, anticipating in Structuralist Poetics some of the premises of deconstructive criticism. (See *deconstruction.) Jakobson's significance to modern literary research is profound and wide-ranging. His assessment of metaphor and metonymy informs Lacanian criticism (see *Lacan), the notion of binary oppositions as the elements of structure are essential to Claude Levi-Strauss' structural anthropology, and the phonological model is basic not only to the transformational grammar of *Noam Chomsky, but also by extension to critical work, such as that of *Julia Kristeva, which develops the transformational model of deep and surface structure into the corresponding notions of *genotext and phenotext. It is impossible to understand the background and the contemporary development of *dialogical criticism and the work of *Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as the Tartu and the Moscow Schools, without a knowledge of the controversies surrounding the formalist research of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. (See Tartu School.) At the same time, many of the specific issues, such as the notion of literariness, have all but disappeared from critical debate, and Jakobson's pioneering work on metaphor seems to have been absorbed largely without acknowledgment in the recent work of the North American cognitivists. Jakobson's most enduring contribution may be, in the sense of *Rolancl Barthes, a fusion of scientific and of creative thought. Jakobson's career is a testimony to his belief that language is the predominant human trait, and that as a linguist, nothing to do with the study of language lay outside his interests. RICHARD KIDDER

primary Sources Jakobson, 'The Dominant,' 1935/1971. Repub in SW 3(1981): 751-6. -The Framework of Language Intro. by Ladislaw

Matejka. Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, 1980. - Tuturizm.' 1919. Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 717-22. Eng. trans. Language in Literature, 28-33. - Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Belknap-Harvard UP, 1987. - 'Language in Operation.' 1964. Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 7-17. - 'Linguistics and Poetics.' 1960. Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 18-51. - Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Nabrosok pervyi. Viktor Khlebnikov. 1921. Repub. in SW 5 (1985): 299-344. Excerpted as 'Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov.' In Major Soviet Writers, Oxford UP, 1972, and in Questions de poetique (see below). - 'On the Relation between Visual and Auditory Signs.' 1967. Repub. in SW 2 (1971): 338-44. - Toeziia grammatiki i grammatika poezii.' 1961. Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 163-86. Eng. version. 'Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry.' 1968. Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 87-97. - Questions de poetique. Deuxieme edition, revue et corrigee par 1'auteur. Publie sous la direction de Tzvetan Todorov. Collection Poetique. Paris: Seuil, 1973. - 'Retrospect.' Repub. in SW i (1962): 631-58. - Selected Writings. 7 vols. The Hague; Paris; New York; Berlin; Amsterdam; New York: Mouton, 1962-85. - 'Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb.' 1957. Repub. in SW 2 (1971): 130-47. - 'Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry.' 1970. Repub, in SW 3 (1981): 136-47. - 'Toward the History of the Moscow Linguistic Circle.' In SW 7 (1985): 279-82. - Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance.' 1956. Repub. in SW 2 (1971): 229-59. - Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Assisted by Brent Vine. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Jakobson, Roman, and Claude Levi-Strauss. 'Les Chats' de Charles Baudelaire.' L'Homtne 2 (1962): 5-21. Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 447-64. Jakobson, Roman, and Krystyna Pomorska. Dialogues. Trans. Mary Fretz. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Jakobson, Roman, and lurii Tynianov. Troblemy skumania literatury i iazyka.' Novj Lef 12 (1928): 36-7. Eng. trans. 'Epigraph: Problems in the Study of Literature and Language.' Repub. in SW 3 (1981): 3-6. Jakobson, Roman, and Linda Waugh. The Sound Shape of Language. Assisted by Martha Taylor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Secondary Sources Barthes, Roland. 'Avant-propos.' Cahiers Cistre 5 (1978): 9-10.

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James Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976. Delcroix, M., and VV. Geerts, eds. "Les Chats" de Baudelaire: Line confrontation dc methode. Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 1980. Eco, Umberto. 'The Influence of Roman Jakobson on the Development of Semiotics.' In Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship. Ed. Daniel Armstrong and C.H. van Schooneveld. Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1977, 39-58. Grzybek, Peter. 'Some Remarks on the Notion of Sign in Jakobson's Semiotics and in Czech Structuralism.' Znakolog: An International yearbook of Slavic Semiotics. i (1989): 113-28. Bochum: Initiative zur Forderung Interkultureller und Slavischer Semiotik (IFISS). - Studien zum Zeichenbegriff der Sowjetischen Semiotik Moskauer und Tartauer Schule. Bochumer Beitrage zur Semiotik. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1989. Holenstein, Elmar. Roman Jakobsons Phanomenologischer Strukturalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. Luria, A.R. 'The Contribution of Linguistics to the Theory of Aphasia.' In Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship. Ed. Daniel Armstrong and C.H. van Schooneveld. Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1977, 237-51. Pomorska, Krystyna, et al., eds. Language, Poetry and Poetics. The Generation of the 1890$: Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij. Proceedings of the First Roman Jakobson Colloquium, at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, October 5-6, 1984. Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987. - 'The Autobiography of a Scholar.' In Language, Poetry and Poetics, 3-13. Riffaterre, Michael. 'Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's "Les Chats.'" Yale French Studies 36-7 (1966): 200-42. Rudy, Stephen. Roman Jakobson: A Complete Bibliography of His Writings. Ed. and comp. by Stephen Rudy. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990. Todorov, Tzvetan. Toetique generale.' Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship. Ed. Daniel Armstrong and C.H. van Schooneveld. Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1977, 473-84. Waugh, Linda R. 'The Poetic Function and the Nature of Language.' In Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Assisted by Brent Vine. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985, 143-68. - 'On the Sound Shape of Language: Mediacy and Immediacy.' In Language, Poetry and Poetics, 157-73- Roman Jakobson's Science of Language. Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1976. Winner, Thomas G. 'The Aesthetic Semiotics of Ro-

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man Jakobson.' In Language, Poetry and Poetics, 2 57~74- 'Roman Jakobson and Avant-garde Art.' In Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship. Ed. Daniel Armstrong and C.H. van Schooneveld. Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1977, 503-14.

James, Henry (b. U.S.A., i843~d. England, 1916) Novelist, writer of short stories and novellas, literary critic, man of letters. Born into a wealthy family, Henry James travelled widely and attended a variety of schools, including two in Switzerland and Germany. The result was a cosmopolitan and European perspective that convinced him to discontinue his law studies at Harvard in 1862 for a life of writing. His first story, 'A Tragedy of Error,' appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864. Thereafter, William Dean Howells, who became editor of the Monthly in 1871, gave James a number of assignments. As a result of a lengthy journey in Europe in 1869, James discovered a congenial cultural milieu. In 1875, both Henry and his brother William travelled first to Paris and then to London where Henry lived until his death. It was during this time that James met such important literary figures as Flaubert, de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers and Turgenev, whose writing became a model for James' later work. In this international atmosphere he produced much of the work that established his reputation as a major novelist, short story and novella writer, literary critic, and theoretician. In his 2oth Century Literary Criticism (1988), *David Lodge states that 'more than any other single writer, James may be said to have presided over the transformation of the Victorian novel into the modern novel, and at the same time to have laid the foundations of modern criticism of the novel.' A writer of imaginative ""literature, James also wrote important criticism and theory, at least in part to explain his fictive purposes. His ideas are rooted in organic forms with a synthetic focus that stems particularly from Aristotle and Longinus. An additional influence stems from the work of his brother William. William James' studies in psychology and his creation of such terms as 'stream of consciousness,' a metaphor which marks a whole new approach to fiction, as well as his pragmatism and ethical sense are

James keystones of Henry's work. (See "metonymy/ metaphor.) Also reflected in the writings of Henry James is the criticism of Matthew Arnold. In mid-19th-century England, Arnold was bemoaning the philistine mentality and AngloSaxon attitudes of English writers of the first half of the century, especially in poetry, whereas James was decrying the 'naivete' and 'vulgarity' of American and English literature, particularly in the novel of the second half of that century. Both men contrasted that literature with the tradition from the Continent that stemmed from Greek and later European examples that had intellectual and philosophical dimensions they found lacking in English and American literature. Both looked to that tradition to modernize and deepen sensibilities, and to broaden awareness of the comparative virtues of other literature. For James, the Victorian novel was lesser than the best European examples because 'it had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it - of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice or comparison' ('The Art of Fiction'). Even in tone James' criticism mirrors Arnold's, but their major agreement concerned what they saw as the absence of formal and ethical values in English literature. A point they both emphasized again and again was that it should be the function of the imaginative writer and critic (as Arnold puts it when he defines 'criticism') as a 'disinterested endeavor to learn and propogate the best that is known and thought in the world' ('The Function of Criticism'). If Arnold could be accused of 'kid-gloved arrogance' in his criticism, James could be described as a man whose standards were elitist, intellectual and demanding of a deep and abiding knowledge of the great literature of the past, of the tradition of ideas that it reflects in the so-called *canon. Though it is much less read than his fiction, James' literary criticism is both an invaluable chronicle of literary and cultural life in the late igth century and an essential adjunct to his fiction. Much of his criticism is contained in informal reviews collected in a Library of America edition. He wrote on American writers such as Hawthorne, Howells, Lowell, and Parkman; English writers such as Arnold, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Trollope; French writers Balzac, Daudet, Flaubert, and Taine; and other Europeans such as Goethe, Turgenev, and D'Annunzio. These reviews give

insights into the intellectual milieu of the century but they do not have the same status in criticism and theory as do the sections in the Library of America edition entitled 'The Prefaces to the New York Edition' (the collected edition of his novels) and 'Essays on Literature/ containing a number of essays such as 'The Science of Criticism' (1891: 93), 'The Future of the Novel' (1899), 'The Present Literary Situation in France' (1899), and especially The Art of Fiction' (1884: 88). 'The Prefaces to the New York Edition' encapsulate James' 'theory' in a methodological sense, the entries in his 'Notebooks' in a practical sense. 'The Art of Fiction' is a general statement about James' philosophy of creation, expressing his deep commitment to pluralism, humanism and the life of the mind. Each of the 'Prefaces' concerns his studies of 'point of view/ that is, the narrative methods in his novels. 'The Art of Fiction' is a statement about the nature of art and the responsibility of the artist to his art. On the experimental requirement and capacity, he writes that the novelist 'must write from his experience, that his characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life.' On organicism in form and content: 'A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.' That intellect, ethics, and aesthetics are required in good works of literature: 'No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground.' James insisted on study of the crucial philosophical ideas, on being aware of the techniques of fiction, on being cultured, and on having the generosity, self-discipline, and disinterest to allow the artist his donnee, his gift and his perspectives. REED MERRILL

Primary Sources Arnold, Matthew. 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.' In Essays in Criticism. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865, 1-38. James, Henry, Jr. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and L.H. Powers. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. - Henry James Letters 1543-1975. 4 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1974-84.

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Jameson - Henry James: Literary Criticism ('Essays on Literature/ 'American Writers'). Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. - Henry James: Literary Criticism (Trench Writers/ 'Other European Writers/ 'The Prefaces to the New York Edition'). Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. - Selected Letters of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Secondary Sources Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James. Philadelphia: A. Salter, 1954. Blackmur, R.P. 'Introduction/ The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces [from the New York edition]. New York: Scribner, 1934. Daugherty, Sarah B. The Literary Criticism of Henry James. Athens: Ohio UP, 1981. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. - The Modern Psychological Novel. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1955. - Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau. A Bibliography of Henry James. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Gass, William. 'The High Brutality of Good Intentions/ In Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975, 704-13. Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. New York: New York UP, 1967. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. New York: Viking, 1957. Roberts, Morris. Henry James's Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1929. Veeder, William. 'Image and Argument: Henry James and the Style of Criticism/ Henry James Review 6 (1985): 172-81. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism 17502950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965. Wimsatt, William K., Jr., and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

Jameson, Fredric R. (b. U.S.A., 1934-) Literary critic. Fredric Jameson received his B.A. from Haverford College (1954), his M.A. (1956) and Ph.D. (1960) from Yale University and also studied at the Universities of Aix, Munich and Berlin. His doctoral dissertation became his first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961). After teaching at Harvard and elsewhere, he is now the William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, co-editor of Social Text and a contributing editor of the Minnesota Review. One of the leading Marxist literary theorists

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and cultural critics in the Anglo-American world, Jameson seeks a genuinely dialectical engagement with Marxist theorists like *Theodor Adorno, *Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, *Georg Lukacs, and *JeanPaul Sartre (see Marxism and Form), but also confronts from a resolutely Marxist perspective the theoretical challenge posed by *structuralism, *poststructuralism and *postmodernism. (See also *Marxist criticism, *materialist criticism.) Jameson's thought is in a Hegelian or Western Marxist tradition. Thus certain themes or tendencies assert themselves in his writings: (i) a concern with the interaction between subject and object or the 'data of individual experience and the vaster forms of institutional society'; (2) the recapitulation of this 'opposition' at the aesthetic level in the relation between form and content; and (3) the conception of reality as a 'totality/ (See *subject/ object, *theme.) Jameson brings to these themes a very personal mode of dialectical analysis that does not attempt simply to answer a question but rather to reflect on the very existence of the question itself, a mode of reflection that leads back, ultimately, to a concrete underlying historical reality. Thus, for example, instead of accepting the concept of 'point of view' as a universal formal category of fiction, the dialectical critic will recognize its roots in a determinate social reality: a condition of isolated subjectivity and individualism characteristic of early capitalism. Similarly, faced with the obscurity of modern poetry, the dialectically trained reader will avoid interpreting or restoring to transparency the verbal opacity he or she is confronted with but will instead question its status, quality and structure, as well as his or her own mental processes in responding to it. In Marxism and Form, his first major theoretical work, Jameson explores the dialectical relation between form and content, which he understands not merely in a literary and formalist sense but as a historical and dialectical constituent of all cultural institutions and symbolic acts. Form and content are dialectically interchangeable: what at one level of interpretation is perceived as form turns out at another level of insight to be content. This *paradox arises from the fact that form is simply the abstraction or transformation of an already meaningful content, namely, the components

Jameson of our concrete social life and of history. The manifest content of that form (here Jameson adapts Freudian terminology to his own purposes) is the abstraction and distortion of the real that we call *icleology. (See *Freud.) Interpretation works to reverse this process, to reveal the latent, concrete, already meaningful content behind the form. Jameson calls for a Marxist hermeneutic to undertake this process of restoration. Just as a religious hermeneutic seeks to recover meaning in texts and cultures resistant or inimical to its outlook, so too a political hermeneutic will preserve access to revolutionary energies in repressive times and cultures. This hermeneutical operation has a negative and positive aspect, not only the task of *demystification and the destruction of illusions, but also the restoration of the genuine Utopian impulse behind alien and antagonistic cultural forms. The work of a conservative like *T.S. Eliot or a writer with fascist leanings like Wyndham Lewis must be stripped of its illusory character, but equally the Utopian, prophetic cry that lies buried beneath the surface of the *text must be freed and reconverted to the political aims for which it rightfully calls. (See *hermeneutics, *metacriticism.) Jameson's Fables of Aggression: Wi/ndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979) is a critical work that takes up this double hermeneutic task. The Prison-House of Language (1982) accepts the challenge of structuralism, which is to consider language as a model and to 'rethink everything through once again in terms of linguistics.' Here Jameson shows how Saussurean linguistics, Russian *formalism and French structuralism all constitute fundamentally ahistorical theories that value synchronic analysis over diachrony and ignore the role of the observer in the structures they describe. (See *Saussure.) In order to become a genuine hermeneutic, the structuralist model must re-emphasize the place of the analyst and open itself to 'all the winds of history' (216). This Jameson himself attempts to do by showing how structuralism and formalist analysis are products of a determinate historical moment and social reality. Jameson's most ambitious theoretical work to date, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act ( 1 9 8 1 ) , attempts to develop an authentically dialectical criticism. Jameson argues that Marxism is no mere substitute for other approaches but constitutes an ' "untranscendable horizon" t h a t subsumes ...

apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once cancelling and preserving them' (10). Other methods have a local validity, reflecting one or another element within the complex cultural superstructure and offering 'strategies of containment' that promote the illusion of complete and self-sufficient readings. Only Marxism can claim to comprehend the totality, whose ultimate ground is the unity of History itself. The historical past and its relation to current reality can be grasped only if they are understood as parts of a single great collective story, a story of humankind's fall from an original plenitude whose shattered fragments generate humanity's need for narrative and interpretation. But many elements of that fundamental story - the collective struggle for freedom - have been distorted and suppressed: hence, Jameson's preoccupation with the concept of a political unconscious. History can be apprehended only in textual form; in other words, like the concepts of time and space, 'narrative' is a fundamental epistemological category that structures our experience of the world and represents in its form the contours of human desire. As a 'socially symbolic act,' the narrative of a literary text demands interpretation and Jameson adapts the four-fold medieval allegorical framework (as reworked by *Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism) to the requirements of a Marxist hermeneutic. Thus interpretation moves through three concentric frameworks or horizons: first, the immediate historical context of the work; second, the social order in the broadest sense (especially as constituted by class struggle); and third, the 'ultimate horizon of human history as a whole.' (See also *ideological horizon.) Jameson is pre-eminently a cultural rather than a literary critic, as his recent writings on modernism and postmodernism indicate. His greatest strength as a theorist is perhaps his ability to synthesize (synthesis being the dialectician's hallmark) the work of others *Althusser, *Greimas, *Gadamer, and *LeviStrauss, among others. Some indication of his critical influence may be gleaned from the debate that his work has generated. But Jameson's position as a Marxist thinker in the postwar Anglo-American world has meant that he has remained, as Eagleton puts it, an intellectual 'client of Europe.' This is not to undervalue his powerful creativity of thought, but

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Jauss simply to comment dialectically on his historical position as a theorist. FRANS DE BRUYN Primary Sources Jameson, Fredric R. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. - The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. 2 vols. Theory and History of Literature 48 and 49. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. - Marxism and Form: zoth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. - 'Modernism and Imperialism.' In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990, 43-66. - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. - Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. - The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. - Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961. Secondary Sources Eagleton, Terry. 'Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style.' Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982): 14-22. Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986. LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1983. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 'The Unconscious, History, and Phrases: Notes on The Political Unconscious.' New Orleans Review 11 (Spring 1984): 73-9. Mohanty, S.P. 'History at the Edge of Discourse: Marxism, Culture, Interpretation.' Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982): 33-46. Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985. Sprinker, Michael. 'The Part and the Whole.' Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982): 57-71. Watkins, Evan. The Critical Act: Criticism and Community. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1978, 158-87. Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Theory and History of Literature 31. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987, 46-58. White, Hayden. 'Getting Out of History.' Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982): 2-13.

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Jauss, Hans Robert (b. Germany, 1921-) Professor of Romance languages and literary theorist. Jauss studied at Heidelberg and taught at Heidelberg, Munster and Giessen before his appointment at the University of Constance in 1966. He is one of the central figures in the ""Constance School and is best known for the aesthetics of reception (Rezeptionsasthetik), a hermeneutically based approach to "literature and literary history influenced primarily by the Russian formalists and by Jauss' teacher *Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-). (See *hermeneutics, Russian ""formalism.) Jauss' early work concerned aspects of French literature, particularly the medieval period. In 1967 he attracted the attention of literary theorists with his inaugural address at Constance, 'Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Literaturgeschichte?' [What is and for what purpose does one study literary history?]. This talk was subsequently published as Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft [Literary History as a Provocation to Literary Scholarship]. In this work Jauss outlined the main precepts of the aesthetics of reception, which attempted to combine the best features of two putatively opposing schools of criticism: Russian formalism and *Marxist criticism. From the former he takes the insight that perception is fundamental to our encounter with literary texts and to change in literary history. From the latter he draws the notion that literature is thoroughly historical and can only be understood as a product of historical mediations. The aesthetics of reception thus places the perceiving subject at the centre of a literary historiography that locates texts in a larger artistic, social and political context. (See ""reader-response criticism, ""text.) The main tool which Jauss employs to accomplish this re-definition of interpretation and historiography is the ""horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont). Never explicitly defined by Jauss, the term evidently refers to a system or structure of expectations that are literary, cultural and social. Jauss proposes that literary scholarship should try to determine the Erwartungshorizont for any particular work and then measure the distance between the two. Only those works that violate or break the horizon of expectation evidence artistic merit. A guide to aesthetic distance can be found in the

Jung array of reactions to a given work by its initial audience and by literary critics, and later by other writers and literary scholarship. The aesthetics of reception thus postulates novelty or a deviation from an established standard as both a criterion for evaluation and as the motive force for change in literary history. By the early 19708, however, Jauss had revised his deviationist stance. In his Kleine Apologic der Asthetischen Erfahrung [Small Apology for Aesthetic Experience 1972] and in other essays from this period, he criticized what he called the 'aesthetics of negativity.' Reacting to the posthumous publication of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970), for Jauss the paradigmatic case of negative aesthetics, he reconsidered the implications of his own 'negativity' as well. The aesthetics of negativity is deficient in two areas. First, it unnecessarily reduces the progressive role of art in society by admitting a positive social function only when the work negates the society in which it is produced. There is no room for affirmative art and consequently only elitist and hermetic works are declared authentic. Second, the aesthetics of negativity tends to deny the pleasure art gives. It thereby denies the primary function of art through the ages and is unable to appreciate the artistic value of a wide range of literary works, from medieval heroic epics to the classics of 'affirmative' literature. Applying this criticism to his own theses from the 'Provocation' essay, Jauss developed a more differentiated notion of reception. In his magnum opus Asthctische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik [Aesthetic Experience and Literary Henneneutics 1977; 1982], he was centrally concerned with doing justice to the variety of responses to works of art. To avoid the deleterious consequences of negative aesthetics, he places the notion of pleasure or enjoyment (Genuss) at the centre of his theory. In the aesthetic realm we distance ourselves from the object that we produce by an act of consciousness. The key to aesthetic experience for Jauss is self-enjoyment in the enjoyment of something else (ScWstgenuss im Fremdgenuss). It consists of three moments: poesis, aisthesis and catharsis. The first refers to the productive aspect of our encounter with literature and art, the pleasure that stems from the application of our own creative abilities. Aisthesis is Jauss' designation for the receptive side of aesthetic experience. By supplying common perceptions for members of a c o m m u n i t y , aisthesis contrib-

utes to social unity. Finally, catharsis can be understood as the communicative component between art and recipient. It can best be illustrated by the various ways (associative, admiring, sympathetic, cathartic, ironic) in which we interact and identify with the hero. Despite the subtlety and refinement of his later theoretical work, Jauss' early work had more of an impact in Germany, influencing an entire generation of younger scholars and sparking lively international debates. His importance in the English-speaking world, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the 19805, when his work became more generally available in translation. His acclaim in both, however, is due to his ability to apply the principles of Gadamerian hermeneutics to the sphere of literature and poetic theory. ROBERT C. HOLUB

Primary Sources Jauss, Hans Robert. Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hcrmeneutik. Munich: Fink, 1977. Rev. and exp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Theory and History of Fiterature 3. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. - Kleine Apologie der Asthetischer Erfahrung. Konstanzer Universitatsreden 59. Constance: UP, 1972. - Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. - Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Theory and History of Literature 2. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1982.

Jung, Carl Gustav (b. Switzerland, 1875-01. 1961) Founder of analytical psychology, mythologist and psychiatrist. After studying science at the University of Basel, Jung received his medical doctorate (1900), then specialized in psychiatry at the Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich. His early wordassociation experiments resulted in his discovery of the basic elements of personality, 'the feeling-toned complexes/ autonomous networks of emotionally charged associations organized around a specific core (a mother complex, father complex and so on). This work led to a meeting with *Freud in 1907 and a collaboration that culminated in their 1909 lectures at Clark University and in Jung's in-

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Jung stallation as first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910-14). Jung began private psychoanalytic practice in 1909. His developing interest in the mythic dimension of dreams and fantasies led to his increasing difficulty in accepting Freud's Oedipus complex as the underlying *universal of all neuroses and to a conviction that the singledrive (sexual) theory of libido was inadequate (see Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido 191112; trans. Symbols of Transformation, Collected Works 5). (See *myth.) Further differences with Freud over the role of transference in analysis, the nature of dream symbolism, and the meaning of seduction fantasies (Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4) resulted in their break in 1913 and in Jung's subsequent designation of his own researches as analytical psychology. As a structuralist and formalist thinker, Jung stands outside the linguistically oriented mainstream of Continental structuralist theory, although his work is related to it and in his own terms would be 'compensatory,' since it explores the domain systematically excluded by structuralist linguistics. (See *structuralism.) Jung's thought is thus mythocentric rather than logocentric: it is concerned with essence rather than function; with the symbolic rather than the semiotic and with the diachronic or historically continuous aspect of language (as mediated through recurring images) rather than with its synchronic aspect. (See *logocentrism, *semiotics.) As the 'talking cure,' psychoanalysis in general must also be concerned with what *Saussure termed parole, the subjective and individual utterance, rather than with langue, the abstract language-system underlying individual and individualizing speech. (See *langue/parole.) As a psychological structuralist, Jung located the instinct to formulate structures, as well as the primary patterns upon which all structures are formulated, in the human psyche. He first designated the basic organizing patterns 'primordial images,' after Jacob Burkhardt's concept of eternally recurring motifs or mythologems. Later, Jung adopted the term *archetype, inspired by Plato, St. Augustine and Kant, and used it generally in his writings after 1919. As innate, a priori impulses to organize images and ideas, archetypes are tendencies to produce form, relatable to instincts and representing 'the precipitate of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line, the accumulated experiences of organic life in gen-

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eral, a million times repeated, and condensed into types' (CW 6: 659). 'Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns' (CW 7: 270). The instincts and the archetypes together form the 'collective unconscious,' different from the 'personal unconscious' (which Freud dealt with) because it is not made up of individual, unique or repressed contents, but of those that are inborn, universal and recurring. Crucial to an understanding of Jung is the distinction he makes between the archetype itself and the archetypal image, the concrete representation of the archetype's energic potential. While the archetype as such is irrepresentable and transcendent, it is mediated through spontaneously arising images, which are projected as the symbols comprising fantasies, 'big' dreams and myths and also found in the mystical, gnostic and alchemical texts in which Jung immersed himself (Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/ Spirit/Trickster, CW 9: i). Some post-Jungians, notably James Hillman, have suggested the distinction between the archetype and its image is irrelevant. *Northrop Frye, a literary structuralist, and *Claude Levi-Strauss, an anthropological structuralist, apply the term archetype to what Jung designates as its image, thus locating their 'archetype' within a closed system of textual or mythic phenomena that excludes the psyche. That archetypes are unconscious structures is central to Jung's psychology. As the agency that patterns and directs all psychic activity, the archetype, being projectable in an infinite variety of images, acts to correct or compensate for conscious attitudes and values that are one-sided, fixated or development-inhibiting. Both on the individual and cultural level, the archetype is an equilibrium-inducing and balancing factor. Its image-symbols mediate and resolve the oppositions of a human consciousness that must differentiate (and so create opposites) in order to function; its symbols also heal the division of a psyche split phylogenetically with the 'coming of light' and individually with the birth of consciousness into binary parts. The most important archetype is the 'self,' its most culturally significant image that of Christ on the cross; as a quaternio, the crucified Christ is also a mandala, the circle as perfected form and the common feature of all archetypal images of the self (see Aion, CW 9:

Jung ii). (See *self/other.) The self directs individuation, the process through which the individual achieves distinction from and transcendent relationship to collective humanity. As the archetype of wholeness and perfected form, the self resolves or synthesizes the opposites confronted on the individuation journey. Jung's analytical psychology posits as the ultimate goal of its therapy the activation of the self archetype, full realization of which would constitute an experience of redemption and divinity. (See also *psychoanalytic theory.) As a record of individual and cultural psychic process, "literature occupies a privileged place in Jungian thought. Myth offers an archive of archetypal images that aid the amplification of dreams and fantasies, while narrative projects, through the figure of the hero/ ine, an image-record of the development of ego-consciousness in its successive stages. The classic and most comprehensive application by an analytical psychologist of Jung's thought on myth is Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Human Consciousness (1952), an interpretation of the psychic significance of the universal patterns and figures of heroic quest cycles. The seminal Jungian study of poetry is that of the literary critic *Maud Bodkin, whose Archetypal Patterns in Poetry appeared in 1934. Since then, Jung's influence on literary criticism, while pervasive, has been diffuse and, until recently, evident chiefly in the use of such standard Jungian concepts as the 'shadow' (the unassimilated, negative element of the personality) and animus and anima, the contrasexual components, respectively, of the female and male psyches. Since 1980, major Jungian studies of Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Beckett, Robertson Davies, and Doris Lessing have appeared, as have Jungian approaches to American romanticism and to women writers. Applications of Jungian thought to the visual arts and to film have also been published, as have books on Jung and theology and the Bible. (See also *archetypal criticism.) JEAN COATES CLEARY

Primary Sources Major writings by Jung are from The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, 20 vol., Bollingen Series 20, Princeton UP, 2nd ed., 1970.

Jung, C.G. Aiou: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. 195 i . Vol. 9.

- 'The Analysis of Dreams.' 1909. Freud and Psychoanalysis. Vol. 4. - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 1934-5. Vo1- 9- 'Freud and Jung: Contrasts.' 1929. Freud and Psychoanalysis. Vol. 4. - Letters. 2 vols. Bollingen Series 95. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. - Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1965. - 'On the Criticism of Psychoanalysis.' 1910. Freud and Psychoanalysis. Vol. 4. - The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. 1929-32. Vol. 15. - Symbols of Transformation. 1911-12/1952. Vol. 5 - 'The Theory of Psychoanalysis.' 1913. Freud and Psychoanalysis. Vol. 4. McGuire, William, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters. Bollingen Series 94. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time. Boston and Toronto: Little Brown, 1975. Wehr, Gerhard. Jung: A Biography. Boston: Shambala, 1988. Secondary Sources i. Applications of Jungian Thought: Myth, Literature, Art Barrett, Gregory. Archetypes in Japanese Film: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines. London and Toronto: Associated UPs, 1989. Bickman, Martin. The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980. Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: Oxford UP, 1934. Cederstrom, Lorelei. Fine-tuning the Feminine Psyche: Jungian Patterns in the Novels of Doris Lessing. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Doll, Mary A. Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988. Driscoll, James P. Identity in Shakespearean Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP; London and Toronto: Associated UPs, 1983. Edinger, Edward F. Encounter with the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1986. Jung, Emma, and M.L. Von Franz. The Grail Legend. 2nd ed. Boston: Sigo Press; London: Coventure, 1986.

Knapp, Bettina L. A Jungian Approach to Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. - Women in 2oth Century Literature: A Jungian View. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1987". Monk, Patricia. The Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982.

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Kermode Neumann, Erich. The Archetypal World of Henry Moore. Bollingen Series 67. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. - Art and the Creative Unconscious. Bollingen Series 61. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. - The Origins and History of Human Consciousness. Bollingen Series 42. Princeton UP, 1954-70. Olney, James. The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy - Yeats and Jung. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. Richards, David G. The Hero's Quest for the Self: An Archetypal Approach to Hesse's Demian and Other Novels. Lanham, Md.: UP of America, 1987. Slusser, Gerald H. From Jung to Jesus: Myth and Consciousness in the New Testament. Atlanta: John Knox P, 1986. Weaver, Rix. Spinning on a Dream Thread: Herman Hesse: His Life and Work, and His Contact with C.G. Jung. Perth: Wyvern Publications, 1977. 2. Post-Jungian Archetypal Theory Goldenberg, Naomi R. 'Archetypal Theory after Jung.' Spring (1975): 199-220. Hillman, James. Archetypal Psychology. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985. Lauter, Estella, and Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985. Samuels, Andrew. Jung and the Post-Jungians. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Kermode, Frank (b. England, 1919-) Literary critic. Frank Kermode went from a B.A. (1941) and M.A. (1947) at Liverpool University into a teaching career in English ""literature highlighted by numerous distinguished chairs. As early as 1958-65 he was J.E. Taylor Professor of English at Manchester, then Winterstoke Professor at Bristol (1965-7), Lord Northcliffe Professor at University College London (1967-74), and finally King Edward Professor of English Literature at Cambridge (1974-82). Subsequently he accepted invitations to distinguished visiting lectureships at Columbia (1983, 1985). Retired at Cambridge, he has continued to write acclaimed works of literary criticism covering a wide range of subjects in literary and aesthetic history. Early books of note reflect Kermode's teaching interests: Romantic Image (1957), John Donne (1957), Wallace Stevens (1960), William

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Shakespeare: The Final Plays (1963), and D.H. Lawrence (1973) are all indicative of his critical intelligence and lucid expository style. Moreover, each work in its own way expresses Kermode's unflagging practical commitment to a Leavisite *canon and aesthetic celebration of the 'Great Tradition/ and thus anticipates his principle legacy to Anglo-American criticism of what is generally called *hermeneutics or interpretation theory. (See *F.R. Leavis.) The first of his more theoretical books, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, is the published form of the Flexner lectures given by Kermode at Bryn Mawr College in 1965. Here he explores the 'apocalyptic' impulse in historical fiction, that characteristic tendency to want to see the world and the structure of fiction as making most sense retrospectively from its point of closure as optimal signifier. The Bible, in this view, offers the most familiar modelling of meaningful history: starting with Tn the beginning' (Genesis), ending with a vision of the end (Apocalypse), it provides the ideal of 'a wholly concordant structure' (6). But the impulse evident in the structure of the biblical anthology Kermode finds echoed in varying degrees everywhere in literature. A fundamental principle in Western hermeneutic - that the end alone should declare the purpose of the beginning and order the meaning of all that follows up to that end - is thus taken by Kermode to provide the heuristic motive in our 'explanatory fictions' (35-6). Yet for the modern reader this meaning is not often welcomed as 'our' meaning. Modernist resistance to closure, and indeed the implications of the notion of a beginning before our beginning, creates in both our history and fiction a rejection of the metafictional implications of sequence: modern literature is thus tense with a counter-impulse, separating history from chronicle, novel from simple narrative. (See *closure/dis-closure.) In The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979) Kermode turned his focus from the question of meaning as realized structure to the issue of 'insider' versus 'outsider' *discourse in the pursuit and disclosure of meaning. Turning his attention to the Gospel of Mark and Jesus' explanation of his use of parable at once to instruct the insider and confound 'those without' - those who have 'eyes to see and see not, ears to hear and hear not' - Kermode invokes the historical relation-

Kermode ship between biblical exegesis and literary theory to juxtapose criticism as elite priestcraft with interpretation more broadly conceived as a vernacular means of negotiating life. In this book the sharply theoretical potential in his agenda is subtly metamorphosed into questions of strategic praxis and culturally responsible, contextualized interpretation. The question of institutional control of interpretation, raised in this work, is explored in an important article in Salmagundi (43: 72-86), and returned to again in 'Canons' (1988; cf. his essay in Alter and Kermode [1987]), each time in a manner still largely affirming of preoccupations already articulated in an earlier book, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (1975). Kermode's continuing reflections have led him to consider periodization, aesthetic standards and the relation of history and value. In Forms of Attention (1985), History and Value (1988), Poetry, Narrative, History (1989), and in his editorial collaboration with Robert Alter in The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), Kermode elaborates essentially traditional views of canon (he edited, with John Hollander, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature [1973]). Assessment of the formation of hierarchies of value, and of social determinacy versus subjective "Indeterminacy in establishing meaning are set in illuminating relation to an aesthetic curriculum still basically Arnoldian in its ambitions. Frank Lentricchia, in his preface to Forms of Attention, identifies what is in effect a premise in Kermode's critical writing, that 'all commentary on canonical texts varies from generation to generation because it must meet different needs, and that the canonical text proves itself canonical by being able to withstand changing assaults of interpretation without ever seeming to be exhausted.' This characteristic grants to such a "text what Kermode calls 'perpetual modernity.' The Uses of Error (1990), a collection of review essays, declares Kermode's traditionalist venerations and hermeneutical stance as a critic who sees his writing as subordinate, as second-order discourse. In the essay 'Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion' he concludes that 'the preservation of canonical works is achieved by means of argument that may not be truly worthy of that name, and which is, at best, incapable of resisting later criticism.' Kermode's mature work is marked by a keen

sense of the distinct enterprises of what the Germans call Tageskritik (reviewing) and Literaturwissenschaft(formal literary study). As one who has persistently done both tasks, and argued for their necessary complementarity in the English tradition, he wagers his own effort on a diachronist's faith in the future of literary history: 'The success of interpretative argument as a means of conferring or endorsing value/ he contends, 'is, accordingly, not to be measured by the survival of the comment but by the survival of its object.' DAVID LYLE J E F F R E Y Primary Sources Kermode, Frank. 'Apocalypse and the Modern.' In Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? Ed. Saul Friedlander et al. New York: Holmes, 1985, 84-106. - An Appetite for Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. - 'Can We Say Absolutely Anything We Like?' In Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling. Ed. Quentin Anderson et al. New York: Basic, 1977, 159-72. - 'Canons.' Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 18.4 (1988): 258-70. - The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change. New York: Viking, 1975. - Continuities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. - The Decline of the Man of Letters.' Partisan Review 52.3 (1985): 195-209. - D.H. Lawrence. London: Fontana, 1973. - Essays on Fiction 1971-1982. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. - 'Fighting Freud.' New York Review of Books, 29 April 1976: 39-41. - 'Figures in the Carpet: On Recent Theories of Narrative Discourse.' Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 2 (1980): 291-301. - Forms of Attention. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. - The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979. - 'Hawthorne's Modernity.' Partisan Review 41 (1974): 428-41. - History and Value. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988. - 'Institutional Control of Interpretation.' Salmagundi 43 (i979): 72-86. - 'Interpretive Continuities and the New Testament.' Raritan 1.4 (1982): 33-49. - John Donne. London, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1957. - 'The Last Classic.' Yale Review 78.2 (1989): 147-65. - 'Literary Value and Transgression.' Raritan 7.3 (1988): 34-53.

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Kierkegaard - The Model of a Modern Modernist.' New York Review of Books, i May 1975: 20-3. - 'Modern Poetry and Tradition.' Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 14 (1965): 5-15. - 'A Modern Way with the Classic.' New Literary History 5 (1974): 415-34. - 'Novel, History and Type.' Novel 1(1968): 231-38. - Novel and Narrative. Glasgow: U of Glasgow P, 1972. - 'Novel and Narrative.' In The Theory of the Novel: New Essays. Ed. John Halperin. New York: Oxford UP, 155-74- 'On Being an Enemy to Humanity.' Raritan 2.2 (1982): 87-102. - On Shakespeare's Learning. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1965. - The Patience of Shakespeare. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964. - 'The Plain Sense of Things.' In Midrash and Literature. Ed. G. Hartman and S. Budick. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986, 179-94. - Poetry, Narrative, History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. - Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 19581961. New York: Chilmark P, 1962. - 'A Reply to Denis Donoghue.' Critical Inquiry i (1975): 699-700. - 'Revolution: The Role of the Elders.' In Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution. Ed. I. Hassan. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1971. - Romantic Image. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. - The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. - Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. - 'The Structure of Fiction.' Modern Language Notes 84 (1969): 891-915. - 'The University and the Literary Public.' In The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality. Ed. Thomas B. Stroup. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1965. - 'The Use of the Codes.' In Approaches to Poetics. New York and London: Columbia UP, 1974, 51-79. - The Uses of Error. London: Collins, 1990. - Wallace Stevens. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1960. - William Shakespeare: The Final Plays. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1963. - 'World Without End or Beginning.' Malahat Review i (1967): 113-29. - The Living Milton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. - and Robert Alter, eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987. - and John Hollander, eds. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1973- Foreword to Guiraud, Pierre. Semiology. Trans. George Gross. London: Routledge, 1975.

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Secondary Sources Arac, Jonathan. 'History and Mystery: The Criticism of Frank Kermode.' Salmagundi 55 (1982): 135-55. [With a response by Frank Kermode, 156-62].

Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye (b. Denmark, 1813-d. 1855) Philosopher and religious thinker. S0ren Kierkegaard originally studied at the Borgerdyskole in Copenhagen and was taught Latin and Greek by his father, who also initiated him into religious studies. Kierkegaard's early rejection of traditional Christianity led him to years of doubt and dissoluteness filled with self-hatred and guilt. At the University of Copenhagen, and under the influence of George Hamann, he completed his theological studies in anticipation of the Lutheran ministry. His dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841), remains an important work on the subject of *irony as well as a source for his lifelong dedication to the maieutic-dialectical method of the master ironist, Socrates. After a short journey to Germany in 1841, Kierkegaard returned to Copenhagen in 1842, dedicating his remaining years to restoring what he considered to be Christ's ideas as opposed to the orthodoxies created in Christ's name, which he believed were antithetical to real Christian ideals. As was the case with so many other 19thcentury students of philosophy, Kierkegaard was confronted by the idealism of Hegel only to reject it and other kinds of absolutism as being unrealistic and opposed to intellectual freedom. He began a new investigation of the idea of a philosophy of the inner self structured upon an intensive and practical awareness by the individual of life's choices and responsibilities. His philosophy of the discovery of the inner self, one of the important contributions to igth-century philosophy, occupies the many volumes written from 1841-55. Scholarly discussion of Kierkegaard's ideas constitutes an impressive body of writing, but his importance for literary theory and criticism has been remarkably neglected, perhaps because his ideas are not a priori but rather based on the varieties of human experience in a world of infinite possibility and flux. His philosophy of life's choices and stages is also

Kierkegaard exemplified by his use of fiction itself (his 'novel' Either/Or, which remains an important analysis of aesthetic existence) and of such fictional characters as Don Juan, Faust and Ahasuerus (the Wandering Jew) as analogues of lived experience and decision-making. In addition, his contribution to such literary matters as point of view, indirect discourse, irony, and narrative are yet to be fully discussed in criticism. Kierkegaard emphasizes that each individual must be aware of choices and their consequences - that is, to create one's own values through the use of one's intellect. He maintains that 'the crucial thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live or die.' Because of numerous facile readings of Kierkegaard which suggest that his subjectivity begets relativism, it needs emphasizing that he was insistent upon one's ethical awareness of the myriad choices of existence. Neither did he accept relativism nor immoralism as valid positions. Kierkegaard believed that although it is filled with doubt and endless paradoxes, only 'passionate certitude' and 'blind faith' in God can transcend the turmoil of finite existence. (See *paradox.) He argues that 'men are not so corrupt that they actually desire evil, but they are blind and really do not know what they are doing. Everything centers on drawing them out into the area of decision.' To illustrate the choices of the reflective person, Kierkegaard's works depict those decisions and their implications in an open and flexible discussion of free choice and its realm of possibility with Christianity as its base. Although Kierkegaard uses traditional philosophical and theological terms, he does not think about the self in 'pure speculation but constantly relies upon his actual experience for problems and confirmation' (Collins), while also making numerous allusions to literary works, music and history. Kierkegaard's oeuvrc falls into two groups that parallel in chronology in writing and publication what he intended to be a description of the ascending value of 'life's choices,' 'categories,' or 'stages on life's way.' Many of his books are narrated by 'pseudonymous authors' whose indirect discourses and individual points of view concern the relative advantages and disadvantages of existential decision-making. Of these his most important works are The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to

Socrates (1841); Either /Or (1843), a study of aestheticism based on the example of Don Giovanni; Fear and Trembling (1843), concerning absurdist faith and Abraham and Isaac, as well as classical tragedy and its ethical requirements; Philosophical Fragments (1844), describing the psychology of his radical transcendent Christian faith; and Stages on Life's Way (1845), and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), perhaps the two most important works that synthesize his categories. The stages/categories are the 'aesthetic/ 'ethical' and 'religious,' with borderline categories of 'irony' (between the aesthetic and ethical), and 'humour' (between the ethical and religious). The narrators find examples from their own intellectual dialectics to justify their positions. Each of these narratives is placed within a framework much like the confessional; each 'author' defends his position while, at the same time, being aware of its contingencies and limitations. The second group of Kierkegaard's writings largely consists of his own first-person, direct discussions of the freedom and paradox inherent in one's coming to faith, the conditions that inhere in that understanding. Here again he emphasizes the necessity for personal choice in the discovery of faith and the freedom that it implies, but he also stresses the solitude and doubt that comes of the 'one-toone' faith in the primacy of God and the debilitation of the believer. These 'personal' discussions of the new faith are introduced in The Point of View of My Work as an Author (1859), an important *text for an understanding of Kierkegaard because it gives direct expression to his revolutionary ideas about Christianity, its requirements, and its transcendent value over other choices of existence. It serves as his 'Apology.' Among the other works that illustrate the category of religious choice are Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), Works of Love (1848), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), and Training for Christianity (1850). Even though Kierkegaard contributed to theories of comedy, irony and humour, virtually nothing has been written to date about this crucial body of ideas. The same holds for his writings on tragedy, and particularly for his profound understanding and elucidation of the ideas of Socrates, who dominated his life and served as his intellectual mentor and 'friend.' Whether or not one accepts Kierkegaard's idea of the paradox of Christian faith, his discursive

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Koestler analyses of the psychology of possibility and probability have continuing importance for critical analysis. The accessibility and application of his ideas are also of value for literary as well as individual study of the psychology of the free intellect. REED M E R R I L L Primary Sources Kierkegaard, S^ren Aabye. The Concept of Anxiety [Dread]. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton, Nj: Princeton UP, 1944. - The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates. Trans. Lee M. Capel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. - Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1941. - Edifying Discourse, I-IV. Trans. David and Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Publishing, 1943-6. - Either/Or. 2 vols. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987. - Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, Nj: Princeton UP, 1983. - Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. - The Point of View of My Work as an Author: A Report to History. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962. - The Present Age. Trans. Walter Dru and Walter Lowrie. London: Oxford UP, 1940. - The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. - S0ren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers. 7 vols. Trans, and ed. Howard and Edna Hong. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1967-78. - Stages on Life's Way. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. - Training for Christianity. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1964. - Works of Love. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Secondary Sources Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Collins, James. The Mind of Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Diem, Hermann. Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Existence. Trans. Harold Knight. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959. Fabro, Cornelio. Some of Kierkegaard's Main Categories. Copenhagen: Reitzels, 1988.

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Heywood, Thomas J. Subjectivity and Paradox: Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford UP, 19^7. Lapointe, Francois. Stfren Kierkegaard and His Critics: An International Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1980. Lowrie, Walter. Kierkegaard. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1938. Malantscuk, Gregor. The Controversial Kierkegaard. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1980. - Kierkegaard's Thought. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. - Kierkegaard's Way to Truth: An Introduction to the Authorship of S0ren Kierkegaard. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1963. Shestov, Lev. Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Trans. Elinor Hewitt. Athens: Ohio UP, 1969. Taylor, M.C. Journey to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. - Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and Self. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. Thulstrup, Niels, and Howard A. Johnson. Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel. Trans. George Stengren. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969. Wyschograd, Michael. Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969.

Koestler, Arthur (b. Hungary, igc^-d. England, 1983) Man of letters, political and social chronicler, essayist, and theorist. After studying science and psychology at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna (1922-6), Arthur Koestler became a foreign correspondent in Palestine and Paris for the Ullstein syndicate, and later foreign and science editor for the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin. Between 1930 and 1932 he was a member of the Communist party. In covering the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the London News Chronicle, he was captured and sentenced to death. After he was released from prison he was again imprisoned in France, finally escaping to England in 1940. This period is recalled in his two-volume autobiography Arrow in the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954). Before 1952, Koestler's interests were largely political. However, as early as 1931, his disillusionment with the 'Great Experiment/ especially its Stalinist manifestations, led him to question political values in general and eventually to become an important critic of dialectical materialism and other political ideologies as well as of absolutist systems. (See *ideol-

Koestler ogy.) His political scepticism is evidenced in the prose fiction trilogy The Gladiators (1939), his most famous work, Darkness at Noon (1941), and Arrival and Departure (1943) - all dedicated to describing the negative effects of political expediency - and landmarks in the political novel as a genre. Koestler also contributed an essay to The God That Failed (1950), a collection by other disaffected excommunists such as Andre Gide, Ignazio Silone and Richard Wright. His total output is 33 volumes, encompassing six novels; one play; literary, political and critical essays; and five volumes of autobiography. After 1952, Koestler abandoned politics and set about finding solutions to contemporary problems in the sciences and humanities. He referred to himself as a 'trespasser in an age of specialists/ Because of his 'educated generalist's' approach and for speculating and theorizing at the expense of rigorous method, he was often in conflict with academics from various disciplines. Koestler's literary essays, which largely consist of reviews published in English and Continental newspapers and literary journals (many published in the journal Encounter), are collected in such volumes as The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), Drinkers of Infinity (1968), The Heel of Achilles (1974), and Kaleidoscope (1981). They reveal a polymath whose range of knowledge encompasses the arts and sciences as well as crucial contemporary historical, social and economic issues. The expression of a humanist sharing common intellectual interests with the largest possible educated audience, his informal essays are impressionistic in the same vein as those of *Edmund Wilson or V.S. Pritchett, while his formal and critical works show the clear influence of his background as a scientist whose literary analyses often reflect his scientific perspectives. Perhaps Koestler's two most important contributions to literary criticism and theory come from his attempt to discover common elements in the diversities of the sciences and humanities. The first contribution concerns the creative process in the arts and sciences, particularly in regard to the psychology of creativity and its relation to humour. The second, which is only tangentially literary criticism, concerns *pluralism as opposed to reductionism, positivism and behaviourism, subjects addressed both in the collection of essays Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life

Sciences edited with J.R. Smythies, and including Ludwig von Bertalanffy, F.A. Hayek, C.H. Waddington and Holger Hyden, among others; and most directly in a withering attack on Skinnerian-Watsonian-Pavlovian behaviourism and positivism in The Ghost in the Machine (1967), foreshadowed in his early novel The Age of Longing (1951). Koestler's lifelong attempt to find commonalities between the arts and sciences is first found in his 'bisociation' theory: that there is a consistent pluralisitic and 'Janus-faced' relationship between theories in all the disciplines. His first volume on the subject was Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics (1949). The bisociation hypothesis is much more fully developed in his 'tri-valent creative process/ or 'holon' systems theory (an 'open hierarchic' association theory), a three-layered ontological paradigm that attempts to synthesize and organize the arts and sciences. This desire to find a universal systems theory is also reflected in The Act of Creation (1964), in the second part of The Ghost in the Machine and in Janus: A Summing Up (1978). Koestler's most direct contribution to criticism and theory is in his discussions of the interrelatedness of comedy and tragedy. Although there is no evidence that Koestler knew *Friedrich Nietzsche's views of the connectedness of comedy and tragedy, he extends Nietzsche's perspective to include the common elements in artistic and scientific creativity as well. Like *Freud's, Koestler's theory of comedy and humour is largely affective (hedonistic and psychological) at the expense of its philosophical implications. In his studies on the comic, Koestler borrows Freud's term, the 'Janus effect/ to describe the complexity of the comic transaction. According to Koestler, the creative act consists of comparing and contrasting matrices (much like attempting to synthesize a theory) and creating new wholes. This process is best demonstrated in the 'laughter reflex' of comedy that occurs when seemingly incongruous elements are combined, creating an unexpected but surprisingly congruous result. Laughter is the shock of recognition resulting from the creation of new patterns in the face of normal patterns of expectation. This process of creativity occurs in a world that consists of hierarchies of systems ('holons') that tend to be conservative and to have organic consistency, 'biological, social,

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Krieger and cognitive/ but that can at the same time adjust to obviously superior changes (theories). Koestler's holon metaphor is the matrix within which the various bisociative processes occur and changes take place. (See ""metonymy/metaphor.) The Janus image illustrates how subordinate elements of any holon (in this case of comic and tragic genres) function individually and collectively as parts of larger wholes. Each organism contains potentially opposite and essentially antithetical elements which, at their polar extremes, tend to be conservative or radical (static or dynamic). The 'integrative tendency' of each unit functions in harmony with the 'self-assertive' tendency. According to Koestler, although there is a basic polarity between the self-assertive and integrative tendencies of holons at all levels, 'under favorable conditions the two basic elements are more or less equally balanced, and the holon lives in a kind of dynamic equilibrium within the whole - the two faces of Janus complement each other.' The 'comic effect' is self-assertive in that it is a collision of 'selfconsistent but incompatible frames of reference' which are resolved in laughter. The opposite end of the pole is that of 'artistic and aesthetic creativity,' which is self-transcending in its need to resolve the self in a community, a religious creed or political cause, Nature or Art. Koestler's works remain of importance because of his argument that monological systems invariably lead to autocratic and destructive ends and that a valid theory will always contain the constituents of creative freedom in an open universe. REED MERRILL

Primary Sources Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation: A Study of the Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Humor, Scientific Discovery and Art. London: Hutchinson, 1964. - The Age of Longing. London: Collins, 1951. - Arrow in the Blue: An Autobiography. London: Collins with Hamish Hamilton, 1952. - Darkness at Noon. Trans. Daphne Hardy. London: Jonathan Cape, 1941. - Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-67. London: Hutchinson, 1968. - The Ghost in the Machine. London: Hutchinson, 1967. - The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973. London: Hutchinson, 1974.

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- 'Humour and Wit.' In Encyclopaedia Britannica, i 5th ed., 1974, 5-11. - Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics. London: Macmillan, 1949. - The Invisible Writing. London: Collins with Hamish Hamilton, 1954. - Janus: A Summing Up. London: Hutchinson, 1978. - Kaleidoscope. London: Hutchinson, 1981. - Reflections on Hanging. London: Victor Gollancz, 1956. - The Trail of the Dinosaur. London: Collins, 1955. - with Alistair Hardy and Robert Harvie. The Challenge of Chance. London: Hutchinson, 1973. - and J.R. Smythies. Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences: The Alpbach Symposium. London: Hutchinson, 1969. - et al. The God That Failed. Ed. Richard Crossman. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950. Secondary Sources Calder, Jenni. Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1968. Debray-Ritzen, Pierre, ed. Arthur Koestler. Paris: Editions de 1'Herne, 1975. Harris, Harold, ed. Astride Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Levene, Mark. Arthur Koestler. New York: Ungar, 1984. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror. Trans. John O'Neill. Boston: Beacon P, 1969. Merrill, Reed, and Thomas Frazier. Arthur Koestler: An International Bibliography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Publications, 1979. Sperber, Murray A., ed. Arthur Koestler: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1977. Strachey, John. The Strangled Cry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Swingewood, Alan. The Novel and Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Krieger, Murray (b. U.S.A., 1923-) Literary critic. Murray Krieger earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1952. He has been University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, since 1974, is the founding director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (1987-), and was director of the School of Criticism and Theory from 1976-81. His many honours include election to the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1987.

Krieger While remaining strongly rooted in the assumptions of formalism and *New Criticism, particularly the belief in the unique otherness of literary language, Krieger's work has nonetheless evolved in response to the shifting theoretical terrain. The New Apologists for Poetry (1956) modified formalist theory along more rigorously philosophical lines. The Tragic Vision (1960) reread modernist "literature from the point of view of existentialism. A Window to Criticism (1964) further qualified formalism with what Krieger called 'contextualism,' a term signifying a concern with the historical contexts of the literary *text. The opening essay in that book, originally titled 'After the New Criticism/ provided Frank Lentricchia with the title of his study of 'four exemplary careers/ of which Krieger's is one. Contextualism is also the guiding methodology of the essays collected in The Play and Place of Criticism (1967). Poetic Presence and Illusion (1979) and Words about Words about Words (1988) contain essays responding to poststructural and New Historical concerns. (See *poststructuralism, *New Historicism.) Krieger has resisted what he considers to be the 'leveling' tendencies of theories which reduce literary language to ordinary language or which turn the text into merely a social document. The danger to culture of theories that would absorb the literary text into a generalized ecriture or *textuality is the central focus of Arts on the Level (1981). Because of Krieger's defence of the unique literary text, Frank Lentricchia (perhaps unfairly seeking a social allegory in Krieger's literary beliefs) has accused him of being undemocratic. Krieger's defence of the literary text as an elite object and Lentricchia's attack on this position as being a displaced form of social elitism is one of the significant debates in late-ioth-century cultural studies. Grant Webster, failing to appreciate Krieger's ongoing revisions of his previous positions, particularly his incorporation of developments in phenomenology and reception theory, has insisted on seeing him as a belated New Critic. (See *phenomenological criticism, *Constance School of Reception Aesthetics.) But Webster's objections, which privilege fashion and opportunism, do not initiate the examination of the place and function of literary studies that the Krieger-Lentricchia confrontation does. Those who influenced Krieger most in his formative stage were Eliseo Vivas, *Erich

Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Sigurd Burckhardt, and Rosalie Colie. Vivas' idea of the subsistent, insistent and existent aspects of the literary work are central to A Window to Criticism, and Krieger refers to Rosalie Colie's theories of metaphor even in his most recent work, seeing her formulations as anticipating the problematics of *deconstruction. (See ""metonymy/metaphor, *problematic.) Throughout his work, in fact, Krieger's strong grasp of the history of theoretical issues and positions has been a corrective to the notion of the radical newness of concerns designated by such terms as *structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and neo-Marxism. (See also *Marxist criticism.) Krieger has done much to further the teaching of literary criticism, theory and history in the university curriculum, most notably as the director of the School of Criticism and Theory. (See also *theory and pedagogy.) His booklength study of the history of critical theory, Theory of Criticism (1976), explains the evolution of the critical and theoretical tradition as an ongoing conflict between formal and mimetic positions. Any history is also an argument, and Krieger does not hide his formal biases - 'imitation theory is the enemy' (67). Any attempt to formulate a tradition will inevitably proscribe and exclude, and such figures as Marx, *Nietzsche and *Freud receive scant attention in Krieger's history, which has therefore been criticized for its conservatism. His departures from a conservative, formalist poetics can be seen in 'An Apology for Poetics' and in the colloquy devoted to the discussion of this essay at the University of Konstanz in 1982. Both are reprinted in Words about Words about Words. Krieger's interest in the role of desire and in the provisional 'as if status of literary truth are distinctly 'postmodern/ as is his concern with the question of 'presence.' While his willingness to accept ""paradox in literary theory (see 'Both Sides Now' in Words) has elicited charges of logical inconsistency, this aspect of his poetics is entirely in harmony with the postmodern suspicion of totalizing or monologic theories. (See *postmodernism, ""totalization, ""metaphysics of presence, *desire/lack.) Krieger, a broad, synoptic literary critic, has functioned at once as a historian and a trenchant commentator on the contemporary critical scene, all the while developing and refining a critical theory of his own that has grappled

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Kristeva with the new developments in Continental philosophy and the human sciences. BRUCE

HENRICKSEN

Primary Sources Krieger, Murray. Arts on the Level: The Fall of the Elite Object. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1981. - The Classic Vision: The Retreat from Extremity in Modern Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971. - The New Apologists for Poetry. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956. - The Play and Place of Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1967. - Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. - Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. - Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. Vol. i: The Tragic Vision: The Confrontation of Extremity. Vol. 2: The Classic Vision: The Retreat from Extremity. Paperback repr. with new Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. - A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. - Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.

Secondary Sources Free, William J. 'Murray Krieger and the Place of Poetry.' Georgia Review 22.2 (1968): 236-46. Graff, Gerald. Tongue-in-Cheek Humanism: A Response to Murray Krieger.' ADE Bulletin 69 (Fall 1981): 18-21. Henricksen, Bruce, ed. Murray Krieger and Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Joseph, Terri B. 'Murray Krieger as Pre- and PostDeconstructionist.' New Orleans Review 12.4 (1985): 18-26. Kartiganer, Donald M. 'The Criticism of Murray Krieger: The Expansions of Contextualism.' boundary 2 2.2 (1974): 584-607. Leitch, Vincent. American Literary Criticism from the jos to the 8os. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, 45-52. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980, 212-54. Morris, Wesley. 'The Critic's Responsibility "To" and "For."' Western Humanities Review 31.3 (1977): 265-72.

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- Toward a Neio Historicism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972, 187-209. Raaberg, Gwen. 'Ekphrasis and the Temporal/Spatial Metaphor in Murray Krieger's Critical Theory.' New Orleans Review 12.4 (1985): 34-43. Webster, Grant. The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979, 190-202. Weinsheimer, Joel. 'On Going Home Again: New Criticism Revisited.' PTL: A Journal of Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1977): 563-77.

Kristeva, Julia (b. Bulgaria, 1941-) Psychoanalyst, linguist, semiotician. After an early education in Bulgaria and a brief career as a journalist, Kristeva emigrated to Paris in 1965 to pursue doctoral studies under *Lucien Goldmann and *Roland Barthes at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. She soon joined the Tel Quel group' (headed by Philippe Sellers, whom she later married), and through it became active in leftist French politics, including the upheavals of May 1968. During her early years in Paris, she published numerous articles in Tel Quel, joining its editorial board in 1970. As well, she began to follow the seminars offered by the psychoanalytic theorist *Jacques Lacan. In 1973 she gained her state doctorate in Paris for the defence of a 6io-page thesis, published the following year as La Revolution du langage poetique: L'Avant-garde a la fin du XIXe siecle: Lautreamont et Mallarme [Revolution in Poetic Language 1984]. Since 1974, she has held the chair of linguistics at the University of Paris vn, as well as visiting appointments at Columbia University in New York. She has been a practising psychoanalyst since 1979. Her writing represents a complex synthesis of materialist and psychoanalytic theories in an attempt to develop a poststructuralist understanding of language and the self. (See *psychoanalytic theory, *materialist criticism, *poststructuralism, *self/other.) Like other works of the Tel Quel collective, Kristeva's publications of the later 19605 both delineate her opposition to Western culture's theory of language as product or representation and suggest an alternative understanding of language as a material practice which can support political revolution. For example, the essays collected in Serneiotike: Recherches pour

Kristeva un semanali/se (1969) critique the scientificrationalist model of *semiotics which was developing at the time out of structuralist linguistics. Kristeva proposes that semiotics should develop as a method she calls 'semanalysis/ a way of analysing the text as material production. Le Texte du roman: Approchc semiologique d'une structure discursive transformationelle (1970) experiments with this method of 'semanalysis' in order to demonstrate shifting conceptions of the "text in the early modern prose works of Antoine de la Sale. These early publications indicate Kristeva's debt to the futurists and to Russian *formalism, especially the work of *Mikhail Bakhtin, from whom she develops the concepts of '*intertextuality' (every text as the product of the intersection of several texts) and 'poetic language' (language of materiality, which is open to the scene of its production). La Revolution de langage poetique (1974) extends her method of 'semanalysis' to include psychoanalytic theory. In critical dialogue with a number of major thinkers, including Hegel, Marx, *Husserl, *Heidegger, and *Derrida, Kristeva interprets the theories of *Freud and Lacan as opening structuralist linguistics to the problematics of the production of meaning in relation to the body of the linguistic subject. (See *problematic, *subject/object.) The book develops her notion of language as a dialectical struggle between two poles, the 'semiotic' (a pre- or trans-linguistic modality of psychic inscriptions controlled by the primary processes of 'displacement' and 'condensation') and the 'symbolic' (propositions or representations constitutive of language as a system of signs). Kristeva maintains that although language always includes both of these modalities, modern Western society has consistently refused the 'semiotic,' thereby dissociating the subject from language and adopting a unidimensional model of language and self. Intending to challenge this unitary model, she elaborates a theory of subject identity as produced in language, in dialectical process ('on trial') between the 'semiotic' and 'symbolic' poles. This theory involves her proposing a number of specialized terms, including '*chora,' 'thetic,' 'signifying practice,' 'genotext,' and 'phenotext.' (See *genotext/phenotext.) The French publication of La Revolution includes detailed textual analysis of inscriptions of the 'semiotic' in the writing of Lautreamont and Mallarme,

paralleling the literary activism of the avantgarde with political revolution. The essays collected in Polylogue (1977) continue Kristeva's analysis of visual and literary texts as manifestations of both the 'semiotic' and 'symbolic' dimensions of language and self. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980) presents some of these essays in English translation. In these and other essays Kristeva addresses the question of 'female identity' through her theory of the subject of language. From her first publications, she has attempted both an analysis of historical valorizations of 'woman' and a reevaluation of the meaning of sexual difference that can be socially transformative. Pouvoirs de I'horreur: Essai sur I'abjection [Powers of Honor: An Essay on Abjection 1980; trans. 1982] offers a psychoanalytic discussion of the process of 'abjection' (expulsion, rejection of the other) which she ties to the historical exclusion of women. In Histoires d'amour [Tales of Love 1983; trans. 1987], she examines historical myths of love in order to probe the significance of idealization for the autonomizing of a subject in language, again with particular attention to the meaning of 'woman.' Au commencement etait I'amour: Psychanalyse et foi [In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and faith 1985; trans. 1987] compares psychoanalytic and religious understandings of love, sexuality and desire. (See *desire/lack.) Soleil Noir: Depression et melancolie [Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy 1987; trans. 1989] offers a semiotics of melancholy as the underside not only of amorous *discourse but of every positing of meaning in language. Etrangers a nous-rnemes [Strangers to Ourselves 1988; trans. 1991] is a semanalysis of estrangement. The book examines the 'foreigner' in ""literature and philosophy as well as continuing Kristeva's psychoanalytic exploration of an 'otherness' within the self. Les Samourais, a novel, appeared in French in 1990. Kristeva has emerged as one of France's major contemporary theorists. Her writing has achieved international recognition across a number of academic disciplines and has stimulated significant theoretical activity within literary criticism and feminism. (See *feminist criticism, French.) DAWNE MCCANCE

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Lacan Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Kristeva, Julia. Au commencement etait I'amour: Psi/chanalyse et foi. Paris: Hachette, Textes du XXe siecle, 1985. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. - Des Chinoises. Paris: Editions des femmes, 1974. About Chinese Women. Trans. Anita Barrow. New York: Marion Boyars, 1977. - Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. - Etrangers a nous-memes. Paris: Fayard, 1988. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. - Histoires d'anwur. Paris: Denoel, 1983. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. - Le Langage, cet inconnu. Paris: Seuil, 1981. - Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Eight essays trans, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. - Pouvoirs de I'horreur: Essai sur I'abjection. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. - La Revolution du langage poetique: L'Avant-garde a la fin du XIXe siecle. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. - Les Samourais. Paris: Fayard, 1990. - Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Two essays trans, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. - Soleil Noir: Depression et melancolie. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1987. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. - Le Texte du roman: Approche semiologique d'une structure discursive transformationelle. The Hague/ Paris: Mouton, 1970. - ed. Essays in Semiotics/Essais de semiotique. The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1971. - Jean-Claude Milner and Nicolas Ruwet, eds. Langue Discours Societe: Pour Emile Benveniste. Paris: Seuil, 1975. - and Jean-Michel Ribette, eds. Folle verite: Verite et vraisemblance du texte psychotique. Paris: Seuil, 1979. - Collective publication of Tel Quel. La Traversee des signes. 1975. Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Caws, Mary Ann. 'Tel Quel: Text and Revolution.' Diacritics 3.1 (1973): 2-8. Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism: Developments in Scmiology and the Theory of the Subject. Boston, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Fletcher, John, and Andrew Benjamin, eds. Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan, 1982. Jardine, Alice. 'Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva.' Enclitic 4:2 (1980): 5-15. Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Lewis, Philip. 'Revolutionary Semiotics.' Diacritics 4.3 (1974): 28-32. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: NLB/Verso, 1986. Roudiez, Leon. 'Twelve Points from Tel Quel.' L'Esprit Createur 14.4 (1974): 291-303. Zepp, Evelyn. The Criticism of Julia Kristeva: A New Mode of Critical Thought.' Romanic Review 73.1 (1982): 80-97.

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Lacan, Jacques-Marie Emile (b. France, igoi-d. 1981) Jacques-Marie Lacan was awarded his diplome de medicine legiste, qualifying him as a forensic psychiatrist in 1931 and his doctoral d'etat in 1932. Initially, Lacan's psychoanalytic writings inspired the surrealists of Paris more than the psychologists, and for several years from 1933 onward he published a number of articles on paranoia in the French surrealist publication Minotaure. A practising psychoanalyst, sometimes accused of using unorthodox methods, from 1953 onward Lacan conducted a weekly seminar at the University of Paris which influenced a generation of French intellectuals. His influence has since spread beyond psychoanalysis to the literary world, where it has acquired increasing popularity especially among many feminist critics. (See *psychoanalytic theory, *feminist criticism.) Both the original French versions and the English translations of Lacan's papers are problematic for some readers because of Lacan's lack of conventional linear or logical expression. Translators such as John P. Muller and William J. Richardson suggest that Lacan's writing can be thought of as a type of rebus or

Lacan puzzle. In fact, Ecrits, the title given to his work, is a misnomer, since the articles included in the two volumes are based on transcripts of his lectures given over a number of years. They are neither 'writings' per se nor do they represent a well-organized whole. Lacan claimed that he structured his papers in a particular manner in order to suggest the shifting structures of dreams and the unconscious. His predilection for language play, puns and associative leaps in logic illustrates and enacts the relationship of mind to language. However, his opacity remains a challenge for many readers. Lacan's theory, rooted in the linguistic models of *Ferdinand de Saussure and *Roman Jakobson as well as the psychoanalytic methods of *Sigmund Freud, has affected the work of many poststructural literary critics. (See *poststructuralism.) His fundamental thesis is that language is a manifestation of structures in the unconscious and that linguistic patterns reveal important characteristics of the individual subject's psychic state. However, where Saussure regards the relationship between signifier/signified as being relatively fixed, Lacan argues that the signifier can shift in meaning and that the signified is always provisional. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Freud maintains that desire is biological, driven by a sexual force, and that the healthy human eventually grows toward a psychic unity. (See *desire/lack.) By contrast, Lacan sees desire as a drive tor an ontological unity which can never be achieved because of a psychic split resulting first from the *mirror stage (the individual subject's primal encounter with a mirror which precipitates the T in primordial form) and then the Oedipal phase (characterized by the male subject's desire for the taboo mother). For Lacan, as for Freud, the individual is socialized by passing through the three phases of the Oedipal complex: ( i ) the 'seduction' phase in which the subject is attracted to the object of desire or mother; (2) the 'primal stage' in which the subject views the mother having sexual intercourse with the father; and (3) the 'castration' phase in which the father's 'No]' or law prohibiting sexual access to the mother is accompanied by threat of castration. The father's law or the '*Name-of-the-Father' inspires a deflection of desire from the 'mother' to what Lacan calls the 'Other,' (See *self/other, *subject/object.) The Other can be thought of as the locus of desire which can be projected

onto a human counterpart by the subject. More precisely, it is a hypothetical place or space, that of a pure signifier, rather than a physical entity, which resides in the subject's unconscious. It is significant that, according to Lacan, this 'Other' can never truly be grasped because the nature of desire is such that its object is always out of reach. This unfulfilled desire contributes to a Spaltung or 'split' in the subject's psyche. It should be noted that instead of understanding Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex on the level of biology, Lacan views it on the level of language. Thus, the Taw' in the 'Name-of-the-Father' is a linguistic phenomenon which serves to socialize the subject. For Lacan, the three Oedipal phases have an indirect relationship to three psychic levels or 'registers:' ( i ) the 'imaginary' (which has nothing to do with the imagination per se) corresponds to variations in the unconscious initiated by the formation of the ego, the result of the mirror encounter; (2) the 'symbolic' (which has little to do with symbolism as we generally understand it) corresponds to the metonymic substitutions of the conscious mind; the symbolic register serves an organizing function, particularly on a linguistic level, and thus provides a means by which the subject can enter society through language; and (3) the 'real' (which has nothing to do with reality, objectivity or empiricism) which serves a function of constancy and is beyond the realm of speech; it can be thought of as the ineffable world of objects and experiences, or as that which is lacking in the symbolic order and which may be approached but never grasped. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan's Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis offers a cogent extended discussion of the significance of these registers. (See *imaginary/symbolic/real.) The mirror stage involves two recognitions. First, the subject as child recognizes its own physical unity in the mirror. The subject's first encounter with its idealized self-image in the mirror is fundamentally narcissistic. The mirror encounter serves a catalytic function which initiates a development of the ego and a sense of self-awareness. Second, the subject mis-identifies the spectral 'Other' in the mirror as the object of desire. This meconnaisance or misunderstanding of the mirror image further contributes to the split in the subject's psyche. Simultaneous with the mirror stage is the subject's acquisition of language. Lacan main-

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Lacan tains that the subject defines itself on the level of *discourse. Language serves a metonymic function that is analagous to the mirror image insofar as words (signifiers) stand in for things (signifieds), but are not the things themselves. (See *metonomy/metaphor.) It is through an endless metonymic chain of language that the subject pursues the ever-elusive object of desire. Lacan points out that by studying a subject's dreams and speech patterns (including the use of particular figures of speech or slips of the tongue), one can illuminate features of the split in the subject's imaginary register. For Lacan, the phallus is the universal signifier; not the male sexual organ, rather, a metonymic presence which is indicative of the manque a etre (a fundamental lack or absence) that can only be fulfilled by the (forever unattainable) object of desire. This manque can be either masculine or feminine. It is through language that the subject seeks to evoke the presence of the absent Other or the object of desire. Lacan himself admitted that he had focused primarily on male experience and that he had failed to account successfully for the formation of the female psyche and feminine desire in Ecrits. With limited success he tried to deal with this phenomenon in his later book Feminine Sexuality (1982). Lacan's personal contribution to literary criticism is limited but significant. For example, his Seminar on Foe's 'The Purloined Letter,' the first essay in Ecrits, demonstrates, among other things, that fiction creates its own rules and therefore aligns itself with and exemplifies the workings of the symbolic register which systematizes language and attempts to order consciousness. His argument that the letter is the 'true subject' of the story is of particular interest to poststructuralist critics. The range of scholarship on Lacan is extensive. Marxist critic *Louis Althusser applies Lacanian theories on the relationship between language and *power in society in his famous and (some would argue) overly deterministic essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.' (See "Ideological State Apparatuses, *Marxist criticism.) In 'Le Facteur de la verite' ['The Purveyor of Truth], *Jacques Derrida aggressively attacks Lacan's essay on Poe, arguing that Lacan's interpretation is phonologocentric, that is, it gives priority to an unveiling or revelation of truth through speech. Other reactions to Lacan, especially feminist re-

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sponses, can in part be attributed to the fact that the non-biological notion of the Other as it relates to a sense of manque is universally applicable. Feminists acknowledge that Lacan has raised the important issue of subjectivity in psychoanalysis and language but that he has done so from a phallocentric perspective. (See *phallocentrism.) *Julia Kristeva has adapted Lacanian concepts to her theory of *semiotics, which considers unconscious patterns of language in regard to the destabilization of the 'thetic' subject in literature. *Helene Cixous' theory owes something to Lacan's imaginary register in which a prelinguistic unity exists between mother and child. Elizabeth Grosz offers a detailed analysis of various feminist responses to Lacan and points out that his phallo(logo)-centrist perspective opens the door to alternative critical perspectives precisely because it articulates presumptions that are socially dominant but which had hitherto remained largely unarticulated. In spite of any shortcomings, the study and application of Lacanian and post-Lacanian theory is flourishing in Europe and North America. Lacan's Television (1974) includes his challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment. His on-going concern for the informing yet perplexing instability of language is revealed in his opening comments on the television program: 'I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.' KARL E. JIRGENS

Primary Sources Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits I. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. - Ecrits H. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971. - Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977. - Feminine Sexuality. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1985. - The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. - Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans, with notes by Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. - Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss,

Lawrence Annette Michelson and leffrey M e h l m a n . Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990. Secondary sources

Bowie, Malcolm. Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 19X7. Davis, Robert Con. Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. - ed. The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981. Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca: Cornel! UP, 199 i . Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 198^. Grosz, Elizabeth, jactjues Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1990. Hogan, Patrick Colm, and Ealita Pandit, eds. Lacan and Criticism: Lssays and Dialogue on Language, Structure and the Unconscious. Athens: U of Georgia P, i 990. Jameson, Fredric. 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society.' In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay P, 1483. Kristeva, J u l i a . Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and I.eon 5. Roudiez. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Eemire, A n i k a . Jacques Lacan. Trans. David Macey. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. MacCannell, J u l i e t I-'lower. Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Llnconscious. London: Croom Helm P, 1986. Macey, David. Lacan in Contexts. London: Verso, 1988. Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson. Lacan and Language: A Reader's Guide to Ecrits. New York: International Universities P Inc., 1982. - eds. I'he Purloined Poe. Baltimore: Johns Flopkins UP, 1988. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psiichoanalysis. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987. - and Mark Bracher, eds. Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (b. England, iSSs-d. 1930) Novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, and critic. D.H. Lawrence was the fourth of five children born to a passionate but uneducated man and a serious, intellectually alive, and religiously devout woman. His mother's Congregationalist views

influenced Lawrence's later attitudes toward his role as a writer and are important for their paradoxically positive shaping effect on his conception of appropriate conduct, especially sexual. Lawrence's education was haphazard; however, his wide reading and interest in languages, as well as his lifetime of world travel nurtured by an appetite to learn, expanded his knowledge considerably. During his years as a teacher at the Davidson Road School, Croydon (1908-12), Lawrence's life changed dramatically because of two events: his mother's death, which was traumatic for him; and his introduction (in 1912) to the wife of his French teacher, Frieda Weekly, with whom he eventually ran off. Throughout his life, Lawrence struggled to find a balance between passion and thought, body and spirit, and the creative and destructive powers flowing around and through human existence. It was his intense desire to find ways of living to achieve such a balance - also embodied in his efforts as a poet, dramatist, critical thinker, and novelist - that shaped his attitudes toward ""literature and other writers. Lawrence the philosopher/critic was an extension of and complement to Lawrence the creative writer; his critical positions, both theoretical and practical, can be found both in individual, specifically critical works (such as his Study of Thomas Hardy) and in scattered comments throughout his other texts. Difficult to classify as a critic, Lawrence was deliberately subjective, but not impressionistic, in his judgments of artists. His opinions were based on a definite set of moral rather than purely aesthetic principles; yet his morality was not conventional. He states his position most succinctly in Lady Chatterley's Lover: 'It [the novel properly handled] can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead ... for it is in the passional secret places of life ... that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening' (104). In his conviction that the novelist can influence cultural development through the proper exercise of his imagination and intuitive powers, Lawrence had an affinity for aesthetic historicists like *Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood. Their emphasis on creative imagination and intuition separated them from

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Lawrence coeval positivist and determinist approaches to cultural history. The influence of the Italian futurist Marinetti on Lawrence's well-known description of the technique of The Rainbow, dealing with 'that which is psychic - nonhuman, in humanity/ suggests much about his evolving theory of the novel and of art in general: successful art is the product of an intuitive process rooted in an awakening awareness of elemental human nature and elemental human needs that must be balanced; in The Crown' essays he identifies these as the force of love and the drive of power or, alternatively, as the female, the unicorn and light opposed to the male, the lion and darkness, each struggling for dominance in the individual and in the human community; as long as there is no triumph, and balance (which he calls the 'Holy Ghost') holds, then fulfilment is possible. He judges novels and art generally according to the artist's ability to represent humanity living the processes and consequences of the struggle. This is also what helps to make inevitable his notion that the novel is the highest literary form. According to Terry Eagleton, Lawrence belongs with the Romantic humanist critics. For Lawrence, the literary artist is a visionary who reveals an elemental truth through a passionately vivid use of language. Lawrence judges other writers according to the power their *text has to affect him personally rather than according to a standard imposed on the work to measure its aesthetic value. In some cases, such criticism results in scathing commentary such as in his views on Wordsworth (Phoenix II 447-8). The implied critical theory and method of Lawrence's idiosyncratic reading of the Bible in Apocalypse has been compared both to *Wilhelm Dilthey's *hermeneutics and to deconstructive criticism: his 'archaeological metaphor for the text of Revelation ... strikingly resembles terms used by Gayatri Spivak to describe Derrida's notion of a text' (Bonds 107-8). A true precursor of neither contemporary deconstructive or hermeneutic criticism, Lawrence as a critic defies any neat categorization. (See also *deconstruction, *Jacques Derrida.) Lawrence's own definition of literary criticism as a 'reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing' and his description of the proper critic as someone 'able to feel the impact of a work in all its complexity and force ... [who]

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must be a man of force and complexity himself (Phoenix 539) associates him with Romantic expressionism; modernist conceptions of the artist and of his work shape Lawrence's vision as well but, as with the rest of his life and work, the shape is unique. LAWRENCE GAMACHE

Primary Sources Lawrence, D.H. Apocalypse. London: Penguin, 1977. - D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Anthony Beal. New York: Viking, 1966. [Contains Study of Thomas Hardy.] - Lady Chatterley's Lover. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961. - Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Viking, 1968. [Contains 'Pornography and Obscenity/ Lawrence prefaces, introductions and reviews of books; Study of Thomas Hardy; 'Surgery for the Novel - OR a Bomb'; 'Art and Morality'; 'Morality and the Novel'; 'Why the Novel Matters'; 'John Galsworthy'; 'Introduction to These Paintings'; and 'The Novel and the Feelings.'] - Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D.H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking, 1968. [Contains 'Rachel Annand Taylor'; 'Art and the Individual'; uncollected reviews and introductions; 'The Crown'; and 'The Novel.'] - Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Penguin, 1977.

Secondary Sources Arnold, Armin. D.H. Lawrence and America. London: Linden P, 1958. Bien, Peter. 'The Critical Philosophy of D.H. Lawrence.' D. H. Lawrence Review 17.2 (1984): 127-34Bonds, Diane. 'Review of Peter Faulkner, ed. The English Modernist Reader.' D.H. Lawrence Review 20.1 (1988): 106-8. Foster, Richard. 'Criticism as Rage: D.H. Lawrence.' In A D.H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959: 312-25. Gordon, David J. D.H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1966. Peters, Joan D. 'The Living and the Dead: Lawrence's Theory of the Novel and the Structure of Lady Chatterley's Lover.' D.H. Lawrence Review 20.1 (1988): 5-20. Sharma, K.K. Modern Fictional Theorists: Virginia Woo// and D.H. Lawrence. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P, 1982. Singh, Tagindar. The Literary Criticism of D.H. Lawrence. New Delhi: Sterling, 1984.

Leavis Sitesh, Aruna. D.H. Lawrence: The Crusader as Critic. New Delhi: Macmillan, 197S. Wellek, Rene. 'The Literary Criticism of D.H. Lawrence.' Sewanee Review 91 (1983): ^98-613.

Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond) (b. England, 1895-1! 1978) Literary critic. After service as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, Leavis entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1918), initially to study history, though he later moved into the newly founded English program. He gained his Ph.D. in 1924 with a thesis on 'The Relationship of Journalism to Literature' and taught regularly at Cambridge thereafter, although he was not appointed as college lecturer at Downing College until 1935 or as a member of the University Faculty Board until 1954. He made a reputation as a brilliant if controversial teacher, known in particular for his impassioned advocacy of 'criticism in practice,' his editing of the critical journal Scrutiny (1932-53), and his championing of 'English' as a discipline of thought totally distinct from philosophical *discourse. After retiring from Cambridge in 1962, he was visiting professor for some years at the University of York and served more briefly in a similar capacity at Wales and Bristol. Leavis' importance in the development of literary criticism in England in the middle decades of the 2oth century lay in his unceasing insistence on the priority of practice over theory and of the centrality of evaluation within the critical process. Ideally, he argued, the critic should 'say nothing that cannot be related immediately to judgments about producible texts' (Revaluation 3). Moreover, mature literary discussion can manifest itself only within an informed human community: 'The form of a judgment is "This is so, isn't it?", the question asking for confirmation that the thing is so, but prepared for an answer in the form, "Yes, but -", the "but" standing for corrections, refinements, precisions, amplifications' (Living Principle 35). Collaboration is essential, he maintains, because a work of art can exist only in what he calls 'the "Third Realm" - the realm of that which is neither public in the ordinary sense nor merely private' (Living Principle 36). The collaborative nature of criticism is con-

tinually underlined in Leavis' own practice, most obviously in the collaborations with his wife, Queenie Dorothy Leavis, in Lectures in America and Dickens the Novelist. Leavis' early work, indeed, was considerably influenced by her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), a work originating as a thesis directed by *I.A. Richards that focused on the rise of 'popular' journalism, the concept of the best-seller and the cultural attenuation that such developments implied. A further example of collaboration was the influence of Leavis upon his students at Downing, many of whom introduced his methods and principles in schools and universities where they subsequently taught. Above all, it showed itself in the founding of Scrutiny, which provided an important if embattled centre and outlet for a wide range of committed and often astringent critical comment. Dependent upon his view of "literature is the concept of tradition and the necessity of an educated public to maintain cultural continuity. A living culture draws upon the best from the past, adapting it to new situations and new needs, but maintaining its essence; an educated public performs an irreplaceable function by upholding standards that have been established in the past, not as a deadening proliferation of set conventions but as a revivifying series of alterations and challenges. Leavis begins from a strong sense that in his own time English culture had entered a period of crisis, exemplified in the title of an early pamphlet, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930). Traditional standards and therefore the allimportant continuity were threatened; 'new bearings' were desperately needed. His writings attempt to address the situation on a number of fronts: in books that sought out the major figures in contemporary writing, both poetry and fiction (New Bearings in English Poetry, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist); in others that mapped out their significant literary precursors (Revaluation, The Great Tradition); in short books and pamphlets offering practical programs for improved teaching and educational change (Culture and Environment with Denys Thompson 1933; Education and the University); and, above all, in Scrutiny, of which Leavis was the dominating figure. In his later life, in books like Nor Shall My Sword, The Living Principle and the posthumously published Critic as Anti-Philosopher, he consolidated his position with forceful and often acerbic anal-

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Leavis yses of the further threats to cultural standards that came in the 19605 and 19705 with the expansion of universities (accompanied, Leavis maintained, by a disastrous decline in standards and seriousness) and the increased emphasis placed by government on science and (especially) technology. (See also *theory and pedagogy.) Leavis' critical principles have always attracted controversy and are often misunderstood. While his attitudes bear some superficial resemblance to those of the *New Criticism flourishing contemporaneously in the United States, he was never antihistoricist. Because literature and life are for Leavis inextricably connected - 'I don't believe in any "literary values," and you won't find me talking about them; the judgments the literary critic is concerned with are judgments about life' (Nor Shall My Sword 97) - a work of art cannot be separated from the culture that produced it (though a great work from the past is not confined in significance to its historical context). Similarly, while he has been criticized for failing to define his terms, Leavis argues that words like 'life' or 'standards' or 'sensibility' cannot be 'so fixed by definition as not to shift when we use' them, since this is 'a peculiarity of important words - words we find we can't do without - in the field of our distinctive discipline of intelligence' (English Literature 85). The last phrase is crucial. Major creative writers are concerned, he insists, with a 'necessary kind of thought' (Living Principle 20) but this is not the thought of mathematicians or philosophers or experimental scientists. Creativity is important because it is heuristic, 'concerned with discovery, or new realization' (Critic as Anti-Philosopher 14). Leavis' increasing desperation in his later years stemmed from his awareness that because the modern 'Technologico-Benthamite' world values only what can be scientifically measured, human creativity, as embodied in major writers, was itself threatened. W.J. KEITH

Primary Sources Leavis, F.R. 'Anna Karenina' and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967. - The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952. - The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. Ed. G. Singh. London: Chatto and Windus, 1982.

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- D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955. - Education and the University: A Sketch for an 'English School.' London: Chatto and Windus, 1943. - English Literature in Our Time and the University. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969. - The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. - Letters in Criticism. Ed. John Tasker. London: Chatto and Windus, 1974. - The Living Principle: 'English' as a Discipline of Thought. London: Chatto and Windus, 1975. - Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. 1930. Repr. in For Continuity. Cambridge: Minority P, 1933. - New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. - Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972. - Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1936. - A Selection from 'Scrutiny.' 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. - et al, eds. Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review. 1933-52. Repr. in 20 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963. - Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D.H. Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976. - Valuation in Criticism, and Other Essays. Ed. G. Singh. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. - and Q.D. Leavis. Dickens the Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. - and Q.D. Leavis. Lectures in America. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969. - and Denys Thompson. Culture and Environment. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933.

Secondary Sources Bilan, R.P. The Literary Criticism of F.R. Leavis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Boyars, Robert. F.R. Leavis: Judgment and the Discipline of Thought. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1978. Hayman, Ronald. Leavis. London: Heinemann; Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1976. Leavis, Q.D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. McKenzie, D.F., and M-P. Allum. F.R. Leavis: A Checklist, iyiq.-6q.. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966. Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of 'Scrutiny.' London: New Left Books, 1979. Robertson, P.J.M. The Leavises on Fiction: An Historic Partnership. New York: St. Martin's P, 1981. Thompson, Denys, ed. The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Walsh, William. F.R. Leavis. London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. Watson, Garry. The Leavises, the 'Social,' and the Left. Swansea: Brynmill, 1977.

Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss, Claude (b. Brussels, 1908-) Cultural anthropologist. Although he received his agregation in philosophy and law in 1931, Claude Levi-Strauss found neither discipline satisfying. In Brazil from 1933-9 he taught sociology at the University of Sao Paolo and conducted fieldwork among the Caduveo and Bororo tribes. Following a short period of military service on his return to France, he emigrated to the U.S.A., where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York (1941-5). During this period he met and worked with *Roman jakobson. He returned to France in 1947 and, in 1948, received the doctorat es lettres from the University of Paris. From 19=53 to 1960, LeviStrauss was secretary general of the International Council of Social Science. After his election to the chair of anthropology at the College de France in 1960, he co-founded L'Homine, a journal of anthropology. In 1973, he was elected to the Academie Francaise. He continued to teach at the College de France until his retirement in 1982. From his early studies of kinship systems through to his exploration of systems of mythology, Levi-Strauss has attempted to uncover universal structures existing in the unconscious that are capable of generating, through transformation, all possible systems. (See "universal.) At the same time, he is a differentialist and rejects the universalism of the i8th century. All cultures are equivalent and produce a social and political equilibrium which has to be respected. Basic to his method is the assumption that in any study of a system, the models constructed by individuals existing within the system 'are not intended to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them' (Structural Anthropology 281); thus consciously created models of a structure must constitute part of the data of the analysis but cannot be assumed to be the structure itself. Conscious models consider kinship terms or mythological elements as containing meaning in and of themselves; at the unconscious level, elements gain meaning only through their relationship with other elements. All elements in a system are interdependent; no element 'can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements' (Structural Anthropology 279). The shift in focus from the conscious to the unconscious mind and the emphasis on mean-

ing as generated by relationship place LeviStrauss' work within the domain of *structuralism. Although he had independently formulated a method of structural analysis, his meeting with Roman Jakobson in 1941 presented him with a discipline, structural linguistics, that had formal principles similar to his own method and an existing vocabulary that could be transferred from the study of language to the study of other cultural phenomena. In Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Levi-Strauss develops Marcel Mauss' principle of reciprocity (Essai sur le don 1924). This principle ensures the stability of society through the exchange of gifts between groups. Gifts express symbolic value, becoming 'vehicles and instruments for realities of another order, such as power, influence, sympathy, status, and emotion' (54). In the systems generated by the structural principle of reciprocity, food, material goods, and women become signs in a symbolic system, having no intrinsic meaning: 'each term is defined by its position within the system' (49). (See *sign.) Levi-Strauss proposes an analogy between kinship systems and language, subsuming both under the category of communication and suggesting that, in the system of marriage exchange, 'women themselves are treated as signs, which are misused when not put to the use reserved to signs, which is to be communicated' (497). Since the late 19505, Levi-Strauss has focused his attention on the study of *myth. He concedes that the principles governing social relationships may be 'the reflection in men's minds of certain social demands that [have] been objectified in institutions' (The Raw and the Cooked 10). Myths, on the other hand, are not constrained by the demands of social necessity or by the need to reflect the logic of objective reality. The mind that creates myth 'is in a sense reduced to imitating itself as object' (10). Following a discussion of principles and terminology in The Structural Study of Myth' (Structural Anthropology, ch. 11), he demonstrates his method with an analysis of the Oedipus myth. Positing that the character of mythological time is simultaneously synchronic and diachronic, Levi-Strauss concludes that a myth consists of the accumulation of all its versions, that is, there is no single authentic or authoritative version. A sufficient analysis of a myth includes all of its known variants. The correlation of the similarities and differ-

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Levi-Strauss ences between versions reveals the gross constituent elements of myth which he terms mi/themes, on analogy with phonemes. In The Savage Mind (1962), he discusses the nature of mythical thought, which accumulates a store of images from the observation and classification of natural objects on the basis of their distinctive features. These images perform the function of signifier in a sign system (18). (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Mythical thought is analogous to bricolage. Like the bricoleur who chooses his materials and tools from an existing inventory that bears no necessary relationship to his immediate purpose (17), the 'primitive' mind considers the existing set of images and recombines them through a series of transformations into new systems of meaning. In The Raw and the Cooked (1964), the first of a series of four volumes (Mythologiques), Levi-Strauss analyses 187 myths that demonstrate the transformation of one *theme, the transition from nature to culture, through the continual reordering of image sets whose content is the opposition of sensory qualities: the raw and the cooked, noise and silence, rotten and burned. (See *binary opposition.) Levi-Strauss' work 'has been the main stimulus to the development of structuralism as an intellectual movement' (Clarke 118). Although his works have been criticized for their often obscure formulations and on the basis that his selection of data for analysis has been directed by a preconceived purpose, his application of the methods of structural linguistics to anthropological data demonstrates the adaptability of the system of analysis to other semiotic domains. (See *semiotics.) His formulation of the logical relationships and principles underlying the transformation of myth through various permutation groups constitutes, according to "Jonathan Culler, a theory of reading that, because the texts on which it is based are unfamiliar, 'makes clear just how much we rely, in the reading of texts from Western culture, on a series of codes and conventions of which we are not fully aware' (53). (See *code.) NANCY FARADAY

Primary Sources Levi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie structural. Vol. i. Paris: Plon, 1958. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G. Schoepfe. New York: Basic Books, 1963. - Le Cru et le cult. Paris: Plon 1964. The Raw and

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the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Leqon inaugurals. 1960 lecture. The Scope of Anthropology. Trans. Sherry Ortner Paul and Robert A. Paul. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. La Pensee sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962. The Savage Mind. Trans. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. Les Structures elementaires de la parente. Paris: PUF, 1949. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1967. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Ed. Rodney Needham. Trans. James Harle Bell and John R. von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon P, 1969. and Didier Eribon. De Pres et de loin. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1988. Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss. Trans. Paula Wissing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. and Roman Jakobson. 'Charles Baudelaire's "Les Chats.'" L'Homme 2 (1962): 5-21. Trans. P.M. De George. In The Structuralists: From Marx to LeviStrauss. Ed. Richard T. DeGeorge and Fernande M. DeGeorge. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Secondary Sources Champagne, Roland A. Claude Levi-Strauss. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Clarke, Simon. The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique of Levi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Derrida, Jacques. 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.' In The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenic Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. Gardner, Howard. 'The Structural Analysis of Protocols and Myths.' Semiotica V i (1972): 31-57. Hayes, Eugene, and Tanya Hayes, eds. Claude LeviStrauss: The Anthropologist as Hero. Cambridge: MIT P, 1970 Lapointe, Francois, and Claire Lapointe. Claude LeviStrauss and His Critics. New York: Garland, 1977. Leach, Edmund. Claude Levi-Strauss. New York: Viking, 1970. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Pace, David. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Riffaterre, Michael. 'Describing Poetic Structures.' In Structuralism. Ed. Jacques Ehrmann. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970, 188-230. Scheffler, Harold W. 'Structuralism in Anthropology.' In Structuralism. Ed. Jacques Ehrmann. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970, 57-79. Steiner, George. 'Orpheus with His Myths: Claude

Lewis Levi-Strauss.' In Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (b. N. Ireland, 1898-1! England, 1963) Literary historian and critic, novelist, essayist, and religious apologist. C.S. Lewis' most formative experiences were his mother's death in 1908, his residence from 1914 to 1917 with a tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, whom he called a 'logic-engine,' and boyhood reading of Norse myths and the prose romances of William Morris and George MacDonald. From these he derived his devotion to *literature of the past, especially *myth and fantasy; his interest in other worlds; in part, his return from agnosticism to orthodox Christianity; and his impersonal, 'either-or' style of argument. Lewis entered University College, Oxford, was wounded while serving in France, then read classics and philosophy ('Greats'), taking a double first in 1922 and another first, in English, in 1923. He was Lecturer in English and Fellow of Magdalen College (1925-54). His lectures on medieval literature drew large attendances even before his Allegory of Love (1936) won general acclaim. This study of chivalric romance and allegory was followed by one of the epic poem, A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). In the latter he attacked T.S. Eliot's claim that poets could best judge poetry. He had already disputed E.M.W. Tillyard's claim that poets knew 'hells and heavens' unknown to the common reader as leading to 'poetolatry,' and the belief that the poem revealed the poet's experience and personality in their controversy, The Personal Heresy, published in 19^9. Lewis sought to rehabilitate Shelley, Scott and Morris, and wrote both science-fiction and fairy tale. He was denied promotion even for his monumental English Literature in the i6th Centum, Excluding Drama (1954), apparently because of his engagement in religious controversy. His Pilgrim's Regress (1933) allegorized his conversion to Christianity. Published broadcasts espousing orthodoxy made him a national figure, and ridicule of feminism and scientific positivism in his novel That Hideous Strength (1941) made him enemies in Oxford who helped to defeat his 1 9 5 1 bid for election

as Professor of Poetry. In 1954 ne accepted a specially created chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. Ill health compelled him to resign it in 1963. Some 60 books by Lewis attract separate readerships, the largest for his apologetics and children's classics The Chronicles of Narnia, with smaller ones for his critical works. Of his novels the most penetrating is Till We Have Faces (1956), based on the Cupid and Psyche myth and improved by consultation with Joy Davidman, with whom he enjoyed a brief but happy marriage from 1956 to 1960. Nearly all his works were first tried out upon his fellowChristian authors and friends, notably J.R.R. Tolkien. Together, the 'Inklings,' as they called themselves, developed a 'mythopoeic' strain of fantasy. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the most famous example. Lewis' career progressed from *genre criticism through literary and religious controversy (at Oxford) to a preoccupation at Cambridge with language and the act of reading. His often-overlooked contribution to literary theory (a term he used in 1936) can best be conveyed by an account of his principles. Lewis maintained that no 'expert' assessments or extraneous biographical, ideological or other pre-considerations should distract that reader from 'enjoying' first-hand reading. Nor should premature 'contemplation' be required of the reader. For their part, authors practised the art applicable to a given form, using language as their instrument. The modern idol of 'originality' therefore was neither attainable nor desirable; the value of literary works resided not in truth but in concreteness and formal consistency. They aimed to demonstrate what a more or less imaginary way of life was like and also to entertain. Unlike the daydreams in popular novels, the best myths, fantasies, or romances could apply to life in all ages and cultures. They offered the reader a liberation from his own circumstance and from conditioning by the 20th-century Zeitgeist. Deprecating evaluative criticism, especially if negative, in The Discarded Image (1964) Lewis sought to assist the would-be reader by depicting earlier models of the cosmos as 'prolegomena' to the reading of unfamiliar texts. In insisting on first-hand reading, in viewing a work as an object or poiema and in opposing commercialism and technocracy Lewis had much in common with *F.R. Leavis and the New Critics. (See *New Criticism.) Yet, he was

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Lewis at odds with them in valuing an author's intention, in his antipathy to modernism, positivism and feminism, and in his contention that an author developed his skill by imitating his precursors. (See *feminist criticism.) Early disabused by Owen Barfield of 'chronological snobbery/ Lewis condemned the application of any reductionist *ideology or psychology to texts and authors. In his Abolition of Man (1943), he argued that to denigrate non-referential diction was to impoverish the student's imagination and vocabulary. In his Experiment in Criticism (1961), Lewis proposed the evaluation of texts according to their power to sustain a 'literary' reading. The 'unliterary' read a *text but once, while the 'literary' re-read and absorb texts into their consciousness of life. Though resembling *Wayne Booth's '*implied reader/ Lewis' 'literary' reader differs in being a psychological type evident from childhood. Thus his form of reader-response theory focuses on the individual rather than on the ideal figure. (See *reader-response criticism.) Significantly, Lewis differs from Leavis in ascribing no superior 'maturity' or virtue to his literary reader. Though criticized for his prejudices in favour of friends and the authors of his youth, and against women and contemporary literature, Lewis remains valuable as a scholar-critic because of his range of reading, his incisive questioning of 20th-century assumptions, his lively and sensitive studies of Spenser, Milton and Chaucer, in particular, and his gift for lucid and witty exposition. LIONEL ADEY

Primary Sources Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in ... Schools. Riddell Memorial Lectures. London: Oxford UP, 1943. - The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1936. - The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964. - English Literature in the i6th Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1954. - An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. - That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups. London: Bodley Head, 1945. (See also

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Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943.) - Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Ed. Walter Hooper. London: Bles, 1966. - Of This and Other Worlds: Essays. Ed. Walter Hooper. London: Collins, 1982. - The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. London: Dent, 1933. - A Preface to 'Paradise Lost': Being the Ballard Matthews Lectures. Rev. and enlarged. London: Oxford UP, 1942. - 'Rehabilitations,' and Other Essays. London: Oxford UP, 1939. - Selected Literary Essays. Ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. - Spenser's Images of Life. Ed. Alastair Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967. - Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Collected by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966. - Studies in Words. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1960. - They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses. London: Bles, 1962. - Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. London: Bles, 1956. - and E.M.W. Tillyard. The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. London: Oxford UP, 1939. Secondary Sources Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. London: Allen and Unwin, 1978. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Como, James, ed. 'C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table' and Other Reminiscences. Incl. bibliography of works by Lewis. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Gibb, Jocelyn, ed. Light on C.S. Lewis. London: Bles, 1965. Green, R.L., and W. Hooper. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. London: Collins, 1974. Hart, Dabney Adams. Through the Open Door: A New Look at C.S. Lewis. University, Ala.: U of Alabama P, 1984. Manlove, C.N. C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. New York: St. Martin's P, 1987. - Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Sayer, George. Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988. Schakel, Peter. Reason and Imagination in C.S. Lewis: A Study of 'Till We Have Faces.' Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984. Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979. Wilson, A.N. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1990.

I.otman

Lodge, David John (b. England 1935-) Literary critic and novelist. David Lodge studied at the University of London, where he received his B.A. (1955) and his M.A. (19*59). For the latter he wrote a thesis on the English Roman Catholic novel. He has been at the University of Birmingham since 1960 and was appointed Professor of Modern English Literature in 1976. He has published well-received novels as well as books of criticism. Lodge's criticism has been concerned almost exclusively with the English novel of the 19th and 2oth centuries and with the poetics of the novel. Language of Fiction (1966), his first book, shows the influence of, among others, *Wayne Booth, Mark Schorer, *W.K. Wimsatt, and Ian Watt, and attempts to go beyond Anglo-American *New Criticism by using rhetorical analysis to suggest the possibility of a poetics of fiction. (See *rhetorical criticism.) Lodge follows J.M. Cameron in insisting that the term or category 'poetry' include poetry and prose and be defined on the basis of its purpose, which is the deliberate making of fictions. Although Lodge rightly calls himself a formalist critic, his work emphasizes, even when influenced by *Roman Jakobson, "Roland Barthes and "Gerard Genette as it is in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977) a n d Working with Structuralism (1981), that 'it is the essential characteristic of literature that it concerns values' (Language of Fiction 57). His later books show Lodge responding sympathetically to *structuralism, though not to *deconstruction. In his major contribution to critical theory, The Modes of Writing, he presents an ontology and typology of literary "discourse based on Jakobson's comments on metaphor and metonomy in his classic essay 'Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.' (See "metonymy/metaphor.) On the basis of close readings of 20th-century stories and novels, Lodge argues that the major modernists develop from a metonymic to a metaphoric representation of reality and that ultimately all discourse oscillates between the two terms. One of the consequences of his argument is that prose in general and realistic fiction in particular are more firmly grounded in Jakobson's definition of the poetic. Another is a

challenge to Barthes' views on the non-referentiality and autonomy of literary discourse. Lodge's work on the novel brings together in an interesting synthesis New Criticism, the moral and evaluative criticism of Matthew Arnold and "F.R. Leavis, structuralism, and the dialogism of "Mikhail Bakhtin. With the exception of Lodge's extended engagement with Jakobson's essay, however, the influence of critical theory is evident primarily in some key terms and concepts from Barthes (the death of the author, the five codes in S/Z) and Genette (analepsis and the three categories of time in narrative) and, most recently, Bakhtin's dialogism and polyphony). (See "polyphony/dialogism, *code.) His novel Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is a satiric look at contemporary criticism, theory and the academic profession. SAM SOLECKI

Primary Sources Lodge, David. After Bakhlin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1990. - Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1971. - Evelyn Vfaugh. New York: Columbia UP, 1971. - Craham Greene. New York: Columbia UP, 1966. - Language of Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. - The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metojn/my. and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Arnold, 1977. - Nice Work. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1988. - The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. - Paradise News. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1992. - Small World: An Academic Romance. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1984. - Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on lyth and 2oth Century Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. - Write On! Occasional Essays '6*;—'Si;. London: Seeker and Warburg, 198(1.

Lotman, lurii Mikhailovich (b. R.S.S.R., 1922-) Semiotician. After earlytraining in philology and history of Russian Literature, Lotman remained at the University of Leningrad to complete his doctorate in philology. He then went on to teach at Tartu State

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Lotman University in Estonia. In 1963 he was named head of the Department of Russian Literature in the same university and began to organize seminars on art, culture, *myth, and religion as sign systems. The results were published in the series Semeotike: Trudy po znakovyrn sistemam [Semeotike: Works on Sign Systems]. His Letnaia shkola - Summer School on Secondary Modelling Systems - was internationally famous. Lotman's talent for research and organization quickly identified him as the foremost representative of the Russian structural semiotic approach to "literature, art and culture, as well as the founder of the *Tartu School. That regional label is deceptively restrictive. The school included important input from Moscow semioticians such as *Boris Uspenskii. (See also *semiotics, *semiosis, *sign.) Lotman's structural semiotic approach follows from the work of the Russian formalists, particularly *Iurii Tynianov's 'system of genres' and *Roman Jakobson's 'system of systems.' (See Russian *formalism, *genre criticism.) Lotman's work is also related to the Czech structuralists, notably to *Jan Mukafovsky's notion of the value of aesthetic functions in culture, as well as the importance of '*intertextuality' (Mukafovsky 1936). (See *Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School, *structuralism.) He also follows Mukafovsky on the opposition between the synchronic and the diachronic, pointing out their relative and heuristic rather than existential nature (Winner 1978). Lotman locates his own works within the tradition of *Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of semiotics, which stresses language and not 'individual sign' ('Introduction/ Lotman and Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Culture), but he supplements this with ideas drawn from information theory, mathematics and cybernetics. (See also *communication theory.) Lotman's structural semiotics is based on the central and unifying concept of 'secondary modelling system' (SMS): all cultural systems other than language such as literature, cinema, art, music, religion, and myth. These systems are 'secondary' to natural language, the 'primary modelling system.' Based on natural language, SMSS have a far more complex structure (Struktura khudozhestvennovo teksta. Structure of the Artistic Text) and are subdivided into a non-artistic (myth, religion and folklore) and an artistic series. Moreover, the latter series is organized hierarchically according to the degree to which the art in question is related

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to the natural language structure (Lotman and Uspenskii, 'O semiotitcheskom mechanizme kul'tury.' 'On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.'). As a result, Lotman distinguishes between the semiotics of verbal and non-verbal arts (that is, between the symbolic, future-oriented, aspects of verbal arts and the iconic, past-oriented, dimensions of visual arts). As carriers of information, SMSS penetrate all levels of communication networks. However, the artistic model, because of its specific and distinct structure, and unlike other models (such as scientific models), allows for a much more complex form of modelling. Information in an artistic work is different from that contained in everyday language because of a 'surplus value' directly related to both the very structure of the work and the process that produces its structure (Analiz poeticheskovo teksta: Struktura stikha. Analysis of the Poetic Text: Verse Structure). The reading of a literary *text will necessarily be double, as the text is both an autonomous entity and an expression of something more significant. For Lotman SMSS add up a complex semiotic totality: culture. Thus the work of art is itself a sign within the sign system of culture. Conceiving culture as a secondary language demanded the expansion of the notion of text to the notion of 'culture text.' Culture is then conceived as a unique text which includes non-verbal systems, while text is conceived as part of a culture text. The 'culture text' represents the most abstract model of reality for a culture. 'Non-text,' one with a decreased semantic value, is produced for no cognitive or pragmatic aim. The opposition between text and 'non-text' allows Lotman to develop a typology of cultures ('O metaiazyke tipologicheskikh opisanii kul'tury'; 'On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture'). (See *metalanguage.) Lotman defines culture as the 'totality of non-hereditary information which is accumulated, stored and transmitted by various groups within human society.' Following Jakobson's distinction in linguistics between 'code' (a system of constraints) and 'message' (content), he further distinguishes between the content of culture texts and the structure of their 'language,' between the langue of a culture and its parole - a distinction that forms an essential grounding of any analysis or typology of culture. (See *langue/parole, code.) This

Lotman approach leads him to represent the history of cultures as a 'paradigmatic series' in which each structural type is deduced from its relationship with signs, with semiotics and with other characteristics of language. By defining culture as the accumulation, storage and transmission of non-hereditary information, Lotman equates its birth with that of history when humanity became the 'addressee' of information. Raising the questions of time and of duration, he accentuates the two principal mechanisms of culture: memory (a set of texts, conservation functions) and program (dynamic systems to reproduce information; generation of new knowledge) (Lotman, Ivanov et al. 1973). The structural period of Lotman's research was initiated by Lcktsii po struktural'noi poetike [Lectures in Structural Poetics]. Broadening his line of investigation in Struktura khudozhestvennovo teksta, Lotman applied his method to Russian poetry in Analiz poetichcskovo teksta: Struktura stikha. His conception of culture led to the study of texts of various cultures and periods, a trend well illustrated by 'O semioticheskom mechaniz.me kul'tury.' He treated cinema in Semiotika kino i problem]/ kinoestetiki [Semiotics of Cinema and the Problems of Cinema Esthetics]. The 'montage' process - the collision among elements coming from various texts and producing a maximum polysemic effect, seemed to provide Lotman with the archetypal example of intertextuality. Lotman's masterpiece of analysis and commentary in this vein is Roman A.S. Pushkina 'Evgenii Onegin.' Kommentarii [On Pushkin's Novel 'Evgenii Onegin.' A Commentary]. While Lotman's achievements were central to Russian structural semiotics and the TartuMoscow collaboration, they are now 7 informing Western semiotic investigations, especially those in the U.S.A., but also in Italy, Germany and France. His work is distinguished by his constant application of theory to concrete historical materials of varied artistic forms, by the supreme role granted to text and by his emphasis on the diachronic aspects of the semiotics of culture. E V A I,E G R A N D

Primary Sources Lotman, lu. M. Analiz poeticheskovo teksta: Struktura stikha. Leningrad, 1972. Anah/sis of the Poetic Text: Verse Structure. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976.

'Dinamicheskaia model' semiotitcheskoi sistemy.' Predvaritel'nye publikatsii 60 (Moscow, 1974): 1-23. 'The Dynamic Model of a Semiotic System.' Semiotica 21.3-4 ( 1 977) : 193-210. Lektsii po struktural'noi poetike: Vvedenie, teoriia stikha. Tartu, 1964. Lectures in Structural Poetics: Introduction, Verse Theory. Repr. Brown University Slavic Reprint Series. Providence: Brown UP, 1968. 'O metaiazyke tipologicheskikh opisanii kul'tury.' Trudy 4 (Tartu, 1969). 'On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture.' Semiotica 14.2 (i975): 97-123. 'O modeliruischem znatchenii poniatii "kontsa" "nachala" v khudozhestvennykh tekstakh.' Tezisy (Tartu, 1966): 89-95. 'The Modelling Significance of the Concept "End" and "Beginning" in Artistic Texts.' Poetics in Translation 3. Colchester: U of Essex, 1976, 7-11. 'O nekotorykh printsipal'nykh trudnostiakh v strukturalnom opisanii teksta.' Trudy 4 (Tartu, 1969). 'On Some Principle Difficulties in the Structural Description of a Text.' Linguistics 121 (1974): 57-63. 'The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.' Poetics Today 1:1-2 (1979): 161-84. [Orig.: In Stat'i po tipologii kul'tury. Vol. 2. Tartu, 1973.] Roman A.S. Pushkina 'Evgenii Onegin.' Kommentarii. [On Pushkin's Novel 'Evgenii Onegin.' A Commentary.] Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1980. Semiotika kino i problemy kinoestetiki. Tallin, 1973. The Semiotics of Cinema and the Problems of Cinema Esthetics. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions 5, 1976. Stat'i po tipologii kul'tury. [Articles on the Typology of Culture.] 2 vols. Tartu, 1970, 1973. Struktura khudozhestvcnnovo teksta. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970. Structure of the Artistic Text. Repr. Brown UP, 1971. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions 7, 1977. 'Zametki o strukture khudozhestvennovo teksta.' Trudy 5 (Tartu, 1971). 'Notes on the Structure of a Literary Text.' Semiotica 15.3 (1975): 199-205. and B.A. Uspenskii. The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Ed. Ann Shukman. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions 11, 1984. and B.A. Uspenskii. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by Lotman, Ginsburg and Uspenskii. Ed. A.D. Nakhimovsky and A.S. Nakhimovsky. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985. and B.A. Uspenskii. 'O semioticheskom mechanizme kul'tury.' Trudy 5 (Tartu, 1971): 144-6. 'On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.' New Literary History 9.2 (Soviet Semiotics and Criticism: An Anthology), 1978. and B.A Uspenskii et al. Travaux sur les systemes de signes. Ecole de Tartu. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1976. and A.M. Piatigorskii. 'Tekst i funktsiia.' Tartu 1968. 'Text and Function.' New Literary History 9.2 409

Lubbock (1978). 'Le Texte et la fonction.' Senriotica 1.2 (1969): 205-17. - and V.V. Ivanov et al. 'Tezisy k semioticheskomu izucheniiu kultur: v primenii k slavianskim tekstam.' In Stati po tipologii kultury. Tartu, 1973, 74-89. 'Thesis on the Semiotic Study of Culture: as Applied to Slavic Texts.' In The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Lisse: Ridder P, 1975. Secondary Sources Bailey, R.W., L. Matejka and P. Steiner, eds. The Sign Semiotics Around the World. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions 9, 1978. Baran, H., ed. Semiotics and Structuralism : Readings from the Soviet Union. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences, 1974. Eimermacher, K., and S. Shishkoff. Subject Bibliography of Soviet Semiotics: The Moscow-Tartu School. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications Bibliographic Series 37, 1977. Halle, M., et al. Semiosis: Semiotics and History of Culture (In Honorem Georgii Lotman). Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions 10, 1984. Margolin, U. 'Lotman on the Creation of Meaning in Literature.' Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 2.1-3 (F3^ 1 975) : 262-82. Matejka, L., S. Shishkoff, M.E. Suino, and I.R. Titunik, eds. Reading in Soviet Semiotics (Russian Texts). Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1977. Mukafovsky, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Trans. Mark E. Suino. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions 3, 1970. [Orig.: Esteticka funkce, norma a hodnota jako socidlni fakty 1936.] Prague: Borovy, 1936. Shukman, A. Literature and Semiotics: A Study of the Writings of Ju.M. Lotman. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishers, 1977. Winner, I. Portis. 'Cultural Semiotics and Anthropology.' In The Sign Semiotics Around the World, 335-63-

Lubbock, Percy (b. England, 1879-0!. 1965) Man of letters, critic. Percy Lubbock was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, where he gained a first in the classical tripos. From 1906 to 1908 he was Pepys librarian at Magdalen College, Cambridge, a position which led to his publication in 1909 of Samuel Pepys, an introduction to the Diary. In 1906 he had published Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Her Letters. Between 1908 and 1914 Lubbock was a frequent contributor to the TLS and during these years he met *Henry James. After James' death

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Lubbock wrote prefaces for editions of the unfinished works, The Ivory Tower, The Sense of the Past and The Middle Years. In 1920 he edited a two-volume edition of James' letters. The influence of the novelist on the critic is apparent in Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921). This very popular work was Lubbock's chief contribution to the theory and criticism of the novel. In it he examines works by Tolstoy, Flaubert, Thackeray, and James, among others, from the point of view of novelistic technique. 'How it is made is the only question I shall ask/ he claims, and proceeds with a critical study of the form and design of the various novels. His assumption is that the novel must be seen as a work of art, that its linear nature makes it difficult for the reader to grasp its form, and that the intelligent reader, in trying to fix in mind the form of any novel, is cooperating with the novelist in creating the art work. The terms he uses to discriminate novelistic methods of presentation - 'scenic,' 'panoramic,' 'point of view/ 'pictorial/ 'dramatic/ 'scene/ 'summary' - have become staples of ""rhetorical criticism of the novel and have helped prepare for more extensive and subtle treatments such as *Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. WALTER O'GRADY Primary Sources Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. James, Henry. The Ivory Tower. London: Collins, 1917. - Letters. Ed. Percy Lubbock. London: Macmillan, 1920. - The Middle Years. London: Collins, 1917. - The Sense of the Past. London: Collins, 1917. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London: Jonathan Cape, 1921. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Her Letters. London: Smith, Elder, 1906. - Samuel Pepys. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909.

Lukacs, Georg (Gyorgy) (b. Hungary, i885-d. 1971) Literary critic, philosopher and political thinker. Georg Lukacs was born Gyorgy von Lukacs into an uppermiddle-class family of German-Jewish descent. He studied philosophy and ""literature in Buda-

Lukacs pest, Berlin and Heidelberg, where he met Georg Simmel and Max Weber. 'The impact of German philosophy lasted my whole life/ he later acknowledged (Record of a Life). Opposing the prevailing neo-Kantian philosophy, Lukacs was attracted by the more historically minded thought of Hegel. To this period of intense study of German modern philosophy and of a passionate examination of the contemporary 'tragedy of culture' (as defined by Georg Simmel) belong such works as Soul and form (1911) and the Theory of the Novel (1916), as well as the unfinished 'Heidelberg Aesthetics' (1916-18), in which the young Lukacs tried to find an answer to the crises of the bourgeois society that formed the cultural background of the First World War. His study of German philosophy, as well as his deep discontent with issues of current policies and culture in war-torn Central Europe led Lukacs to Marx; after the advent of the Russian Revolution he finally committed himself to Marxism and joined the Communists. (See *Marxist criticism.) A member of the Hungarian Communist party since December 1918, he became a leading member of the Revolutionary Governing Council and a Red Army commissar in the short-lived Bela Kuhn 'proletarian' dictatorship of 1919. After the defeat of the 'Red Republic/ Lukacs lived in exile, first in Vienna and Berlin, where he continued to actively participate in shaping Communist politics and "ideology, writing his most influential works of political ideology (History and Class Consciousness, The Blum Theses). A leading figure in the constitution of Western Marxism, which proposes the renewal of Marxism by critically reappropriating its 'traditional' categories in terms of democratic rationality, Lukacs opposed more dogmatic forms of Marxism, developed mainly by the Stalinist 'ideological' apparatus and the Comintern. During his Moscow exile, in the 19303, Lukacs had to limit his activity to literary and philosophical work, occasionally publishing short texts of literary criticism. In these years he wrote 'The Historical Novel (1937) and The Young Hegel, published only in 1948. In i94> Lukacs returned to Hungary and finally became a university professor; his main disciples formed the future Budapest School: Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Istvan Meszaros, Mihaly Vajda. In 1956 Lukacs, as minister of culture and education, participated in the ill-fated Imre Nagy government, historically the first

East European attempt at constructing a truly democratic state structure outside a dictatorial Stalinist frame. After the crush of that democratic 'revolt/ brought about by Soviet and Warsaw Pact military intervention, Lukacs, as well as the other members of the doomed democratic government, was briefly imprisoned in Romania. Unlike Imre Nagy's, his life was spared and in 1959 Lukacs was allowed to return to Hungary, although his civil liberties were seriously restricted until 1967, when the liberalization of the regime also brought about a more tolerant assessment of Lukacs' lifelong activity. The Theon/ of the Novel integrates the development of the epic into a general frame of philosophy of history: Lukacs reads the history of the epic genre into a Fichte-inspired epochal frame that explains the actual realization of narrative forms, culminating with the novel. Lukacs regarded Western civilization as undergoing a transitional phase, where the loss of normativity (of standards of belief and conduct) made it an age of 'absolute sinfulness' (vollendete Sundhaftigkeit). The novel opposes the Homeric epic, proper to an age of innocence and homogeneity between transcendence and immanence, where the hero is an Eponymous, non-individual I, at peace with the values of his own world; the novel, however, is a work proper to an age of crisis, being 'the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea.' From Cervantes' Don Quixote to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky the novel mirrors the quest for a new normativity: thus, the Western novel depicts a world dominated by desire, lacking unity and tragically destroying the alienated individual subject who is heroically searching for an immanent meaning. The character's never-ending quest for an immanent meaning in a 'bourgeois world/ unable to provide it, is what gives the novelistic hero his 'demonic nature'; at the same time, the modern author, inasmuch as he perceives the perpetual break between the character's vision and his or her failure caused by a deceiving reality, is invariably placed in a position of *irony. The Historical Novel continues Lukacs' preoccupation with the fate of the Western novel, this time within a Marxist-oriented *discourse. Lukacs proposes to constitute historical authenticity as a main category of aesthetic evaluation and, in this way, the complexity of the social-historical understanding in terms of

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Lukacs 'accuracy' is seen as the main value of the literary *text. Regardless of this somewhat muddled aesthetic, the volume contains interesting examinations of Balzac, Walter Scott, Leon Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, and Tolstoy. Lukacs' analysis of Scott's novels is exemplary, showing how the 'veridic analysis' of the social representation is constituted as the main criterion of aesthetic judgment. Scott is seen as a radical innovator because he succeeds in showing how the historical meaning of human destiny is constituted as concrete narrrativity. Lukacs indicates a number of central points that support his opinion: the plot of the novel usually concerns an important historical crisis, the novel succeeds in depicting and involving social strata of complex structure and, finally, the main character (like Frank Osbaldiston in Rob Roy) is more often than not chosen from a middle-class environment, so as to act as a mediating element within the social conflicts depicted in the novel. Largely ignored by West European thinkers, the later Lukacs has its importance. The impressive Eigenart des Asthetischen [The Specificity of the Aesthetic 1963], a synthesis of his lifelong thinking on art, integrates art and science into a comprehensive Marxist phenomenology of the Spirit and subsequently examines its social and historical function as a form of spirituality. (See *phenomenological criticism.) Art is defined as man's self-awareness as a species involving the anthropomorphic representation of the world (Selbstbewusstsein-von). The work of art thus integrates the fragmented parts of the real and represents the human subject as a totality (Mensch ganz). Lukacs' is the most coherent attempt at building a 20th-century systematic aesthetic of Marxist conceptualizations (as compared with similar attempts made by *Adorno, Bloch or *Benjamin). Its merits and its limits have yet to be fully assessed, but it is already evident that such a project deserves a judgment that is able to take into account the whole impact of an age of modern thought on the development of the Marxist doctrine in the field of cultural studies. For this reason Lukacs seems more and more a forefather whose work has contributed to the postmodern ability of auto-critique and delegitimation of the totalizing social subject. (See also *reification, *postmodernism, *totalization, *subject/object, *materialist criticism.) M1RELA SAIM

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Primary Sources Lukacs, Georg. Asthetic. Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1972. - 'Eigenart des Asthetischen.' Orig. pub. as 'Asthetik' in Werke, vols. 11-12. Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962-86. - Essays on Realism. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge: MIT P, 1981. - Essays on Thomas Mann. Trans. Stanley Mitchell. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965. - Goethe and His Age. Trans. Robert Anchor. New York: Howard Fertig, 1978. - 'Heidelberger Asthetik.' 1916-18. In Werke, vol. 17. Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962-86. - The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. Boston: Beacon P, 1962. - History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. 1923. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971. - Realism in Our Times. Trans. John Mander and Necke Mander. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. - Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1983. - Solzhenitsyn. Trans. William David Graff. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971. - Soul and Form. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT P, 1974.

- Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964. - Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971. - The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relation Between Dialectics and Economics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin P, 1975.

Secondary Sources Feher, Ferenc, and Agnes Heller. Reconstructing Aesthetics: Writings of the Budapest School. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Goldmann, Lucien. Lukacs et Heidegger. Paris: Donoel/Gonthier, 1983. Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984. Kadarkay, Arpad. Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought and Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Rockmore, Tom. Irrationalism: Lukacs and the Marxist View of Reason. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. Tertulian, Nicolas. Georges Lukacs: Etapes de sa pensee esthetique. Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980.

Lvotard

Lyotard, Jean-Francois (b. France, 1924-) Philosopher. A man of 'peregrinations' (Peregrinations 1988), physical as well as intellectual, Jean-Franc.ois Lyotard taught in Algeria, Brazil and California; he was named professor of philosophy at the University of Paris in 1968 and became director of the College International de Philosophic in 1985. Lyotard acquired an international reputation with The Postmodern Condition (1979), a report on the condition of knowledge written at the request of the Government of Quebec. The unity of Lyotard's work is not found in a single method or analysis or a single political outlook but in its very activity or in what he calls the 'effort of thinking' - the effort necessitated by those situations where thought is least able to deliver definite or incontrovertible conclusions. He reflects on what is undecidable in judgment, on the knots, the double binds, the paradoxes or the 'paralogisms' of "discourse. (See also *paradox.) Lyotard has tried to restore the place of those who, like the Sophists, resist or complicate finalistic or ontological assertions. Among such thinkers, Lyotard especially refers to 'artists': not only writers, but also painters, dnematographers and musicians. One of the first in L'rance to write about "Theodor Adorno's aesthetics, he was also the curator of Les Immateriaux (1985), a vast exhibition at the Beaubourg Museum, which examined new technologies in *postmodernism. His work on Duchamp (Les Tratisforniareurs DttLhanip 1977) and on painting (Que peindre? 1987) helped shape theory and practice in the visual arts. Like many thinkers of his generation, Lyotard has tried to connect and to reconcile the philosophical questions raised by avant-garde or modernist art with the political militancy of the Left. Llis work is punctuated by successive formulations of these problems which give rise to new styles of analysis. Between his early study of phenomenology (La Phenoinenologic 1954) and the later Discours/figure (1971), Lyotard was principally engaged in political militancy and journalism (Appendix, Peregrinations). (See *phenomenological criticism.) Along with C o r n e l i u s Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, Lyotard created the journal Socialisme ou barbaric [Socialism or Barbarism] and subsequently wrote for the newspaper Pouvoir ouvrier [The Power of the Worker]. The struggle

for Algerian independence and a growing dissatisfaction with Soviet Marxism resulted in Lyotard's scepticism about the fulfilment of the Marxist Utopian ideal. (See *Marxist criticism.) In Discours/figure Lyotard turned to aesthetics. A criticism of phenomenology, the book marks the introduction of psychoanalysis in his work and also critiques "Jacques Lacan's *structuralism (the attempt to conceive of the unconscious on a linguistic or discursive model) and instead uses the Freudian dreamwork (which casts the dream thought into visual form) as the model of the incidence of the figural in the discursive. The place of desire becomes the place of constant gap between form and content; the truth of desire can therefore never discover a completely adequate expression. (See *Sigmund Freud, "psychoanalytic theory, *desire/lack.) In this period, the phenomenological "theme of the flesh is replaced by the psychoanalytic theme of desire and its vicissitudes - of a Tibidinal economy' (Des Dispositifs pulsionnels 1973 and Economic libidinale 1974). Also, Lyotard attempted to rethink Marxism from the standpoint of a figural unconscious of 'intensities' in the manner of *Gilles Deleuze and "Felix Guattari. Such 'intensities' consisted in those sites of energy which can't be measured or programmed and which are prior to interpretation. Yet another beginning occurred with the realization that his metaphysics of 'intensities' 'didn't work' (An Juste 1979, 170) because it could not account for the problem of injustice - the problem of political judgment: of what to do or what side to take. In response, Lyotard, rather in the style of *Ludwig Wittgenstein, devised a theory of different regimes of sentences (enonces) which he elaborates in Le Differend (1983). (See *enonciation/enoiice.) A different! arises when there must be a decision made among incommensurable regimes of sentences, as distinct from a tort (a wrong), where there is only the question of the application of received principles. The question of injustice brings Lyotard to the Kantian theme of reflective judgment: judgment in the absence of criteria or in the case where the method of judging always forms part of the judgment. Lyotard then turns to a detailed exposition of the place of the sublime in Kant's critical philosophy. The sublime is the concept through which Kant introduces the "problematic of representing the unrepresentable, an

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Macherev idea central to modernist art and thought ('The Sublime and the Avant-garde' 1984). Le Different!, the fruit of a ten-year labour begun immediately after Economic libidinalc, supplies the framework for the sociological diagnosis of The Postmodern Condition: the collapse of legitimation based on grand historical schemes (les grands recits). The debate that crystallized around the theme of the end of the grands recits perhaps points to the philosophical core of Lyotard's work: the problem of the kind of legitimacy that theory can have when it is not based on a priori principles or on a progressive, holistic history. Lyotard has chosen to draw attention to those events which disrupt and alter our thinking: 'Auschwitz, Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, May 1968, Poland 1980, and Kolyma.' In Heidegger and the Jews (1988), Lyotard later elaborated the theme of Auschwitz as such an event in the context of the debate over *Martin Heidegger. ANNE BOYMAN

Primary Sources Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La Condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit, 1979. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. - Derive a partir de Freud et Marx. Paris: UGE, 1973. - Des Dispositifs pulsionnels. Paris: UGE, 1973. - Le Differend. Paris: Minuit, 1983. - Discours/figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. - Economic libidinale. Paris: Minuit, 1974. - L'Enthousiasme, la critique kantienne de I'histoire. Paris: Galilee, 1986. - Heidegger and the Jews. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1988. - Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. - La Phenomenologie. Paris: PUF, 1954. - Que Peindre? Paris: Editions de la Difference, 1987. - 'The Sublime and the Avant-garde.' Trans. L. Liebmann, G. Bennington, and M. Hobson. Paragraph 6 (1985): 1-18. - Les Transformateurs Duchamp. Paris: Galilee. 1977. - and Jean-Loup Thebaud. Au Juste. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986.

Secondary Sources Carroll, David. Paraesthetics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Bennington, Geoffrey. Lyotard: Writing the Event. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.

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Macherey, Pierre Pierre Macherey (b. France 1938-) Marx theorist. Best known in the anglophone world as the author of Pour une theorie de la production litteraire [A Theory of Literary Production 1966; trans. 1978], Macherey worked with *Louis Althusser in the 19605, has published books on Spinoza, Comte and Hegel and, most recently, renewed his interest in sociological criticism and philosophy with A quoi pense la literature? (1990). Terry Eagleton has referred to Macherey as the 'first Althusserian critic' (Against the Grain 2), and certainly Macherey's work owes much to the work in Marxist philosophy carried out by Althusser in the 19605. While there is a tendency in the North American academy to meld the various 'structuralisms' of *Jacques Lacan, *Claude Levi-Strauss, *Roland Barthes, and Althusser into one enormous project based on Saussurean linguistics and Freudian theories of the unconscious, Althusser's work, and therefore Macherey's, cannot be assimilated into any homogeneous form of 'French structuralism.' (See *structuralism, *Sigmund Freud, *Ferdinand de Saussure.) Althusser sought to engage with Karl Marx's actual writings as *text; and he worked to disengage Marxist theory from what he then saw as the trap of a false humanism. (See *Marxist criticism.) The first strategy necessitated a 'return to Marx/ culminating in the theory of an 'epistemic rupture' between the earlier, humanist Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the later, scientific Marx of The German Ideology and Capital. (See *episteme.) The second strategy, then, meant breaking out of the concerns with alienation and *reification associated with the work of Hungarian Marxist *Georg Lukacs, as well as attempting to steer the French Communist party away from the valorization of humanism, of 'man' as the 'agent of history.' The most radical and influential effect of Althusser's works (including For Marx and the collectively written Reading Capital, both 1965) has been his theory of ""ideology not as a 'false consciousness' or commonly swallowed lie, but rather as the way in which a society will 'reproduce' its own continuation. Ideology, then, is like Freud's 'manifest content': merely the most visible form of the social real, which must then be analysed.

Macherev What Althussor's work means for Macherey's theory is apparent in the first section of A Theory of Literary Production, where Macherey confronts the 'elementary concepts' that underwrite literary criticism - that is, primarily, three fallacies: the empirical fallacy, the normative fallacy and the interpretive fallacy (19). Macherey sets out to show that criticism is bedevilled by ideological constraints and is itself an ideology. Thus, first of all, criticism will assume unquestioning!}' the empirical status of its given object - the literary work of art. Macherey's later work (particularly the essay 'On Literature as an Ideological Form' 1981) shows clearly how ^literature is a product of social desire. (See *desire/lack.) Criticism will strive 'to modify the work in order to assimilate it more thoroughly, denying its factual reality as being merely the provisional version of an unfulfilled intention' (19). By seeking some truth in the literary work, interpretation will 'resolve a problem in a way that simply gets rid of it' (38), without, that is, showing how the problem came, historically, to be a part of the text. While Macherey has been characterized as a poststructuralist, his readings of V.I. Lenin and structuralism in A Theory of Literary Production sternly disallow such miscalculation. (See *poststructuralism.) In 'Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy,' Lenin's articles on Tolstoy are interpreted as subtle meditations on the relationship between an individual writer, history and ideology: in effect, Lenin becomes a precursor of the Althusserian critique of humanist Marxism. Most convincingly, Macherey argues that Lenin's criticism offers a way out of naive reflection theory, a topic Macherey returns to in 'The Problem of Reflection' (1976). For Macherey, art is a mirror in the same way that ideology is a mirror. The *trope is psychoanalytic and Lacanian, and signifies the role of the unconscious in the book: 'there is an internal displacement of ideology by virtue of this redoubling; this is not ideology contemplating itself, but the mirror effect which exposes its insufficiency' ( i ^n)- A work of art is ideological by dint of its contradictions, but the point is not for the materialist critic simply to point out some contradictions in a work to 'deconstruct' it. (See also *materialist criticism, *deconstruction, *psychoanalytic theory.) This is the point at which Macherey leaves the realms of garden-variety Marxist criticism and deconstruction. The critic who seeks, as

does Barthes in Mythologies, to show the cracks in an ideological edifice is not too different from the old-style critic with his 'normative fallacy' mentioned above: both types of criticism are forms of Platonism. Macherey is unambiguous on this point: 'it is futile to denounce the presence of a contradiction in ideology' (194). So it is not contradiction that the Machereyan critic will tease out in a literary work, but rather gaps or absences, for these gaps indicate a break with the ideological circumstances of the work. Such an understanding underlies Macherey's reading of Jules Verne's work and particularly the lesson Macherey draws from the novel The Mysterious Island. While Verne's works can be said to reflect the bourgeois ideology of scientific expansionism of the Third Republic, this reflection is an active, critical process. The figure of Robinson Crusoe functions as the novel's own 'unconscious' - just as European explorers were not colonizing 'virgin' territory but the homelands of others, so Verne's characters are merely repeating, in a modernized version, the adventures of Daniel Defoe's hero. Jules Verne's narratives are 'faulty' (en defaut) in a geological sense: absent but powerful presences - Crusoe as imaginary father, Captain Nemo as ideological one - in the end determine the narrative. Macherey returns in his later work to problems he first enunciated in A Theory of Literary Production. In The Problem of Reflection', he poses the *problematic in terms of aesthetics in general. He seeks strenuously to distance materialist aesthetics from Hegelian expressionism, or the notion that 'art "expresses" social reality' (7), or even aesthetic pleasure (10). For Macherey, reflection theory depends upon naive distinctions of subject-object and formcontent: his way out of mechanical and abstract aesthetics is first of all to refer to Althusser's work on *Ideological State Apparatuses, and then to Renee Balibar's work on how literature is bound up with national (French) educational practices. (See *subject/object.) Macherey returns briefly to the question of reflection in 'On Literature as an Ideological Form' (1981), co-written with Etienne Balibar, but here the two critics engage most directly questions of how the educational system in France, with its rigid hierarchy 'reproduces the social division of a society based on the sale and purchase of individual labour-power' (85). The division, Macherey and Balibar argue, is

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Macherev primarily linguistic, and accomplished most forcefully in terms of the teaching of literature - the frani^ais eli'mentaire of primary school and franqais litteraire of advanced education. The uses of literature, on the one hand, to teach grammar, and on the other, as example of truth and beauty, are interdependent, the critics argue, as tools of class domination. The more philosophical bent of Macherey's recent work is accessible in his essay 'In a Materialist Way' (1983). Here he formulates materialism not as a body of knowledge but in the tradition of the critique. He seeks to 'make philosophy admit its historicity' (139), and flirts with *Antonio Gramsci's ideas of a philosophy that re-works 'common sense' as practice. The brief essay is both a summary of Macherey's work on Hegel and Spinoza, and an indication of where he sees a materialist philosophy going, ceaselessly interrogating its multiple and inexorable conditions and struggles. Two major book-length works by Macherey have not yet been translated into English, and yet the directions implicit even in the Theory of 1966 can be seen in the later works. Hegel ou Spinoza continues the Althusserian fascination with Baruch de Spinoza - Althusser remarked once that to be a Spinozist or Marxist is essentially the same thing (Lenin and Philosophy 175). Spinoza's appeal lies, Christopher Norris has suggested, in his reflections on the difference between lived experience and a transcendent epistemology (44). Macherey is interested in how Spinoza, unlike Hegel, refuses to see philosophy as a reflection of some predetermined reality: 'For Spinoza, ideas are not images or passive representations, and they do not reproduce, in a more or less correct fashion, external realities' (79). Hegel fundamentally misreads Spinoza: unlike Hegel's Absolute Spirit, 'the God of the Ethics is not a totality of determinations, arranged in a rational order by the logic of their development or their system' (223). Macherey's work suggests a way for 'materialist philosophy' to continue to work out of the anthropological Marxism still predominant today. A quoi pense la litterature? synthesizes Macherey's concerns at the intersection of literature and philosophy. Here Macherey is most successful when he engages with writers precisely on such boundaries: Raymond Roussel, de Sade, Georges Bataille, Mme de Stael, and Raymond Queneau.

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Macherey has been quite influential on British Marxist and leftist criticism - Catherine Belsey and Tony Bennett devote substantial space in their first books to his work, and Eagleton was perhaps the first 'Machereyan critic' in such works as Criticism and Ideology and Marxism and Literary Criticism. It is easy to see why this should be so. By harnessing both a sophisticated Althusserian theory of ideology and a neo-Freudian or Lacanian idea of the unconscious to a close critical attentiveness, Macherey set the agenda for materialist literary criticism. CLINT EURNHAM

Primary Sources Macherey, Pierre. A quoi pense la litterature? Paris: PUF, 1990. - Hegel ou Spinoza. Paris: Maspero, 1979. - 'In a Materialist Way.' Trans. Lorna Scott Fox. In Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan Montefiore. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983, 136-54. - 'Interview.' Red Letters: Communist Party Literature journal 5 (Summer 1979): 3-9. - 'Interview: Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey.' By James H. Kavanagh and Thomas E. Lewis. Diacritics (1982) 12: 46-62. - Pour une theorie de la production litteraire. Paris: Maspero, 1966. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans, by Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978. - 'The Problem of Reflection.' Trans. Susan Sniader Lanser. Sub-Stance (1976) 15: 6-20. — and Etienne Balibar. 'On Literature as an Ideological Form.' Trans. Ian McLeod, John Whitehead and Ann Wordsworth. In Untying the Text. Ed. Robert Young. London: Routledge, 1981, 79-99.

Secondary Sources Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Barker, Frances. 'Ideology, Production, Text: Pierre Macherey's Materialist Criticism.' Praxis 5 (1980): 99—108. Belscy, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen, 1979. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1976. - 'Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory.' In Against the Grain: Selected Assays 1975-1985. London: Verso, 1986, 9—22. - Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976.

Maritain Elliot, Gregory. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. London: Verso, 1987. Frow, John. 'Structuralist Marxism.' Southern Review 15.2 (1982): 208-17. Kavanagh, James H. 'Marx's Althusser: Towards a Politics of Literary Theory.' Diacritics 12 (1982): 2 5-45Lewis, Thomas E. 'Aesthetic Effect/Ideological Effect.' Enclitic 7.2 (1983): 4-16. Norris, Christopher. Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theon/. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Poole, Roger. 'Generating Believable Entities: PostMarxism as a Theological Enterprise.' Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 7 (1983): 49-71.

Maritain, Jacques (b. France 1882-d. 1973) Philosopher. At the Sorbonne, where he was studying natural sciences, Jacques Maritain met Raissa Oumansoff. They were married in 1904 and their intellectual development progressed in tandem under three main influences. One was that of Henri Bergson. Believing that scientists held the supreme principles of the intelligence in little esteem, they began to attend the lectures of this philosopher, whose intuitionism combated the reductive tendencies of the scientific mind. A second influence was the writer Leon Bloy, who led them towards Catholicism and served as their godfather when they were received into the Church in 1906. It was a major step for them to take, since Maritain came from a liberal Protestant background and Raissa was Jewish, and since the prevailing intellectual climate made them feel that in embracing the Church they were abandoning philosophy forever. In Heidelberg, however, where he had gone to study the state of biological sciences in the German universities, Maritain came under a third influence, that of Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologia came to him as 'a luminous flood'; from that time on he became a leading exponent of Thomism in the modern world, considering that the doctrine of St. Thomas would provide a method for fruitful discussion of such contemporary questions as the relations between science and wisdom, the person and the common good, and Christianity and democracy. Beginning in 1912, he taught at the College Stanislas in Paris and the following year he spoke on Bergson and Christian philosophy, the first of many series of lectures

at the Institut Catholique (also in Paris). Subsequently he was to teach at Columbia, Chicago, Notre Dame, and especially Princeton; and from 1933 on he was on the faculty of the Institute (later, Pontifical Institute) of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. Among his 60 books, there were a number on aesthetics, beginning with one suggested to him by the work of a modern painter, Georges Rouault. In this book, Art and Scholasticism (1920), Maritain notes that the schoolmen composed no special treatise on the philosophy of art; their theories about it have to be sought in austere dissertations on problems of logic. St. Thomas, he writes, defined the beautiful as that which gives pleasure on sight. Art belongs to the order of making, the practical realm rather than the speculative. Nevertheless it is stamped with the character of a man, a rational animal, and therefore is intellectual: its activity consists in impressing an idea upon matter. Like James Joyce, Maritian describes the three qualities of the beautiful in intellectual terms: integrity, because the intellect is pleased with fullness of being; proportion or consonance, because the intellect is pleased with order and unity; and radiance or clarity, because the intellect is pleased with what causes intelligence to see. The fine arts depend upon things; they have a certain relation to imitation, which is difficult to define. (See '"mimesis.) But a work of art is more than an objectit possesses a transcendental nature. Aquinas said that 'the beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similitude of divine beauty participated in things,' and this is especially true of the work of art. Man is grossly in error, Maritain thought, when he seeks to build his existence around art as a supreme end in itself. In The Degrees of Knowledge (1932), he wrote that it is wrong to attribute to psychology, the speculative science of the human being, the profound insights of a Pascal or a Shakespeare. Properly speaking, they are not psychologists but moralists; they study the dynamism of the human being, his use of free will and his disposition towards a sovereign good. In six lectures he gave on the responsibility of the artist at Princeton in 1951, Maritain discussed such matters in a systematic way. From the viewpoint of art, he said, the artist seeks only the good of his work. From the viewpoint of morality, to assume that it does not matter what one writes

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Maritain is permissible only to the insane: the artist is responsible to the good of human life, in himself and in his fellow men. In Art and Scholasticism, he explained that he intended to consider the essentials of art rather than the nature of poetry; but 'later on it was this mysterious nature that I became more and more eager to scrutinize.' He did so in Art and Poetry (1935) and in a much more ambitious work, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). In the background of his reflection was the idea that, though poetry is by its process of creation an art, poetry and poetic knowledge infinitely transcend art merely conceived of as the craftsman's virtue. Dante in the Middle Ages and Baudelaire in the modern age both see the spiritual as immanent in the real world: the mysteries of the world and of the spirit embrace each other. St. Thomas lists art among the intellectual virtues; it is a habitus or capacity involving reason. As Armand Maurer points out, Maritain and another leading Thomist, Etienne Gilson, differed about what this implied. Maritain sees art as intellectual in essence; manual skill is no part of it. The source of every work of fine art is creative intuition; the whole work, 'the totality of the work to be engendered/ is present in intuition before it is fashioned. For Gilson, this makes the artist too like a God. He agreed that knowledge accompanied artistic production but not that art is a form of knowing rather than making. For him the artist's habitus is in the hands as well as the mind; the art is in the execution, not in the intellect alone. Maritain had a wide acquaintance among poets, painters and musicians; and paradoxically, on the basis of Thomistic principles, he was able to provide an interpretation and defence of their art. The major innovation of modern art, he thought, lay in its exploration of the self, especially of the preconscious and subconscious activity of the mind. (See *self/ other.) Wallace Fowlie writes that the success of Art and Scholasticism was due to a surprising concurrence of its conclusions with the beliefs of modern artists, especially those outside any religious persuasion. They were pleased to see confirmation of their belief that the lesson of art is as useful to philosophers as to artists, and that the movement of modern art is a valid illustration of modern ideas and ideologies. (See *ideology.) At the same time, Maritain saw that the

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pride of the artist could lead him astray. He deplored modern art's tendency towards 'angelism/ by which he meant its tendency to divorce form from content and seek a 'pure' form of art - an absolute which, by its very nature, art is capable of producing. While praising many abstract artists, he wished to see their work anchored in the real; some provided us with elements of contemplation only by quitting the realm of the human. Still he paid tribute to art and artists for continuing to surprise and delight us: 'Poetry is capable of worming its way in anywhere.' As employed by Maritain, Thomistic aesthetics was not so much a coherent system as a surprisingly novel approach to both age-old and entirely new problems. DAVID J. DOOLEY

Primary Sources Maritain, Jacques. Art et scholastique. Paris: Art catholique, 1920. Art and Scholasticism. Trans. J.F. Scanlan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930. - Court traite de V existence et I'exist ant. Paris: P. Hartmann, 1947. Existence and the Existent. Trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan. New York: Imagen Books, 1957. - Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953. - Distinguer pour unir: ou, les degres du savoir. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1932. The Degrees of Knowledge. Trans. Bernard Wall and Margot R. Adamson. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937. - Le Docteur angelique. Paris: P. Hartmann, 1929. St. Thomas Aquinas, Angel of the Schools. Trans. J.F. Scalan. London: Sheed and Ward, 1933. - Frontieres de la poesie et autres essais. Paris: L. Rouart, 1935. Art and Poetry. Trans. E. de P. Matthews. New York: Philosophical Library, 1943. - Humanisme integral: Problemes temporals et spirituels d'une nouvelle chretiente. Paris: F. Aubier, 1936. Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom. Trans. Joseph W. Evans. New York: Scribner, 1968. - Neuf leqons sur les notions premieres de la philosophie morale. Paris: Pierre Tequi, 1950. An Introduction to the Basic Problem of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Cornelia N. Borgerhoff. Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1990. - Le Paysan de la Garonne: Un Vieux laic s'interroge a propos du temps present. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1930. The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. Trans. Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. - Religion et culture. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer,

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1930. Religion and Culture. Trans. J.F. Scalan. London: Sheed and Ward, 1 9 3 1 . Reponse a jean Cocteau. Paris: Stock, 1926. The Responsibility of the Artist. New York: Scribner's, 1960. Sept lemons sur I'ctre: et les premiers principes de la raison speculative. Paris: P. Tequi, 1934. and Julian Green. The Story of Two Souls. The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green. Trans. Bernard Doering. New York: Fordham UP, 1988. and Raissa Maritain. Situation de la pocsic. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1938. The Structure of Poetry. Trans. Marshall Suther. New York: Philosophical Library, 1 9 ^ 3 .

Secondary Sources Editors of La Revue Thoniiste. Jacques Maritain: Son oeuvre philosophique. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1949. (See especially Charles Journet, 'D'une philosophic chretienne de 1'histoire et de la culture.') Evans, Joseph. Jacques Maritain: The Man and His Achievement. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963. (See especially Wallace Fowlie, 'Maritain the Writer/ and Francis Fergusson, 'Poetic Intuition and Action in Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. ) Fowlie, Wallace. Jacob's Night: The Religious Renascence in France. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1947. Gilson, Etienne. The Arts of the Beautiful. New York: Scribner's, 1963. - Painting and Reality. New York: Pantheon Books, 19T7-

Hamm, Victor M. Language, Truth and Poetry. The Aquinas Lectures, 1960. Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1960. Hanke, John W. Maritain's Ontology of the Work of Art. The Hague: Martinus N i j h o f f , 1973. Maritain, Raissa. Les Grandcs amities: Souvenirs. 2 vols. New York: Editions de la maison franchise, 1941-4. Maurer, Armanci A. About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation. Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, i 98 v Mclnerny, Ralph. Art and Prudence: Studies in the Thought of Jacques Maritain. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame P, 1988. Redpath, Peter A., eel. From Twilight to Dawn: The Cultural Vision of Jacques Maritain. Mickawaka, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1990. Rover, Thomas Dominic. I'he Poetics of Maritain: A Thomistic Critique. Washington: Thomist P, 1963. Simonsen, Vagn L u n d g a a r d . L'Lsthetique de Jacques Maritain. Copenhagen: Munsgaard, 19=16. Speaight, Robert. The Springs of Poetry.' Neio Scholasticism. M a r i t a i n issue 4(1 ( 1 9 7 2 ) : 31—69.

Mauron, Charles (b. France, 1899-01. 1966) Literary critic and theorist of psychocritique. Trained as a chemist, Mauron's increasing blindness (detached retinas) forced a radical change in career plans before even beginning his first job. At the insistence of the British formalist art critic of post-impressionism, Roger Fry, Mauron began translating *E.M. Forster's A Passage to India with the aid of his first wife, Marie. This was to be the first of many translations, including work by Laurence Sterne, *D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, ""Virginia Woolf, and T.E. Lawrence. Through his friendship with Fry and Forster, Mauron absorbed a very British and not at all French - literary aesthetic. His first two books, The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature (1927) and Aesthetics and Psychology (1935), were published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press and translated by Fry. Mauron finally received his doctorat es Lettres from the Sorbonne when he was 64 years old. He taught briefly at the Universite d'Aix before his death. In his first two English books, Mauron began to develop a concept of aesthetics as the science that treated of the conditions of sensuous perception and therefore as a form of psychology that empirically examined the nature of aesthetic creation and judgment. While attracted to the theories of *Sigmund Freud (well before most French critics), he felt the need to posit a higher reality, a spiritual sensibility, as the source of art and as a counter to the instinctive, libidinal unconscious. Freud's system, as its critics have delighted in pointing out, is the historical result of an amalgam of 18th-century deterministic rationalism, Romantic irrationalism and 19th-century biologism. When adapted to literary studies, psychoanalysis opens the door to expressive and affective theories of criticism that both tend to value subjectivity and intuition as ways to knowledge. (See *psychoanalytic theory.) This is precisely what appealed to Mauron. His added fascination with the Eastern mystics grew directly out of his early distrust of rationalism and his appreciation of the accounts by Claude Bernard and Llenri Poincare of the role of intuitive insight, even in such codified systems of knowledge as experimental medicine and mathematics. But by 1950, with the publication of L'Introdiiction a la psychanalyse de Ma/-

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Mauron larme [Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Mallarme] Mauron had formulated psychocritique, his own compromise between what he saw as the 'subjective' and the 'objective/ between aesthetics and psychology. Psychocritique aims to increase our knowledge of literary works by isolating (and then studying) textual structures whose origin is attributed to the 'unconscious personality' of the author. It does not deny the existence (or the significance) of consciously intended or elaborated textual structure; nor does it underestimate the force of influences. Placing himself always in the position of what he calls the 'man of science/ Mauron insisted that his experimental method demands that the critic acknowledge three variables within the poet's free act of creation - milieu, language and the artist's personality - and the third was his major interest. Using Freud's concept of the unconscious latent source of the manifest form and content of the work of art, Mauron posited, beneath the overt, surface unity to the text, a hidden and more significant one. He did not fall into the reductionist trap of confusing the work of art with either a dream or a symptom. Psychoanalysis or 'scientific psychology' offers, he felt, insights into imaginative fantasies, into the creative process, and into ego-object relations that the literary critic ignores at his or her peril. Mauron was aware that the methods of psychoanalysis, unlike its insights into the structure of the psyche, must be adapted for use in literary criticism. With no patient to analyse on a couch, with no free associations to work with, the psychocritic must substitute a textually based method, one which Mauron felt must seek to unite the advantages of the patient's free associations (the voluntary suspension of conscious control) and the vigilance of the analyst (ready to seize upon repetitive structures). The method he invented involved the mental superimposition of texts, which are more or less known by heart. (See *text.) The critic allows his/her conscious attention to float and permits coincidences to suggest themselves as the texts are called to mind, though in no conscious or chronological order. Such coincidences are noted and, if the cause does not seem to be in the formal surface unities of the text, they are deemed to be unconscious, latent, and thus of interest. These are now grouped together into what are called 'obsessive metaphors' (though not all are tech-

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nically metaphors) or networks of associations that 'resonate.' (Auditory images are common in the blind Mauron's theory; indeed, his blindness is central to his thinking about literary method.) These networks are said to represent unconscious groupings within the author's psyche, groupings of relations to internal and external objects; that is, they are attempts to create a unified vision of the inner fragmented world - as described by Melanie Klein. But in Mauron's work as a whole, the important role of systems of relations in art took root well before his discovery in the 19505 of the objectrelation theorists. Its source is in the *formalism which Mauron espoused as early as the 19205 through his contact with Bloomsbury and Fry. This formalism only took its final form, however, after the discovery of Klein. Her theories of projection, of the internalization of desired objects or, more generally, of the dynamic nature of psychic interrelations, allowed Mauron to make dynamic the static associative networks which the process of textual superimposition can single out. He then argued (summarized later in Des Metaphores obsedantes au my the personnel 1962) that a psychic 'force field' is created by the networks of images, a field of conflicts, anguish and defences which become affectively polarized into mythic figures. These then act out certain dramatic roles which represent Kleinian internalized objects and identifications. In other words, underlying the networks of obsessive images, there is an obsessive fantasy - the 'personal myth' - which is the dramatic representation of the structures of the psyche and their interrelations. (See *myth.) Mauron's early interest was in lyric poets whose works lend themselves well to superimpositions, revealing networks of obsessive metaphors. However, the postulation of the dramatic nature of the personal myth allowed the subsequent extension of his method to the study of dramatic and epic works, as seen in L'lnconscient dans I'oeuvre et la vie de Racine (1954). With his attempt to carry out a psychocritique of the work of Moliere, however, Mauron was forced to consider both generic structures and the possible function of the unconscious of the audience: that is, when Moliere's personal myth turned out to coincide with the formal structures of comedy in general, Mauron undertook an analysis of the comic genre as a whole (Psychocritique du genre comique 1964), combining the theories of

McLuhan Freud on jokes, *Carl Gustav Jung on the collective unconscious, and Klein and Anna Freud on defence mechanisms. (See *genre criticism.) Mauron's psychocritical work, taken as a whole, reveals a constant tension between his desire to elucidate the created object itself and his interest in the creator's psyche. In a sense this is but another formulation of the early conflict between aesthetics and psychology. For a brief time in the early 19608, Mauron became embroiled in the battle over the nouvelle critique - over the importation of the frameworks from the social sciences into French literary criticism. At the time, he was alternately admired and condemned for the rigour of the particular methodology he derived from psychoanalysis. Today his work tends to be considered out of date in France, or else is rewritten - not without considerable distortion - in Lacanian terms. (See *Jacques Lacan.) But his contribution both to critical methodology and to the reading of the work of individual writers (and painters, as well) is perhaps clear in that the term psychocritique is still reserved in French for his particular complex psychoanalytic theorizing of the creative process. LINDA HUTCHEON

Primary Sources Mauron, Charles. Aesthetics and Psychology. Trans. Roger Fry and Katherine John. London: Hogarth P, 1935. - Introduction a la psychanalyse de Mallarme. 1950. Repr. Paris, Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1968. Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Mallarme. Trans. Archibald Henderson, Jr., and Will McLendon. Berkeley: U of California P, 1963. — Mallarme I'obscur. Paris: Denoel, 1941. - The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature. Trans. Robert Fry. London: Hogarth P, 1927. - L'lnconscient dans I'oeuvre et la vie de Racine. 1954 thesis; Paris: Jose Corti, 1969. - DPS Metaphores obsedantes an mythe personnel: Introduction a la psychocritique. Paris: Jose Corti, 1962, 1964. - Psychocritique du genre comique. Paris: Jose Corti, 1964. - Mallarme par lui-meme. Paris: Seuil, 1964. - Le Dernier Baudelaire. Paris: Jose Corti, 1966. - Le Theatre de Giraudoux. Paris: Jose Corti, 1971.

Secondary Sources Clancier, Anne. 'Charles Mauron.' In Psychanalyse et critique littcraire. Toulouse: Privat, 1973, 191-221.

Cruickshank, John. Tsychocriticism and Literary Judgment.' British Journal of Aesthetics 4.2 (1964): 1 55~9Hutcheon, Linda. Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge UP, 1984. LeSage, Laurent. 'Charles Mauron in Retrospect.' L'Esprit Createur 14.3 (1974): 265-76. Mehlman, Jeffrey. 'Entre psychanalyse et psychocritique.' Poetique 1.3 (1970): 365-83.

McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (b. Canada, ign-d. 1980) Literary critic, culturologist, educator. Marshall McLuhan spent his youth in Winnipeg, where he attended Kelvin Technical H.S. and regularly assisted at Baptist church services. He earned degrees in English from the University of Manitoba (B.A. 1933; M.A., thesis on George Meredith, 1934), after an initial year in the Engineering program. During his years as an IODE Scholar at Cambridge (B.A. 1936), McLuhan studied under *F.R. Leavis and *I.A. Richards, and had his perception of the poetic process further shaped by readings in *T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. No less formative were the writings of the 'practical mystic' G.K. Chesterton. In 1937, while working at the University of Wisconsin, McLuhan was received into the Roman Catholic church. Teaching in the English Department of St. Louis University (1937-9, 1940-4) afforded him the opportunity to install the *New Criticism there and to develop, within the ambiance of 'Saint-Louis Thomism/ his sense of intellectual processes as the perceiving of 'nets of analogy.' McLuhan was awarded his doctorate from Cambridge in 1943 for 'Thomas Nashe and His Place in the Learning of His Time.' A correspondence struck up that same year with Wyndham Lewis, then in Windsor, Ontario, led to McLuhan's moving there in 1944, to teach at Assumption College. He joined the Department of English at St. Michael's College (of the University of Toronto) in 1946 and was the first (and last) Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology (1963-80). McLuhan's polymorphic oeuvre turns on one *theme, the genesis and effects of the 'dissociation of sensibility' in Western culture. As characterized in his doctoral dissertation, that breakdown can be traced to the supplanting of

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McLuhan grammar and rhetoric by logic in the curriculum of the late Renaissance. Nashe (15671601?), it is proposed, retained something of the unified sensibility of the rhetorical tradition extending from Cicero through Augustine to Dante. Indifferent to 'logical copulae' and rich in wordplay and inclusive digression, Nashe's 'polyphonic prose' is praised for the way in which it snubs the dialecticians and their fragmenting 'lineal decorum.' The many essays in literary criticism from McLuhan in the 19405 and 19505 extend his initial reading of psycho-intellectual trauma. Similarly concerned with the cultural and scientific context of writing, they focus on pun, analogy, *paradox, metaphor, *myth, and symbol as media fitted by their alogicality for the restoration of synthetic perception and communication. (See also *metonomy/metaphor.) Like Richards, *Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate, McLuhan favours 'concrete poetry,' a ""literature of indirection striving for comprehensiveness, over a poetry of statement and partiality. Joyce's writing is especially remarked for its polysemic qualities: his 'trivial' puns restore that fulness of sense lost to the 'abcedmindedness' of linear perception, while his adaptation of the newspaper page as an art form synchronous in its action and paratactical in its arrangement recalls the symbolist poetry of Stephane Mallarme and, more distantly, the cyclopaedic art of medieval manuscript culture. The writings which brought McLuhan celebrity in the 19603 also show the impress of H.A. Innis, a Canadian political economist interested in the effects of communications media in history. Adopting a 'mosaic or field approach' in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), McLuhan develops his own variations on Innis' central teaching, that the growth of literacy, from the invention of the phonetic alphabet to the instauration of moveable type, spelled the decline of spoken *discourse and the sense of community which that medium incorporated. The radical effect of alphabet and typography, according to McLuhan, was to isolate the visual, linear sense: 'Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.' This notion is given more stirring expression yet in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Making his own the non-discursive techniques he prizes in artists -

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puns, metaphor, paradox and juxtaposition McLuhan plays to provoke the reader into groping towards a consciousness of the ways in which media transform perception. The englobing circuitry of the electronic age holds out for McLuhan the possibility or promise of a return to the plenary consciousness and communal sense lost since the coming of typographic man and the age of mechanism. Though it sometimes gives the impression of making a virtue of unreason and analphabetism, McLuhan's work is impelled by a calculated moral intention: 'study the modes of media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, nonverbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.' In his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), McLuhan jokingly exposes the exploitative mythology buried in newspaper ads. The admen resemble the symbolist poets in their reliance on indirection and parataxis; but, unlike genuine artists, who serve as 'antennae of the race' (Pound) or agents of deep cognition (Wyndham Lewis), they achieve their purpose by maintaining the public in a subliminal trance. Part Freudian 'analyst,' part Erasmian jester and Joycean prophet, McLuhan is always an educator. (See also *Sigmund Freud, *psychoanalytic theory.) As he explains in Explorations in Communication (1960), his aim is 'to develop an awareness about print and the newer technologies so that we can ... get the best out of each in the educational process.' Even in The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, the most disinterested and arguably the least ethically unambiguous of McLuhan's faceted theses regarding the dissociative effects of formal logic and literacy, the educational intention is manifest. 'Our extended faculties [in the electronic age],' he writes in his account of typographic man, 'now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious.' For McLuhan, the essence of education is 'civil defense against media fall-out.' Of his many books in the 19705, several are intended to enlighten a world of corporate business locked into the modes of specialization. The charges levelled at McLuhan have zeroed in on his apparent indifference to the niceties of logical analysis and systematic research. He has been said to be inventive to the point of whimsicality, his work a virtual nonsense. McLuhan's response as a watcher of analogical

Merleau-Ponty patterns from, he insists, no fixed point of view: 'I explore, I don't explain.' He is not given to consecutive argument. In this respect, McLuhan more resembles Ralph Waldo Emerson than he does Aquinas or Chesterton or even Joyce. McLuhan's importance, as even the staunches! of his opponents acknowledge, is in having prompted a long-neglected crossdisciplinary discussion of the ways in which mass media have shaped and continue to modify human sensibility. (See also "communication theory.)

Steam, Gerald, ed. McLuhan, Hot and Cool. New York: Dial P, 1967. Theall, Donald F. The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan. Montreal: McGillQueen's UP, 1971.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

(b. France, igoS-d. 1961) Philosopher. Raised in Paris, Merleau-Ponty was educated at the lycees Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole Normale Superieure. After takC A M I L L E R. LA BOSS I ERE ing his agregation in philosophy in 1930, he taught at lycees in Beauvais and Chartres until Primary Sources 1935 and, from 1933 to 1934, held a research McLuhan, H. Marshall. Counterblast. New York: Har- grant from the Caisse Nationale de la Recourt, Brace and World, 1968. cherche Scientifique. From 1935 until the out- Culture Is Our Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, break of the Second World War, he taught at 1970. the 1'Ecole Normale Superieure. He served in - The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, the infantry until 1940 and then returned to 1962. teaching philosophy while remaining active in - The Interior Landscape: I'he Literary Criticism of the resistance. During this period he became Marshall McLuhan 194.1-1962. Ed. E. McNamara. acquainted with "Jean-Paul Sartre and carried New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. out the research that would produce his first - Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Matie Molinaro, major works: La Structure du comportement [The Corinne McLuhan and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. Structure of Behaviour 1942, trans. 1963] and - The Mechanical Bride. New York: Vanguard P, Phenomenologie de la perception [Phenomenology 19 s i . of Perception 1945, trans. 1962]. In 1945 he - Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill, joined the faculty of the Universite de Lyon 1964. and began working with Sartre and *Simone - Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations. New York: Somede Beauvoir as unofficial co-editor of Les thing Else P, 1967. Temps modernes, a charge he held until 1953. - and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Message. In 1950 he was called to the Sorbonne to New York: Bantam Books, 1967. teach general and child psychology. Two years - and Quentin Fiore. War and Peace in the Global later he began lecturing in philosophy at the Village. New York: Bantam Books, 1968. - and Harrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive College de France as successor to Edouard Le as Dropout. New York: Harcourt, Brace, JovanovRoy, Henri Bergson and Louis Lavelle. Alich, 1972. though only 53 when he died, he had already - and Harley Parker. Through the Vanishing Point: made significant contributions to phenomenolSpace in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper ogy, existentialism and "structuralism. His and Row, 1968. working notes were edited and published post- and E.5. Carpenter, eds. Explorations in Communihumously as Le Visible et I'invisible [The Visible cation. Boston: Beacon P, iqtio. and the Invisible 1964]. (See also "phenomenological criticism.) Secondary Sources Often described as an enigmatic philosophy of ambiguity, Merleau-Ponty's thought can be Duffy, Dennis. Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Mcunderstood as an exploration of the region beClelland and Stewart, 1969. tween philosophy's subjective and objective Finkelstein, Sidney. Sense and Nonsense of McLuhan. New York: International Publishers, 1968. extremes. In his first major works he rejects Rosenthal, Raymond, ed. McLuhan: Pro and Con. Bal- empiricist and intellectualist accounts of contimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1968. sciousness in favour of a notion of human Sanderson, George, and McDonald, Frank, eds. Marawareness rooted in the corporeal dimension shall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. Golden, of existence that is always situated in concrete Col.: Fulcrum. Inc., 1489.

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Merleau-Ponty lived experience. (See "Lebenswelt.) Although closest to the phenomenology of *Edmund Husserl and *Martin Heidegger, MerleauPonty's point of departure in the prereflective perceiving body allows him to move freely between existentialism and structuralism and into the field of visual art. For Merleau-Ponty, our body is not just one object among many. It is a dynamic region of sensory awareness that is oriented toward the world. Through the body, consciousness is free to reach out to and intermingle with our environment, giving it meaning and form. Everyday perceptions and gestures therefore have a creative and symbolic quality. To this direction from the perceiver to the world corresponds a second direction from the world to the perceiver (Sens et non-sens 1948, trans. Sense and Non-sense 1964, and L'Oeil et I'esprit 1964, trans. 'Eye and Mind,' in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays 1964). The world also acts upon us, for we perceive those aspects of the world that 'call our attention.' In turn, all that calls our attention and upon which we focus is outlined or framed by what is not perceived. Merleau-Ponty understands existence in terms of the visible and the invisible rather than in terms of being and nothing. The two directions mediating body and world give perception a to-and-fro character similar to a conversation, while the interdependence of what we perceive and what we do not perceive is reflected in the meaningful interdependence of each spoken work and the whole system of language. Although Merleau-Ponty's approach to language often converges with the linguistics of *Ferdinand de Saussure, Merleau-Ponty tends to focus on the individual act of expression rather than on the langue or system ('La Conscience et 1'acquisition du langage' 1964; Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language 1973). (See "langue/parole.) There is also a two-way relationship mediating language and perceptual life. On the one hand, the speaking subject is rooted in the natural expressivity of the body situated in its perceptual field. On the other hand, the lived experience of the body as motor subject transcends itself through language and enters a linguistic field beyond its immediate perceptual one (Phenomenologie de la perception). In that words are essentially related to the things that come into our existence through them, the linguistic field offers the truth of our field of perception. In

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this transcendental layer of existence, writers carry out the task of transforming life into its truth. Since the meaning of a word exists in the silent mediation between it and the other words of language, a writer must express new meaning by 'intertwining' words together in such a way as to reveal a new configuration of the silent 'chiasm' lying between them (Le Visible et ['invisible.) Language, for Merleau-Ponty, is an intersubjective, cultural phenomenon that mediates mind and world. Unlike Sartre, he does not propose that consciousness is absolutely free. He moves closer to the structuralism of *Claude Levi-Strauss when he affirms that human consciousness is intertwined with the preconscious structures of intersubjective and collective meaning ('La Conscience et 1'acquisition du langage' and Signes 1960; trans. Signs 1964). He also differs from Sartre in his understanding of the relation of poetry to prose. Sartre opposes the two by stating that while poetry expresses and refers to itself, prose refers to objects independent of itself. MerleauPonty, on the contrary, insists that prose and poetry should be distinguished by degrees of difference. Although Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has had an impact on structuralist, existentialist, and phenomenological inquiry in general, it is the phenomenological *hermeneutics of *Paul Ricoeur that has inherited many of its primary concerns. As James M. Edie has noted, Ricoeur offers an important development of Merleau-Ponty's theory of speech by taking it beyond the level of the word to that of the sentence (Edie xxxii). Ricoeur's understanding of symbol and metaphor as well as his explanation of time and narrative bear the mark of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. (See "metonymy/metaphor.) Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, however, remains an unfinished project and its potential lies in the new directions it suggests for literary research. To the degree that terms such as 'narrative perspective' and 'point of view' are inextricably bound to a theory of perception they can be re-examined in the light of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. DANIEL CHAMBERLAIN

Primary Sources Merleau-Ponly, Maurice. 'La Conscience et 1'acquisition du langage.' Bulletin de psychologic 18.3-6 (1964): 226-59.

Miller - L'Ocil et I'esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. - Phenomenologie dc la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945-

- La Prose du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. - Resumes de cours. College de France 1952-1960. Paris: Gailimard, 1968. - Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel, 1948. - Signes. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Gallimard, 1960. - La Structure du comportement. Paris: PUF, 1942. - Le Visible et ['invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

Secon dan/ Sources Chamberlain, Daniel Frank. Narrative Perspective in Fiction: A Phenomenological Mediation of Reader, Text, and World. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. Edie, James M. Intro. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. By Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. Madison, Gary Brent. La Phenomenologie de Merle auPonty: Line recherche des limites de la conscience. Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1973. Trans. Gary Brent Madison. The Phenomenology of MerleauPonty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness. Athens: Ohio UP, 1981. Mallin, Samuel Barry. Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Schmidt, James. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism. Houndmills: Macmillan, ig8s.

Miller, J(oseph) Hillis (b. U.S.A., 1928-) Literary critic. As a child, J. Hillis Miller was exposed to an academic environment and to rural Protestant culture, from both of which he derived 'a vigorous respect for truth' and a sense 'that the truth might be dark, ominous' (Salusinszky 231). Miller attended Oberlin College, where he majored in physics before turning to *literature. He then studied with Andrew Bongiorno, an Aristotelian, and encounted the theoretical work of *Kenneth Burke, which he continues to admire. At Harvard, where he 'learned mostly from the other [graduate] students,' Miller wrote a dissertation on Dickens and read *Geoffrey Hartman's The Unmediated Vision, which he valued for its 'awareness of continental modes of criticism' (Salusinszky 236-7, Moynihan 102). He taught at Williams College, Johns Hopkins and Yale before becoming University Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in uj86, the same year he

served as president of the Modern Language Association of America. Miller's influence upon Anglo-American literary theory is due to the breadth of appeal of his work: his theoretical positions are typically revealed and sustained within analytic discussions of the literature of the i9th and 20th centuries. Since Miller adheres to his principle that 'what counts for most in literary criticism is the citations made and what the critic says about those citations' (Fiction and Repetition 21), readers often need not embrace the literary theories employed in Miller's analyses in order to benefit from his critiques. A major reason for this seems to be Miller's consistent desire to reveal and explain 'how very strange ... works of literature are' by stressing 'not the theory itself but [by] establishing ... tools ... to make an adequate report on what's actually there in a piece of literature' (Moynihan 111, 116). Miller observes that he grew interested in developing additional modes of literary theory primarily because 'the New-Critical method ... was not all that effective as a way to deal with the works that [he] had been hired to teach, namely Victorian ones' (Salusinszky 231). (See *New Criticism.) The initial phase of Miller's career (ca. 1958-70) is deeply influenced by the Geneva phenomenological critics, among them *Georges Poulet. (See *Geneva School, *phenomenological criticism.) Fundamental to the mode of inquiry of such books as Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958), The Disappearance of God (1963), Poets of Reality (1965) and The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968) is the premise that such an entity as a writer's 'mind' exists, is embodied in his words, and is accessible to the mind of another provided the proper techniques of inquiry are used. Miller's analytic technique assumes that 'certain elements persist' in a given author's work, and that, by means of 'such evidence of recurrence,' a critic can 'identify what persists throughout all the swarming multiplicity' and thereby 'assess the specific quality of [an author's] imagination,' perhaps even discover 'a permanent law' and accomplish a 'revelation of that presiding unity hidden at the center' (Charles Dickens 328, x-xi). Miller suggests that naive causal sequences binding an author's mind to his works be revised in favour of an understanding of the works as a medium whereby the author creates and sustains himself. Thus in the process of citing diverse pas-

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Miller sages that contain recurring rhetorical features, Miller does not stress temporal or generic distinctions. (See *genre criticism.) Instead, he creates a mimetic collage consisting of his own observations mingled with an author's words for example, quotations from a novel, a poem, an essay, a diary, or a private letter - while he fulfils 'the task of the critic' as he now conceives it: 'to identify himself with the subjectivity expressed in the words, to relive that life from the inside, and to constitute it anew in ... criticism' (The Disappearance of God vii). In Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970) and in the essays 'Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry' (1970) and 'Geneva or Paris?' (1971), Miller begins to articulate a departure from his prior phenomenological allegiances. He now judges assumptions about the immanence in texts of 'an impalpable organizing form' (Charles Dickens ix), signature of an authorial mind, to be the result of a mistaken effort 'to explain the text by something extralinguistic' (Thomas Hardy vii), a 'priority of presence ... associated, finally, with a tendency to take language for granted in literature' ('Geneva or Paris?' 212). This judgment severely qualifies Miller's prior strategy of reading, which presupposed 'that each sentence or paragraph of a novel ... defines a relationship between an imagining mind and its objects' (Charles Dickens ix), for Miller comes to understand the concept of 'mind' itself as merely a *trope that must be identified and interrogated, as 'a fiction arising from the taking literally [of] a metalepsis' (The Linguistic Moment 239). Miller's new understanding changes his own use of certain prominent patterns of rhetoric. (See *rhetorical criticism.) He once applied a rhetoric of *paradox to the perceptual processes that create a mind, a 'person/ who 'contains as well as hides the truth' (Charles Dickens xvi). But later Miller uses such rhetoric more inclusively to define an ontic 'darkness/ a 'metaphysical entity' that lurks 'in every thing and person, underlying them as their secret substance, but also denying them as formlessness denies form' (Poets of Reality 28). And eventually these rhetorical patterns signify for him the essence of language itself, the 'double movement of cancellation and reaffirmation' that 'characterizes ... linguistic action ... as a whole/ that 'both makes ... emblems and at the same time undermines their referential validity' (The Linguistic Moment 35, 337). Such conceptual development in part reflects

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the influence upon Miller of Parisian critics who 'innovated' the analytic technique known as *deconstruction (most notably ""Jacques Derrida, whose 'La Differance' appeared in 1968). (See *differance/difference.)These critics claim that it has been possible in Western culture for certain kinds of ""discourse to function as selfauthenticating, sovereign sources of rational truth only because certain texts historically have been exempt from rigorous rhetorical analysis. When they are exposed to such analytic scrutiny, these privileged texts disclose the inescapable essence that they share with all other language: a 'covert dependence on catachresis, the figurative naming of that which has no name' (The Linguistic Moment 141). This essence inherently subverts reasoned coherence because all figurative devices combine disparate categories and therefore annul both the principle of contradiction and the associated system of binary oppositions that makes rational order possible. (See *binary opposition.) Moreover, deconstructive critics deny that a *text can objectively embody invariant structures or patterns that might reveal the presence of an authorizing mind or final metaphysic existing before or beyond rhetorical effects. (See ""metaphysics of presence.) As 'a principle of instability and insubstantiality/ the 'self itself is a trope, and it turns everything it encounters into more tropes' (The Linguistic Moment 161). (See ""self/other.) The practice of deconstruction ultimately defines two irreconcilable ways of reading: 'A critic must choose either the tradition of presence or the tradition of "difference," for their assumptions about language, about literature, about history, and about the mind cannot be made compatible' ('Geneva or Paris?' 216). The most dramatic manifestation of Miller's abandonment of the 'tradition of presence' is his unfavourable review of Meyer Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971). Entitled Tradition and Difference/ Miller's essay attacks Abrams for his 'taking for granted of languages and figures of speech' and his consequently naive creation of 'a book about Romanticism which is permeated ... with Romantic assumptions' (11, 8). Miller also castigates Abrams for misrepresenting the 'underminers of the Occidental tradition ... Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure' (8), who subverted the very concept of opposition that Abrams draws upon for both the title of his

Miller book and overall critical methodology. (See *Nietzsche, *Freud, *de Saussure.) Most important, the occasion of this review is apparently used by Miller to articulate his own abandonment of 'the grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship' (6) and subsequent advocacy of deconstructive criticism. In contrast to Abrams, he asserts that 'the continuity of the tradition is not determined by coercive "sources" which have imposed themselves century after century but is a matter of concepts, metaphors, and myths, each generating the others, which are latently there in the lexicon, the grammar, the syntax of our languages' (10). (See *metonymy/metaphor, *myth.) Miller's aggressive advocacy of deconstruction - or, as he now puts it, 'rhetorically sophisticated reading' focused 'on the role of figurative language in interfering with the straightforward working of grammar and logic' ('Presidential Address 1986' 289; 'The Function of Literary Theory' 105) - possibly began with his reading in 1968 of Jacques Derrida's 'La Differance.' But the rhetoric of 'opaque similarity' (Fiction and Repetition 9), of subtly oblique, perpetually qualifying differences, was a prominent part of his work from the outset of his career, and his encounter with Derridean thought seems to be both a conceptual fulfilment of a linguistic tendency that long had haunted Miller's work as well as a catalyst for sudden and remarkable change. Even in his early criticism Miller repeatedly offers at the end of an analytic sequence a remark that seems to function as a conclusion, only immediately thereafter to qualify or question it. Since repetitive self-scrutiny is a prominent part of Miller's own analytic strategies, enabling him to elude the 'fault of premature closure ... intrinsic to criticism' (Fiction and Repetition 51), it seems inevitable that he eventually focuses explicitly upon techniques of repetition in literary works, stressing the distinction between ' "Platonic" repetition,' which assumes the possibility of 'mimetic copy,' and a 'Nietzschean mode, which 'posits a world based upon difference' wherein each thing is 'intrinsically different from every other thing' (Fiction and Repetition 6). (See ""mimesis.) Recently, Miller is concerned with a question that might seem inappropriate for a critic whose work has been profoundly influenced by Derridean deconstruction: Is there an ethics of reading? However, Miller's 'ethics of read-

ing' is in fact made possible by the theoretical contexts created by deconstructors (such as *Paul de Man), who assert the invalidity of hermeneutic techniques of reading, techniques that assume it is appropriate to seek extralinguistic entities to which the words of the text refer. (See *hermeneutics.) Building upon remarks made by de Man in Allegories of Reading, Miller declares in Ts There an Ethics of Reading?' that 'literature always and universally' makes 'the literal mean something else/ this 'something else' being 'the law of language whereby a work fails to disclose itself fully or coincide unambiguously ... with a single determinable meaning' (20). And the 'ethics of reading, if there is such a thing, must be a response ... to the demand made by that ... "something else" within language' (21). A crucial issue in any postmodern discussion of ethics is the nature of the subject. (See *postmodernism, *subject/object.) Miller remains firmly within the context of deconstructive theory when he asserts that in 'response to the implacable demand made by the act of reading, the "I" dissolves as a willing and wilful subject and becomes a relay station ... in a purely linguistic transaction,' merely a 'function in a transference from one locus of language to another' (22-3). Consequently, Miller's 'ethics' engages at best obliquely with traditional imperatives of seeking an adequate ethical basis whereupon responsible subjects might predicate decisions to take or avoid significant action. Instead, Miller seems concerned primarily with an ethics of humility that would negate the familiar practice of founding personal moral acts upon messages supposedly embodied in various literary works. Miller does not deny that certain decisions and acts necessarily follow the event of reading, but he insists that such responses must always be errant because they do not emerge logically from specific knowledge obtained during the reading experience. If referential techniques of interpretation are invalid, Miller at last can appeal only to his claim that, as a consequence of reading, skilled readers will derive merely a humbling and elusive awareness of their own final inability to read and understand. This awareness must then be used to avoid 'the disaster of a misuse of literature for didactic ends for which it offers no sound basis.' Thus teachers of literature should make the primary ethical decision to teach 'the irre-

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Moi levance of the thematic assertions of even the most apparently morally concerned literature for the making of moral decisions/ since such judgments appear within literary works only as symptoms of the dynamics of language itself, which dictate 'a perpetual obscuring of grammatical and logical clarity' owing to the predominance of tropes (24). Miller's current application of these perspectives is perhaps best expressed in the recent essay 'The Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time' (1989). He affirms that the study of literature indeed has much to do with the topics of history, society and the individual, but this relationship is not a result of the presence within literature of 'extra-linguistic forces and facts.' Instead, such study provides opportunities to 'identify the nature of language as it may have effects on what de Man calls '"the materiality of history,"' one example of which seems to be 'the new permeability of the university to invasion by industrial research' (104,

107). WILLIAM BONNEY

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Primary Sources Miller, J. Hillis. 'The Antitheses of Criticism: Reflections on the Yale Colloquium.' Modern Language Notes 81 (1966): 557-71. - 'Ariachne's Broken Woof.' Georgia Review 31 (i977): 44-6o. - 'Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line.' Critical Inquiry 3 (1976): 57-77. - Charles Dickens: His World of Novels. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1958. - 'The Critic as Host.' Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 439-47- 'Deconstructing the Deconstructors.' diacritics 5 (1975): 24-31. - The Disappearance of God: Five iyth Century Writers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1963. - 'Dismembering and Disremembering in Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense."' boundary 2 9-10 (1981): 41-54. - The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. - 'The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank's Illustrations.' In Dickens Centennial Essays. Ed. Ada Nisbet, Blake Nevius. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971, 85-153. - Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982. - The Form of Victorian Fiction. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1968. - 'The Function of Literary Theory at the Present

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Time.' In The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. New York: Routledge, 1989, 102-11. 'Geneva or Paris? The Recent Work of Georges Poulet.' In The Quest for Imagination. Ed. O.B. Hardison. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1971, 205-24. 'The Geneva School: The Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Georges Poulet, lean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski.' Critical Inquiry 8 (1966): 302-21. 'The Interpretation of Lord Jim.' In The Interpretation of Narrative. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1970, 211-28. Ts There an Ethics of Reading?' Tokyo: English Literary Society of Japan, 1986. The Linguistic Moment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. 'The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet.' Modern Language Notes 78 (1963): 471-88. 'Narrative and History.' English Literary History 41 U974): 455-73'Nature and the Linguistic Moment.' In Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Ed. U.C. Knoepflmacher, G.B. Tennyson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977, 440-51. Poets of Reality: Six loth Century Writers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1965. 'Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.' Publications of the Modern Language Association 104 (1987): 281-91. 'The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth.' New Literary History 2 (1971): 297-310. 'The Stone and the Shell: Wordsworth's Dream of the Arab.' Moments premiers. Paris: Cord, 1973. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1970. 'Tradition and Difference.' Diacritics 2 (1972): 6-13. 'Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry.' Daedalus 99 (1970): 405-34.

Secondary Sources Leitch, Vincent B. 'The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J. Hillis Miller.' Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 593-607. Moynihan, Robert. 'J. Hillis Miller.' In A Recent Imagining. Camden, Conn.: Shoestring P, 1986, 97-131. Salusinszky, Imre. 'J. Hillis Miller.' In Criticism in Society. New York: Methuen, 1987, 208-40.

Moi, Toril (b. Norway, 1953-) Feminist literary critic. Toril Moi completed the Dr.Art. (1985) at the University of Bergen, was lecturer at Oxford

Moi

University (1983-5), director of the Centre for Feminist Research in the Humanities, University of Bergen (1985-8), and is currently professor of comparative literature, University of Bergen, and professor of literature, Duke University. Since 1986, she has addressed university audiences in the U.S.A., the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Scandinavia. Her engaging, agonistic style of feministic critical practice aims to 'theorize and politicize while remaining historically and materially concrete.' Moi has published widely in international journals of feminism, critical theory and cultural studies, translated numerous literary works by English women writers into Norwegian, and introduced French feminists *Julia Kristeva, *Luce Irigaray and Michele Le Doeuff to Anglo-American audiences. (See *feminist criticism.) She is editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986) and French Feminist Thought (1987). Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), the first study to chart major trends in contemporary feminist criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, considers the major attitudinal phases of American feminist literary criticism since Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969) before proceeding to outline the different textual strategies of contemporary French feminist theorists in order of their anti-patriarchal subversiveness. American feminist literary criticism, notes Moi, has become more sophisticated in its approach to the English *canon but without producing an adequate theory of canon formation. Conversely, French feminists have no lack of anti-patriarchal theory but fail to mobilize pro-feminist thought and action: they overlook the existentialist critical initiative of *Simone de Beauvoir, taking their cue instead from *Jacques Lacan and ""Jacques Derrida. Moi accepts this genealogy, showing how *Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva use men's theory for a feminist textual practice; but ultimately, she contends, this theory fails to enter the historical arena of feminist politics, lured instead by the seductive entrapments of deconstructing phallogocentrism - the ideological/idealist assumption that language is structured by a determining 'centre' or presence - Will, Ego, Cogito, God, Desire - for which it is a symbolic substitute. This centre is essentially masculine, patriarchal and self-referential in terms of a master phallic signifier. (See ""patriarchy, ""metaphysics of presence, ""signified/signifier/ signification, *deconstruction, *phallocentrism.) Moi repeatedly calls for a clarification of the

oft-conflated terms 'feminine/ 'feminist' and 'female.' She criticizes some feminists for privileging 'postfeminist'/'feminine' styles at the expense of all feminist positions (1988) and urges feminists to write paradoxically from three historical and political fronts: those of equality (the claim to the same rights, opportunities, recognition as men), difference (the claim to specificity) and the abolition of difference (the struggle to dissolve the categories of male and female and to displace the phallus as the signifier of sexual identity with a proliferation of signifiers). Moi champions a feminist return to *Sigmund Freud, whose writings show how psychoanalytic epistemology and, by implication, any master ""discourse is structured by patriarchal bias undermining its claim to universality and objectivity (1981). Moi considers Freud's model of transference as a paradigm for feminist epistemology since it is dialogical and dialectical, subverting and transforming hegemonic oppositions between the phallic 'subject who knows' and the 'castrated' subject who 'lacks' knowledge. (See ""hegemony, ""subject/ object.) Moi urges feminists (1989) to consider Freud's materialist critique of classical epistemology - his notion of 'epistemophilia' which views knowledge as a drive arising with infantile sexuality and not as a disembodied, disinterested rationalism issuing from a transcendental cogito. Moi's book on Beauvoir (1989) reviews the hostile reception of the intellectual woman, Beauvoir, before presenting an analysis of her novel The Woman Destroyed. The latter draws on Freud's theory of transference and *Emile Benveniste's subject of enunciation to disclose the rhetorical effects of Beauvoir's writing and to show how her ""text, contrary to authorial intentions, generates feminist sympathy for, rather than aversion to, her existientialist antiheroine. (See *enonciation/enonce.) Moi is currently preparing a full-length study of Beauvoir which uses the theories of sociologist ""Pierre Bourdieu to analyse Beauvoir's 'self-constitution as an intellectual woman in the specific symbolic, political and economic domain of the 20th-century French academy. (See ""self/other.) DIANNE CHISHOLM

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Mukafovsky Primary Sources Moi, Toril. 'Feminism, Postmodernism and Style: Recent Feminist Criticism in the U.S.' Cultural Critique 9 (Spring 1988): 3-22. - Feminist Theory and Sirnone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. - 'Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge.' In Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Teresa M. Brennan. London: Routledge, 1989, 185-205. - 'Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud's Dora.' Feminist Review 9 (1981): 60-74. - Sexual /Textual Politics. London: Methuen, 1985. - French Feminist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. - The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell; New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Mukafovsky, Jan (b. Bohemia, iSgi-d. Czechoslovakia, 1975) Structuralist, aesthetician and semiotician. One of the most active members of the Prague School (Prague Linguistic Circle, founded in 1926), Jan Mukafovsky differed from his colleagues in the importance and originality of his own work on poetics and structural aesthetics. (See *Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School.) A member of the academy and a professor of Czech literature at Charles iv University in Prague, Mukafovsky was nominated rector of the university. However, in Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia, he was forced (in 1951) to disavow all of his earlier structuralist studies. (See *structuralism.) While a few of his texts were later re-edited in the 19605, his work was fully rehabilitated only after the collapse of the communist government. It would be both a historical and a cultural mistake to approach the collective studies of the Prague Linguistic Circle or Mukafovsky's personal works exclusively as extensions of *Russian formalism. Doing so would mean forgetting the importance of the Czech linguistic and aesthetic tradition stemming from the 'national renaissance' (as early as the end of the i8th century); it would also mean overlooking the cosmopolitan dimensions of the cultural and artistic fever that seized the country between the two world wars. Although the literary theories of the Russian formalists are present in Mukafovsky's early works (1928-9), thanks in part to *Roman Jakobson's move

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from Moscow to Prague in 1920, Mukafovsky's functional form of structuralism differs from Russian formalism in a fundamental manner. He replaces the concept of causality by reciprocity and form by structure; both substitutions easily testify to the fact that *Edmund Husserl's phenomenological vision - he had spoken at conferences organized by the Prague Linguistic Circle - had markedly influenced Mukafovsky's theoretical developments. (See *phenomenological criticism.) Mukafovsky always managed to have concrete analyses and epistemology intersect in his theoretical studies. Moreover, he, as well as the other members of the Circle, always insisted on discussing their theoretical reflections with the artistic avant-gardes that were then in full effervescence. Today, it is clear that Mukafovsky's thought can also be distinguished from formal methods by his semiological conception of language, art and culture - a conception logically derived from his approach that was both structural and functional. Refusing as early as the 19305 any theory limited to the *text alone (La Noblesse de la nature de Polak 1934), Mukafovsky conceives of the artistic *sign as a social and therefore contextual phenomenon ('L'Art comme fait semiologique' 1934). (See *semiotics, *semiosis.) For him, structure generates the very meaning of a work. At the same time, he underscores the double semiological function of any artistic work: as autonomous and as communicational sign. Later, he elaborated the concept of semantic gesture, that is the 'gesture' through which the artist intentionally proceeds to choose the elements of his or her work and makes them converge within a single, meaningful unity. This also brought Mukafovsky to develop the problem of intentionality and unintentionality in art along with that of the creative individual. (See *intention/ intentionality.) In this way, he reached the question of the reader and that of 'reception.' However, among all of Mukafovsky's texts, Esteticka funkce, norma a hodnota jako socialni fakty [Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts 1936] plays a special role as it revolutionizes European aesthetic theory in fewer than 75 pages. So important is this work that, according to K. Chvatik, the theoretician and historian of Czech structuralism, Mukafovsky is to aesthetics what *Wittgenstein was then for philosophy (Chvatik, 'Jan Mukafovsky'). In order to rid aesthetics of positivism and of

Mukafovsky any psychologizing speculation over 'Beauty' as absolute idea, Mukafovsky increases the phenomenological (functional) organization of empirical reality. He deconstructs 'beauty' into three components that can be apprehended from a sociological perspective: function, norm and aesthetic value. He extends the aesthetic function practically to forms of human action and conceives of norm as the regulating agent of this action. 'Beauty' thus becomes an agreement between aesthetic and social norms within a given culture. However, it is his conception of aesthetic value that remains most important. Mukafovsky divorces it from any emotional or sensual consideration and demonstrates that 'through its negative aesthetic values, the distortion that sets in between a work and the reigning system of aesthetic values could be the source of innovative artistic values' (Chvatik, 'Jan Mukafovsky'). Mukafovsky wrote many studies on the aesthetic dimensions of almost all artistic forms (such as film, architecture, theatre, folklore), as well as on aesthetic phenomena located outside the artistic system. However, most of his theoretical texts rest upon concrete analyses of modern Czech *literature, notably in poetry (such as intonation as an element of poetical rhythm). This explains a certain difficulty in gaining access to his work outside the small community of Czech literature specialists. Unlike his studies on poetics and on literary theory, Kapitohj z ceskc poetiky a estetiky /-/// [Chapters in Czech Poetics /-///, 1948], Mukafovsky's aesthetic studies and his art theory were never collected in a single volume. This void was filled only when Studie z estetiky [Studies in Aesthetics 1966] and Cestami poetiky a estetiky [Along the Roads of Poetics and Aesthetics 1 9 7 1 ] appeared. By approaching aesthetic and poetic problems through semiotics and phenomenology, Mukafovsky appears closer to *Mikhail Bakhtin than to the formalists. In this regard, it is significant that the semiotic structuralism of *Iurii Lotman, a leading figure of the *Tartu School, is related to Czech structuralism and its functional dimensions, notably through its use of value and of aesthetic function within culture - notions that were elaborated by Mukafovsky. In fact, Lotman has written a preface to the Russian translation of Mukafovsky's aesthetic tract. Moreover, his aesthetic theory and particularly the questions of 'semantic gesture' and of reception bring him and the

whole Prague School a good deal closer to the German Rezeptionasthetik. The founding figures of this movement, *Hans Robert Jauss and *Wolfgang Iser, indeed, often refer to Mukafovsky's work as well as to Felix Vodicka, the semiotician, and another member of the Prague Linguistic Circle. (See ""Constance School of Reception Aesthetics.) EVA LE G R A N D Primary Sources Mukafovsky, Jan. 'L'Art comme fait semiologique.' Actes du huitieme congres international de philosophic a Prague 2-7 septembre 1934. Prague, 1936. Repr. in Poetique 3 (1970). - Cestami poetiky a estetiky. [Along the Roads of Poetics and Aesthetics.] Prague: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1971. - 'La Denomination poetique et le fonction esthetique de la langue.' Actes du quatrieme congres international des linguistes. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1938. Repr. in Poetique 3 (1970). - Esteticka funkce, norma a hodnota jako socialni fakty. 1936. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Trans. Mark E. Suino. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1970. - 'Intonation comme facteur du rythme poetique.' Archives neerlandaises de phonetique experimental 8-9. In The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukafovsky. Ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. - Kapitoly z ceske poetiky a estetiky I-III. Chapters on Czech Poetics l-lll. Prague: Svoboda, 1948. - 'Karel Capek: Prose as Lyrical Melody and as Dialogue.' In A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style. Ed. Paul L. Garvin. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1964. - Polakova vznesnost prirody. [La Noblesse de la Nature de Polak.] Prague: Sbornik Filologicky 10, '934- Machuv Maj: Esteticka studie. [Macha's May. An Aesthetic Study.] Prague: Filosoficka fakulta University Karlovy, 1928. - Pfispcvek k estetice ceskeho verse. [A Contribution to the Aesthetic of Czech Verse.] Prague: Filosoficka fakulta University Karlovy, 1923. - Structure, Sign and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky. Ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978. - Studie z estetiky. [Studies in Aesthetics.] Prague: Odeon, 1966. - Studie z poetiky. [Studies in Poetics.] Prague: Odeon, 1982. Secondary Sources Bojtar, Endre. Slavic Structuralism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1985.

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Nietzsche Burbank, }., and P. Steiner, eds. Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukafovski/. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. - eds. The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukafovsky. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. Chvatik, K. 'Jan Mukafovsky, Roman Jakobson et le Cercle linguistique de Prague.' Critique 483-4 (Aug./Sept. 1987). - Structuralismus a avantgarda. Prague: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1970. Danow, D.K. 'Dialogic Perspectives: Bakhtin and Mukafovsky.' In Semiotics 1984. Ed. John Deely. Lanham, Md.: UP of America, 1985. Deak, F. 'Structuralism in the Theatre: The Prague School Contributions.' The Drama Review 20.4 (1976): 83-94. Dolezel, L. 'Mukafovsky and the Idea of Poetic Truth.' Russian Literature 20 (Nort-Holland) 12.3 (1982): 283-98. Eagle, H.J. 'Verse as a Semiotic System: Tynianov, Jakobson, Mukafovsky, Lotman Extended.' Slavic and East European Journal 25.4 (1981): 47-61. Faye, J.P., and L. Ropel. 'Le Cercle de Prague.' Change 3 (1969). Special Issue. Fizer, J. Tngarden's and Mukafovsky's Binominal Definition of the Literary Works of Art: A Comparative View of Their Respective Ontologies.' Russian Literature 20 (Nort-Holland) 13.3 (1983): 269-90. Galan, F.W. Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-194.6. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985. Garvin, P.L., ed. A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1964. Jechova, H. 'Conception et fonction du temps dans la pensee theorique de Jan Mukafovsky et de Roman Ingarden.' Russian Literature 20 (NortHolland) (1986): 353-80. Le Grand, E. 'Hommage a Jan Mukafovsky.' Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparee. Special issue on Dialogue. (Winter 1976): 106-12. Matejka, L., and I.R. Titunik, eds. Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Cambridge: MIT P, 1976. - eds. Sound, Sign and Meaning: Cinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1976. Tobin, Y., ed. The Prague School and Its Legacy: In Linguistics, Semiotics, Folklore, and Arts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1988. Veltrusky, J. 'Jan Mukafovsky's Structural Poetics and Esthetics.' Poetics Today 2.ib (Winter 1980-1): 117-57. - 'The Prague School Theory of Theatre.' Poetics Today 2.3 (1981): 225-35. Wellek, Rene. The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1969. Repr. in Discriminations: Fur-

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ther Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970, 275-303.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (b. Prussia, 1844-01. Weimar, 1900) Philosopher, poet, philologist, composer, historiographer, theothanatologist. Born of a line of Lutheran ministers (his father and grandfathers) many of whose ancestors were butchers, Nietzsche was christened Friedrich Wilhelm after the reigning Prussian king whose birthday he shared. The loss of his father (to a brain disease) and his infant brother left the five-year-old Friedrich with his mother, sister, paternal grandmother, and two spinster aunts. An able musician by age 12, he composed, on the event of his confirmation, a fantasia for four-hand piano under the motto Tain is the Keynote of Nature.' The 'a priori of doubt' took hold early in Nietzsche, attended by an enthusiasm for Byron's Manfred: in his first attempt at philosophical writing, at age 13, he 'made God the father of evil' ('Preface' par. 3, Genealogy of Morals). As a student at Pforta (1858-64) he acquired a fine classical education and a predilection for the natural religion of Theognis, Holderlin and Emerson. After courses in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn (1864-5), Nietzsche dropped divinity and moved to Leipzig, where he majored in classical ""literature but devoted his mind to the reading of Kant, Schopenhauer and F.A. Lange. He accepted the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869, Leipzig having graced him with doctor's name without examination or thesis. Promotion to full professor came in 1870. What little charm the world of workaday classical learning held for Nietzsche vanished soon after his arrival at Basel. The tragic pessimism and prophetic power of Schopenhauer's philosophy of will, Burkhardt's history of culture and Wagner's operatic poetry proved headier; the prospect of heroic solitude, more enticing. Like Mathilde Trampedach's refusal of his offer of marriage, his accelerated estrangement from scholarism evidently came as a relief to Nietzsche. Something of his disaffection from the toming philology of the time shines through The Birth of Tragedy [Die Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik], a brief yet grand speculation, free of footnotes or

Nietzsche Greek quotations, on the sublime as the artistic conquest of the horrible. To Nietzsche's mind, tragedy was born of the synthesis of two tendencies in the spirit of Greece - 'the Apollonian' (harmony, proportion, restraint) and 'the Dionysian' (ecstatic self-abandon) - then died with the advent of rationalism and moralism, epitomized in Socrates/Plato. Late in life, Nietzsche would repudiate his first book, finding its patterning 'offensively Hegelian,' or moribund with the logos of metaphysical idealism ('Why I Write Such Good Books' in Ecce Homo). A series of 'untimely meditations' (Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen) succeeded The Birth of Tragedy: on David Strauss as enlightened Darwinian and non-Christian yet still a philistine (1873), on the kinds and uses of history (1874), on Schopenhauer as teacher of self-reliance (1874), and on the return to pre-ethical drama once promised in Wagner (1876). The larger question of the genesis of 'good' and 'evil' in the history of mentalities came increasingly to occupy Nietzsche in the late 18705. With Human, All Too Human [Menschliches, Allzumenschliches 1878], dedicated to Voltaire, he introduced his psychocultural notion of 'moral prejudices' and their bicameral origin in hale 'aristocratic morality' and lifedenying 'slave morality/ rival responses to 'the will to power.' By decade's end Nietzsche had taken his distance from a Schopenhauer now found contaminated with the otherworldliness and pity of slave morality and had broken with Wagner on the grounds of nationalism and anti-Semitism, the 'pandering' to Christianity in Parsifal. The synthetic amoralism of Heraclitus, the existential contradictoriness of Montaigne and the worldly optimism of Goethe had become more attractive. Never good, Nietzsche's health so worsened at Basel that he resigned his chair in 1879. A pension, though modest, allowed him to move from place to place in France and Italy over the next ten years, and to prepare (and pay for the publication of) those works that were to make him a power in modern Western ""ideology: The Dawn: Reflections on Moral Prejudices [Morgenrothe: Gedanken uber die moralischen Vorurteile 1881], The Gay Science [Die frohliche Wissenschaft 1882], Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Also Sprach Zarathustra parts 1-3, 1883-4; P art 4/ 1891], Beyond Good and Evil [Jenseits von Gut und Bose 1886], On the Genealogy of Morals [Zur Genealogie der Moral 1887], and The Twi-

light of the Idols [Die Gotzen-Dammerung 1889]. In 1889, not long after the completion of Der Antichrist (1895), Nietzsche lapsed into a complete paralysis of mind and body and was taken to an asylum at Basel; he subsequently passed into the care of his mother at Naumburg, then of his sister at Weimar. The diagnosis of Nietzsche's insanity as tertiary syphilis was to pass into modern legend, thanks in part to the portrait of the artist in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. A year after her brother's death in 1900 Elisabeth Nietzsche's selection from his notebooks for 1884-8 appeared as Der Wille zur Macht [The Will to Power]. His mocking self-portrait Ecce Homo was made public in 1908. The substantial negativity of Nietzsche's major undertaking, its devaluation and discrediting of intelligibility and truth as such (cf. Beyond Good and Evil par. 34; Will to Power par. 493), makes any attempt at a discursive account of his oeuvre more than a little uncertain: 'We are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in grammar' (Twilight of the Idols par. 5). Founded on a rejection of traditional logic and referential language, the Nietzschean *text at its labyrinthine best builds toward minimal disclosure (devoilement) with maximal unclosure, 'the zero degree of discourse, a philosophy which never takes place' (Jean-Luc Nancy 57). As deconstructionist readings have asserted, interpretation can never accomplish itself in the Nietzschean disordering of things since there is no-thing at bottom to interpret. (See *deconstruction.) Certainly, the brilliantly playful self-concealment and self-contradiction, the endless ironies, maskings and shiftings in the extravaganza of metaphoricity that is Thus Spoke Zarathustra are not made to encourage authoritative reading. (See *irony, ""metonymy/metaphor.) Nor is a logically coherent apprehension of Nietzsche's musical yet deterministic doctrine of 'the eternal recurrence' - the repetition of what is, has been and will be, times without end (cf. Thus Spoke part 3) - very likely to come in the foreseeable future. But the Nietzschean tabling of new and proper values is not altogether innocent, enjoining as it does a universal theory of the will that portends 'the mastery of all being' (Hans-Georg Gadamer 230). When Zarathustra speaks in the language of Luther's Bible he tacitly appropriates at least as much *authority as he burlesques (cf. Andre Gide: Journal 1889-1919 [Dijon: Gallimard,

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Nietzsche 1948, 990). And Nietzsche himself recognized the potential of his works for empowering new absolutisms: 'I am terrified by the thought of the sort of people who may one day invoke my authority' (letter of June 1884 to his sister). Such is the ethical *indeterminacy of Nietzsche's *text, as *Jacques Derrida has acknowledged in his 'Otobiographies,' that virtually any use may be made of it: 'There are no facts, only interpretations' (Will to Power par. 481). It is a fact, though, that Nietzsche's texts have been interpreted, and perhaps no more tellingly than by Nietzsche himself in the least undiscursive of his aphoristic works, the polemical Genealogy of Morals, which reviews his progress in decoding the ethics of *power ciphered in the history of mentalities. His readings of the origin of good and evil in 'the long hieroglyphical text of the past of human morality' have 'ripened' since Human, All Too Human, have grown 'clearer, more solid' ('Preface'). Part i of the Genealogy affords a fairly consecutive account of Nietzsche's matured sense of Western history as the victory of slave over aristocratic morality - that is, of Judea's values over Rome's: 'It is the Jews who, with a terrifying logic, dared invert the equation of aristocratic values (good=noble=beautiful= happy=beloved of the gods) and who maintained this inversion with a bottomless hatred (the hatred of impotence) ... asserting that only the miserable are the good.' The coming of Vulgar' Jesus with his Tove born of hatred/ 'the instrument of Israel's revenge,' heralded master morality's demise and the triumph of the common man, the effects of which were the mixing of races and values ('a poisoning of the blood') and the nihilism of heavenly ideals. Shaken though it was during the Reformation, when free spirits attempted a restoration of classical values, the slave morality institutionalized in 'the ecumenical synagogue' of 'New Rome' held firm, 'thanks to the movement of fundamentally populist ressentiment' against a worldly church's domination. Judea's victory was more complete yet in the French Revolution, when European nobility bowed before a populace enslaved to resentment. The present hegemony of democratic socialism in Europe represents 'a montrous atavism.' Part 2 of the Genealogy, on good and bad conscience, characterizes the manly hero to come after two millennia of resentment towards the world and its aristocratic morality.

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He is the Uberrnensch ('Overman') heralded in Thus Spoke Zarathustra ('Of the Bestowing Virtue' par. 3) and Beyond Good and Evil (par. 260), 'the autonomous and supra-moral man' who, true to the instinct to mastery, has given style to his character (cf. Gay Science par. 290), achieved sovereignty over himself. So empowered to say 'yes' to himself, he shuns all nationalisms or parties and the 'bad conscience' that arises from 'the will to mistreat oneself (cf. Antichrist par. 55). He is perforce irreligious, since 'all religions at the bottom of themselves are systems of cruelty' or self-denial, the gods having been invented for 'the autocrucifixion and the autoprofanation of man.' Likewise anathema to the fully realized man are the moral pose and subjacent idealism of the socialists, anarchists and anti-Semites, who represent 'the man of resentment returned,' yet another triumph for Judea (cf. part 3, par. 26). The hope for the coming of the Overman is secured by the ironic principle that 'every good thing on this earth ends by destroying itself,' including the Judaeo-Christian morality of 'mercy' born of the 'autodestruction of justice' by 'resentment': 'this antichrist and this antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness - he must come some day ...' In part 3, Nietzsche reviews his diagnosis of the exhausted ascetical idealism of the West and speculates on the prospects for humanity on its inevitable demise. Like the philosophers and scientists before them, the free thinkers of his time have not broken with the otherworldliness of the herd (Christianity is a Platonism for the people), 'since they still believe in truth.' In their hunger for transcendent verity they have not yet considered 'the value of truth'; nor have they come to see that 'there is no "vision" but perspective, no "knowledge" but perspective.' But the end of their moribund idealism is in sight, since the very acuteness of their illness assures imminent cure. In accordance with the law of life - 'All great things perish of themselves, by an act of self-destruction' - this 'will to truth' in populist Christian metaphysics (a multiple redundancy for Nietzsche) 'will end by drawing the ultimate conclusion, the conclusion against itself,' that there is no God, that 'God,' never more than a semantic fiction, is now empty of meaning (cf. 'Prologue' par. 2, Thus Spoke; Gay Science par. 125). At that moment, all morality must crumble: 'if nothing is true,' as Nietzsche transposes from Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, 'all things

Nietzsche are permitted.' Projection into the two centuries to follow the 'unconditional atheism' born of 'the will to truth' affords 'a horrifying spectacle, fraught with the unknown, and perhaps also with the highest hopes ...' His own transvaluation of all received values, so the author of the Genealogy anticipates, will have its long day. The range and force of Nietzsche's impact on high Western culture ('1 am no man, I am dynamite'; Ecce Homo par. 326) are difficult to overestimate. Its markings are distinctly visible, for example, in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn and William Butler Yeats; in the novels of Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, Remain Rolland, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jack London, Ayn Rand, and Susan Sontag; in the elegiac historiography of Oswald Spengler; and in the social theory of Max Horkheimer and "Theodor Adorno. Comparisons of Nietzsche with "Sigmund Freud and "Jacques Lacan on dreamthinking, with *Mircea Eliade on the history of religions, with "Jose Ortega y Gasset on mass culture and with *Ludwig Wittgenstein on language have become relatively common. But it is in the direct shaping of a variety of existentialisms and phenomenologies that his influence has been most masterful: the writings of Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, *Martin Heidegger, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, and *Jean-Paul Sartre voluminously comment on the death of transcendent reality announced by Nietzsche. (See also "phenomenological criticism.) The theothanatology of Thomas J. Altizer, William Hamilton and Paul van Buren, prominent members of the U.S. avant-garde of the 19605, represents an extension of that gloss. Among even the leading Christian existentialists at mid-century, Gabriel Marcel is exceptional in his unambiguous characterization of Nietzschean unreason as suicidal, fatal for theology and philosophy alike. The importance of Nietzsche for contemporary critical theory is commensurate with his eminence in philosophy. Deconstructionist criticism, as in Derrida, *Roland Barthes, *Paul de Man, "Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Gilles Deleuze, and *J. Hillis Miller, has found his theothanatology especially virtuous for the propagation of autogeneal, autotelic, 'grammarless' reflection. "Michel Foucault has credited the Genealogy of Morals with founding a new approach to 'history.' Given Nietzsche's relentless twitting of 'the flatheads of socialism' (Beyond Good and

Evil par. 203), his treatment at the hands of leading Marxist critics has been reasonable: *Georg Lukacs, for example, has denounced Nietzsche as the founder of irrationalism in the imperialist period; and "Jiirgen Habermas has lamented the effect of his mere aestheticism on the writings of Adorno. (See "Marxist criticism.) Marxist ideology, though, has substantially profited from the Nietzschean rejection of otherworldliness in all its forms: 'with Jehovah buried,' in the words of e.e. cummings, 'Eternity is now a Five Year Plan.' While Nietzsche's inversion of the 'masculine' principle of reason has appealed to "feminist criticism, his actual misogyny understandably has not. CAMILLE R. LA BOSSIERE

Primary Sources Nietzsche, Friedrich. Bask Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1966. - The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954. - Samtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. 15 vols. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980. — Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.

Secondary Sources Behler, Ernst. 'Nietzsches Auffassung der Ironie.' Nietzsche-Studien 4 (1975): 1-35. Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God. New York: Harper and Row, 1952. Copleston, F.C. Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture. London: Burns Dates and Washbourne, 1941. Danto, Arthur C. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche et sa philosophic. Paris: PUF, 1965. Derrida, Jacques. 'Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/ Heidegger): Two Questions.' In Looking After Nietzsche. Ed. Laurence A. Rickels. Albany: SUNY P, 1990, 1-17. - 'Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name.' In The Ear of the Other. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. New York: Schocken, 1985, 1-38. - Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Fink, Eugen. Nietzsche aujourd'hui. 2 vols. Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1973.

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Olson Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 'The Drama of Zarathustra.' In Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics. Ed. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988, 220-31. Gilman, S.L. Nietzschean Parody. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag H. Grundmann, 1976. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. 2 vols. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Heller, Eric. The Importance of Nietzsche. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Irigaray, Luce. Amante marine: De Friedrich Nietzsche. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. Janz, Curt Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie. 3 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1978-9. Jaspers, Karl. Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity. South Bend: Regenery/Gateway, 1965. Kaufmann, Walter A. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1950. Magnus, B. Nietzsche's Existential Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Murchland, Bernard, ed. The Meaning of the Death of God. New York: Vintage, 1967. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 'Nietzsche's Thesis on Teleology.' In Looking after Nietzsche. Ed. Rickels, 49-66. Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Key, Jean-Michel. L'Enjeu des signes: Lectures de Nietzsche. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971. Reichert, H.W. Friedrich Nietzsche's Impact on Modern German Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Shapiro, Gary. Nietzschean Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Thatcher, David S. Nietzsche in England 1890-1914: The Growth of a Reputation. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970.

Olson, Elder (b. U.S.A., 1909-) Poet, playwright, critic. Educated at the University of Chicago, Olson taught at Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago (1938-42) and the University of Chicago (1942-77). As founding member of the socalled Chicago School, Olson is a theorist and practitioner of *pluralism (the pursuit of various ways of knowing literary texts by using a variety of methodologies). (See *text.) The philosophical bases of his approach are discussed in 'The Dialectical Foundations of Critical Pluralism' (1976) in which he identifies seven types of dialectic and eight fundamental kinds of criticism. As a practical critic, however, Olson, like the other Chicago critics, is most closely identified with the method of 436

Aristotle. (See *Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago School.) Olson distinguishes mimetic from didactic literary works. (See *mimesis.) This is not a value judgment (the Iliad and Hamlet would belong to the former category, Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy to the latter) but rather a formal distinction based on the final end or intention of the work. Both sorts of works imitate human actions, but whereas mimetic works do so merely for whatever interest lies in these actions, didactic works do so in order to demonstrate some thesis. Thus didactic works, although they may superficially resemble mimetic works (such as tragedies, comedies, epics), are really works of rhetoric and can only be understood according to rhetorical principles. The author's intention to persuade has powerful consequences for probability of plot and consistency of characterization among other things. Olson provides a good specimen of rhetorical analysis in 'Rhetoric and the Appreciation of Pope' (1976). (See ""rhetorical criticism.) Olson's approach to criticism strongly relies on experience, both of the artist and of the reader: 'I am not sure that art permits of absolute demonstration; I am positive that it entails experiences which are matters of fact and can be generalized' (Tragedy 75). As a practical critic, Olson is primarily concerned with tracing the reasoning of artists in forming their works and with the reasons why these works affect us as they do. While he has written on numerous writers, perhaps the best introduction to his work is his Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (1961). Olson influenced a wide variety of critics including *Wayne Booth, Sheldon Sacks, Norman Friedman, James Phelan, Walter A. Davis, and James Kinneavy. His strength as a critic lies in his consistent effort to expose the theoretical bases of differences of interpretation so that readers can both formulate and resolve problems of their own. HOLLIS RINEHART Primary Sources Olson, Elder. On Value Judgements in the Arts and Other Essays. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1976. - The Poetry of Dylan Thomas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1954. - The Theory of Comedy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.

Ong - Tragedy and the Theory of Drama. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1961.

Secondary Sources Batterby, James L. Elder Olson: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1983. Crane, R.S., ed. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952.

Ong, Walter Jackson (b. U.S.A., 1912-) Literary critic. Walter Jackson Ong is a Jesuit priest, Emeritus University Professor of Humanities, William E. Haren Professor of English, and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at Saint Louis University in Missouri. During the 19505 Ong researched and taught at Harvard. His academic credits include Ph.L., 1940; M.A., 1941; S.T.L., 1948 (St. Louis University); Ph.D. 1955 (Harvard University); as well as a number of honorary degrees. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1935 and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946. Ong lectured extensively in Canada, France and the U.S.A. where he has also appeared on national radio and television. His Terry Lectures at Yale were published in 1968 as The Presence of the Word and his Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto were published as Hopkins, the Self, and God. Ong is a literary critic, a scholar of rhetoric and the European Renaissance, a specialist in the interrelationship between consciousness and communications, a vocal American Catholic and past president of the Modern Language Association. His communications theory which is founded on a unique blend of sociology, anthropology, religious *hermeneutics, classics, and rhetoric, has affinities with French *semiotics and *structuralism. Orality and Literacy (1982), his best-selling book to date, has been translated into eight languages. (See also *rhetorical criticism, ""communication theory.) Ong's early essays, including those collected in The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays (1954) and In the Human Grain (1967), deal primarily with literary topics such as the methodologies of the New Critics. (See *New Criticism.) Finding New Critical methods useful but unnecessarily limiting, Ong disputed their view of the *text as autonomous object. His theories - influenced by those of his colleague and former teacher *Marshall McLuhan,

who argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that the invention of the printing press marked a major shift in human consciousness - trace the relationship between communications media and the human psyche. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong continues the study that he began in his trilogy which includes The Presence of the Word (1967), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971) and Interfaces of the Word (1977). In these books he deals historically and anthropologically with three phases in the development of Western verbal communications media: the preliterate or primary oral/aural; the chirographic/typographic; and the electronic or secondary oral/aural. He points to the importance of formulaic composition, which was used as a mnemonic device in preliterate culture and then traces the influence of oral composition and rhetoric on the chirographic/typographic and electronic or secondary oral phases. He perceives logic and rhetoric as two opposing features in Western culture. Rhetoric is founded in preliterate orality, while logic emerges from the visual technology of writing and print. Ong explains that the shift from oral/aural to visual modes of communication and perception marks a fundamental change in human consciousness which features an internalization of the technology of writing and rhetorical modes embedded in language. Ong stresses the importance of Latin in this development and the fact that we are often unconscious of rhetorical features embedded in both language and psyche. He also notes that the three phases bear an uneven resemblance to the Freudian psychosexual stages (oral, anal and genital). (See *Sigmund Freud, *psychoanalytic theory.) Although he does not pursue this resemblance, in Hopkins, the Self, and God (1968) he suggests that a complex interbreeding of, for example, Saussurean linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis as found in *Jacques Lacan might prove most useful in further studies of what he calls the 'interiorizing and anthropologization' of culture and society. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure.) Ong occasionally applies his theories to a Catholic view of the world. For example, he finds it remarkable that the word of God in the form of Christ entered into the world precisely at the time when it had the 'greatest opportunity to endure and flower/ that is, during a period when primary orality was still predominant but also a time when the alphabet

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Ong was coming into use, thereby ensuring that the word could be recorded and disseminated. Fundamental to Ong's view is his study of the Huguenot educationalist and rhetorician Peter Ramus. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) and in Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958) Ong suggests that Ramus played a pivotal role in re-shaping Western consciousness through the introduction of visually oriented systems to organize new knowledge. He reminds his readers that the inward turn of human consciousness that appears to have been inspired by Ramus has been studied by psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and *Carl Gustav Jung and by palaentologist-mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Ong also believes that the romantic period has a special significance in the shift in human consciousness since it draws from both primary oral and print-oriented phases of cultural development. While, on the one hand, romanticism favoured the old primary oral world by rejecting typographically grounded rationalism, it also showed an academic or para-academic interest in popular literature, folk ballads and folklore. On the other hand, romanticism relied heavily on rationalism founded in writing and print. Ong points out that the quest for originality, or the new, reveals romanticism as a typographically inspired phenomenon despite its avowed commitment to the oral past. We are still in a typographic world, he reminds us, and the quest for the new is still under way. In other studies Ong applies his theories specifically to literary matters. In The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction/ Ong discusses the idea of an imagined audience and its relationship to the writer. This essay has contributed significantly to the current debate on reader-response theory. (See ""reader-response criticism.) In Hopkins, the Self, and God, Ong examines 19th-century English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his concern with 'inscape' within the context of Christian and Victorian sensibilities. He maintains that Hopkins' sense of self and his related particularism is a pivotal example of the large-scale, centuries-old movement toward greater particularization of the exterior world and interiorization of consciousness that marks the evolution of the human psyche. Ong shows how Hopkins' writing anticipates the predilections of the modern and postmodern movements. (See *self/other, *postmodernism.) There have been substantial objections to

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Ong's view of orality in regard to voice, which situates material logos in human ethos and finds a partial basis in Longinus' rhetoric and Kant's aesthetics. Anthropologists argue that Ong's view veers toward essentialist primitivism. Deconstructionists object to his phenomenological definition of voice and regard language in a material sense as a reified figure that forever defers meaning. For deconstructionists, voice is a figural deviation; for Ongians, it is an event, itself unstable and indeterminate, always retaining some 'ineluctable interiority' ('Dialectics' 500). (See *deconstruction, *phenomenological criticism.) A major study of the implications of Ong's theories, Media, Consciousness, and Culture (1991), re-examines Ong's writing in reference to electronic media, First and Third World rhetoric, feminist theory, and current critical debate on *discourse and theories of the dialogic self. Critics have only begun to fathom the degree to which Ong's studies have implications for structuralist, deconstructionist, speech act and reader response theories. (See also *feminist criticism, *dialogical criticism, *speech act theory.) KARL E. JIRGENS

Primary Sources Ong, Walter J. 'Agonistic Structures in Academia: Past to Present.' Interchange; A Journal of Education 5: 1-12. (An earlier abridged version appeared under the same title in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 103.4 ('i974): 229~38.) - American Catholic Crossroads (Catholic Book Club Selection). New York: Macmillan, 1959. - The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1954. - 'Communications Media and the State of Theology.' Cross Currents 19: 462-80. - 'A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives.' In 2oth Century Literary Criticism. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longmans, 1972, 497-508. - Fighting for Eife: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981. - Frontiers in American Catholicism. New York: Macmillan, 1957. - Hopkins, the Self, and God. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986. - Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1977. - In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Ortega - Gratify and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. - The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History- New Haven: Yale UP, 1467. - Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1958. - 'Ramus: Rhetoric and the Pre Newtonian Mind.' In English Institute Essays 19,2. Ed. Alan S. Downer. New York: Columbia UP, 1954, 138—70. - Ramus and Talon Inventory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1958. - Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 197!. — 'Technology Outside Us and Inside Us.' Cammunio 5 (1978): 100-21. - 'Truth in Conrad's Darkness.' Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas n (19/8): 151-63. - Why Talk? A Conversation about Language. San Francisco: Chandler and Sharp, 1973. - 'The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction.' PMLA 90 (19/5): 9-21. Also in 2oth Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology. Ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. Buffalo: SUNY P, 1987, 401-22. - ed. and co-author. Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspective. New York: Macmillan, 1960. - and co-author. Knowledge and the Future of Man. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. - ed. Petrus Ramus and Audornarus Talaeus: Collectaneae praefationes, epistolae, orationes. [Facsimile of the 1599 Marburg edition.] Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969. — Petrus Ramus: Scholae in liberates artes. [Facsimile of the 1569 Basel edition.] Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1970.

Secondary Sources Gronbeck, Bruce E., Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup, eds. Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1991. Kermode, Frank. 'Father Ong.' In Modern Essays. Glasgow: Fontana P, 1990, 99-107.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose (b. Spain, 1883-d. 1955) Philosopher, journalist, social critic. Born into a liberal, literary family well-connected with the artistic, political and intellectual elite of Spain, Ortega y Gasset received a privileged education from the Jesuits, and began his studies of philosophy in the Jesuit University of Deusto. From

1898 he studied philosophy at the University of Madrid, where he received his doctorate in 1904. While still a student, he met Miguel de Unamuno, whose initial influence upon him was great, and with whom he began an important correspondence. At this time, he also became friends with Ramiro de Maeztu, with whom he later claimed to have passed through the 'torrid zone' of the thought of *Nietzsche. Despite the deep mark left upon him by French *literature, he chose to continue his studies in Germany, first in Leipzig and Berlin. Later, in Marburg, he was exposed to neoKantianism as well as to the thought and personalities of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. The experiences in Germany intensified his interest in language, philosophical and scientific thought and, especially, rigorous intellectual methodology. As he matured, however, he moved away from neo-Kantian idealism. From 1908 until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, Ortega was one of the most influential thinkers in Spain and a significant bridge to contemporary European thought and methods. From his chair as professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid, he formed a distinguished generation of Spanish intellectuals, among whom the best-known is Julian Marias (1914-). Perhaps still more important, he founded important intellectual journals (Faro, Europa, Espana), specifically conceived as vehicles that would permit a broad range of Spaniards to become familiar with the best of contemporary creative thinking. His most influential journal was the Revista de Occidents (1923-36), in which great European thinkers (Einstein, Frank, Frobenius, Huizinga, *Jung, Russell, Simmel) could present their world to Spaniards and in which Spanish thinkers might find an encouraging atmosphere. Virtually all of Ortega's own writing first appeared in a journalistic context and was only later collected into volumes. With the notable exception of religion, almost no area of thought escaped Ortega's consideration. His most enduring studies of literary and aesthetic creativity appeared between 1914 and 1925, but many of his theories on language and social usage received their fullest treatment in the last decade of his life. His own highly characteristic and plastic literary style made him especially sensitive to a broad range of aesthetic concerns, to which he was able to add a solid intellectual base, so important in a time in which Western artistic

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Ortega practices seemed disoriented and in flux. He argued that the 19th-century concept of beauty as a utilitarian and orderly instinct had to be surpassed by new norms that saw aesthetics and all forms of criticism as indispensable adjuncts to the creative process. Only through responsible criticism, which could add understanding to instinct, could high standards be stimulated. However, in literature, as in painting, Ortega detected an increasing reliance upon technique, at the expense of the feeling and intelligence that engender creativity. Genuine style, he was to argue, is rather a unique perspective dictated by observation or experience, and passed through the filter of artistic individuality. In 1913-14, Ortega's reservations about the evolution of the thought of *Edmund Husserl and of phenomenology helped him to refine his view that the surface of reality, in which he included artistic creations, presupposes depth, and that an understanding of this fact is imperative to any task. (See *phenomenological criticism.) In a literary *text, for example, the visible surface is characterized by the fact that it both suggests and conceals depth, without which it would not exist, and which the viewer and the critic have the obligation to seek consciously so as to bring it into being. 'Surface,' 'depth,' 'foreshortening,' and 'latency,' as well as the importance of perspective in interpretation acquired an increasingly important role in Ortega's thought, as he derived social consequences from a more intense critical methodology. This methodology was developed in his first book, Meditations on Quixote (1914), published as a philosophical introduction to Cervantes' novel, both as literary and historical object and as an example of the Spanish way of seeing the relationship between the 'I' and its world: 'I am I and my circumstance.' In addition, Ortega offered here his earliest significant views on the novel, in which, as in all art, both context and personal feeling converge in the object of contemplation, and relate it to the individual. Himself a superlative practitioner of imagery, his insight into the functioning of metaphor ('Essay on Aesthetics by Way of a Prologue' 1914), remains an illuminating affirmation of the ability of the T to be executant and dynamic, that is, to create new reality, both actively and as the object of contemplation, in counterposition to the transparency of the aesthetic object. (See *metonymy/meta-

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phor.) The miracle of the metaphor flows from the fact that, although it is created out of elements that are perceived as being in some way similar, it is itself radically lacking in sameness, and thus opens onto another possible world. Through a series of shorter essays in which he examines dance, music and the ludic elements of life, Ortega reaches his great, but often misunderstood, essay The Dehumanization of Art (1924-5), in which he sets himself the task, not of dictating artistic criteria, but of understanding and analysing those that underlay such current artistic manifestations as cubism and the literary avant-garde. Of particular interest is his conviction that contemporary art had set as its goal the division of its public into a 'mass,' which could not possibly understand the work, and an 'elite' of the initiated, to whom it was directed. This division was largely achieved by stripping art of its sentimental, 'human,' elements, as well of its transcendence. In Ideas on the Novel (1924-5), Ortega offers his analysis of a genre that continued to live in crisis. He posits that since the novel had effectively run out of themes, and the 20th-century reader is more knowledgeable about human nature, the importance of plot may be reduced in favour of a new type of density, especially psychological, that may stimulate the willingness of the reader to become effectively cut off from his daily life upon entering the possible world created by the novel. (See *genre criticism, *theme.) Especially in the years of his exile (1936-45) and after, Ortega devoted considerable attention to the concept of artistic expression as the vanguard of social change. Highly suggestive are his reflections on the function of 'derealization' in art, that is, its ability to be something other than merely a representation of the object that it claims to represent, or from which it seems to have sprung, as well as his thoughts on the dynamics of social structures and institutions. His writings on 'The Idea of the Theatre' (1946), and especially on the social significance of language and gestures (Man and People 1949-55), prefigure many ideas in *semiotics and sociolinguistics that would be developed by others only in the 19605 and 19708. VICTOR OUIMETTE

Peirce Primary Sources Ortega y Casset, Jose. La Deshumanizacion del arte. Obras completas. Vol. 3. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947-83. 12 vols. The Dehumanization of Art. Trans. Helene Weyl. In The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. - 'Ensayo de estetica a manera de prologo.' Obras completas. Vol. 6. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947-83. 'Essay on Aesthetics by Way of a Prologue.' Trans. Philip W. Silver. In Phenomenology and Art. New York: Norton, 1975. - El hotnbre y la gentc. Madrid: Revista de Occidente en Alianza Editorial, 1980. Man and People. Trans. William R. Trask. New York: W.W. Norton, 1957. - 'The Idea of the Theatre.' 1946. Trans. Philip W. Silver. In Phenomenology and Art. New Y'ork: Norton, 1973. - Ideas sabre la novela. Obras completas. Vol. 3. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947-83. Ideas on the Novel. Trans. Helene Weyl. In The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature. - Meditaciones del Quijote. Obras completas. Vol. i. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947-83. Meditations on Quixote. Trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.

Peirce, C(harles) S(anders) (b. U.S.A., i839-d. 1914) Philosopher, logician, scientist, and mathematician. Founder of modern semiotic theory (1867), pragmatism (1878), the logic of relations and quantification (1870-85). At Harvard, where his father was professor of mathematics, Charles Peirce studied science, mathematics and philosophy. From 1861 to 1891 he worked as a scientist for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and, throughout an immensely productive life, published many significant papers in mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and other sciences. While he was briefly (1879-84) a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, he planned and supervised the first carefully controlled experiments in psychology conducted in America. Peirce's major achievements are his original and foundational contributions to *semiotics, logic, theory of induction, probability, measurement, and scientific method and to the philosophy of pragmatism. In 1867 Peirce published 'On a New List of Categories' (Writings 2: 49-59), a short, dense, and profoundly original paper in which he laid

the philosophical foundations for a comprehensive and detailed system of semeiotic (his preferred spelling). He outlined its three chief subdivisions (a semeiotic grammar, theory of truth conditions and rhetoric), defined some of the major classes of signs or representations and briefly indicated their application to logic and scientific reasoning. (See *sign.) He suggested in passing that the semeiotic had bearing on linguistics, *literature, the arts, law and society. In papers published in 1868 he argued that the semeiotic confuted the Cartesian theory of the mind and replaced it with the view that 'man is a sign, so that ... my language is the sum total of myself ('Some Consequences/ Writings 2: 41). Perception, emotion, attention, action, and thought are all forms of semeiosis. After 1890 Peirce embarked on a fresh and original examination of the basic principles of semeiotic change and evolution, arguing that such change is fundamentally teleological. In his correspondence with Victoria Lady Welby (1903-11), Peirce amplified his triadic analysis and elliptically sketched a dekadic analysis of signs, distinguishing ten elements essential to the constitution of a sign. The dekadic semeiotic, if it were ever clarified and completed, would permit a far subtler and more precise specification of signs and of sign change than the earlier triadic analysis. It is unfortunate that he never wrote a systematic and comprehensive account of his triadic semeiotic or of his later dekadic semeiotic. Peirce took the concept of a sign so broadly that he sometimes spoke of an entire book or an entire literature as a single complex sign. He understood anything to be a sign, or representamen if, when it is present to an interpreter, some aspect of it is interpreted in feeling and imagination, in practice, and in cognition, as standing for something beyond what is present. A sign or representation is thus a triad of (a) interpretation or Interpretant; (b) Object beyond the sign, for which the sign is interpreted to stand; and (c) significant aspect, sometimes called the Ground of the sign. A sign can be interpreted only in further signs. Since each Interpretant is a sign it must itself beget further interpretants, each of them encompassing an interpretation in imagination and feeling (the emotional interpretant), an interpretation in action (the energetic interpretant), and a cognitive interpretation (the logical interpretant). Self-referring signs excepted, every sign must be a sign of something be-

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Peirce yond itself, its object. Signs arise and function within a real-world context. The Object of a sign is something with which all interpreters of that particular sign must have some collateral and independent acquaintance so that the sign may communicate further information. Peirce's semeiotic thus avoids some familiar problems, like reference to non-existent or problematic entities, or signs which do not refer at all - conjunctions, adjectives, samples, natural phenomena like the rainbow or medical symptoms. Peirce further distinguished the Ground, or significant aspect of a sign, from the many material features irrelevant to its functioning as a representamen (sign). Since each sign is a triad, it can be classified and distinguished from other signs according to the nature of its Ground, relation to its Object and relation to its Interpretant. The Ground of a sign may be a Qualisign, Sinsign or Legisign, according to whether it is a quality (for example, a colour sample), a singular event or entity (for example, the starter's pistol, a memorial monument), or a general law, rule or function (for example, words and their meaningful combinations, codes, notational systems). A sign is an *icon, *index or symbol, as it is related to its object through qualitative resemblance, forceful interaction or a general rule followed by all its interpretants. Analogously, signs may be related to their interpretants in three different ways, as rhemes, dicents and arguments. Signs are interpreted by their interpretants to be signs of the characteristics of possible entities (rhemes), signs of actual entities (dicents) or signs of general law (argments). Ground, relation to object and relation to interpretant then combine to form species or classifications of signs. A feeling of empathy with another person is a rhematic iconic qualisign. A portrait painting is, if the subject is not identified, a rhematic indexical sinsign. If the subject is identified it is a dicent indexical sinsign. If it is a portrait of a purely imaginary or fictional subject it is a rhematic iconic sinsign. A demonstrative pronoun is a rhematic indexical legisign. An autobiography is a dicent indexical legisign whose component parts are almost entirely dicent symbols. During Peirce's lifetime, only Josiah Royce recognized the importance of the semeiotic. *T.S. Eliot, a member of Royce's seminar, indicates in Knowledge and Experience (103) that he knew something of the semeiotic. Still, it was not until C.K. Ogden and *I.A. Richards de-

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voted a section of The Meaning of Meaning (1923) to Peirce's later semeiotic that it began to reach a wider literary audience. But it was *Roman Jakobson's frequent admiring and commendatory references to Peirce that brought him to the attention of both the international linguistics community and the community of literary critics and theorists. Peircean semiotics is being pursued and developed notably by Jean Fisette, Maryan Ayim, Richard Tursman, and David Savan in Canada; by Michael and Marianne Shapiro, Joseph M. Ransdell, Raimo Anttila, Tom Short, and many others in the United States; by Max Bense, Elisabeth Walther, Helmut Pape, and *Jiirgen Habermas in Germany; by G. Granger, Gerard Deledalle and his school in France; and by *Umberto Eco and others in Italy, and Dan Nesher in Israel. DAVID SAVAN

Primary Sources Deledalle, G., ed. and trans. Ecrits sur le signe. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Eisele, C, ed. New Elements of Mathematics by C.S. Peirce. 4 vols. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Fisch, Max H., et al., eds. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Vols. i-. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982-. Fouchier-Axelsen, B., and C. Foz, trans. Intro. D. Savan. Textes fondamentaux de semiotique: C.S. Peirce. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1987. Hardwick, C.S., ed. Semiotic and Signifies: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. Hartshorne, C., and Paul Weiss, ed. Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. 8 vols. Ed. A. Burks; vols. 7, 8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1931-58. [The following references are a guide to some of Peirce's chief writings on semeiotic: Collected Papers (by volume and paragraph number) i: 545-67, 2: 227-308, 5: 213-317, 8: 313-5, 317-79; New Elements 3: 839-44, 4: 235~^3.] Ogden, C.K., and LA. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923.

Secondary Sources Bense, Max. Semiotische Prozesse und Systeme. BadenBaden: Agis, 1975. Deledalle, G. Theorie et pratique du signe. Paris: Payot, 1979. Fisch, M. Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Potebnia Fisette, ]. Introduction a la semiotique de C.S. Peirce. Montreal: XYZ, 1990. Haley, M.C. The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Humbolt, Potebnia differentiated between the autonomous existing empirical world and the spiritual/cultural reality. Both of these entities, he thought, exist in a synchretic and continLangages 58 (juin 11980), La Semiotique de C.S. Peirce. gent bond. While the former emerges and Special issue. Ransdell, J.M. Peirce. In Encyclopedic Dictionary of Se- transforms according to its own energy and laws, the latter is an object of man's continumiotics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, ous creativity. It emerges and manifests itself 1986. through and by language. It does not precede Savan, D. An Introduction to C.S. Peirce's Full System of Semeiotic. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle, language, nor does it proceed from language; Monograph Series i, 1976; rev. 1987-8. rather it exists within language. Reality and - 'Peirce's Semiotic Theory of Emotion.' In Proceedlanguage are therefore coterminous. ings of the C.S. Peirce Bicentennial International Language is a cognitive energy, a continuous Congress, K.L. Ketner et ah, eds., 319—33. Lubbock: process of becoming rather than a mere readyTexas Tech UP, 1981. made instrument of cognition. It is therefore - 'Peirce and the Trivium.' Cruzeiro Semiotico 8 (Jan. both the means of generating ever-new knowl1988): 50-6. Assodagao Portuguesa de Semiotica, edge about the empirical world as well as the Porto. Shapiro, M. The Sense of Change: Language as History. impediment to its conclusive apprehension. Hence, it is not a mere acoustic construct existBloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. ing at the service of thought. Language and - The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. thought are inseparable. There is no thought - with Marianne Shapiro. Figuration in Verbal Art. without language and no language without Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. thought. Sheriff, J. The Fate of Meaning. Princeton: Princeton According to Potebnia, the minimal unit of UP, 1989. the speech act is the word, defined syntactically rather than lexically. (See also *speech act theory.) The word's structural aspects are the external form, the content or idea, and the Potebnia, Aleksander A. internal form. The external form is inseparable from the internal one, changing along with it (b. Ukraine, 1935-1! 1981) Linguist, literary theorist. Aleksander Potebnia matriculated at while retaining its own specificity; the content is always abstract, hidden and difficult to Kharkiv University's faculty of law in 1854. grasp; the internal form is the relationship of Two years later he transferred to the faculty of the content to consciousness. It is a demonhistory and philology and then studied at Berlin University in 1862. Receiving his doctorate strated appearance of our thought. The word contains two levels of signification: the objecfor Iz zapisok po russkoi granimatike [Notes on tive or closely etymological, with only one sinRussian Grammar] in 1874 in Kharkiv, Potebnia gle property of the referred object, event or was promoted to professor (1875) and in 1877 occurence; and the subjective or distant, with elected corresponding member of the Imperial potentially many properties. (See *signified/ Academy of Sciences in Petersburg. At Kharsignifier/signification.) At the moment of the kiv University he lectured on literary figures, word's enunciation, the close signification is its literary theory and folklore. Potebnia's significance for literary theory rests upon three of his only content. (See "enonciation/enonce.) At the same time, however, the close signification, works: Mysl' i iazyk 1862 [Thought and Langiven the different sensory perception of the guage], Iz lektsii po team slovesnosti 1894 [Lectures on the Theory n/ Literature] and h zapisok speaker and the recipient, is transformed into a multitude of referential variants. Thus, if it po teorii slovesnosti 1905 [Notes on the Theory of Literature.] were not for the 'ethnic kinship' of the close signification, the communicative process would In the disciplines that constituted his intelbe seriously impeded or even completely brolectual horizon - epistemology, psychology, ken. If the close signification of the word is philosophy of language, folklore - Potebnia obliterated and thus not recognized dialogiwas akin to scholars of the Berlin school centred around Zeitschrift fur Spradmnssencally, the external form then becomes the sole schaft nnd Volkerpsychologie: Wilhelm Humbolt, transmitter of signification and communication. Out of the subjective or distant signification Hevman Steinthal and Herman Lotze. Like

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Potebnia results a higher objectivity of thought, namely, scholarly and scientific. The same structural components exist in the poetic work of art as in the word: the external form, the internal form and the content or idea. As in the word, these three components are coextensive and interdependent. This means that they have no separate value; that in perception all three are determined at once rather than sequentially and that such simultaneous determination permits no radical variability in their configuration. The external form of the poetic work, in order to be a viable component of the poetic structure, must be meaning-generating. The internal form of the poetic word is synonymous with its images. The image is either a progressively constructed collocation of words that is pregnant with explicit or implicit meanings or a transcendent configuration of them. The first resembles the algebraic ground and depends upon the combinatory system of a given syntax or on the modality of combination. The second is a non-additive whole that is intentionally created at strategic points of the *text. Usually the former aims at a realistic or mimetic creation of reality and the latter at a symbolic creation of reality. Images of both types form the leap from representation to signification. (See *mimesis.) As long as they remain constant predicates to their everchanging subjects, they retain aesthetic valency. Should they, however, become equivalents of the intended reference, they automatically assume a didactic role. They convert the text either to referential prose or to *myth. The poetic image is a linguistic rather than a psychological category. Yet, its relative constancy does not guarantee its permanence. In time, it may, as it often does, lose its palpability and cease to elicit aesthetic responses. In this way, the poetic text becomes a mere historical artefact. It follows that the content of the poetic work as it appears in our consciousness is not an indiscriminate computation of all of the text's semantic components but instead an intentional correlation of what is being selected, retained, transformed, and amplified by our mind. (See *intention/intentionality.) Potebnia rendered the poetic text - namely, its being, its creation and its perception - algorithmically. Thus, he may have inadvertently impressed some of his readers and followers that it was theoretically possible to define all

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variants of poetic text by one all-embracing notation. His algorithm reads as follows: X = a < A, in which X stands for the content or idea; a for the text; and A for the writer's and reader's perception. The reception of the poetic work is an inverted process of its creation, that is, a < A = X. Aesthetic reception, however, should not be understood as semantically coextensive with the text's creation. Because a is the only one of the three components involved in both processes that is constant, while X and A are variable, we should infer that a paired measure like this will vary in accordance with the value of the two variables. Should a be perceived as identical with X, the text will become strictly referential, that is prosaic or scientific; should a retain its imaginative character while at the same time mimicking X, the text will be mythological; only when a serves as a tertium comparationis between X and A does the text retain its poeticalness. The text as a bare signal of transmission rather than as a polysemous invocation is prosaic. Algorithmically, the three textual modalities are to be written as follows: poetry: X = a < A; prose and science: X = a; myth: X = a (A). Potebnia's theory distinguishes between two kinds of poetic forms: one constitutes the very essence of poetic language and is independent of man's creative intentionality; the other results from such an intentionality. Verbal constructs, seen from the perspective of the former, are determined by the semantic function of their internal forms or images; when seen from the perspective of the latter, they are determined by the poet's creative choice. From among the various generic or intentional forms, Potebnia chose the fable and the proverb as demonstrative models for such complex works as the novel and such simple works as the simple poetic statement. Fable, he thought, was highly representative of the structure of poetic art in general. It consists of two parts: the first is not expressed by words, does not enter the fable directly, and hence in abstraction is easily omitted. It is the explenandum of the text. The second, which is usually called fable, is the explaining predicate. As the protracted explanation of ever-new existential predicaments, fable must have four characteristics: (i) it must consist of a series of actions; (2) the actions must form a definite unity; (3) the actants must be recognized without de-

Poulet principal function is cognition; (5) aesthetic seription or explanation; and (4) the images perception is productive rather than merely must refer to concrete events. (See *actant.) reproductive; (6) poetry and prose, including The proverb may be formed out of a condensed fable. Such a condensation might occur scholarly and scientific texts, are complementary; (7) generic taxonomy is arbitrary and in one of two ways: first, the fable's two givens - the story and the generalization - are in- serves only heuristic purposes; (8) poetic *semiosis is predominantly ethnocentric; verted, the latter retained completely and the (9) poetic signs and their signification are former either condensed or abandoned altoasymmetrical; and (10) mythological, poetic, gether. Fables can also be condensed to what and scientific function are potentially present are generally known as sayings - allegorical in reading, interpretation and aesthetic experiimages consisting of one person or one action, ences. As a set of general principles, proposed but never all three. Fables, however, are not for the purpose of explaining existing poetic the only genre that can be transformed into texts, Potebnia's theory has a historical signifiproverbs. More complex forms, such as comcance, but owing to its by and large deductive edy, epic, novella, and the novel also can be character, it retains, if only in part, epistemocondensed into one syntactical unit. (See also logical cogency. (See also *sign.) *genre criticism.) JOHN FIZER In sum, the work of poetic art is a 'form of forms,' a configuration of either intentional or Primary Sources immanent forms. Intentional forms, inherently tied with man's progressing or regressing conPotebnia, A.A. Iz lektsii po teorii slovesnosti: Basnia, sciousness, specify either the 'poeticalness' or poshvitsa, pogovorka. Kharkiv: K. Scahsin, 1894. the 'prosaicness' of the work. Immanent forms, - Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti: Poeziia i proza. Tropy tied with historical conventions and history, as i figury. Myshlenie poetichneskoe i mificheskoe. it manifests itself in language, is a resevoir of a Kharkiv: M.F. Potebnia, Prilozheniia, 1905. never ceasing creative quest, both poetic and - Mysl' i iazyk. In Estetika i poetika. Ed. I.V. Ivan'o prosaic. Language, in its perennial variation, and A.I. Kolodnaia. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976. remains polysemous and therefore multifunctional. Its two seemingly exclusive directions Secondary Sources poetry and prose - are actually complementary. Thus, poetry, myth and science coexist in Fizer, J. Alexander A. Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Thea state of symbiosis. ory of Literature: A Metacritical Inquiry. Cambridge: This function of poetic art, by involving cogHarvard UP, 1988. Presniakov, O.P. A.A. Potebnia i russkoe literatitrovednition, emotion and endeavour, is reducible to enie kontsa iy-nachala 20 veka. Saratov: Izd. Sarathree equivalent categories: cognitive, exprestovskogo Universiteta, 1978. sive and representational. A work of poetic art Franchuk, V. Iv. Oleksander Opanasovych Potebnia. does not function cognitively without also afKiev: Naukova dumka, 1975. fecting two other mental faculties. This funcShklovskii, V. 'Potebnia.' In Poetika: Sborniki po teorii tional syncretism, however, does not preclude poeticheskogo iazyka. Vol. i. Petrograd, 1919. various ratios among the three. Consequently, a view that the work of poetic art generates only emotional catharsis, or invokes only the Poulet, Georges sense of beauty or repulsion, or arouses only a will to act, is, in Potebnia's view, explicitly (b. Belgium, 1902-) Theoretician and critic of reductive. French "literature. After receiving his doctorate In retrospect, the significance of Potebnia's from the University of Liege in 1927, Poulet theory lies not only in how it actually defined taught at the University of Edinburgh (1927the work of poetic art but also in how it redi51), Johns Hopkins University (1952-7), the rected critical theory towards the issues of the University of Zurich (1957-9), and the Unitext itself. Generally, then, the principal claims versity of Nice (1968-). The best known of the of Potebnia's theory are as follows: (i) language and poetic art are genetically related; (2) phenomenological critics associated with the *Geneva School, he popularized an interprelanguage and poetry have a triune structure; tive practice based on the tenets of phenomen(3) internal form in language and images in ology. (See *phenomenological criticism.) poetry have generative power; (4) poetry's

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Poulet Rather than analyse the formal structures of particular works, his criticism reconstitutes an author's distinctive subjectivity or consciousness of self and world as expressed in the entire corpus of that author's writing. (See *self/ other.) Although Poulet's emphasis on author subjectivity runs counter to later structuralist interests, his work paved the way for the rise of theory in the 19703 by initiating American critics into the use of philosophy as a tool for reading and by providing those critics with a powerful alternative to the formalist doctrine of the *New Criticism. His phenomenological approach particularly influenced the early work of the two most visible American proponents of *deconstruction, *Paul de Man and *J. Hillis Miller. (See also *structuralism.) Poulet gained prominence fairly late in his career with the publication of Etudes sur le temps humain (1949). This collection of essays examines the patterns of consciousness and the sense of selfhood expressed by French authors from the Renaissance to the present. The initial volume under the title was followed by three others: La Distance interieure (1952), Le Point de depart (1964) and Mesure de I'instant (1968). Unlike the formalist criticism dominating Anglo-American criticism at that time, these studies reject the analysis of individual literary constructs in favour of reanimating the itinerary of an author's consciousness as it consolidates itself into a distinctive identity over time. Poulet reconstructs each author's distinctive expression of the self's relationship to the world and to itself by extrapolating from all of the author's writing - including correspondence, journals, critical essays, fragments, and literary works of various genres consistent figures of speech, vocabulary choices and ways of emplotting human action within the world. Rather than specifying the meaning of a particular *text, then, Poulet's method weaves citations from many texts into a narrative of the author's characteristic way of achieving a sense of self. Typically, these narratives precede from a Cartesian origin - that of the writing ego's consciousness of itself as pure consciousness - through an enumeration of the successive reassessments of self-presence which consciousness undergoes as it confronts the problem of its own duration and location in the world. The unifying *theme of temporality or lived time which dominates Etudes sur le temps humain is replaced in other studies,

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such as L'Espace proustien (1963) or Les Metamorphoses du cercle (1961), by the experience of space, but Poulet's strategy remains consistent in all of his dozen or so subsequent books. In La Conscience critique (1971), Poulet extended his phenomenological analysis to include the activity of the critic and reader of literature, interpreting the subjectivity of literary critics from Madame de Stael to *Jean Rousset. His analysis of the reading consciousness in the same volume, Thenomenologie de la conscience critique' (repr. 'The Phenomenology of Reading') is perhaps the most succinct introduction to the critical perspective assumed by the critics of the Geneva School. There Poulet traces the way a reader's consciousness becomes absorbed in a literary work and perceives itself to be immersed in the consciousness of another subjectivity while at the same time aware of its own identity. His analysis makes clear the difference between phenomenological criticism, which conceives of the reading experience as a means of apprehending the consciousness of another, and American ""reader-response criticism, which seeks the meaning of texts in the interaction between textual structure and reader identity. In the wake of *poststructuralism, with its devaluation of consciousness and the individual *subject, Poulet's influence waned considerably. More recent critical trends which emphasize cultural history and the study of ""ideology have further reduced his prominence. But his work remains important not only as a document of the historical moment when theory began to displace the New Criticism but also as a point of entry into the problematics of subjectivity as they apply to reading and literary criticism. WILLIAM RAY

Primary Sources Poulet, Georges. La Conscience critique. Paris: Corti, 1971. - La Distance interieure. Etudes sur le temps humain 2. Paris: Plon, 1952. The Interior Distance. Trans. Elliot Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1959. - Entre moi et moi: Essais critiques sur la conscience de soi. Paris: Corti, 1976. - L'Espace proustien. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Proustian Space. Trans. Elliot Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - Etudes sur le temps humain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

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UP, 1949 Studies in Human Time. Trans. Elliott Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1916. Mesure dc {'instant. Ftudes sur le temps humain 4. Paris: Plon, 19(18. Lcs Metamorphoses du cerde. Paris: Plon, 1961. The Metamorphoses of the Circle. Trans. Carley Davvson and Elliot Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 11)66. The Phenomenology of Reading.' ,VLH 2 (1970): 123-62. La Poesic h'latee: Baudelaire/Rimbaud. Paris: I'UF, 1980. Exploding Poetry: Baudelaire/Rimbaud. Trans. Francoise Meltzer. Chicago: L of Chicago P, 1984. Le Point Ac depart. Etudes sur le temps humain 3. Paris: Plon. 19(14

Secondary Sources Alexander, Ian VV. French Literature and the Philosophy of Consciousness. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1984. dc Man, Paul. 'The Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet.' In Blindness and Insight. New York: Oxford UP, 1971, 79-101. Miller, J. Hilhs. The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet.' MLN 78.=, (1963): 471-88.

Praz, Mario (b. Italy, 1896-0!. 1982) Comparatist, critic, educator, translator, scholar, and connoisseur. Mario Praz received his Dr. Juris at the University of Rome in 1918 and his D.Litt. from the University of Florence in 1920. Most of his life was spent as an educator, teaching at a number of universities but largely at the University of Rome. The recipient of honorary degrees and numerous awards, Praz has been called 'one of the last humanists/ indicating his life-long commitment to learning and to perpetuating the ideas and methods of the 'great tradition,' a view undergirding all his writings, which include autobiography, "literature, translation, and comparative studies. Much of Praz's work is dedicated to showing the intellectual and artistic linkages between the i / t h and 2Oth centuries. Machiai'clli and the Elizabethans (1928) is a reception study of Machiavelli's contribution to modern theories of state. Originally a lecture, this short work emphasizes the negative view which Machiavelli's contemporaries had of him and the sinister and amoral Italian Gothic themes thought to have evolved from his influence. (See "theme.) Praz argues that Machia\elli's contemporaries saw in his work

what was already in themselves, never comprehending the political pragmatism of The Discourse and The Prince. The Romantic Agony (1933), Praz's most important critical work, is a study of the historical evolution of one strain of romanticism stemming from de Sade, Poe, Baudelaire, Keats, and others, accentuating degeneration and the pathology of romantic ideas, particularly their sexual manifestations. The lasting influence of this point of view is underlined by Praz who argues that 'the sexual idiosyncracies ... offer ... a distorted image of characteristics common to all mankind.' A comprehensive history of the literature of emblems and devices, Studies in ijth Century Imagery (1939) is an analysis of the development of love conceits since the Alexandrian age which also illuminates the history of iconography and religious feeling during the iyth century. 'The connection of emblem and device with epigram and conceit ... are considered here as manifestations of the same spirit which promoted epigrams and conceits.' Similar synthetic tendencies of reading one art form in the light of another are apparent in The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction (1956), a comparative study of genre painting and its pervasive influence on the fiction of the i8th and igth centuries. Praz argues that the 'decay of sacred art as the result of Protestantism' generated the portrait, the interior scene and genre painting, as well as generally initiating the birth of realism, which carried with it an increasing sense of disillusionment, decay and artlessness, particularly since nobility of subject-matter no longer seemed necessary. Although it is similar to his earlier book on Machiavelli, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaiv, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations Between Italian and English Literature From Chaucer to T.S. Eliot (1958) is a more comprehensive reception study. Praz shows that the extensive Italian influence on English literature in the i6th century dissipated by the i8th century but for some Gothic images and ideas derived from Italian models. Praz concludes that 'an author is popular in so far as he lends himself to be interpreted in the terms of current vogue or a prevalent tendency of the age.' Although they have no direct connection with literary criticism and theory, the three works An Illustrated History of Furnishings, From the Renaissance to the zoth Century

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Prince (1964), his memoir The House of Life (1964), and Conversation Pieces: A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (1971) show the intimate connection between Praz's idea that the good life is that of the man of culture, the connoisseur and aesthete whose pleasures derive from the diversity of artistic creation and from his ability to comprehend and recognize that diversity and its commensurate beauty and affirmation. In one of his last major works, Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts (1970), Praz suggests that the greatness of a work of art is reflected in a kind of 'aesthetic memory' of sensations of consciousness. He also maintains that there is an abiding structural affinity between arts and letters until the i8th century, largely because of architectural models. After the igth century architecture ceases to be the structural foundation of the arts, hence comparisons and contrasts between modern writing and painting are not obvious or valid because the old norms and harmonies no longer exist. Praz has been criticized for his greatest strength - his synthetic ability to discover common themes and parallel ideas and influences in historical periods, in the arts themselves and in images and icons of common usage as they have appeared since the i7th century. This ability to synthesize important concepts is the result of Praz's enormous range of knowledge, his love of the arts and his dedication to scholarship and the pleasures of connoisseurship. Yet in his memoir, The House of Life, Praz seems to anticipate the antihumanist turn of critical fashion when he wistfully views himself as already outmoded: 'I see myself as having myself become an object and an image, a museum piece among museum pieces, already detached and remote, and that, like Adam in the graffito on the marble floor of the church of San Domenico in Siena, I have looked at myself in a convex mirror, and have seen myself as no bigger than a handful of dust.' REED MERRILL

Primary Sources Praz, Mario. Conversation Pieces: A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America. College Park, Perm.: Pennsylvania State P, 1971. - The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other Studies in the Relations Between Italian

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and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. Repr. W.W. Norton, 1973. The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction. Trans. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford UP, 1956. The House of Life. Trans. Angus Davidson. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. An Illustrated History of Furnishings, From the Renaissance to the zoth Century. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Braziller, 1964. English version: An Illustrated History of Interior Decorating from Pompei to Art Nouveau. Trans. William Weaver. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964. Machiavelli and the Elizabethans. London: Folcroft, 1928. Repr. 1970. Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. On Neoclassicism. Trans. Angus Davidson. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1969. La Poesia metafisica inglese del seincento, John Donne. Rome: Edizioni Italiane, 1946. Richard Crashaw. Rome: Morcelliana, 1946. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. New York: Oxford UP, 1933; 2nd. ed., 1951. Studies in lyth Century Imagery. London: Warburg Institute, 1939; 2nd ed., expanded, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964.

Secondary Sources Gabrieli, Vittorio, ed. Friendship's Garland: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on His jolh Birthday. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966.

Prince, Gerald (b. Egypt, 1942-) Literary theorist. In 1968, Gerald Prince obtained his Ph.D. in French "literature at Brown University. He became a member of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and was promoted to full professor in 1981. While he has written on 20th-century French literature, most of his work is devoted to literary theory, especially to *narratology. One of his early books, A Grammar of Stories (1973), directly inspired by the first versions of *Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, presents a grammar of narrative with the objective of developing an instrument to simplify the structural analysis of narrative. Prince's proposed grammar consists essentially of three components: the stative event, which expresses a state; the action event, expressing an action; and conjunctive features that encompass all

Propp conjunctive elements. The kernel narrative consists of an active event framed by two stative events, all of these united by three conjunctive features. The first feature links the first component to the second on the temporal axis, and the other two connect the second component to the third on the causal and temporal axes. For instance, 'He was happy, then he met a woman, then, as a result, he was unhappy' is a basic structure from which several types of narrative can be elaborated. To be effective, a narrative grammar must contain two intrinsic qualities: simplicity of use and applicability to all forms of narrative. Prince's grammar possesses neither characteristic, since it is both unwieldy and excludes certain forms of narrative such as that structured by association. Still, A Grammar of Stories is rich in insight and touches on themes that the author explores more fully in his later work. (See *theme.) Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (1982) presents a synthesis of acquired understanding of narratology, referring to work by other researchers in the field, notably *Roland Barthes, *Gerard Genette, *Tzvetan Todorov, *Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, and ""Jonathan Culler. Prince's contribution is found in his articulation and development of the concept of *narratee and in his discussion of the functions of metanarrative signs. (See *sign.) Prince shows how the metanarrative sign can take on a great many functions at the level of several narrative codes. (See *code, *narrative code.) In the concluding chapter, inspired by Barthes, Chatman and William Labov, Prince attempts to identify the features needed to ensure a high degree of narrativity in a "text. According to Prince, a narrative is good (from a narrative standpoint) only if the narrated event is individualized, concrete and narrated with assurance. Further, 'good narrative' should attempt to represent a whole; otherwise it becomes a simple concatenation of unrelated events. In addition, all narration must be oriented, that is, the reader must feel an organizing principle at work in the text, awakening the desire to continue reading to the end. Finally, a narrative must have a higher objective than the simple telling of a story. (See *story/plot.) By determining the characteristic elements of narration - the presence of which nevertheless does not guarantee work of high quality - we encourage a better understanding of the functioning of nar-

rative in general and of the meaning of the narrative moment. The concern for synthesis evident in Narratology can also be seen in Prince's next work and most important achievement, A Dictionary of Narratology (1987). Intended mainly for beginners, it constitutes an excellent introduction to the field of narratology. However, his major contribution to narrative theory as such remains his development of the concept of the narratee in 'Introduction a 1'etude du narrataire' (1973), which inspired a number of scholars who studied the means by which the reader's presence is implied or written in the text. (See ""implied reader.) FRANCOIS GALLAYS

Primary Sources Prince, G. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1987. - A Grammar of Stories. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973. - 'Introduction a 1'etude du narrataire.' Poetique 14 (1973): 178-96. 'Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.' In Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1988, 313-34. - Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1982.

Secondary Sources Bremond, Claude. Logique du recit. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and The Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Albany, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. Cohn, Dorritt. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, Nj: Princeton UP, 1978. Hamburger, Kate. The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1975. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1972.

Propp, Vladimir lakovlevich (b. Russia i895~d. 1970) Russian formalist scholar. Born in St. Petersburg to a family of German extraction, Propp studied Russian and German philology from 1913 to 1918 at the

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Propp University of St. Petersburg. In the 19205 he worked as a teacher in a secondary school. From 1932 until his death he was a professor at Leningrad University, chairing the Department of Folklore until it was incorporated into the Department of Russian Literature. As an outstanding folklorist, Propp contributed to the study of the theory and history of Russian folklore. His folkloristic studies concentrated on the fairy tale, heroic epic poetry and historical semantics. Propp's most important contribution to the theory of ""literature was his pioneering study of the structural laws of the folktale, Morfologiia skazki [Morphology of the Folktale 1928; English trans. 1958]. Propp believed that all folktales are structurally identical if we approach them from the point of view of their composition rather than their characters. What is important in the structure is not the characters and their identities but the actions they perform. He identifed these as 'functions' and defined them from the standpoint of their significance for the course of the action. He distinguished 31 functions that appear in the structure of the folktale and emphasized that they are constant, regardless of how and by whom they are carried out. In addition Propp also formulated some important rules about their sequence. An individual tale, he claimed, can use all the functions or it can dispense with some of them, but the sequence of functions would remain the same. The absence of certain functions, he emphasized, would not interfere with the order of appearance of the others since the sequence of functions is constant. In Transformatsiia volshebnykh skazok' ['Fairy Tale Transformations' 1928; English trans. 1971], he investigated the external circumstances that modify the genre. He argued that we would not grasp the evolution of the genre unless we considered comparative material from the environment of the fairy tale. He singled out two areas of special significance to the transformations of the fairy tale - religion and life in general - and formulated several principles that characterize the interrelations between them: (i) if the same form occurs in both a religious monument and in a fairy tale, the religious form is primary; (2) if the same element has two variants, one of which derives from religious forms and the other from daily life, the religious formation is primary and the one drawn from daily life is secondary; (3) a fantastic element in a fairy tale com-

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ponent is older than its rational treatment; (4) a heroic treatment of a fairy tale is older than a humorous treatment; (5) a form used logically is older than a form used nonsensically; (6) an international form is older than a national one. Propp's morphological and historical investigations of the structural laws of the folktale had important implications for the theory of literature. Following the model of *Iurii Tynianov, Propp put forward the notion of a literary structure in which all elements are interconnected and interdependent. He introduced the concept of 'function,' defining the role of a narrative element from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action. He combined the synchronic and diachronic approaches by showing the role of the invariant functions at any given point in time, and by analysing the transformations that occur in the historical process. More than any other Russian formalist, Propp influenced the development of French *structuralism, stimulating responses from *Claude Levi-Strauss, *Algirdas Greimas, *Claude Bremond, and Tzvetan Todorov. He also played an important role in the emergence of Russian semiotics, influencing the works of E.M. Meletskii, S.D. Serebrianyi, I.I. Revzin, and others. (See Russian *formalism, *semiotics.) NINA KOLESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Propp, V.I. Morfologiia skazki. Leningrad: Akademia, 1928. Morphology of the Folktale. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958. - Theory and History of Folklore. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. - 'Transformatsiia volshebnykh skazok.' Poetika: Vremennik otdela slovesnykh iskusstv 4. Leningrad: Akademia, 1928, 70-89. 'Fairy Tale Transforma 1 tions.' In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1971, 94-116.

Secondary Sources Bremond, C. Logique du recit. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Greimas, A.J. 'A la recherche des modeles de transformation.' In Semantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Levi-Strauss, C. 'La Structure et la forme. Reflexions sur un ouvrage de Vladimir Propp.' In Anthropologie structurale deux. Paris: Plon, 1973.

Richards Maranda, P., ed. Soviet Structural Folkloristics. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Shukman, A. 'The Legacy of Propp.' Essays in Poetics 1.2 ( 1976): 82-94. Todorov, T. 'Les Transformations narratives.' In Poetique de la Prose. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (b. England, 1893-d. 1979) Literary critic and theorist. The English School at the University of Cambridge was established in 1917; LA. Richards was one of its first teachers. A philosopher by academic training, Richards imposed a theoretical rigour and logical exactitude on the study of English *literature that was unusual for that historical moment. Immersed in psychology, semantics and aesthetics, he tried to give the emerging discipline of literary criticism a scientific grounding. In 1929 Richards left Cambridge for Peking. After spending several years abroad, he eventually settled at Harvard in 1939. His influence on Anglo-American criticism derives mainly from his early work (1922-38), the latter part of his career being devoted to the propagation of Basic English - a prospective universal language that is built on 850 words - and to language-training and pedagogy in general. (See *theory und pedagogy.) The cornerstone of Richards' theory of literature is the distinction between the referential and emotive uses of language, first developed as early as 1923 with C.K. Ogden (The Meaning of Meaning 150). In Poetries and Sciences, Richards makes this distinction more precise by using the term 'pseudo-statement' to define an utterance in which the evocative function is dominant and the term 'statement' to define an utterance in which the symbolic function is dominant: a pseudo-statement is justified entirely by its effect in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes ... A statement, on the other hand, is justified by its truth, that is its correspondence, in a highly technical sense, with the fact to which it points' (Poetries and Sciences 60). Hence an utterance 'may be used for the sake of the reference, true or false, which it causes. This is the scientific use of language. But it may also be used for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by the reference it occasions. This is the emotive use of language' (Principles of Literary Criticism 268). (See *reference/referent.)

Science, therefore, yields a body of undistorted references whose criteria for legitimacy are empirical verifiability and correspondence with objective reality, whereas literature yields a body of possibly distorted references whose criteria for legitimacy are coherence, verisimilitude and sincerity. As science organizes the external realm of reference, so poetry organizes the internal realm of impulse and attitude. Richards defines attitudes as 'imaginal or incipient activities or tendencies to actions' (Principles of Literary Criticism 112). The function of poetry is to integrate these attitudes and impulses, converting 'a welter of responses' into a 'systematized complex response' (Principles of Literary Criticism 183) and thus creating in the reader 'a balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not through the force of its exclusions' (Principles of Literary Criticism 248). This equilibrium of synaesthesis is the vibrant poise of a completely coordinated individual whose harmonized attitudes are 'imaginal' rather than 'stimulative.' Thus poetry has a compensatory or therapeutic function. It is a momentary stay against the chaos and confusion of 20th-century life, a fictive substitute for a religious belief that has been challenged by science. Like his predecessor Matthew Arnold and his contemporary Wallace Stevens, Richards believes that poetry is a source not only of value and significance but also of harmony and consolation. Richards' qualitative distinction between referential and emotive language implies a rejection of the 'Proper Meaning Superstition' 'the common belief ... that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered' (The Philosophy of Rhetoric 11). Richards contends that such a view is committed to the mistaken proposition that meaning is context-neutral. He proposes as an alternative the context theorem of meaning. 'Freud has taught us that a dream may mean a dozen different things; he has persuaded us that some symbols are, as he says, "over-determined" and mean many different selections from among their causes. This theorem goes further, and regards all discourse outside the technicalities of science - as overdetermined, as having multiplicity of meaning' (The Philosophy of Rhetoric 38-9). (See *Freud, *overdetermination, *discourse.) Richards' theorem emphasizes 'the interinanimation of 451

Richards words' in a "text, claiming that 'the senses of an author's words are ... are resultants which we arrive at only through the interplay of the interpretative possibilities of the whole utterance' (The Philosophy of Rhetoric 55). The reader must attempt to decipher the 'systematic ambiguity' (The Philosophy of Rhetoric 73) of the text. Richards' dichotomous view of linguistic functions and his concomitant view of literary language as inherently ambiguous influenced not only his students (the most famous of whom were "William Empson and *F.R. Leavis) but also *New Criticism, the formalist school of criticism that reigned supreme in the U.S.A. from the 19403 to the 19705. New Criticism is grounded in Richards' distinction between scientific and literary language as well as in his valorization of ambiguity, a nonpejorative term for the capacity of language to sustain multiple meanings. The notion that ambiguity is the root condition of all literary discourse as well as the key to its richness, complexity and concentration became an integral aspect of the New Critical view that *irony, *paradox and tension are definitive aspects of the work of art. This movement also owes to Richards the idea that the analysis and assessment of a work of art can take place only with reference to certain intrinsic criteria - form, coherence, poise, organic unity (the interdependence of parts and whole), and so forth. Extrinsic criteria, such as facts that might be gleaned from biography and history, are deemed to be inadmissible. The aesthetic object is to be seen as autonomous and selfcontained. Though Richards was more in tune with the psychology of reader response than were his New Critical counterparts (they in fact derisively labelled such audience-oriented concerns the affective fallacy), their whole process of practical criticism - the close reading of individual texts, especially poems, with particular attention to intrinsic verbal texture and structure - derives from Richards' eponymous book, Practical Criticism. (See also '''readerresponse criticism.) In Practical Criticism Richards analyses the responses of his students to poems unfamiliar to them in order to point out ten characteristic errors in understanding, interpretation and evaluation: (i) failure to make out the plain sense of a poem, not to mention its feeling, tone and intention; (2) failure to grasp the sound and rhythm of a poem; (3) failure to

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grasp the function of imagery; (4) indulgence in mnemonic irrelevances, personal associations that have nothing to do with the words on the page; (5) stereotyped and stock responses; (6) sentimentality; (7) inhibition; (8) doctrinal adhesions, belief-systems that the reader improperly uses to determine the truth and value of poetic utterances; (9) technical presuppositions such as the view that poetry is not poetry if it neither rhymes nor has a regular meter; and (10) general critical preconceptions, prior demands made upon poetry as a result of theories - conscious or unconscious about its nature and value. By inductively examining his students' responses to poems that ranged from John Donne's Holy Sonnets to the Reverend G.A.Studdert Kennedy's More Rough Rhymes of a Padre, Richards demonstrates that the undergraduate elite of Cambridge can go badly wrong in their understanding, interpretation and evaluation of poems they have never seen before. What inferences one draws from his study are open to debate, but Richards concludes that defective pedagogy is responsible for the bizarre misreadings that even intelligent students are capable of producing. What is not open to debate is the fact that Richards' method of practical criticism has been enormously influential and that it is still the method of teaching poetry to undergraduate students, the hegemony of contemporary literary theory notwithstanding. GREIG HENDERSON

Primary Sources Richards, LA. Beyond. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. - Coleridge on Imagination. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1934. - Complementarities: Uncollected Essays. Ed. John Paul Russo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976. - How to Read a Page: A Course in Efficient Reading, with an Introduction to One Hundred Great Words. New York: Norton, 1942. - Interpretation in Teaching. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. - Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932. - The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. - Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929. - Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924.

Ricoeur - Science and Poetry. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926. 2nd ed.; 1935. 3rd ed., Poetries and Sciences, with a Reurientation and Notes. New York: Norton, 1970. - Speculative Instruments. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955- and C.K. Ogden. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923. - C.K. Ogden and James Wood. The foundations of Aesthetics. London: Allen and Unvvin, 1922.

Secondary Sources Brower, Reuben, Helen Vendler, and John Hollander, eds. LA. Richards: Essays in His Honor. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. London: Chatto and Windus, 1951. Eekete, John. The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980. Graff, Gerald. Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma. 2nd. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Hotoph, W.H.N. Language, Thought and Comprehension: A Case Study of the Writings of LA. Richards. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study of the Methods of Modern Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1948. Karnani, Chetan. Criticism, Aesthetics, and Psychology: A Study of the Writings of LA. Richards. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1977. Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956. Needham, John. 'The Completest Mode': LA. Richards and the Continuity of English Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1982. Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk: New Directions, 1941. Russo, John Paul. l.A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Schiller, Jerome P. LA. Richards' Theory of Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.

Ricoeur, Paul (b. France, 1913-) Philosopher and Christian activist. Paul Ricoeur's range of interests is as remarkable as the suggestiveness of his contributions to whichever debate he enters. Ricoeur, whose strongest institutional links are to the universities of Paris and Chicago, is well

known for his contributions to philosophical anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, ethics, theology, phenomenology, *hermeneutics, and literary theory. His political and social writings are less well known than they deserve to be, but this may change with the changing intellectual climate, the recent publication of a number of his lectures on Marx, *Althusser and Weber, and the growth of interest in connections between historicity and human agency. (See *psychoanalytic theory, *phenomenological criticism.) In his early volumes devoted to The Philosophy of the Will (1950-60), Ricoeur came to recognize with increasing force that the need for a 'poetics of the will' would require a major investigation of the role of language in the expression and recovery of meaning. It is this project, this poetics, which has taken up much of the remainder of his career and has made him an important figure in literary theory. Ricoeur's background in the existentialism of Gabriel Marcel and the phenomenology of *Edmund Husserl might have marooned him in a disciplinary backwater, vainly endeavouring to accommodate the claims of rigour and mystery, intentionality and divinity. (See *intention/intentionality.) However, his study of the symbolism of evil (as stain, sin, guilt) prepared him for a linguistic turn to symbol, metaphor, "text, and narrative, a shift in emphasis from the rigours of phenomenological description to a hermeneutic phenomenology. (See ""metonymy/metaphor.) If, as hermeneutics traditionally affirms, understanding precedes explanation, how can those distinct activities performed in that sequence be used to connect semantic innovation with a more inclusive *semiosis where knowing and communicating, sense but also reference, are both possible and intelligible? Well versed in the theories of reflexivity enunciated by Descartes, Husserl and "Heidegger, and yet still affirmative in his emphasis on the productive rather than the partial nature of signifying systems, Ricoeur proceeds to consider semantic innovation first on the level of the figure, rewriting Aristotle's Poetics in The Rule of Metaphor (1978), perhaps his most difficult yet rewarding book. This work consists of eight 'studies,' patient and generous engagements with some of the most influential ancient and modern work on linguistic meaning. Ricoeur distinguishes between a semantics of the word and a semantics of the sentence,

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Ricoeur showing how 20th-century emphases on the latter 'cannot but assign the phenomena of meaning-change to the history of word usage' (Rule 5). French *structuralism shares with Saussurean linguistics a valid but (from the standpoint of a poetics of the will) insufficiently purposive theory of meaning, despite its recognition of the primacy of the word in the process of semantic innovation. Ricoeur feels the need to move from the semantic to the hermeneutic level, shifting his focus from the sentence both back to the word and forward to discourse. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure.) Metaphor can be situated in the scene of interpretation, where the fact of its contributing to both sense and reference justifies a renewed claim for "literature as heuristic, a mode of learning reality. Ricoeur does not argue that metaphor affords the sole access to reality, or that hermeneutics offers the only means of accounting for figuration. However, Aristotle was shrewder than most of his successors for esteeming metaphor as highly as he did and for reasons which Ricoeur painstakingly reconstructs. Metaphor is crucial because it originates in the 'tension' between the existential and relational functions of the verb to be (248); it rules a definable and valuable domain, where particular forms of ""discourse variously encourage us to experience this figure not simply or predominantly as 'aberrant attribution' (Rule 21) or 'ontological vehemence' (249) but as the appropriate and inevitable dynamism of meaning (Aristotle's epiphora). The dynamism of metaphorical meaning is for Ricoeur not a flight from identity but its necessary reconstitution in relation to that textual identity which moves 'between the Charybdis of logical identity and the Scylla of the identity of identity and difference' (The Text' 175). The text is the product of invention (both discovery and creation [Rule 306]) for its author and for its readers, and this process is distinguished by a 'dialectical structure' (Interpretation Theory 72) in both instances. The text comes into being as written signs whose materiality marks in an especially graphic way the 'exteriorization of discourse' (43); however, the text thus distanced from its author can be appropriated by the reader through a productive dialectic between otherness and ownness, distanciation and appropriation. (See *sign.) In his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricoeur clarifies the relation between his dy-

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namic, dialectical hermeneutics and theories of meaning and action promoted by Marx, Weber, Mannheim, and others. The early Marx, up to and including The German Ideology, is interpreted as moving from consciousness to *praxis in a way that anticipates Ricoeur's own itinerary. However, Ricoeur is not willing to follow Marx in limiting the role of representation to ideological distortion in the scene of praxis; nor can he accept Marx's reductive appeal to 'the language of real life.' Linguistic representation, whether considered as rhetoric or ""ideology, helps constitute praxis and must therefore be understood as part of rather than apart from (and opposed to) what really happens. This does not mean that Ricoeur has joined the camp of (to use his own designation) 'modern pre-Socratics' like ""Derrida or antihumanist Marxists like Althusser. There is no withdrawal of interest from the living individual and the poetics of the human will. The problematic mediation of the actual creates a need for articulation of the potential (utopia), and the dynamic transformation that distinguishes metaphor on the level of the figure is hence replayed on the level of discourse as a dialectic between ideology and Utopia. What ensues is not the cynicism or quietism that too readily attends the deconstructionist logic of the supplement but rather a sense of possibility and purpose authorized by a poetics of the complement. (See ""deconstruction, ""supplementarity.) Ideology confers identity and wholeness on that which is merely a prefiguration of those attributes; Utopia entails a transfiguration of reality whereby what has been prefigured comes to pass. In these lectures ideology is no longer the other of science, subject to a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' in the interpretative tradition of Marx, ""Nietzsche and ""Freud (Freud and Philosophy 35), but a term in the pair ideology/utopia which illuminates 'the unsolved general question of imagination as a philosophical problem' (Ideology and Utopia i). In the three volumes of Time and Narrative Ricoeur completes the project begun in The Rule of Metaphor. He had concluded the earlier work by insisting on the links between temporality and narrativity, invention and distanciation, while examining the philosophical grounds of his own arguments. His points of departure in the trilogy are Augustine (Book xi of the Confessions) and Aristotle's Poetics once

Ricoeur again. The notion of *aporia so prominent in deconstructionist discourse is freshly inflected as part of a characteristic move from mise-enabime to mise-en-intrigue, from serial "Indeterminacy to sequence and story. (See *story/ plot.) With a systematic austerity worthy of Althusser, Ricoeur distinguishes three kinds of imitation as temporal functions: prefiguration (past; the order of action), configuration (current; the order of narrative), and refiguration (future; the order of life). The power of this model is made clear through a review of the treatment of time in analytical philosophy, and an assessment of modern theories of historiography. Ricoeur recognizes the tendency to think of fiction as 'owning' narative while history 'owns' reference, but he resists such claims to exclusive title by showing how rhetoric and narrative feature in even the most sober attempts to reconstruct rather than redescribe reality. Aligning the imagination with continuity rather than causality, Ricoeur reaffirms that that which is narratable is always already symbolically mediated, and those mediations are challengingly exemplified in fiction. He thus concentrates in part 3 on 'The Configuration of Time in Fictional Narrative,' endeavouring to 'characterize the nature of the narrative function without giving in to any sort of essentialism' (2: 4). (See *essentialism.) The only 'transcendence' allowable is that which moves from the work (in whatever medium the fiction is made) to the world it projects outside itself, and thence to the 'life-world of the reader' (2: 160). He shows himself to be an accomplished reader of classics by *Woolf, Mann and Proust, before returning to metaphor (2: 148). The 'novel about time ... preserves, in my opinion, an indelible privilege ... [as] the 'silent sister' of the epic of death and the tragedy of culture' (2: 117), Ricoeur says, thus confirming his commitment to a generously inclusive and engaged poetics. The fourth and concluding part of Time and Narrative begins with an elaboration of the view (derived from Augustine) that 'there has never been a phenomenology of temporality free of every aporia, and that in principle there can never be one' (3: 3). The return to Augustine (and to Husserl and Heidegger) is a return to the 'phenomenology of time-consciousnesss' and the risky business of philosophy which helps radicalize the activities of 'historiography and narratology.' An aporetics of temporality

squares off against a poetics of historical and fictional narrative in order to show how Ricoeur's linguistic turn has maintained its 'relatedness to the real' (3: 5). He has been motivated by a discursive necessity rather than an aestheticist or otherwise escapist impulse. To analyse temporality is to multiply aporias, while to configure it in narrative is to claim aporia for denouement. However, Ricoeur is not intent on denying 'the ultimate unrepresentability of time' (3: 243), but only on establishing the opportunities as well as the limitations deriving from that fact. He readily admits that there is no compelling reason for resorting to narrative forms as antidotes to indeterminacy, and his final caveat appropriately blends will and humility while looking forward to the human subject of Soi-meme comme un autre: 'It ought not to be said that our eulogy to narrative unthinkingly has given life again to the claims of the constituting subject to master all meaning' (3: 274; emphasis added). Throughout his life, from his internment as a prisoner of war to his installation in high academic office, Paul Ricoeur has remained faithful to a credo that appears to have room for us all - if on exacting conditions, yet without prejudice: 'Beyond every possible suspicion, we must have confidence in the powerful institution of language. This is a wager that brings its own justification' (Time and Narrative 2: 22). LEN FINDLAY

Primary Sources Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Trans, and intro. Don Ihde. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1974. - Fallible Man. Trans. C. Kelbley. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965. - Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. E.V. Kohak. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1966. - Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. D. Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. - From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Trans. Kathleen Blarney and John B. Thompson. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1991. - Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. - History and Truth. Trans, and intro. C. Kelbley. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1965.

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Riffaterre - Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1967. - Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1976. - Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. - Political and Social Essays. Ed. D. Stewart and J. Bien. Trans. D. Siewert et al. Athens: Ohio UP, 1974- The Reality of the Historical Past. Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1984. - A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. Mario J. Valdes. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1991. - The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, Sj. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; Cambridge UP, 1981. - Soi-meme comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990. - The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. E. Buchanan. Boston: Beacon P, 1969. - 'The Text as Dynamic Identity.' In The Identity of the Literary Text. Ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985, 175-86. - Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin Blarney and David Pellauer. 3 vols. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984-8.

Secondary Sources Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Ihde, Don. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1971. Kemp, T. Peter, and David M. Rasmussen, eds. The Narrative Path: The Later Works of Paul Ricoeur. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1989. Klemm, David E. The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell UP, 1983. Reagan, Charles E., ed. Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Athens: Ohio UP, 1979. Thompson, John B. Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. University of Ottawa Quarterly 55.4 (Oct.-Dec., 1985). A la recherche du sens/In search of meaning. A special issue on Ricoeur. Valdes, Mario J. Introduction. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1991, 3-40.

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Riffaterre, Michael (b. France, 1924-) Literary theorist. After studies at the University of Lyons and the University of Paris in the 19405, Riffaterre emigrated to the U.S.A. and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1955. His dissertation, Le Style des Pleiades de Gobineau: Essai d'application d'une methode stylistique, won the Ansley Award and was published by Columbia University Press (1957). After teaching at New York University until 1964, he took up an appointment at Columbia, where he held the Blanche W. Knopf Chair in French Literature from 1975 to 1982, chaired the Department of French (1974-83), and was appointed University Professor in 1982. He has held several prestigious visiting professorships in the U.S.A., Canada and France. He is general editor of the Romanic Review and, since 1987, directs the School of Theory and Criticism at Dartmouth College. Riffaterre's principal concern in his theoretical writings has been to re-orient the search for the definition of literariness in the reading process itself. A priori theorizing on the nature of ""literature or attempts to apply categories and methods borrowed from other disciplines - no matter how closely related - can only displace properties specific to literature or risk overshadowing them with concerns pertinent mostly to those other disciplines. Only by focusing on the very practice of literature, the actual reading process, Riffaterre argues, can the categories and the modes of operation specific to the literary *text be delineated. Beginning with the stylistic tradition which has always presented literary discourse's particularity as heightened expressivity by deviation from normal usage, Riffaterre argues that whatever norms or rules from which literary discourse diverges are not pre-existing linguistic or grammatical ones but norms set up within the text itself in patterns perceived by readers engaged in the reading process. (See *discourse.) His concepts of the 'average reader' and of the 'superreader' are not meant as substitutes for any actual reader or for some abstract set of functions of communication. Both of these concepts are in fact collections of readers' responses to specific segments of literary texts. (See ""reader-response criticism.) What elicits these responses are sudden breaks with a perceived pattern (grammatical, seman-

Riffaterre tic, rhetorical) established within the text itself. These stylistic devices (consisting of both the pattern and its break) constrain the reading process by intensifying attention on some points rather than others. For Riffaterre, all aspects of literariness are determined and defined in and through the reading process. The sense of 'estrangement' (*defamiliarization) which some of the Russian formalists identified as the essence of literature is not an effect experienced through a contrast with norms available in reality or in some coherent sense of everyday experience. (See Russian *formalism.) For Riffaterre, such norms are generated within the text itself - often, precisely at the same time as they are contravened. Similarly, the reader's presumed expectations are not to be determined through the a priori constitution of a Weltanschauung (cf. *Wolfgang Iser) but are produced in the reading process itself, by the text's ability to summon the reader's idiomatic and textual memory in relation to itself. Particularly successful sets of stylistic devices become cliches and descriptive systems. They are integrated into the reader's linguistic competence so much so that modifying them becomes a new stylistic device in itself referring the reader back to the original cliche as a kind of *hypogram, a text already present in the cultural baggage the reader brings to bear in attempting to decipher the text. (See *competence/performance.) Describing and mapping out all stylistic devices is primary to the analysis which takes place at a second, hermeneutic stage of the reading process. (See *hermeneutics.) This second stage is, according to Riffaterre, a requirement particular to literary texts. In the first, heuristic stage the reader relies essentially on basic linguistic competence to get the 'meaning' of the text (whatever realities the text at first appears to be about). In this first interpretation literary language is still conceived of as practical, as primarily mimetic: it is still experienced as referring to reality despite the indirection imposed by the text's use of tropes and figures. (See *mimesis, *trope.) Reality is infinitely diverse, whereas what characterizes literary discourse, according to Riffaterre, is its unity, its integrity. Literary texts survive long after the realities they point to or describe have lost all interest or pertinence; and it is this aspect of literariness which literary theory needs to investigate.

Readers remain aware - no matter how farranging or how complex its references may appear - that the text is about one thing. What Riffaterre calls the text's 'significance' is the active process through which the reader is constantly oriented back, beyond the text's mimetic diversity, to its essential unity of form and meaning. Riffaterre emphasizes the experiential nature of significance: to attain it, readers must go through a second, retroactive reading in which they attempt to resolve the discrepancies and contradictions they perceive in the first reading. What creates both the discrepancies and the reader's sense of an ultimate unity is the fact that the text is organized around an absent key word or sentence, a matrix, which makes its presence felt by constantly generating variants of itself through the text's mimesis. Because the matrix also substitutes its own structure for that of the reality the text seems to be about at the mimetic level, its variants appear as 'ungrammaticalities/ as misfits, in the first reading. It is precisely through this perceived ungrammaticality that the matrix becomes available to analysis. Because the ungrammaticalities have to be resolved into latent equivalents (generated by a form of intertextual interference), readers become aware of the presence of another level of meaning in the text. What Riffaterre calls *semiosis consists of all the elements which participate in this promotion of a text's signs from the mimetic level to the level of significance. (See *intertextuality, *sign.) GABRIEL MOYAL

Primary Sources Riffaterre, Michael. 'Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's les Chats.' Yale French Studies 36-7 (1966): 188-230. - Essais de stylistique structural. Paris: Flammarion, 1971. - Fictional Truth. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. - La Production du texte. 1979. Text Production. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. - The Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington/London: Indiana UP, 1978.

Secondary Sources de Man, Paul. 'Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading.' Diacritics 9.4 (1981): 17-35.

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Robertson, Durant Waite, Jr. (b. U.S.A., 1914-92) Medievalist and historical critic. Beginning his graduate career at the University of North Carolina with an extensive M.A. thesis which studied the Renaissance controversy over 'katharsis' in Aristotle's definition of tragedy, D.W. Robertson proceeded with a textual examination of a Middle English confessional manual, Robert Mannyng's Handlynge Synne, for his Ph.D. (1946). Robertson became aware of substantial discrepancies between modern evaluations of classical and medieval texts and interpretative reflections on them written during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (See *text.) Central to his early work was his recognition that for medieval readers the Bible and its traditional commentaries were, with medieval versions of certain Roman classics, foundational to a richly intertextual medieval praxis. (See *intertextuality.) Among formative interpreters for the Middle Ages of scriptural tradition, he discovered St. Augustine to be of primary influence, and that Augustinian formulations on aesthetic and hermeneutic as much as theological matters had, until well after the 14th century, almost canonical status among medieval authors. (See *hermeneutics, *canon.) Especially after going to Princeton (1948), Robertson wrote a number of influential articles, largely on Anglo-Norman and medieval French texts, illustrating something of the character of medieval intertextuality and literary self-consciousness. In 1951, with his then colleague B.F. Huppe, he brought together the substance and method of his earlier work in 'Piers Plowman' and Scriptural Tradition. This study, dependent for its insights upon primary textual materials available to the 14th-century author, stirred almost immediate controversy. Fruyt and Chaff (1963), actually first drafted by Robertson and Huppe in this same period, undertook the same approach to Chaucer. Adversarial critics called the authors 'neoAugustinians' or 'neo-exegetes.' When Huppe shortly thereafter left Princeton, the derogatory appellation 'Robertsonian' soon began to attach itself to any who seemed to follow Robertson's inclination to approach medieval texts from the perspective afforded by medieval works of literary theory, textual commentary, pictorial iconography, and scriptural exegesis. Robertson himself called his approach 'Histori-

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cal Criticism/ which he defined as 'that kind of literary analysis which seeks to reconstruct the intellectual attitudes and the cultural ideals of a period in order to reach a fuller understanding of its literature' (English Institute Essays; repr. Essays in Medieval Culture [1980] 3). This he distinguished from literary history, as then conceived, citing the literary historian's preoccupation 'with purely literary rather than with intellectual traditions.' But in the 19508, when adherents of *New Criticism still dominated medieval literary scholarship, Robertson's effectual 'Catholicization' of medieval vernacular texts (by referring their idiom to contemporary intellectual traditions) seems to have been the chief irritant in many quarters. By A Preface to Chaucer (1962), when he had extended his study of medieval iconography considerably, his interest in 'stylistic history' had begun to evidence the influence of art historians Emile Male, and Heinrich Wolfflin, as well as the 'psychological history' of phenomenologist J.H. Van den Berg. This Europeanoriented interest in the intellectual history of style was further developed in Abelard and Heloise (1972) in which he considered the reception history of the famous correspondence from medieval to modern times, using it as a guide to understanding the evolution of aesthetic attitudes as revealed in ""literature. In 1969, in the first volume of New Literary History, Robertson had already published 'Some Observations on Method in Literary Studies.' These pages affirm some of the general insights of *Michel Foucault (while wishing for more historical precision in Foucault's 'evidences'). The relationship of Robertson's method to that of Foucault may be contextualized usefully by Robertson's prefatory comment to the article's third reprinting (1980): 'It seems to me that students are often taught to be skeptical about the beliefs and ideas of the past without being taught also that current beliefs are equally contingent and transitory. This does not mean that verbal "truths," which always have a date and place, should not be respected when they have operational validity, but that their contingent nature should be recognized, and their practical function (if any) in the society that produces them should be considered. If they are or were useful tools, they deserve the utmost respect. And this is true in spite of the fact that verbal formulations useful at some time in the past may no longer be useful.' Robertson's 'Robertsonianism/ often as

Rorty distinct from that of those associated with it by influence, is most concisely articulated, as theory and as method, in his 'Historical Criticism' (1950) and 'Observations on Method' (1969) essays. (See also *phenomenological criticism.) DAVID LYLE J E F F R E Y

Primary Sources Robertson, D.W., Jr. Abt'lard and Hcloise. New York: Dial P, 1972. - Chaucer's London. New York: Wiley P, 1968. - Essays in Medieval Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. - The Literature of Medieval England. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. - A Preface to Chaucer. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962. — 'Some Observations on Method in Literary Studies.' New Literary History i (1969): 21-33. - and B.F. Huppe. Fruyt and Chaff: Studies in Chaucer's Allegories. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963. - and B.F. Huppe. 'Piers Plowman' and Scriptural Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1951.

Secondary Sources Utley, Francis L. 'Robertsonian Redivivus.' Romance Philology 19 (1965): 250-60.

Rorty, Richard (b. U.S.A., 1931-) Philosopher. Rorty took his B.A. and MA. at the University of Chicago (1949, 1952) and his doctorate at Yale University (1956). After military service (1957-8) his first appointment was at Wellesley College (1958-61); the bulk of his career was at Princeton University (1961-82). His increasingly critical view of analytic philosophy was publicly voiced in his American Philosophical Association presidential address (Eastern Division 1979), published in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and consummated in his departure from Princeton's philosophy department to become the University of Virginia's Kenan Professor of Humanities (1982). Early recognition included a MacArthur Foundation Prize (1981-6), visiting fellowships at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study (1982-3) and the Australian National University's Humanities Research Centre (1982), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983). A visiting fellowship at the

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1986-7) showed his European popularity. Rorty's views enjoy regular discussion in publications ranging from disciplinary journals to New York's The Village Voice. Rorty's contribution to postmodernist thought has three aspects: the first is his critique of traditional and analytic philosophy's epistemological assumption that human knowledge is grounded in necessity or a 'given' or principles of reason (foundationalism) and its conception of truth as the correspondence of sentences to facts and so of language as essentially referential and descriptive (correspondism). (See *postmodernism.) The second aspect is Rorty's endorsement of 'edifying' philosophy: revolutionary thought as exemplified by *Wittgenstein's and *Heidegger's later work. The third is Rorty's efforts to establish connections between his vision of a post-philosophical culture and his political liberalism and individualism. These efforts seem prompted equally by interest in and by criticism of apparent politically conservative and even resignatory implications in his thought. Rorty's most important contribution lies in his critique of traditional and analytic philosophy's self-bestowed status as repository of capital-T Truth and capital-R Reason and hence as supreme overseer of intellectual inquiry. His impeccable analyst's credentials lent special weight to his criticism and even though the bulk of analytic philosophers have tried to dismiss his writings and lectures as hopelessly relativistic, Rorty's impact on students has been exceeded only by his impact on disciplines ranging from political studies to comparative "literature and film. Rorty finds in W.V.O. Quine's critique of analytic truth and Wilfrid Sellars' critique of elemental perceptual 'givens' exposure of the *myth that philosophy has access to ahistorical Necessity and Certainty. He is unwilling to accept the idea that philosophy has a fundamental criterion for correctness in sameness of meaning or that awareness of a problematic world begins - and ends - with 'internal' phenomenal elements which are the raw material of conceptualized thought and perception. In this connection Rorty also relies heavily on Donald Davidson's rejection of conceptualscheme *pluralism, insisting that we do not have diverse and incommensurable ways of organizing a common but somehow perspective-neutral reality. In replacing the corre459

Rousset spondence theory of truth with 'conversational' standards, spurning foundationalism in favour of established practices and unmasking capital-R Rationality as only entrenched history, Rorty denies epistemology its claimed special subject-matter and criteria for correctness. He argues that philosophy is only, in Michael Oakeshott's phrase, another voice in the conversation of mankind. The rejection of correspondence, foundationalism, and so of philosophy's rational-adjudicator role, turns on Rorty's pragmatism and is encapsulated in the pivotal mirror metaphor of his first monograph - which echoes *Nietzsche's complaint in Daybreak that the history of epistemology is like a series of confused efforts to either grasp the things reflected in the mirror or to see the mirror independently of what it reflects. (See *metonymy/metaphor.) Rorty mocks the conception of knowledge and language as mirroring nature, of knowledge as 'internal' replication of reality and of language as vehicle for faithful facsimiles which are amenable to testing for representational accuracy. Rorty reminds us that we cannot escape language: that truth is always internal to language and that we cannot establish a 'correspondence' or iconic fidelity between what is thought or said and what is, when these are conceived as distinct relata. Rorty's pragmatism is evident in his critical style, for he does not - and cannot - offer philosophical arguments against traditional positions. Instead he comes at his targets from many sides and in many different ways and moods to show us the tenuousness or vacuity of the positions he attacks. But though he extols the classical pragmatists, he under-emphasizes John Dewey's commitment to progress in inquiry. In place of advancement of knowledge he offers newness of 'vocabularies' or discourses; in place of progress he offers greater 'productivity/ not through betterment of past and current discourses but from novel construals of our predecessors' construals of history. (See *discourse.) Even more than the political implications of his views (Richard Bernstein), this area of Rorty's thought has prompted the sharpest philosophical criticism. Many read Rorty as having embraced a 'discourse relativism' which leaves him without standards for inquiry (Charles Taylor) and reduces intellectual activity to 'just talk' (John Caputo). Though his critique of philosophy as self-styled 'adjudicator of reason' is very pow-

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erful, some feel that Rorty's conception of modern science as just another discourse is unacceptable because of the explanatory power of scientific theories and the fact that the scientific notion of 'objectivity' is itself a product of the scientific enterprise and not a confused philosophical imposition (Bernard Williams). The continuity of scientific progress does seem to be more than just our history of science and manifests what Dewey characterized as progress in inquiry. It is also doubtful that Rorty has either basis for his confidence in our ability to endlessly generate discourses novel enough to sustain virtually continuous intellectual revolution or grounds for his implicit view that the world will support near-infinitely varying 'discourses.' C.G. P R A D O Primary Sources Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. - Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. - Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. - Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Philosophical Papers, vol. i. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979 (with minor corrections 1980). - The Linguistic Turn. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967.

Secondary Sources Kolenda, Konstantin. Rorty's Humanistic Pragmatism. Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1990. Malachowski, Alan, ed. Reading Rorty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Prado, C.G. The Limits of Pragmatism. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P, 1987.

Rousset, Jean (b. Switzerland, 1910-) Literary critic. Jean Rousset studied law and arts at the University of Geneva, worked as a lecteur de franqais at the University of Munich and, after four years of research and study in Paris (1946-50), became assistant and then professor of French ""literature in the Faculty of Arts at Geneva. In his critical work he first focused on the iyth century as the context for a study of the

Said baroque movement in literature and the visual arts. He then turned to genre studies, in particular the epistolary novel and the personal diary. His critical approach, based on hermeneutic *structuralism, centred on the links between form and textual interpretation. Akin to *Georges Poulet, *Jean Starobinski and Jean-Pierre Richard, but closest to Marcel Raymond, Jean Rousset has been associated with the *Geneva School. (See also *genre criticism, *phenomenological criticism, *hermeneutics.) His first work, La Litterature de I'age baroque en France (1953), sets out Rousset's main critical interests: careful attention to the themes and symbols of literary genres, authors and periods; preoccupation with the self and the place of the artist's inner world; and the desire to bring together various forms of art. (See *theme, *self/other.) His master's thesis, Forme et signification (1962), best defines Rousset's critical approach. He views 'art as the creation of forms revealing their meaning' (vii). Meaning does not precede the work: it can only be discovered through the formal network that supports it. Form is an ordered series of repetitions and transformations - 'a simultaneously occurring network of reciprocal relations' (xiii). Thus the critic must look solely to the work to discern its meaning. In this perspective, the critic becomes a 'historian of the imagination' (7). Mimetic reading will therefore allow the reader to grasp the concept of the work mediated by its formal source, rather than the author's intended meaning. (See *mimesis.) Subsequent essays on 17th-century poetry and theatre, L'lnterieur et I'exterieur (1968), continued to adhere to the principle that the morphology of a work reveals the author's own perception of the world. With the exception of Le Mi/the de Don Juan (1978) and Leurs i/eux se rencontrerent (1981) Rousset examines, in the former, myths from a structural standpoint and, in the latter, the scene de premiere vue as a fundamental Romanesque structure - Rousset next approached the problems of the self, the personal and the diary. (See *myth.) These issues are also evident in his first work on the baroque period, and are developed in Narcisse romancier (1973) and Le Lccteur intime (1986), as well as in several articles, in particular in 'Preambule semitheorique' (Narcisse romancier), which outlines the typology of the first-person narrative from the standpoint of narrative *discourse.

Of all the members of the Geneva School, Rousset was the most sensitive to form. His critical work constitutes an oveview of literary study since 1950. While Rousset follows a rationalist tendency that sometimes obscures individual characteristics, favouring transparency over an equally significant opacity, he never converts relations into fixed elements, and he always captures their movement and dynamic. His skill can be seen in Passages (1990), a series of essays on intercrossings, exchanges and interferences in the narrative. In the final analysis, as he said of the novelists he examined in Passages, Jean Rousset practised a 'semiologie amoureuse. PIERRE HEBERT

Primary Sources Rousset, Jean. Anthologie de la poesie baroque franqaise. Paris: Armand Colin, 1961. - Forme et signification. Paris: Jose Cord, 1962. - L'lnterieur et I'exterieur: Essais sur la poesie et sur le theatre au XVHe siecle. Paris: Jose Corti, 1968. - Le Lecteur intime: De Balzac au journal. Paris: Jose Corti, 1986. - Leurs yeux se rencontrerent: La scene de premiere vue dans le roman. Paris: Jose Corti, 1981. - La Litterature de I'age baroque en France: Circe et le paon. Paris: Jose Corti, 1953. - Le My the de Don Juan. Paris: Armand Colin, 1978. - Narcisse romancier: Essai sur la premiere personne dans le roman. Paris: Jose Corti, 1973. - Passages, echanges et transpositions. Paris: Jose Corti, 1990.

Said, Edward W. (b. Palestine, 1935-) Literary critic. Edward Said was awarded his A.B. by Princeton in 1957, his A.M. by Harvard in 1960 and his Ph.D., also by Harvard, in 1964. With the exception of acting as a tutor at Harvard and various visiting appointments at other American universities, his entire career has been at Columbia University, where he is now Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His influence in the American academy has been primarily as one of the pre-eminent introducers of contemporary European critical theory, particularly as a critical supporter of *Michel Foucault and opponent of *Jacques Derrida, but his international prestige is based on his position as perhaps the best-known postcolonial critic. (See *post-colonial theory.)

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Said Said's reputation was established by his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), originally his doctoral dissertation. Still very important as Conrad scholarship it is perhaps most interesting as a precursor of various issues Said has followed throughout his criticism. His study depends greatly on Conrad's correspondence and presents as central the relationship between Conrad's development of self and the fiction which he authored. Said denies a simplistic view of intention, that the meaning of the fiction is merely what Conrad intended to say, but posits that the product must be seen as the result of an intent, in this case to create a control seldom available in Conrad's life. (See *self/other, ""intention/intentionality.) Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) remains Said's major contribution to literary criticism in general. His own assessment of the book's historical position, in his preface to the 1985 edition, gives a perceptive look at its value. There he emphasizes a *binary opposition which has continued to be central to his thought, that between filiation and affiliation. Filiation reflects a biological inevitability, the fact of son-ness, of being the product of a parent. Affiliation is instead a choice, in which something chooses to be associated with a metaphorical parent, or even sibling. Thus Beginnings is concerned with the very possibility of beginning. If, as has been claimed by many contemporary critics, *literature is filiation, always controlled by that literature which has gone before, there is no beginning, only a series of false origins. But is it possible to consider any *text, any thing, without asserting that it has an at least arguable 'beginning?' Said's answer is that regardless of the validity, which he admits, of various contemporary arguments about the impossibility of the original, there is always something which can be said to be the origin. Said finds this in the intention of the author. As in his study of Conrad, this is not a simple intention, but one shaped by all the forces of society, one which never makes the author into an individual independent of the multitude of forces of the author's world. Said states that his interest is in the text as writing, rather than reading, so he emphasizes what he calls 'the intentional beginning act' which 'authorizes' the text. One of Said's primary objects of study is Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which he chooses expressly because it

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creates a narrative in opposition to what are presented as pre-existent material events. (See *Sigmund Freud.) For Said, Freud's textual method represents the logic of narrative structure based on a beginning in a subject's intention. As Said notes, Freud's problem of creating a verbal representation of a dream demonstrates what seems the inevitable failure of the relationship between author's intention and the resulting text. Beginnings shows Said the introducer. It is an early example of a work identifiably within the American critical tradition which explores many of the major European poststructuralist thinkers. (See *poststructuralism.) As well, in the conclusion Said makes Vico into a commentator of explicit relevance for the 19703, a view which has continued in much contemporary criticism since. Through Vico Said explores the possibility of 'relevance' in contemporary criticism, ending with *Noam Chomsky. Orientalism (1978) might be seen as a major shift for Said, a venture away from the purely literary but, as the comments at the end of Beginnings show, the social context has always been central to Said's concerns. In Orientalism Said examines a number of European representations of the Middle East and shows how concepts of orientalism shaped what purported to be scientific objective observations. Said argues that these did not represent reality but rather were representations which reflected real conditions. He looks at orientalism as an economy controlled by a series of values. Thus many of the elements associated with orientalism are 'standard commodities.' For example, the assumed greater emphasis on sexuality in 'oriental' cultures meant that texts had to exhibit such sexuality in order to be valued as oriental. Said shows that the attacks on such sexuality and the yearning for it were but swings of the same pendulum. Orientalism is an example of what has come to be called 'colonial critique.' Some, including Said, have called it 'post-colonial criticism/ but it might be contrasted with the latter in terms of its object of study. Colonial critique considers the set of problems provided by imperialist views of the colonies. Post-colonial criticism instead examines the products of the postcolonial societies, usually texts by authors such as Ngugi wa Thiongo or George Lamming, who perceive themselves in direct opposition to colonialism.

Said Said's recent work has followed two apparently disparate but philosophically closely related paths. In one, best seen at length in the collection of essays titled The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Said has become a general commentator on the need for a criticism which responds to society. In a discussion at a symposium in 1985 in which Gerald Graff raised serious questions about the value of French theory, Graff went on to suggest that Said is one of the more important recent examples of Anglo-American social criticism. Appropriately, Beginnings was the winner of the first Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. (See *Lionel Trilling.) The other side of Said's publications has been as a spokesman for Palestinian causes. This has led to him becoming arguably the most controversial American academic after Noam Chomsky. Said's political position was clear quite early, most particularly in 'Chomsky and the Question of Palestine' (1975), but it is best seen in his book The Question of Palestine (1979). In some ways a companion volume to Orientalism, Question is Said's statement of the 'truth' of the Middle East. A word such as 'truth' might seem out of place in a poststructuralist age but it suits Said. His concern that authors be aware of their own positions has, however, never led to an intense self-reflexivity on his part. While always quick to assert his identity as a Palestinian he seldom considers his gender or his position within the academic establishment. Said's various public statements take an almost Arnoldian view of the function of criticism but never with Arnoldian disinterestedness. While he may not claim to be neutral, he seems to believe his observations have a truth well beyond that controlled by his interested subjectivity. All of those ideas might be seen in connection with those early comments on Conrad and intention. In Orientalism Said praises Foucault but also emphasizes his rejection of Foucault's view of the author as only a discursive function. For Said the author must be an always active and responsible subject in the text. Thus the critic must not just present a dissemination, as in Said's version of Derrida, but an assessment of what is - the text as a manifestation of the world. Said's influence as a literary critic continues through the lasting presence of Beginnings. His importance as a spokesman for Palestinian

causes may seem in the future to have been only a moment in a political development but it will have been a moment of historical importance. However, his most discussed work, Orientalism, might come to have much less influence than expected. Post-colonial criticism has rapidly gone beyond colonial critique, from criticism of the imperial self's view of the other to exploration of the other as self. Said's comments on post-colonial writers have been brief, almost always limited to the major figures, but also limited by Said's own intention, as in the following: T don't want to over-interpret what Rushdie means, nor do I want to put ideas in his prose that he may not have intended.' Said offers few practical suggestions about how the oppositional critic can function in support of a text rather than in opposition to it. Said's most recent book, Musical Elaborations (1991), has been considered by some an aberration, in which he allows his accomplishments as a pianist to lead him into an intellectual field not his own. Still, some continuity with his other work may be discerned, such as his assessment of *Paul de Man and of his possible connections to Zionism. Much of the book's criticism reflects the work of Theodor Adorno. At the centre of the book is an extended consideration of that very strange figure Glenn Gould, great pianist, thinker, misanthrope, and Cassandra. As Said shows, the musician in performance is at once moving beyond and locked within society; hence the need for the polemical social critic. TERRY GOLDIE

Primary Sources Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. - Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon, 1981. - Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966. - Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. - Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. - The Palestine Question and the American Context. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1979. - The Question of Palestine. New York: New York Times Books, 1979. - The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.

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Sartre

Sartre, Jean-Paul (b. France, 1905-0!. 1980) Novelist, dramatist, philosopher, literary critic. Jean-Paul Sartre's studies at the Louis-le-Grand preparatory school (1922-4) led to training in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure (1924-9) where he met his lifelong companion, *Simone de Beauvoir. In Berlin, having obtained a scholarship for study at the French Institute, he plunged into the phenomenology of *Edmund Husserl (1932-3). (See *phenomenological criticism.) After a sporadic career as lycee philosophy professor (1931-9), Sartre abandoned teaching altogether to devote himself to what he considered his 'neurosis': writing. A brief detention as prisoner-of-war (1940-1) left a lasting effect on Sartre's world-view. Sartre's debut as a dramatist (followed shortly by the liberation of France), his role as journalist and political analyst, and the founding with de Beauvoir of the influential journal Les Temps modernes (1945) were main factors contributing to the meteoric rise of existentialism as the predominant mode of thought for a postwar generation. At the very moment that the revelations of Stalinism's misdeeds convinced many fellow-travelling French intellectuals to sever all ties with the Communist party, Sartre (who had until then remained aloof, if not altogether critical) was closing ranks with the party's program for 'revolutionary action.' Thus, diverging political philosophies in the midst of the Cold War precipitated infamous breaks with Albert Camus as well as with two notable members of the journal's editorial board, Raymond Aron and *Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 1964, Sartre refused a Nobel Prize on moral grounds. Although remaining a feverish writer of criticism and a political activist, Sartre's influence as maitre a penser began to wane in the mid1960s as *structuralism, Althusserianism and a looming *deconstruction took their place as dominant critical approaches. (See *Louis Althusser.) For a majority of readers, Sartre is best known as an author of fiction and theatre. Indeed, he himself believed that the writer committed to engaging the general public in the debate of ideas needed to exploit literary forms whose impact was as immediate and far-reaching as possible. Sartre's literary works illustrate the principal notions of his philosophy. Thus,

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Roquentin, the diary-writing anti-hero of Nausea (1938), describes the anguishing experience of discovering man's contingent existence. The Wall (1939), a collection of five short stories, deals variously with the exercise of freedom in face of a condemnation to death, the gratuitous act, madness and love, weakness, and conformity fostered by a bourgeois upbringing. The fresco of characters in Sartre's unfinished saga novel, The Roads to Freedom (1945, 1949), constitutes an attempt to map out the various choices open to the individual in the context of world war. Among his plays, Dirty Hands (1948), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) and The Condemned of Altona (1959) in particular are concerned with questions of ethics. An early and a late Sartre may be discerned based on his two principal contributions to philosophy: Being and Nothingness (1943) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). But although a shift is noticeable from the emphasis on a solitary subject in the former to a more socialized one in the latter, human consciousness, according to Sartre, tends to follow a uniformly predictable path beginning with the discovery of contingency, through a triumphant realization of radical freedom (The Flies 1943) and ending ideally in a practice of universal responsibility. The difficulties and variations of this path are examined in Sartre's fiction, theatre and, most poignantly, in the autobiography of his childhood, The Words (1964). The contingent nature of the for-itself (the consciousness of humans as lack of being) is reinforced upon our anguished realization of the essential being of the in-itself (things). Thus Hegel's 'unhappy consciousness' becomes a repulsion (Nausea) so powerful that the subject may be driven to an illusion of human essence: 'bad faith,' in Sartrean terminology. But while things simply are, humans exist (due to the faculty of negation), thereby escaping determination. This leads Sartre to his conceptualization of choice of being or the free creation of oneself with its overtones of moral responsibility. Constantly threatened by the presence of the other, freedom is the most precarious given of human existence (No Exit 1944). (See *self/other.) In the Critique, the individual's struggle against the practico-inert requires a *praxis of group action (the 'group in fusion') in order to overcome, if only temporarily, economic need and political oppression. Sartre's essays on contemporary writers (1938-45) collected in Situations, I (1947)

Sartre transformed literary study and interpretation by manoeuvring these practices closer to philosophical considerations. Indeed the work of several writers analysed in those essays *Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge, Camus - may be situated at the crossroads of philosophy and "literature. In What Is Literature? (1947), Sartre contends that a committed literature (one that addresses the controversies of the historical present) can be produced authentically only through the medium of the novel and related art forms deeply rooted in realism. Yet Sartre repeatedly questions this very thesis in a series of literary biographies that stirred controversy for their methodology and polemical thrust (Baudelaire 1947, Saint Genet 1952, The Family Idiot 1971-2). The redemptive activity of aesthetic creation, of which these literary subjects are emblematic, undermines Sartre's rejection of poetry as ahistorical art for art's sake. Sartre also wrote extensively on the theatre, being particularly fascinated by Diderot's notion of the 'actor's paradox/ where the consummate actor sheds his own character to don another, more noble one. Sartre's early work is as much a reaction against Bergson and French neo-Kantians as it is a positive response to phenomenology, dialectical materialism and certain tenets from *Freud and *Nietzsche. The crucial role that descriptive methods borrowed from Hegel and Husserl were to play in Sartre's thought is evident from the first sentence of Being and Nothingness where he praises phenomenology for having reduced 'the existent to the series of appearances that manifest it.' Sartre perceives an aesthetic operation of 'derealization' at work in what Husserl called 'phenomenological reduction.' As early as The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), he radicalizes Husserl's notion of intentionality by claiming that all consciousness is consciousness of something, thus ridding it of any interiority. (See ""intention/ intentionality.) His later reading of *Heidegger would make him aware of certain historical and ontological implications of this radicalization. While rejecting Freud's theory of the unconscious, Sartre transposed much of his thought and applied 'existential psychoanalysis/ coupled later with the progressive-regressive sociological method, adapted from Henri Lefebvre, in virtually all of his critical work. (See also *psychoanalytic theory.) Sartre's political philosophy, developed late

in his career, is coextensive with his suddenly public role after the Second World War. An on-going debate with Marxist philosophers eventually led to his period of fellow-travelling in the early 19505. Sartre's break with the Communist party after the invasion of Hungary did not dampen his affinity for revolutionary movements, particularly in 'Third World' countries, or his openness to the ideas of certain Marxist critics (*Antonio Gramsci, *Georg Lukacs, the *Frankfurt School, *Lucien Goldmann, Lefebvre). Viewing structuralism as a form of antihumanistic neo-positivism, Sartre's plan to counter the advent of competing positions by writing an existentialist-Marxist ethics late in life was ceaselessly deferred by his political activism and, eventually, by poor health. (See also *Marxist criticism, ""materialist criticism.) The complexity of assessing Sartre's influence derives from a thought whose theoretical expressions are intimately enmeshed with a mode of existence that is (through activism, documentary films and de Beauvoir's memoirs) equally well known. A judgment on any one aspect of Sartre's work or on any one of his contributions to contemporary thought is inevitably inflected by his simultaneous 'presence' in some other realm of culture. The unusually long peak-period of Sartre's activity (1945-65), during which he tirelessly put his critical theories to practice, profoundly influenced the shaping of several generations of European thinking. In the 19605, Sartre's abhorrence of pure theory without grounding in action and lived experience ('situation') placed him at odds with Althusserian scientism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as it had, in the 19503, with *Levi-Strauss and other early structuralists. (See *Jacques Lacan.) Yet Sartre's humanism, his fundamental notion of desire as lack and his profound conviction that Marxism was the one unavoidable philosophy of our time situates him paradoxically close to the concerns of these arch-rivals. (See *desire/lack.) And his repeated and varied attempts to address the incommensurables deriving from the Cartesian ontology of split being foreshadows today's general repudiation of all dualistic metaphysics. Owing principally to his prolonged dominance on the French cultural stage, a wave of anti-Sartrean reaction followed his death. This atmosphere of collective dismissal appears to

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de Saussure be dissipating, however, giving way to a general recognition of his unique contributions to Western thought. ROBERT HARVEY

Primary Sources Sartre, Jean-Paul Les Chemins de la liberte. Paris: Gallimard, 1945, 1949. - Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. - Le Diable et le Bon Dieu. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. - L'Etre et le Neant: Essai d'ontologie phenomenologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. - Huis clos. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. - L'Idiot de la famille. Paris: Gallimard, 1971-2. - Les Mains sales. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. - Les Mots. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. - Les Mouches. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. - Le Mur. Paris: Gallimard, 1939. - La Nausee. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. - Qu'est-ce que la litterature? Paris: Gallimard, 1947. - Saint Genet: Comedien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. - Les Sequestres d'Altona. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. - Situations, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. - La Transcendance de I'ego. Paris: Vrin, [1936,] 1965. - ed. Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

Secondary Sources Buisine, Alain. Laideurs de Sartre. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1986. Burnier, Michel-Antoine. Les Existentialistes et la politique. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: 1905-190^. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Collins, Douglas. Sartre as Biographer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980. Contat, Michel, and Michel Rybalka. Les Ecrits de Sartre. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Froment-Meurice, Marc. Sartre et I'existentialisme. Paris: Nathan, 1984. George, Francois. Deux etudes sur Sartre. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976. Harvey, Robert. Search for a Father: Sartre, Paternity and the Question of Ethics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991. Hollier, Denis. Politique de la prose: Sartre et Van quarante. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Jeanson, Francis. Sartre. Paris: Seuil, 1955. Pacaly, Josette. Sartre au ntiroir. Paris: Klincksieck, 1980. Poster, Mark. Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975. Sicard, Michel. Essais sur Sartre. Paris: Galilee, 1989.

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de Saussure, Ferdinand (b. Switzerland, i857~d. 1913) Linguist. Ferdinand de Saussure studied physics and try at the University of Geneva (1875-6) and then linguistics at the Universities of Leipzig (1880) and Berlin (1878-9), receiving his doctorate from Leipzig (1880). Saussure taught historical linguistics at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris (1881-91), and later Sanskrit and historical linguistics at the University of Geneva. His major impact came through three series of lectures on general linguistics (1907; 1908-9; 1910-11). Saussure's unpublished notes were combined with students' notes in a posthumous book, Cours de linguisticjue generate, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, which forms the basis for the claim that he is the founder of modern linguistics. Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes, the only book published in his lifetime, underlies current views on the phonological system of Proto-Indo-European. While not as explicitly presented as in the Cours, Memoire is based on the premise that language is a set of signs whose values are determined by relationships in a specific system. (See *sign.) Viewing that system rigorously in accordance with mathematical principles, Saussure proposes that verbal roots in the parent language of the Indo-European family, e.g. sed - 'sit,' had a structure consisting of C(onsonant) V(owel) C(onsonant), with e as the basic vowel. Roots not showing this structure, such as ag- 'lead' and (s) ta- 'stand/ he accounted for by positing earlier consonants that he labelled coefficients sonantiques, subsequently called laryngeals. In this way he accounted for vowel variations called ablauts in different forms of a root, such as those still evident on verbs such as sing, sang, sung, as well as for subsequent assumptions about the consonant system. The coefficients that he posited purely by internal analysis were confirmed in 1927, when Jerzy Kurylowicz determined that Hittite sounds transliterated as h corresponded to such coefficients. Besides clarifying the phonological system Saussure put the method of internal reconstruction in historical linguistics on a solid base side by side with the comparative method. Although Saussure's teaching and his chief

de Saussure publications dealt with the historical developments of language, in his series of lectures on general linguistics he set out to identify the fundamental problems of linguistics and to suggest ways to solve them, in an effort to make linguistics a science. In contrast to the predominant attention of the time to the psychological shape of language, Saussure considered linguistics to be concerned with a social institution. He identified language as a system of signs. And in contrast to earlier views classifying it with the physical sciences, he proposed a distinct set of sciences within semiology, now generally known as *semiotics. The proposal is assumed to be original with Saussure, although during the same period the notable American philosopher *Charles Sanders Peirce was also laying the groundwork for semiotics as it is now pursued. Signs for Saussure are arbitrary; they have no direct relationship with their referent, as may be illustrated by variation from language to language. (See "reference/referent.) English house, for example, corresponds to Japanese ie, to Turkish ev, to Latin domus. Signs gain their value through oppositions. English house corresponds also to German Halts, but that has a broader set of values, corresponding also to English building, (business) firm, and so on. Because English know, on the other hand, has a smaller set of oppositions than do the German correspondences wissen 'know (facts),' kennen 'know (people),' konnen 'know (languages),' its value is broader than any of the German equivalents. To determine the value of any linguistic entity/ one must locate its position in its system. A language then is a structure where everything is interrelated or, in the phrase of Saussure's most famous student, Antoine Meillet, ofi tout se tient. As Harris has pointed out, Saussure determined the place of elements in semiotics itself by oppositions, often not providing his essential terms with definitions. Among crucial oppositions are language (langue) as an abstract system maintained by a social group in contrast to speech (parole), the manifestations of that system. (See "langue/ parole.) Elements are then characterized by a duality. By another opposition continuing a contrast of earlier philosophy, we perceive substance in use of language but its essence is form, that is, a social convention consisting of abstractions. Signs are dual entities of signifier (signifiants,

that is, sound patterns) and signified (signifies, that is, concepts). (See *signified/signifier/ signification.) The essential of language is its union of sound patterns and concepts, both of which are mental. Moreover, while linear, language, especially as subsequently treated by *Roman Jakobson, consists of a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic plane. That is to say, relationships are significant through sequences, for example, pot: top, she did: did she, on the syntagmatic axis, and through substitutions of the paradigmatic axis, for example, pit: pot, he does; he did. The Cours secured a position as a science for a social convention. Its success led to comparable procedures for other humanistic pursuits, such as "literature; the approach came to be known as *structuralism, with Saussure as its founder. Yet, the Cours has also been variously interpreted. Received without excitement by linguists in the decade after its publication, later it was elevated by linguists to the position of an almost messianic document. In the devoted attention to it, the editors have been criticized for inadequately representing the full complexities of Saussure's theories as well as for the book's inconsistencies. Saussure raised other debated questions, such as his search for anagrams, chiefly in Latin literature. One type of anagram mirrors proper nouns in syllables of words in the text, as Saussure is mirrored in the italic syllables of the next sentence. He sought these largely for proper names, though it is uncertain whether they are based on pronunciation or spelling, even though Saussure himself proposed anaphony as a more accurate term than anagram (Starobinski 1979: 14). Another type spells out key words, such as proper nouns, by choice of initial sounds or letters, as do the letters in italic in the following sentence. Similarly without answer even under subsequent study is whether they are unintended rather than essential patterns of the text produced by an author. Jakobson, though sympathetic, leaves such questions unresolved (1970: 30). "Jonathan Culler (1976: 106-14) suggests that Saussure may have been seeking to cut through Western *logocentrism, as a kind of forerunner of *deconstruction, directing attention towards phonological segments of language rather than words. The Cours concentrates on only one segment of language, its phonology. Further, even historical study of language is poorly incorpora-

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Scholes ted in the new conception of linguistics. Saussure may be regarded as a teacher who in an initial series of courses posed a number of questions about the essentials of his field, but through accidents of health and other interests never proceeded to a final formulation. The queries of admiring leaders of the field, as well as the misunderstanding generated especially by translations, illustrate the difficulties of understanding his work. But its success in identifying fundamental problems and initiating important investigations as well as in securing for linguistics a position as an independent science justifies the continuing high regard for Saussure. WINFRED P. LEHMANN

Primary Sources Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique generale. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Lausanne and Paris: Payot, 1916. 3rd corrected ed. Paris: Payot, 1931. jth ed. T. de Mauro. Paris: Payot, 1972. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. and annotator, Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983. Cf. earlier trans, by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical P, 1959; McGraw-Hill, 1966. - Memoirs sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes. Leipzig: Teubner, 1879. - Recueil des publications scientifiques, Ed. Charles Bally and Leopold Gautier. Geneva: Editions Sonor; Lausanne: Payot; Heidelberg: Winter, 1922. Repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Ferdinand de Saussure. London: Fontana, 1976. Rev. ed., 1986. Godel, Robert. Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguisticjue generale de Ferdinand de Saussure. Geneva: Droz, 1957. Harris, Roy. Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the 'Cours de linguistique generale.' London: Duckworth, 1987. Jakobson, Roman, and Lawrence G. Jones. Shakespeare's Verbal Art in Th'Expense of Spirit. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Koerner, E.F. Konrad. Bibliographia Saussureana 1870-1970. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1972. - Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of His Linguistic Theory in Western Studies of Language. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1973. Starobinski, Jean. Words upon Words. The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure. Trans. Olivia Emmet. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

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Scholes, Robert (b. U.S.A., 1929-) Literary critic, educator. Educated at Yale (B.A., 1950) and Cornell (M.A., 1956; Ph.D., 1959), Robert Scholes began his teaching career at the University of Virginia (1959) and subsequently taught at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Iowa and Brown University where he is now Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities. Scholes is not essentially a formulator of critical theory; his influence has come rather from the lucidity with which he has explained, applied and evaluated major trends in critical theory over the last quarter of a century. Primarily interested in narrative, Scholes' work combines extensive knowledge of the history of narrative, an essentially ethical perspective and a vital awareness of the possibilities of new critical approaches to *literature. The foundation of his comprehensive understanding of narrative is found in The Nature of Narrative (1966), co-authored by Robert Kellogg. The volume explores the meaning of narrative ('meaning' is here defined as the relationship between the fictional and the 'real' worlds), modes of creating characters, forms of plot, and point of view in narrative fiction to the middle of the present century. (See *story/ plot.) The distinctions first developed here between 'relational' and 'representative' relations to experience, between 'empirical' and 'fictional' narrative, and between the historical and mimetic modes of the former and the romantic and didactic modes of the latter, while constantly reworked, have remained central to Scholes' thought. Thus, The Nature of Narrative associates romantic fiction with a primarily aesthetic impulse and the fable with a primarily didactic one, while in The Fabulators (1967) contemporary fabling (described with relish as 'fabulation') is regarded as partaking of both the aesthetic and the didactic, its strong tendency toward fantasy representing the illustrative rather than the representative. For Scholes, 'tabulation' is represented by 'new literary artifacts' (14) of the kind produced by Lawrence Durrell, Kurt Vonnegut, John Hawkes, Iris Murdoch, and John Barth as well as by a range of earlier texts exhibiting similar characteristics. A significantly expanded version of The Fabulators appeared in 1979 under the title Fabulation and Metafiction. (See *text.)

Scholes Structuralism in Literature (1974) was immediately successful as an introduction to structuralist theory, surveying diverse applications to narrative by Andre Jolles, Etienne Souriau, "Vladimir Propp, *Claude Levi-Strauss, *Tzvetan Todorov, *Roland Barthes, and *Gerard Genette. Scholes' preoccupation with *structuralism during the 19705 led to the argument of Structuralist Fabulation (1975) that while i9thand early 20th-century realism is no longer viable (structuralist theory having been one of the forces that has undermined the realist program), science fiction solves both the metaphysical and practical problems of contemporary fiction and further offers the possibility of ethical transformation through the provision of alternative models of the future: 'The future of fiction lies in the future' (17), Scholes' division of the functions of fiction into 'sublimation' and 'cognition' in this volume is a partial transformation of his earlier distinction between the romantic and the didactic. His interest in fabulation is extended in the useful introduction to the field of science fiction, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, coauthored by Eric Rabkin (1977). Semiotics and Interpretation (1982) is a series of essays applying *semiotics (defined here as 'the study of codes') to literary works; in essence the essays are experiments in moving beyond structuralism to poststructuralist perspectives. (See *poststructuralism, *code.) The ethical concern and especially the pedagogical question of the function of the teacher of the humanities evident in Semiotics and Interpretation is developed further in Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985), which specifically sets out strategies for teaching students to interpret literature. (See "theory and pedagogy.) Such interpretation involves the assumption of authorial intention - as Scholes here explicitly recognizes. Correlatively, the volume also includes specific criticism of elements of the poststructuralist thought of "Jacques Derrida, 'Jonathan Culler and *Stanley Fish in arguments intended to balance the claims of culturally influenced interpretation with those of the structures of the text itself. The direction of this argument is pursued more fully in Protocols of Reading (1989), which grants Derridean *deconstruction its achievement in raising necessary questions but criticizes Derrida and some of his followers for

a failure to recognize that ethics can neither be derived from nor denied by theories of language or rhetoric. 'Rhetoric will help us follow the exchange of pleasure and power in any textual situation. It will not tell us whether these exchanges are right or wrong' (133). (See *power.) The ethical reading for which Scholes argues is to be achieved by a dialectical process of reading 'centripetally' toward the 'original intention located at the center' of the text and 'centrifugally' in relation to one's own life and experience (8). Scholes' major contributions have been in maintaining a historical perspective on narrative while exploring and testing new modes of analysis and commentary. The ethical function of literature, regarded in its broadest aspect as the enhancement of readers' understanding of experience and of the possibilities for improving the condition of human life, has assumed an increasingly central role in his writing; at the same time he has come to reject those elements of structuralist and poststructuralist thought that deny the possibility of evaluating either texts or human action in terms of moral standards. His position is summarized in the last paragraph of Protocols of Reading: 'If we have no Truth with a capital T, we must stop using the notion of such Truth - in whatever guise - to measure what we then take to be our failure to attain it. But we must not give up distinguishing between truth and lies within whatever framework we can construct to make such determinations' (154). W E N D E L L V. H A R R I S

Primary Sources Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. - The Tabulators. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. - Protocols of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. - Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. - Structural Fabulation: As Essay on the Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1975- Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974. - Textual Power: Literary Theon/ and the Teaching of English, New Haven: Yale UP, 198^. - and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. - and Eric Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. - and Richard M. Kain, eds. The Workshop of Dat'da-

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Searle lus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964.

Searle, John R. (b. U.S.A., 1932-) Philosopher of language. John Searle is generally known as a student of *J.L. Austin. During his 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard University (pub. as How to Do Things with Words 1962), Austin drew the attention of language philosophers to sentences that do not simply report states of affairs in the world. Certain types of sentences commands, instructions, expressions of feeling, declarations of intent, promises - actually seem to bring about changes in the world. Their truth conditions involve complex calculations of the sincerity of mental states (intentions) and of actual consequences. In a series of papers published throughout the 19605, Searle explored the philosophical implications of performative language - speech acts uttered in the various contexts of human agency. In Speech Acts (1969), based on his 1959 D.Phil, thesis at Oxford, Searle expanded an analysis of speech acts into a comprehensive philosophy of language. For Searle, 'speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rulegoverned form of behavior.' A coherent theory of speech acts could account for all of language. (See *speech act theory.) Searle was able to produce a much more consistent and far-ranging speech act theory than J.L. Austin's. Uttering a word is performing an 'utterance act'; referring and predicating are 'prepositional acts'; openly performative speech acts - 'stating, questioning, commanding, promising' - are, following Austin, 'illocutionary acts.' Searle's theory of speech acts offers literary critics fresh insight into the way words are able to refer to the world. Reference itself is a speech act but speech acts are also governed by the conventions and rules of language. (See ""reference/referent.) The need to distinguish the representational function of language from its overall logical and grammatical coherence which may have little to do with reference led Searle to posit a realm of 'institutional facts' (x married y; team z beat team r) from non-conventional or 'brute' facts. Reference is never just a game, since 'whatever is referred to must exist.' Fictional *discourse presents an 470

obvious problem for Searle's speech act theory. In a later paper ('The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse' 1975) Searle solved the problem by an ingenious argument: by pretending to refer, novelists create fictional characters. While the act of referring is real, the object of the reference might not be. Sherlock Holmes, for example, need not exist for a statement about him to be true or false. In 1977 Searle came to the attention of literary theorists as the result of a debate with *Jacques Derrida waged in the first issue of Glyph. In 'Signature Event Context,' Derrida questioned the assumptions underlying Austin's notion of a speech act, particularly the idea that the intentionality of a speaking subject is a determining factor in the production of linguistic meaning. (See *intention/intentionality, *subject/object.) How could there be speech acts when language itself is largely a matter of convention? In his response, 'Re-iterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida/ Searle accused Derrida of seriously misinterpreting Austin. While pointing out that Austin died before working out a general theory of speech acts, Searle defends Austin against virtually all of Derrida's objections. According to Searle, Derrida's idea that parasitic discourse is internal to the notion of language does not contradict Austin's view of the role conventionality and iterability play in speech acts. Searle concludes his rebuttal with a renewed emphasis on the role of intentionality in speech acts, an importance strengthened, not (as Derrida claimed) weakened, by the iterability of linguistic forms. In the next issue of Glyph, Derrida responded in a highly unusual piece entitled 'Limited Inc abc ... ' in which he sometimes refers to Searle as 'Sari.' Searle did not reply. Apart from his fame as a speech act theorist, Searle has established himself as an informed commentator on crises within the university. His widely reprinted 1968 article concerning student uprisings became the first chapter of The Campus War (1971). 'Minds, Brains and Programs' (1980) challenged the assumption that Artificial Intelligence models could mirror the structure of the mind. Using the analogy of a Chinese room, Searle argued that human consciousness is fully intentional and thus unique and distinct from all existing Ai models, an idea expanded in Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983). Searle's speech act theory remains influential among literary

Shklovskii theorists, communication action theorists such as *jurgen Habcrmas, and linguists (especially those interested in pragmatics), while his more recent work in the philosophy of mind attests to the continued vitality of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. (See "communicative action.) The literary applications of speech act theory were anticipated, in a sense, by "Kenneth Burke's five key terms of 'dramatism' as outlined in A Grammar of Motives (1945): act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. Human speech acts are produced by agents, acting within contexts or scenes, using language as agency for some purpose. In drama, the illocutionary force of speech acts can be measured against on-stage consequences to determine whether characters mean what they say. Literary works clearly contain representations of speech acts: the status of works as a whole is a different question. In Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977), Mary Louise Pratt laid the groundwork for applying the theories of Austin, Searle and other speech act philosophers to the question of literary texts. (See *text.) The initial question faced by theorists is simply one of classification: how is language used in "literature? For Pratt, literature is circumscribed by its context: 'as with any utterance, the way people produce and understand literary works depends enormously on unspoken, culturally-shared knowledge of the rules, conventions, and expectations that are at play when language is used in that context' (86). Features of the literary speech situation include reader/audience reception, preparation and selection before utterance, and what Pratt calls 'the reliability of what is being asserted' the quality of stories that makes us sit up and take notice. As we learn more about the contexts of literature, its ongoing reception history, and its ability to communicate, we will be in a better position to evaluate the applicability of Searle's work to literary criticism. Intentionality may very well return as an issue in the production of literary texts. As it stands currently, the work of Austin and Searle is largely an untapped resource for literary theory. CRFGOK CAMPBELL

Primary Sources Searle, John R. Ihe Campus War. New York: World Publishing Company, 1971.

- 'Consciousness, Unconsciousness and Intentionality.' Philosophical Topics 17 (1989): 193-209.

- Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. - Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

- 'The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.' New Literary History 6 (1975): 319-32. — 'Meaning, Communication and Representation.' In Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, Intentionality, Categories and Ends. Ed. R. Grandy and R. Warner. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986. - 'Minds, Brains and Programs.' Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417—57. Repr. in The Mind's I. Ed. D.R. Hofstadter and D.C. Dennet. New York: Basic Books, 1981. - Minds, Brains and Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985. - 'Re-iterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida.' Glyph i (1977): 198-208.

- Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Secondary Sources

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1962. Derrida, Jacques. 'Signature Event Context.' Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Glyph i (1977): 172-97. - 'Limited Inc abc . . . " Glyph 2 (1977): 162-254. Fish, Stanley E. 'How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism.' MLN 91 (1976): 983—1025, - 'With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida.' Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 693-721. Lepore, Ernest, and Robert Van Gulick, eds. John Searle and His Critics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Ohmann, Richard. 'Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature.' Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971): 1-19. — 'Speech, Literature and the Space Between,' New Literan/ History 5 (1974): 37-63. Petrey, Sandy. Speech Acts and Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1990. Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literan/Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977.

Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich (b. Russia, 1893-d. 1984) Russian formalist scholar and novelist. Upon graduating from St. Petersburg University, Shklovskii taught at the Institute of Art History. In 1916 with Osip Brik

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Shklovskii and Lev lakubinskii he organized OPOIAZ (acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language), whose members aimed to examine and define the distinctive features of *literature rather than the external conditions under which literature is created. OPOIAZ became the main centre of Russian *formalism and Shklovskii its chief spokesman and theoretician. In the late 19205 he became the chief target of the antiformalist campaign, responding with a self-critical article, Tamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke' ['A Monument to Scientific Error' 1930]. After the suppression of the formalist school, he worked in relative obscurity publishing sociologically oriented studies of Tolstoy. He re-emerged in the 19605 with several reprints of his earlier works and memoirs of OPOIAZ and its members. Shklovskii was the most influential critic in the first phase of Russian formalism. Tskusstvo kak priem' ['Art as Technique' 1917] served as the manifesto of the new school, introducing the concept of ostranenie [*defamiliarization]. At first, Shklovskii used the concept of defamiliarization to describe a new and startling perception of outside reality in a work of art. Later he modified the concept to refer to the process of renewal of old literary forms by new ones. Shklovskii developed a coherent theory of prose in 'Sviaz' priemov siuzhetoslozheniia s obshchimi priemami stilia' ['On the Connection between Devices of Syuzhet and General Stylistic Devices' 1919], Razvertyvanie siuzheta [The Unfolding of the Plot 1921] and Tristram Shendi Sterna i teoriia romana [Sterne's Tristram Shandy and the Theory of the Novel 1921], later reprinted in O teorii prozy [On the Theory of Prose 1925]. He introduced the concepts of 'material' and 'device/ corresponding to the pre-aesthetic and aesthetic phases of the literary process; fabula [story] and siuzhet [plot], describing the chronological and causal order of events as opposed to their artistic rearrangement; and 'new forms' and 'old cliches/ referring to the continuous renewal of literary forms. (See *story/plot.) Shklovskii concentrated on the analysis of plot composition, distinguishing such structures as 'a staircase construction' that breaks the action into episodes with the use of repetition, tautology, and parallelism; double plotting that interpolates heterogeneous material into the story; and 'hook-like composition' that

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relies on contrast, opposition and a false ending. He outlined his favourite technique of 'laying bare' a device, breaking the tradition of realistic motivation in fiction and deliberately revealing the basic technique of narration itself. The chief appeal of Shklovskii's works lies in his discovery of the internal laws of prose through a careful examination of the literary techniques employed by individual writers. The weakness of his approach was his tendency to dismiss all thematic connections. (See *theme.) Despite his own insistence on the continuous renewal of literary forms, he also failed to place texts in their larger historical context, thus excluding diachrony from the synchronic analysis of literary devices. NINA KOLESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Shklovskii, V.B. 'Iskusstvo kak priem.' In Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka 2. Petrograd, 1919, 3-14. 'Art as Technique.' In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. L. Lemon and M. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966, 3-24. - Tamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke.' Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 January 1930, i. - Razvertyvanie siuzheta. Petrograd, 1921. - 'Sviaz' priemov siuzhetoslozheniia s obschimi priemami stilia.' In Poetika. Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka. Petrograd, 1919, 115-50. 'On the Connection Between Devices of Syuzhet and General Stylistic Devices.' In Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation. Ed. S. Bann and J. Bowlt. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1973, 48-72. - O teorii prozy. Moscow, 1925. - Tristram Shendi Sterna i teoriia romana. Petrograd, 1921. 'Sterne's Tristram Shandy and the Theory of the Novel.' In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 25-60. Secondary Sources Sheldon, Richard. 'The Formalist Poetics of Viktor Shklovsky.' Russian Literature Triquarterly 2 (1972): 351-72. - Viktor Shklovsky: An International Bibliography of Works by Him and about Him. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976. - 'Viktor Shklovsky and the Device of Ostensible Surrender.' Slavic Review 34.1 (1975): 86-108. Sherwood, R.J. 'Early Formalist Theories in Modern Context.' Essays in Poetics 1.1 (1976): 1-31. - 'Viktor Shklovsky and the Development of Early Formalist Theory on Prose Literature.' In Russian

Showalter Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation. Ed. S, Barm and |. Bowlt. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1971, 26-40.

Showalter, Elaine (b, U.S.A., 1941-) Feminist literary critic. Elaine Showalter received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1462, her M.A. from Brandeis University in 1964, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1970. She is, at present, professor of English at Princeton University. Showalter's work as a feminist literary critic has had three continuing emphases: recovering a women's literary and cultural history; charting the evolution of feminist literary criticism; and calling for far-ranging curricular and pedagogical reform. All three projects are founded upon an idea of women's culture as 'muted' in relation to the dominant masculine culture (A Literature of Their Own 11). (See *feminist criticism.) Showalter rejects the notion of an innate female literary imagination or style, emphasizing instead women's shared cultural and sociohistorical experiences. Showalter argues that a women's literary subculture, like those of other minority groups, evolves through three major phases: imitation and internalization of dominant literary modes; protest against those standards and advocacy of minority rights and values; and self-discovery, a search for self-identity. Within a women's literary tradition, Showalter calls these phases feminine, feminist and female and, in A Literature of Their Own (1977), she explores the evolution of such a female tradition in the works of a number of iqth- and 20th-century English women writers ranging from Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing. The Female Malady (1983) is a more broadly cultural analysis of the ways in which female insanity has been defined, detected and treated in tgth- and 20th-century England, and of the long cultural associations between femininity and madness. Both .4 Literature of Their Own and The Female Malady suggest that attention to gender and sexual difference reveals 'another plot' ('Review Essay; Literary Criticism'), another literary or cultural history hitherto submerged in that of the dominant, masculine culture. Sexual Anarchy (1990) draws parallels between fin de siecle preoccupations and representations in both i qth- and 20th-century culture, focusing,

as the title suggests, on 'myths, metaphors and images of sexual crises and apocalypse.' (See *myth, "metonymy/metaphor.) After A Literature of Their Own, Showalter turned her attention to charting the relationship both between feminist and other modes of literary criticism and between varieties of feminist criticism. 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' (1979) responds to charges that feminist criticism lacks rigour and a clearly articulated theory by outlining a 'taxonomy' of feminist criticism which distinguishes between feminist critique and 'gynocritics.' Feminist critique is concerned with woman as reader, especially of male-authored texts, and is 'political and polemical'; because of its dependence on existing male texts and critical models, the potential for feminist critique to produce a feminist literary theory is limited. Gynocritics, on the other hand, is concerned with woman as writer and seeks 'to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature.' In its emphasis on a female culture, gynocritics has much in common with feminist research in such fields as anthropology, history and sociology. 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness' (1981) further distinguishes between four models of gynocriticism, listed in order of their perceived value: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural. (See also *psychoanalytic theory.) Showalter draws from the work of Oxford anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ardener to reinforce her argument that feminist examinations of the 'wild zone' or uncharted space of a female culture, 'muted' in relation to the dominant culture, offer the greatest promise for the construction of a women's literary *canon and the evolution of a feminist literary theory. Showalter's interest in curricular and pedagogical issues has remained constant throughout her career. (See "theory and pedagogy.) In 'Women and the Literary Curriculum' (1970) she emphasized the importance of women's studies courses, which would 'serve as the academic equivalent of decontamination chambers,' More recently, Showalter has argued for the need to institute curricular change which would incorporate 'gender as a fundamental category of literary analysis' (The Other Bostonians'), not only by installing women writers but also by defamiliarizing or problematizing masculinity; that is, by showing how masculinity, like femininity, is socially constructed. (See *defamiliarization.) Showalter has been criticized by some fem473

Starobinski inist critics for her negative reading of *Virginia Woolf in A Literature of Their Own and for what is sometimes seen as her theoretical naivete - what *Toril Moi calls her 'traditional humanism.' In part, her work attracts such criticism because it is seen as representative of trends in specifically American feminist criticism, regarded as less sophisticated because more empirical and sociohistorical than French feminist criticism, which draws heavily from psychoanalysis (especially that of *Jacques Lacan) and *deconstruction (especially that of *Jacques Derrida). However, there is no doubt that Showalter's literary and critical histories have served an important function in synthesizing and contextualizing many of the major debates in feminist literary criticism. (See also *feminist criticism, Anglo-American.) JO-ANN WALLACE

Primary Sources Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. - 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.' Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 179-205. - A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. - 'The Other Bostonians: Gender and Literary Study.' Yale Journal of Criticism \ (1988): 179-87. - 'Review Essay: Literary Criticism.' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society i (1975): 435-60. - Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Viking, 1990. - 'Toward a Feminist Poetics.' In Women's Writing and Writing About Women. Ed. Mary Jacobus. London: Croom Helm, 1979. - 'Women and the Literary Curriculum.' College English 32 (1970): 855-62. - 'Women's Time, Women's Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism.' Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 (Spring-Fall 1984-5): 29-43. - The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. - Speaking of Gender. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Secondary Sources Kaplan, Sydney Janet. 'Varieties of Feminist Criticism.' In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London: Methuen, 1985. Moi, Toril. Sexual /Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985.

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Todd, Janet. Feminist Literary History. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Starobinski, Jean (b. Switzerland 1920-) Professor and critic. Jean Starobinski studied at the University of Geneva (1942-9) where he received his doctorat es lettres and doctorat en medecine and served as assistant to Marcel Raymond, leader of the *Geneva School. After interning in medicine and psychiatry, he became assistant professor of French at the Johns Hopkins University (1954-6) and attended clinics and seminars in the history of medicine. Although he abandoned medicine as a profession in 1958, he continues to write on the history and theory of medicine and psychology. At present, Starobinski is a professor of French "literature at the University of Geneva and president of the Rencontres Internationales de Geneve and the Societe J.-J. Rousseau. He has received many honorary doctorates and prizes and has been elected to several foreign academies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Preferring the word 'relation' and not 'theory' or 'method' to describe his criticism, Starobinski argues that theory may be applied in the physical sciences but in literary criticism it merely legitimizes the critic's a posteriori illusions. For Starobinski, relation is a transcoding, a free transcription of various data presented in the 'interior' of the *text (L'Oeil vivant 2: 158-9). Successful criticism will not come from preconceived methods which unfold automatically. Instead, Starobinski looks for relations in the text, for the driving force behind the text. His conviction that the evidence immanent in the text is sufficient data for criticism parallels the primacy and interiority of texts demanded by his professor Marcel Raymond and the Geneva School. Since data must be derived from the text, the text must be 'definitive.' Starobinski insists that philology be applied to verify texts, to understand words according to their historical meanings and to evaluate the distance between the exceptional and the common word (Pour un Temps 11). Starobinski's edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discours sur I'origine et les fondements de I'inegalite and his study of Ferdinand de Saussure's notes, published as Les Mots sous les

Steiner mots, provide examples of exacting standards for textual editions. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure, *genetic criticism.) Once the text's reliability is established, the critic turns to its form, particularly to repeated patterns, the exterior signs of what is hidden in the preconscious of the creator of the text. This is anamnesis, following the psychoanalyst's practice of tracing to discover the inner individual or the society hidden behind such devices as masks, allegory and ornate language. Since his first publication in the 19405, Starobinski has dealt with these artifices of hiding manifested in works from antiquity to the present. Starobinski's main focus has been i8th-century texts. Montesquieu par lui-meme (1966) describes Montesquieu as believing that all obscure, hidden truths can be unveiled and then viewed in the light of reason. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et I'obstacle (1971) traces each work of Rousseau back to a childhood experience of injustice. The child's inability to make his innocence transparent led to Rousseau's later conclusion that such opacities are found throughout the history of mankind. Rousseau's obstacle/transparence conflict continues, culminating in Reveries du promeneur solitaire (1782), when the lonely author offers his innocence up to the hostile world. Drawing upon architecture and art, Starobinski studies the opposition of darkness and light in 1789: Les Emblemes de la raison (1973). The systematic exploration of darkness and opacities found in the subconscious associates Starobinski with surrealism, founded by Andre Breton and Louis Aragon. His search for the one psychological state to explain the entire work of an individual or century recalls Taine's faculte maitresse and produces such convincing studies as Stendhal's pseudonyms and Claude Simon's oneness of the past and present. Yet, the brilliance and clarity of simplification must be accepted as only one point of view. Starobinski's influence in the U.S.A. may be suggested by the numerous translations of his works. (See also *phenomenological criticism.) MARTHA O'NAN

Primary Sources Starobinski, jean, ed. Discours sur I'origine et les fondements de I'inegalite. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

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Vol. 3 of Oeuvres completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 4 vols. 1959-69. 'Entretien avec Jacques Bonnet.' In Pour un Temps. Ed. Jacques Bonnet. Cahiers pour un Temps. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985, 9-23. L'lnvention de la liberte. Collection Art Idees Histoire. Geneva: Skira, 1964. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et I'obstacle followed by Sept essais sur Rousseau. Collection Tel. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. 'La Journee dans "Histoire."' In Sur Claude Simon. Communications au Colloque Claude Simon. Paris: Minuit, 1987, 9-32. 1789: Les Emblemes de la raison. Paris: Flammarion, 1973Montaigne en mouvement. Bibliotheque des Idees. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. Montesquieu par lui-meme. Ecrivains de toujours. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Les Mots sous les mots: Les Anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure. Collection Le Chemin. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. L'Oeil vivant. 2 vols. Collection Le Chemin. Paris: Gallimard, 1961-8. Portrait de I'artiste en saltimbanque. Les Sentires de la Creation. Geneva: Skira, 1970. Trois fureurs. Collection Le Chemin. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. and Nicolas Bouvier. Histoire de la medecine. Lausanne: Rencontre, 1963.

Secondary Sources Bonnet, Jacques, ed. Pour un temps. Cahiers pour un Temps. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. Carrard, Philippe. 'Starobinski, Rousset et la question du recit.' Swiss-French Studies/Etudes Romades 1.2 (1980): 24-61. Demougin, Jacques, ed. Dictionnaire de la litterature fran^aise et francophone. 3 vols. Paris: Larousse, 1988. Lawall, Sarah. Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1968. Reichler, Claude. 'Jean Starobinski et la critique genevoise.' Critique 43: 481-2 (1987): 606-11. Spears, Monroe K. 'Montaigne Our Contemporary.' Hudson Review 41 (1988): 301-18.

Steiner, George Francis (b. France, 1929-) Literary critic. Born in France, George Steiner spent his youth in the United States. He was educated at the Sorbonne (Bachelier es Lettres 1947), the University of Chicago (B.A. 1948), Harvard University (M.A. 19so), and Balliol College,

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Steiner Oxford (D.Phil. 1955). In 1961 he was appointed a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and in 1974 he became professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva. Steiner is a literary critic but prefers the terms Kulturkritiker and Sprachphilosoph, since these better suggest the wide range of his interests: criticism, *hermeneutics, philosophy and philosophies of language, and theories of culture. He has published poetry and fiction, including The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981), a controversial novel about Hitler and the Holocaust which develops some suggestions from Freud's Moses and Monotheism. (See *Sigmund Freud.) Steiner's first two books, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) and The Death of Tragedy (1961), express two of the basic assumptions of his criticism: metaphysical, religious and political concerns are central both in great ""literature and in criticism, and the best criticism uses, in *Kenneth Burke's words (quoted by Steiner), 'all that there is to use.' In Steiner's early work this idea is directed against the *New Criticism; in After Babel (1975) and Real Presences (1989) it is central to his critique of ""deconstruction. The first two books also introduce the apocalyptic note characteristic of his work, with their insistence that Western civilization is in decline and that evidence of this can be found in the fact that its literature is rarely tragic or religious. In Language and Silence (1967) and In Bluebeard's Castle (1971) Steiner argues that modern barbarism - the Holocaust, in particular indicates that the phase of Western civilization which began in Periclean Athens is over. Although he insists throughout his criticism on the value of Western civilization, Steiner, developing ""Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on History,' nevertheless asks disturbing questions about the extent to which that culture's values, ideals and supreme achievements have been implicated in events ostensibly their antithesis. Steiner's concern with language is developed in Extraterritorial (1971), a collection of essays, and in his most substantial work, After Babel. The latter is a history of language, a critique of theories of language and an inquiry into topics such as 'counter-factuality,' the multiplicity of languages, and the debate between linguistic relativists (Humboldt, Sapir and Whorf) and universalists (*Chomsky). The book's central concern is translation. Particularly important for students of literature is Steiner's engage-

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ment with hermeneutics which results in a four-fold model for translation. While sympathetic to linguistics, Steiner nevertheless suggests that it is only of limited use in the study of literature and translation. Both here and in his later work, Steiner acknowledges his debt to Benjamin and *Martin Heidegger, especially Heidegger's interest in hermeneutics and the relationship between language and being. (See theories of ""translation.) Steiner followed After Babel with Heidegger (1978) and Antigones (1984). The first offers a sympathetic reading of a philosopher many of whose major themes are also Steiner's. The second, in its concern with the translations of a major text, looks back to After Babel; but in its emphasis on the classic's 'presence' and its dimension of transcendence it anticipates the critique of deconstruction in Real Presences. Real Presences is Steiner's summa. Arguing against ""poststructuralism's view of literature as play and its deconstruction of 'presence,' Steiner insists that art and reading are a 'wager' on meaning and transcendence and that 'the final stakes are theological' (4, 87). Central to Steiner's argument are the example of music, the well-known aporias (impasses of thought) in Descartes, Kant, and 'axiomatic systems' in mathematics (213-14). (See theories of *play/freeplay, *aporia, ""metaphysics of presence.) Steiner belongs to no critical school and is more syncretic than original. His critical masters are *George Lukacs, Hermann Broch, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, ""Edmund Wilson, and *F.R. Leavis. He is without any apparent disciples in the universities but has a wide influence on the general educated public through his reviews and essays in The New Yorker and the London Sunday Times which show him to be a very effective popularizer of contemporary trends and ideas. Some critics have argued that Steiner conducts his argument at too abstract a level with few references to texts or facts. Others argue that some of his larger, more provocative questions are either unanswerable ('Why is there not just one language?') or meaningless (Ts there a lie, anywhere, in Mozart?'). Like most conservatives he idealizes the past. On the other hand, the case for Steiner can perhaps be best stated by emphasizing the extent to which in an age of narrow specialization, he has attempted to make literary and cultural criticism not only comparative and interdisci-

Todorov plinary but relevant to the large human issues art has always addressed. His introduction to The George Stciner Reader (1984) is an excellent summary of his views on culture and criticism. SAM SOI.HCK1

Primary Sources Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. - Anno Domini: three Stories. New York: Atheneum, 1967. - Antigones. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. - The Death of Tragedy. New York: Knopf, 1961. - Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. New York: Atheneum, 1971. - The George Steiner Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. - Heidegger. London: Fontana and Collins, 1978. - In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971. - Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1967. - On Diffiiulty and Other Lssaus. New Y'ork: Oxford UP, 1978, - The Portage to San Cristobal of A.M. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. - Proofs and Three Parables. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. - Real Presences. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. - Tolstoi/ or Dostoevski/: An Essay in the Old Criticism. New Y'ork: Knopf, 19S9.

Todorov, Tzvetan (b. Bulgaria, 1939-) Literary structuralist and semiotician. Todorov studied Slavic philology for his first degree (19(11) at the University of Sofia and then migrated to France to study language and "literature at the University of Paris. His doctoral thesis (1966) on Choderlos de Laclos' epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangercuses was written under the direction of *Roland Barthes and later published as Litterature et significationn (1967). In 1970 he was awarded the doctorat es lettres. From 1964 to 1967, he was a research assistant at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; and from 1968 to the present he has held a research appointment at the Centre National de la Recherche Sdentifique (CNRS) in Paris. He has also served as member of the board of directors of the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le I.angage and as the editor (1970-9) of the journal Poctiijuc: Revue de theorie et

d'analyse litteraires. Together with "Helene Cixous and "Gerard Genette, Todorov directed the publication of an important collection of studies on poetics, which include, in addition to some of his own work, several influential studies by Genette (Figures I, Figures U and Figures III). Todorov has taught at several universities in the U.S.A., including Yale, Iowa, NYU, Wisconsin, and Columbia. Three works in particular have made him a leading theorist of the structuralist movement in France. One is his influential study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973); the other two, which are more general in scope, are the Poetics of Prose (1977) and Introduction to Poetics (1981). His Theories of the Symbol (1982) is a historical study of the *semiotics of literary symbolic expression and his Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language (1979), written in collaboration with "Oswald Ducrot, discusses many of the schools, fields and concepts of modern, semiotically oriented, language study. (See also *structuralism.) Todorov's work is based in part on the poetics of the Russian formalists (especially "Vladimir Propp, *Roman jakobson and *Mikhail Bakhtin), the textual analyses of the German Morphological School, the epistemology of *Claude Levi-Strauss, and - more recently the poststructuralist arguments of Roland Barthes and "Jacques Derrida. (See Russian "formalism, "poststructuralism.) For Todorov, the proper subject-matter of poetics is not 'interpretation' (or the naming of a work's meaning) but the structures that are generally inherent in literary "discourse. In other words, poetics is concerned with explaining the essence of literariness rather than the significance of literary texts. (See *text.) The particular structures described by poetics concern three aspects of literary discourse as a system: the semantic, the syntactic and the verbal. Literary semantics takes for granted a semiotic distinction between signification and symbolization and is concerned with 'discourse registers.' (See "signified/signifier/signification.) These are formed by certain features of language, especially its degree of abstractness, 'figurality/ 'intertextual valence,' and 'subjectivity.' (See *intertextuality.) Literary syntactics concerns the types of relation - logical, temporal and spatial - that can obtain among minimal units of thematic structure. The 'verbal' aspect of discourse concerns the characterizing of information through its mode ('the

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Todorov degree of exactitude with which ... [a] discourse evokes its referent'), its presentation of time (the relation between the temporal line of a fictional discourse and the temporal line of its corresponding fictive universe), its perspectival vision (the point of view from which an object is observed and the quantity and quality of the information received), and its voice (the properties of fictional discourse analysed as a speech act) (Introduction to Poetics 13-58). (See also *speech act theory, *discourse analysis theory.) Todorov distinguishes between scientific poetics and other types of criticism to which he refers generally as 'projection.' In his view, some forms of projection - especially biographical, psychoanalytic, sociological, and *phenomenological criticism - treat the literary text as essentially a transposition from some non-literary essence: an author's life, a psychological reality, a social condition, or a writer's • mind. (See also *psychoanalytic theory.) Other forms of projection, including commentary, explication de texte, and paraphrase, merely discuss a text as the expression of a certain meaning (Poetics of Prose 234-46). Still other forms can be grouped under the general heading of *archetypal criticism. These involve a projection of certain philosophical, psychological and ethical concepts necessarily implicit in the definition of myths and the constructive use of these concepts to elaborate descriptive taxonomies. (See *myth.) Todorov argues that projective criticism has little explanatory power (The Fantastic 9-21). Todorov also distinguishes between a linguistically oriented poetics and 'reading.' Poetics is an instrument of investigation for the description of an individual textual system; it takes for granted the pre-existence of all categories of literary discourse, all linguistic categories, and an 'atemporal material structure.' Reading, on the other hand, involves an individual's encounter with a particular text and consists 'in relating each element of ... [a] text to all others, these being inventoried not in their general signification but with a view to this unique usage.' Reading thus involves a 'certain destruction of the text's apparent order' as well as the overlaying of linguistic levels and of figuration. As any reading, moreover, necessarily 'privileges' certain elements of the text, an 'indefinite number' of readings of any text are possible (Poetics of Prose 237-40). Todorov, it may be noted,

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strongly disagrees with certain American types of poststructuralism. He is especially critical of the pragmatism advocated by *Stanley Fish and the *deconstruction advanced by *J. Hillis Miller (Literature and Its Theorists 182-91). JAMES STEELE Primary Sources Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

- The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973' - Grammaire du Decameron. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. - Introduction to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1981. - 'Language and Literature.' In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. — Literature and Its Theorists. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. - Litterature et signification. Paris: Larousse, 1967. - Mikhail Bakhtin, Le principe dialogique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981. - The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. - Theories of the Symbol. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. - and Oswald Ducrot. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Trans. Catherine Porter. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. — Theorie de la litterature. Paris: Editions du Seuil,Seuil, 1965.

Secondary Sources Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage (Random House), 1984. Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. - Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Davis, Lennard J. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987. Fokkema, D.W., and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch. Theories of Literature in the ioth Century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics. London: C. Hurst and Co., 1977. Jefferson, Ann, and David Robey, eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. London: B.T. Batsford, 1982.

Tomashevskii Merquior, J.G. From Prague to Pans: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought. London: Verso, i 986. Scholes, Robert. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. - Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974. Selden, Raman. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1983.

Tomashevskii, Boris Viktorovich (b. Russia, i8qo-d. 1957) Russian formalist scholar. Graduating from the University of Liege with a degree in electrical engineering, Tomashevskii attended the Sorbonne, studying i7th- and 18th-century French poetry. Upon returning to Russia, he studied Russian philology at St. Petersburg University and in 1918 joined OPOIAZ (acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in which he played a significant role in developing the formalist theory of versification. From the mid-i92os he taught poetics and stylistics at Leningrad University. Forced to give up teaching in the 19305, he became involved in editorial activities, preparing critical editions of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. In his last years he was allowed both to resume teaching at Leningrad University and to prepare some of his works on poetics and stylistics for publication. (See Russian *formalism.) As a theorist, Tomashevskii was concerned primarily with questions of versification and poetics. His Russkoe stikhoslozhenie. Metrika [Russian Versification. Metrics 1923] is a concise introduction to the problems of Russian versification, defining poetic speech as speech organized in its phonetic aspect and concentrating on the role of stress and intonation in the metric division of verse. But he also saw the need to investigate the interrelations between intonation and syntax, sound and semantics, thus paving the way for the functional approach to the study of metrics. The best examples of this approach to versification are his two articles Troblema stikhotvornogo ritma' [The Problem of Verse Rhythm' 1923] and 'Stikh i ritm' ['Verse and Rhythm' 192=;] included in his 1929 book O stikhe. Stat'i [On Verse: Articles]. He differentiated between the concepts of the traditional

metric *canon and rhythm, the real phonetic form of a given poem, and distinguished the primary signs of rhythm (stress) from the secondary (intonation and euphony). He also elaborated *Boris Eikhenbaum's idea of the dominanta, a device which dominates in a poem and creates a certain artistic and rhythmical impression. In 'Stikh i ritm' he stressed the need to go beyond the analysis of phonetic elements (lexical stress) to the analysis of the phrase construction (phrase stress). He introduced the concept of a 'rhythmical impulse,' the preference of a given poet or poetic school for certain rhythmic devices, and also proposed their detailed study in poetry. Tomashevskii successfully applied his theory to the study of the rhythmical patterns of the leading Russian poets, especially Pushkin. His articles 'Ritmika chetyrekhstopnogo iamba po nabliudeniiam Evgeniia Onegina' ['The Rhythm of the Four-Foot Iamb Based on Observations of Eugene Onegin' 1917] and Tiatistopnyi iamb Pushkina' [The Five-Foot Iamb in Pushkin' 1919] are still regarded as penetrating investigations of Pushkin's use of the iambic forms and of the Russian syllabo-accentual verse in general. In both these articles Tomashevskii formulated those applications of statistical analysis to poetic rhythm which served as the basis for the modern linguistic-statistical approach to the study of Russian verse developed in the Soviet Union in the 19605 by scholars of the Tartu-Moscow school, such as M.L. Gasparov, P.A. Rudnev and A.N. Kolmogorov. (See Tartu School.) NINA KOLESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Tomashevskii, B.V. 'Literatura i biografiia.' Kniga i revolutsiia 4 (1923). Trans. 'Literature and Biography.' In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1971, 47-55. - Tiatistopnyi iamb Pushkina.' Ocherki po poetike Pushkina. Berlin, 1923. - Troblema stikhotvornogo ritma.' Literaturnaia mysl' 2 (1923): 124-40. - Russkoe stikhoslozhenie. Metrika. Leningrad, 1923. - 'Stikh i ritm.' In 0 stikhe. Stat'i. Leningrad, 1929. - Teoriia literatury. Poetika. Leningrad, 1925. Sections trans, as Thematics.' In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. L. Lemon and M. Reis. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1965, 61-98. Sections

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Trilling trans, as 'Literary Genres.' Russian Poetics in Translation 5 (1978): 52-93.

Secondary Sources Gasparov, M.L. 'Quantitative Methods in Russian Metrics: Achievements and Prospects.' Russian Poetics in Translation 7 (1980): 1-19. Jakobson, R. 'B.V. Tomashevskii.' International Journal of Russian Linguistics and Poetics 1-2 (1959): 313-14.

Striedter, J. 'The Russian Formalist Theory of Literary Evolution.' PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978): 1-24. Turner, C.J.G. 'Tomashevsky's Literary Theory.' Symposium 26 (1972): 67-77.

Trilling, Lionel (b. U.S.A., i905-d. 1975) Literary critic. Trilling obtained a B.A. and M.A. in English from Columbia University and began to teach there in 1931 while working on his Ph.D. Newly married and a young instructor, he was faced with the burden of supporting his indigent parents. Turning against the economic system that had betrayed his immigrant parents' dream of success, he became a political and cultural radical. As a committed Marxist, he wrote reviews for the left-liberal magazines The Nation and The New Republic. He was the first Jew to teach at Columbia, and that, plus his adherence to Marxism and, later on, Freudianism, nearly resulted in his being dismissed from the highly conservative 'WASP'-dominated department of English. (See *Marxist criticism, *Sigmund Freud.) During the late 19305 Trilling drew away from Marxism and developed the humanistic liberal political and social attitude that from then on dominated his criticism. He became a model Columbia University English professor, teaching the humanities through the tradition of the great books of Western civilization and analysing modern British and American writers and cultural matters. From Marxism, however, he took a dialectical approach to ""literature: dialectic is 'just another word for form, and has for its purpose, in philosophy or in art, the leading of the mind to some conclusion' (The Liberal Imagination 283). His first two books, Matthew Arnold (1939) and EM. Forster (1943), are characterized by this approach. Trilling's most important work is found in his various collections of critical essays, the

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best known of which is The Liberal Imagination. He states his position in the preface. 'These are not political essays,' he writes, 'they are essays in literary criticism. But they assume the inevitably intimate, if not always obvious, connection between literature and polities' (xi-xii). Trilling goes on to observe that one of the tendencies of liberalism is to simplify issues, to be overly rational. 'The job of criticism would seem to be, then,' he concludes, 'to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty' (xv). In the essays that follow he attacks those writers whom he believes have, ideologically or formally, oversimplified, like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and praises those writers, like *Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald, who were aware of complexity and difficulty. Other essays in The Liberal Imagination indicate the range of Trilling's interests; 'Freud and Literature,' 'Tacitus Now' and 'The Kinsey Report.' Trilling was not a literary theorist although he liked to reflect philosophically on literature and life. He believed primarily in the evaluative function of criticism. 'The word criticism,' he wrote in 'What is Criticism?' 'derives from the Greek word meaning judgment. A critic does more things with literature than judge it, but his judicial function is involved in everything that he does' (The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 57). Trilling was in the tradition of that vigorous group of Jewish intellectuals, including Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Philip Rahv, and Clement Greenberg, who, coming out of a radical background, saw criticism not as an academic exercise but as a means of reforming art and society. In his later years, Trilling, like other liberals, felt that his idea of culture and intellect had been fatally undermined by the mobility and transience of the postindustrial age. As Daniel T. O'Hara has said, 'The spectral politics of the shaped self that Trilling practiced for so long have been outmoded by the global economy of the disintegrated self (288). Trilling became 'the subversive patriarch' of American culture, 'the stylish terminator of modern culture itself (O'Hara 291). Be that as it may, Lionel Trilling will continue to be read for the acuity of his literary criticism, for his urbane moderation and for the elegance of his style, all of which have brought him a devoted audience in and beyond the universities. PETER BUITENHUIS

Tvnianov Primary Sources Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. New York: Viking, 1956. - E.M, Forster. London: Hogarth P, 1943. New York: New Directions P, 1964. - A Gathering of Fugitiiws. Boston: Beacon P, 1956. - Tlit' Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979- The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking, njso. — Matthew Arnold. New York: Columbia UP, 1939. — The Middle of the Journey. New York: Viking, 1947. — Mind in the Modern World. New York: Viking, 1973- Of This Time, Of That Place and Other Stones. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979. - The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking, 1953. - Prefaces to the Experience of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979. - Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard UP, 1972. - Speaking of Literature and Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980.

Secondary Sources Boyers, Robert. Lionel Trilling: Negative Capability and the Wisdom of Avoidance. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1977. Chace, William M. Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1980. Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Hvanston, ill.: Northwestern UP, 1986. O'Hara, Daniel T. Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988, Shoben, Edward Joseph. Lionel Trilling. New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 1981.

Tynianov, lurii Nikolaevich (b. Russia, 1894-1! 1943) Russian formalist scholar. After completing his studies in Russian philology in 1918, Tynianov remained at St. Petersburg University. In 1919 he joined OPOIAZ (acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language). From 1921 till 1930 he was a professor at the Leningrad Institute of the History of the Arts. In the 19205 he published his most important studies. From 1925 he started to write historical novels and also worked as a film scriptwriter. The leading theoretician of the second stage

of formalism, Tynianov developed a system of principles on the nature of "literature, literary structure and literary history. (See *Russian formalism.) Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka [The Problem of Verse Language 1924] advanced the concept of a dynamic structure, in which unity is achieved not by means of combination and merger but through interaction and the foregrounding of one group of elements at the expense of another. He defined the dominant element in a literary work as 'the constructive factor' and described it as the element organizing and subordinating all others. Tynianov distinguished rhythm as the constructive principle of verse subordinating and deforming all other elements and outlined four important factors promoting rhythmical grouping and subordinating the rules of semantics: (i) the unity of the series - the tendency in verse for isolation and independence of individual lines and the failure of the rhythmical boundaries to converge with the boundaries of the syntactical unit; (2) the compactness of the series, resulting from syntactical isolation of lines, forcing each word to enter into more intimate and deforming relations with every other word; (3) the 'dynamization' of vocal material - the process of sharpening the principal meaning of the word in response to the rhythmical significance of the series; and (4) the successiveness of vocal material - the appearance of certain secondary or oscillating signs of meaning as a result of a word filling in a rhythmical gap in a given series. Tynianov proceeded to investigate the relations between the elements of a given literary structure and the whole literary system, as well as extraliterary systems. 'O literaturnoi evolutsii' ['On Literary Evolution' 1927] differentiated between two constructive functions: the 'syn-function,' the interconnection of an element with other elements in the same work, and the 'auto-function/ the interrelation of an element with similar elements in other literary works and in other systems. Initially, he examined intraliterary relations and formulated the principle of literary dynamics, that is, the continuous process of disautomatization and renewal of literary forms. Later, he explored the area of extraliterary relations and stressed their importance in determining the path of literary evolution. He argued for a closer investigation of the correlation between literature and the most immediate systems, especially social systems.

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Uspenskii Tynianov's contribution to the development of formalism was immense. He almost singlehandedly advanced the formalist theory toward *structuralism by formulating the principles of dynamic structure and the constructive factor and of literary dynamics and evolution. Many of these concepts were taken up and developed by the Prague Linguistic Circle, becoming a vital part of a coherent structuralist theory of literature. (See *Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School.) NINA KOLESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Tynianov, I.N. Arkhaisty i novatory. Leningrad, 1929. - Dostoevsky i Gogol'. K teorii parodii. Petrograd, 1921. - 'O literaturnoi evolutsii.' Na literaturnom postu 4 (1927). 'On Literary Evolution.' In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1971, 66-78. - Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka. Leningrad, 1924. The Problem of Verse Language. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981. - and R. Jakobson. 'Problemy izucheniia literatury i iazyka.' Novyi lef 12 (1928): 36-7. 'Problems in the Study of Literature and Language.' In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, 79-81.

Secondary Sources Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine. The Hague: Mouton, 1955. Steiner, Peter. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. Striedter, Jurij. 'The Russian Formalist Theory of Literary Evolution.' PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978): 1-24. - 'The Russian Formalist Theory of Prose.' PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 2 (1977): 429-70.

Uspenskii, Boris Andreevich (b. U.S.S.R., 1937-) Semiotician and structuralist critic. After studying general and comparative linguistics at Moscow University, Boris Uspenskii wrote a dissertation on the structural typology of languages, The Principles of Structural Typology (1965; trans. 1968). His second dissertation was on the relation between the histories of traditional Russian church pro-

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nunciation and literary Russian pronunciation. In 1961 he studied at the University of Copenhagen's Institut for Lingvistik og Fonetik, where he consulted with the Danish structuralist Louis Hjelmslev. (See *structuralism, *semiotics.) Returning to Moscow in 1962, he participated in the Moscow Symposium on Semiotic Analysis, a colloquium which marked the formation of the Soviet school of structural semiotics. He subsequently participated in the Tartu Summer Symposia, organized by *Iurii Lotman in 1964, 1966, 1968, and 1970 to discuss problems relating to structuralism and semiotics. (See Tartu School.) While developing his ideas on structuralist semiotics, Uspenskii engaged in research at the Institute of African Languages (a part of the U.S.S.R.'s Academy of Sciences) and at the Laboratory of Computational Linguistics at Moscow University. He also lectured at Moscow University on the typology of languages and the history of Russian literary language. Although most of his work has been published in Russian only, three of his books have been translated into English. Two of these - A Poetics of Composition (1973) and The Semiotics of the Russian Icon (1976) are concerned with the semiotics of artistic expression and one (The Semiotics of Russian Culture 1984, written jointly with Lotman) with the semiotics of certain historical movements. Uspenskii's structuralist orientation is a synthesis of the semiotics of *C.S. Pierce and Charles Morris, the concepts of syntagmatics and paradigmatics advanced by *Ferdinand de Saussure, the pragmatic notions of the Prague School, and certain critical insights of *Mikhail Bakhtin and V.N. Voloshinov. (See *Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School.) His topics for semiotic analyses have included matters as diverse as fortune-telling by cards, the medieval icon, the songs of the Siberian Ket people, the management of direct speech in Tolstoy's War and Peace, modelling systems for understanding the dynamics of Russian culture, and certain compositional principles inherent in artistic texts. (See *text.) In A Poetics of Composition, Uspenskii is concerned with analysing types of 'point of view' (which he defines as 'an ideological and evaluative position') and the kinds of relationship that may obtain among them. Point of view, he observes, operates as a functional unit of *discourse on several textual planes and forms

Uspenskii part of the 'syntax' of artistic composition. On a deep, semantic plane, which involves a writer's general conception of the world, point of view may be understood as the position or positions 'from which the narrative is conducted.' This viewpoint may be either concealed or openly acknowledged, and it may be expressed by the author, by a narrator, or by a character, or by some combination of these. It may, likewise, be either a simple structure, in which all subordinate viewpoints are dominated by a single perspective, or a polyphonic structure containing multiple, non-subordinated viewpoints. (See *polyphony/dialogism.) On the 'phraseological plane' (or the level of speech characteristics), point of view may be expressed by such means as diction, shifts in 'functional sentence perspective/ kinds of naming, and the management of direct and indirect speech. On the spatial and temporal planes, it is manifested through verbally established relations between the describing subject (the author) and the described event (the object). The spatial position of the author may either concur (in different ways) or not concur with that of the characters described. Time, which is always a fundamental dimension of a literary text, may be ordered either from the position of one or more characters, or in accordance with an author's transcendent schema, or on the basis of some combination of these two systems. On the plane of 'psychology,' narrative can be constructed through the 'deliberately subjective viewpoint of a particular individual's consciousness' or 'objectively' on the basis of 'facts' known to the author. It can also involve two methods of description: ( i ) external description, or description from the point of view of an outside observer who describes only what he sees; and (2) internal description, or description from the point of view of an omniscient observer who can see into conciousness itself. Uspenskii notes that all forms of representational art including pictorial art, *literature, film and theatre - are structurally 'isomorphic/ that is to say, they are all essentially 'framed' constructions combining, in one way or another, both 'external' and 'internal' points of view. Uspenskii elaborates on this last point in The Semiotics of the Russian Icon - an exploration of some general semiotic conventions subsuming 'the language of art' in the medieval period. He argues that the 'internal' point of

view in the art of this period is typically expressed by means of 'a system of inverted perspective/ which is the very opposite of 'perspective' as it came to be understood in the modern period, and that the organizing principle of medieval art is 'summation' either explicitly by the artist or implicitly by the viewer - of a multiplicity of ('inverted') visual positions. Although this richly suggestive book is mainly concerned with the spatial organization of pictorial art, many of the principles discussed are also relevant to an understanding of the literary art of this period. JAMES STEELE

Primary Sources Lotman, lu. M., and B.A. Ouspenskii, eds. Travaux sur les systemes de signes: Ecole de Tartu. Trans. Anne Zouboff. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1976. Nakhimovsky, Alexander D., and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, eds. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by lurii M. Lotman, Lidiia la. Ginsburg, Boris A. Uspenskii. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1985. Uspenskii, Boris. 'The Language Situation and Linguistic Consciousness in Muscovite Rus': The Perception of Church Slavonic and Russian.' California Slavic Studies 12 (1984): 365-85. - '"Left" and "Right" in Icon-Painting.' Semiotica !3-i (i975): 33-9- A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Trans. Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: U of California P, 1973. - The Principles of Structural Typology. The Hague: Mouton, 1968. - The Semiotics of the Russian Icon. Ed. Stephen Rudy. Lisse: Peter de Ridder P, 1976. - 'Structural Isomorphism of Verbal and Visual Art.' Poetics 5 (1972): 5-39. - and M.I. Lekomceva. 'A Description of a Semiotic System with Simple Syntax.' Semiotica 18.2 (1976): 157-69. - and Yu. M. Lotman. The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Ed. Ann Shukman. Michigan Slavic Contributions, no.ii. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, U of Michigan, 1984.

Secondary sources Bakhtin, M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. Eisenstein, S. The Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1957. Lotman, Ju. M. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans. Ronald Vroon and Gail Vroon. Michigan

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Wellek Slavic Contributions, no. 7. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, U of Michigan, 1977. Matejka, Ladislav, and Krystyna Pomorska, eds. Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1971. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York/Toronto/London: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Voloshinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. New York: Seminar P, 1973.

Wellek, Rene (b. Austria, 1903-) Theoretician of "literature and comparative literature, historian of modern literary criticism. Wellek studied in Prague, England (1924-5) and the United States (1927-30). From 1930 to 1935, he was an active junior member of the Prague Linguistic Circle; from 1935 to 1939 he lectured on Czech language and literature at the University of London. (See *Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School.) Wellek left for the United States after Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Director of comparative literature at Yale University from 1946 to his retirement in 1972, a prolific scholar whose work is translated into 23 languages, Wellek has been part of the institution of comparative literature since its rebirth shortly after the Second World War. From Kant, Wellek derives his concept of literature as an autonomous aesthetic phenomenon; from the Prague Linguistic Circle, especially *Jan Mukafovsky and *Roman Jakobson, he takes the idea of the work as a linguistic sign system related to historical norms and values. (See *sign.) He adapts theories of the Polish phenomenologist *Roman Ingarden in his definition of literature as a stratified system of norms. Wellek introduced Slavic phenomenological theory in the United States and spurred the conceptualization of literary studies there. (See *phenomenological criticism.) His discussion of literary-critical concepts in an international context helped define comparative literature as an academic discipline. From his earliest major essay, the 'Theory of Literary History' (1936), he ponders the idea of literary history throughout his career. He is

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best known, however, for the part of his work associated with formalist *New Criticism: a set of theoretical assertions in the 1949 Theory of Literature (co-authored with Austin Warren) that challenged positivist scholarship tied to extraliterary disciplines and encouraged readers to envisage literature as an object of study in itself. Wellek proposed to study works as autonomous aesthetic wholes, monuments rather than historical documents, and he distinguished intrinsic approaches that studied the work's aesthetic structure from extrinsic approaches that subordinated literature to another discipline such as sociology or psychology. Literary analysis was to depend on a coherent theory of literature which Wellek proposed in a discussion of the 'mode of existence of the literary work of art' that included a description of Ingarden's 'stratified system of norms.' Wellek's insistence on methodological priorities and his rejection of historical positivism have helped define modern comparative literature studies. In 'The Crisis of Comparative Literature' (1958), a polemical lecture delivered at the second International Comparative Literature Association Congress, he attacked an arid factualism of literary study that relied on quantitative analysis and exclusive domains of expertise. To current French definitions of comparative literature as the documentable study of literary influence, Wellek responded that the proper subject of comparative literature was the study of literariness across national boundaries and the analysis of a work as a stratified structure of signs and meanings with its own aesthetic value and 'substantial identity' throughout various readings. 'Perspectivism' is Wellek's term for the correlation of history, theory and criticism, and of absolute and relative points of view, that is necessary to grasp this stratified structure of meanings. A perspectivist view of literary history examines patterns of norms or 'regulatory ideas'; it rejects both atomistic description and rigid paradigms such as the division by centuries. Essays like 'The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History' (Concepts of Criticism 1963) attempt to grasp larger frameworks while taking into account the aesthetic identity of individual texts. (See *text.) Wellek considers his chief work the monumental History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 (1955-) which adapts the perspectivist approach to a study of major Western literary critics. When he published the

Wellek first volume he planned to demonstrate a gradual evolution of critical theory. By 1973 (The Fall of Literary History'), he no longer believed in such an evolution and described his History instead as a series of debates on recurrent problems of literary analysis. The immediate impact and global popularity of Theory of Literature has overshadowed much of Wellek's other work. Published in the same decade as many New Critical books, sharing with New Criticism a belief in artistic autonomy and aesthetic value, offering clearly phrased philosophical distinctions, and proposing in the first edition a reform of graduate literary study, Theory of Literature was received as the philosophical foundation for New Criticism. Wellek has repeatedly rejected this identification and reasserted his own preoccupation with literary history. Nonetheless, Theory's insistence on literature as an object of study in its own right and on the rejection of extrinsic or extraliterary criteria for literary judgment has continued to define the book for many readers. Complicating discussion is the fact that the examples of extrinsic criticism are those available in 1949. Less recognized is Wellek's historiographical side: his perspectivism and the notion of literary history as a process governed by a dialectical relationship between the norms of the autonomous literary work and systems of norms in history. This aspect, clearly derived from Prague *structuralism, has elements in common with current approaches such as reception theories and *New Historicism that rely on historical positioning to examine different dialectical relationships between "text and history. (See ""Constance School, *Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo.) A major difference, however, lies in Wellek's insistence on the work's autonomous aesthetic value. Upon similar grounds he rejects deconstructionist criticism, in which he sees the same risk of infinite semiotic regress criticized earlier in Mukafovsky. (See *deconstruction, *semiotics.) Wellek is the 2oth century's best known and most influential comparatist. His emphasis on conceptualizing literary study helped shape analytical criticism in the U.S.A and Europe, including those current theories of *textuality that reject Wellek's aesthetic and work-centred view as part of an older humanistic model. His breadth, liberalism and insistence on the need to coordinate different modes of inquiry helped define the broadly literary-critical

stance of American studies of comparative literature. Although his frame of reference is the Western tradition which he sees as a unity, the clarity and applicability of his analyses have caused his work to be translated and used as a standard reference around the world. SARAH LAWALL

Primary Sources Wellek, Rene. The Attack on Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982. - Concepts of Criticism. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. - Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the i$th Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965. - Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. - Four Critics: Croce, Valery, Lukacs, and Ingarden. Seattle/London: U of Washington P, 1981. - A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. Vol. i: The Later i8th Century, 1955. Vol. 2: The Romantic Age, 1955- Vol. 3: The Age of Transition, 1965. Vol. 4: The Later iyth Century, 1965. Vol 5: English Criticism, 1900-1950, 1986. Vol. 6: American Criticism, 1900-1950, 1986. New Haven: Yale UP; London: J. Cape. - The Rise of English Literary History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1941. - 'The Theory of Literary History.' Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague 6 (1936): 179-91. - and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1949.

Secondary Sources Bucco, Martin. Rene Wellek. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Creed, Walter G. 'Rene Wellek and Karl Popper on the Mode of Existence of Ideas in Literature and Science.' Journal of the History of Ideas 44.4 (Oct. 1983): 639-56. Fietz, Lothar. 'Rene Welleks Literaturtheorie und der Prager Strukturalismus.' In Englische und amerikanische Literaturtheorie. Ed. Rudiger Ahrens and Erwin Wolff. 2 vols. Heidelberg, 1978-9. Lawall, Sarah. 'Rene Wellek: Phenomenological Literary Historian.' In Literary Theory and Criticism: Festschrift in Honor of Rene Wellek. Ed. Joseph Strelka. Zurich: Peter Lang, 1984, 393-416. - 'Rene Wellek and Modern Literary Criticism.' Comparative Literature 40.1 (Winter 1988): 3-24. Wellek, Rene. 'Collaborating with Austin Warren on Theory of Literature.' In Teacher and Critic: Essays by and about Austin Warren. Ed. Myron Simon and Harvey Gross. Los Angeles: Plantin P, 1976, 68-75.

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White - 'My Early Life.' In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 7. Ed. Adele Sarkissian. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988, 205-26. Winner, Thomas G., and John P. Kasik. 'Rene Wellek's Contribution to American Literary Scholarship.' Forum 2 (1977): 21-31.

White, Hayden (b. U.S.A., 1928-) Historian and philosopher of history. White studied at Wayne State University and at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1956. He has taught at the University of Rochester, UCLA and Wesleyan University, and since 1978 has been professor in the History of Consciousness Program, University of California at Santa Cruz. White is best known for applying concepts derived from literary theory to the analysis of historical writings. In his major work, Metahistory (1973), he discusses 19th-century historians (Michelet, Ranke, Toqueville, and Burckhardt) and philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, *Nietzsche, and *Croce). This study is introduced by an idealized 'theory of the historical work' which describes the process by which historians select and arrange the data from the 'unprocessed historical record' in order to render that record 'more comprehensible to an audience of a particular kind' (5). The process involves three modes of explanation which are combined in each historian's work: explanation by emplotment, by formal argument and by ideological implication. White follows *Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism) in speaking of four modes of emplotment: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. There are also four modes of formal argument (following Stephen Pepper's World Hypotheses): formalist, organicist, mechanistic, and contextualist. Explanations by ideological implication (this time following Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia) are either anarchist, conservative, radical, or liberal. Each of the works White discusses exhibits a particular combination of these modes which is the expression of its author's 'coherent vision or presiding image' of the whole historical field. Underlying this vision is a distinctive style whose grounds are 'poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature' (30). The historian 'prefigures' the field in terms that correspond to the traditional tropes identified by poetic theory: metaphor, meto-

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nymy, *synecdoche, and *irony. (See *trope, ""metonymy/metaphor.) 'The theory of tropes provides a way of characterizing the dominant modes of historical thinking which took shape in Europe in the igth century' (38). White draws his ideas from many sources but he is perhaps most strongly influenced by structuralist theories of literature. (See *structuralism.) Though he speaks of the historian's poetic 'acts' or 'choices,' he thinks of these as culturally determined and unconscious ('precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian's own consciousness' 31). White's work has been influential in the literary study of historical texts but the focus of his work is not literary criticism or theory. It must be understood in the context of the debate over the epistemological status of historical knowledge. Some igth- and 20th-century historians and positivistic philosophers have tried to make history into an objective explanatory discipline which tells what happened and why it happened in the manner of the natural sciences. In opposition to this view of history, White stresses the creative and constructive character not merely of historical writing but of historical knowledge itself. In essays published since Metahistory (some collected in two volumes mentioned below), White has continued his literary treatment of history in general and historians in particular, on the whole not adhering to the overly rigid theoretical grid presented in his major work but more generally taking the concept of narrative as his point of departure. DAVID CARR

Primary Sources White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. - Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in i$th Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. - Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Williams, Raymond (b. Wales, igai-d.igSS) Man of letters, literary critic, cultural theorist, and political activist. Williams was born and raised in a working-class family in Wales. As his critique of English culture sharpened through a long

Williams engagement with its "literature and institutions and through a growing affinity for Continental currents of thought, he came to settle on a cultural identity as a Welsh European. His death interrupted an ambitious and impressive work in progress concerning his deepest roots; what is left is a isoo-page fragment of a Welsh historical novel tracking The People of Black Mountain' as far as the Middle Ages. This is the region Williams left in his late teens. From Abergavenny Grammar School he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate on scholarship (1939), married his life-long companion and co-worker, Joyce (Joy) Dalling (1942), rose to the rank of captain in an antitank regiment during the war, and completed his degree just thereafter. He worked in adult education at Oxford (1946-61), promoting the theme of democratic permanent education, and published several books to direct students toward the social and political contexts of drama and fiction. From 1961 to his retirement in 1983, Williams found his place at Jesus College, Cambridge. The position of Professor of Drama was created for him in 1974. As a political writer, Williams engaged in numerous discourses and media, including the academic, the artistic and the journalistic, producing more than 600 publications. In all his cultural work, Williams was writing against two traditions: 'one which has totally spiritualized cultural production, the other which has relegated it to secondary status' (Politics and Letters 352-3). At his death, both opposing traditions had been much weakened. Williams was committed to the view that the prevailing 'categories of literature and criticism were so deeply compromised that they had to be challenged in toto' (Politics and Letters 326). He meant that the whole enterprise of 'imaginative literature,' confined to a specialized reserve secluded from other writing and other activity, had become so complicit in the capitalist system of meanings, values and divisions of labour that it had become an obstacle in the path of the long revolution toward a fuller attainment of (cultural, political and economic) value which he had documented and on behalf of which he always pressed his arguments. His most important legacy is the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies which he pioneered and consolidated. As part of his

contribution, he articulated and refined such key concepts as 'structure of feeling/ 'knowable community,' ""hegemony/ and '*cultural materialism.' Along with New Left Review and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, for both of which he served as a kind of spiritual father at one time or another over two decades, Williams actively built bridges to such converging currents of cultural studies as the *Frankfurt School, the neoGramscians, and other renewals of Western cultural Marxism, as well as French and East European historical semiology, Foucauldian genealogy, and the McLuhan-inspired Canadian *discourse on communications technology. (See *Marxist criticism, ""materialist criticism, *semiotics, *Foucault, *Gramsci, *McLuhan, ""communication theory.) In the 19505 and early 19605, in Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Communications, Williams established the frameworks for placing literary debates in larger contexts. He traced the culture and society argument from the i8th century to the 2oth as a critique of the developing capitalist ""social formation. Where the argument in its early stages had been critical of industrialism, in its modern versions, especially as embraced by *T.S. Eliot and *F.R. Leavis, who both loomed large in the cultural milieu where Williams was active, the argument could become evidently antidemocratic. Williams argued instead for the democratization of culture through the reform of cultural institutions. By studying 'culture' in active and indissoluble relationship with such other key words as 'class/ 'industry/ 'democracy/ and 'art/ he opposed the influence that Eliot and Leavis had mobilized on behalf of minority cultural forms and argued that culture and democracy must be assisted to develop together. His scholarly analyses of the institutions of culture - for example, the forms of drama and fiction, the standardization of the language, the press, education, and literacy - provided evidence that the changes and conflicts of a way of life are deeply implicated in its systems of learning and communication, and supported his contention that relationships of ""power, property and production are no more fundamental to a society than relationships in describing, learning, modifying, exchanging, and preserving experiences. Williams asserted, further, that these latter, far from being secondary communications about some other primary reality, are 'a

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Williams central and necessary part of our humanity' (Communications 18-19). In the later 19605 and early 19705, encouraged by a newly politicized generation, Williams produced revaluations of fiction, drama and television: Modern Tragedy, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, The Country and the City, and Television. He historicized and democratized such categories as 'tragedy/ read texts in their historical context and discussed cultural institutions within a critical sociology of society. In the later 19705 Williams turned to rewriting Marxist literary and cultural theory. No longer a renegade or fellow traveller (who had taken considerable distance from the crude anticultural Marxism of the received orthodox traditions) he became a respected innovator. In Marxism and Literature, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and Culture, Williams elaborated his mature theory of cultural materialism, thematizing culture as a productive process and a constitutive signifying system whose institutions and practices are delimitable from the anthropological sense of culture as a whole way of life. Through the reworked category of 'hegemony/ he also showed that domination saturates the whole process of living culture, but always incompletely, and is therefore always resisted, based as it is in selective traditions of inclusion and exclusion. The result of Williams' theory of culture, in contrast to the formalist model of a cultural order of privileged objects and stable modes of composition and response, is a dynamic picture of a contested culture of practices and formations with varied and variable affiliations. It is a model that is capable of sustaining the gesture for which he was to become celebrated after The Long Revolution: the consistent Gramscian call for a regroupment of the optimism of the will and for 'making hope practical, rather than despair convincing' (Towards 2000 240). JOHN FEKETE

Primary Sources Williams, Raymond. Border Country. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960. - Cobbett. Past Masters series. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. - Communications: Britain in the Sixties. Penguin special 207. 1962. Rev. ed., Penguin special 831. Harmondsworth: Pelican-Penguin, 1968.

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- The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. - Culture. New Sociology series. London: Fontana, 1981. - Culture and Society 27^0-1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. - Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Rev. and exp. successor to Drama from Ibsen to Eliot. 1952. London: Chatto and Windus, 1968. - The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. - The Fight for Manod. London: Chatto and Windus, 1979. - Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Communications series. London: Fontana, 1976. Rev. and exp. ed. London: Flamingo-Fontana, 1983. - The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. - Marxism and Literature. Marxist Introductions series. London, New York: Oxford UP, 1977. - May Day Manifesto 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. - Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966. - Orwell. Modern Masters series. London: Fontana/ Collins, 1971. - Politics and Letters: Interview with New Left Review. London: New Left Books, 1979. - Preface to Film. London: Film Drama, 1954. - Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso, 1980. - Second Generation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. - Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Technosphere series. London: Fontana and Collins, 1974. — Towards 2000. London: Chatto and Windus, 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. - Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1984. Secondary Sources Barnett, Anthony. 'Raymond Williams and Marxism: A Rejoinder to Terry Eagleton.' New Left Review 99 (1976): 47-64. Christgau, Robert. 'Living in a Material World: Raymond Williams' Long Revolution.' The Village Voice Literary Supplement (Apr. 1985): i, 12-18. Eagleton, Terry. 'Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams.' New Left Review 95 (1976): 3-23. Repr. in Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: New Left Books, 1976, 21-43. - ed. Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives. Oxford: Polity P, 1989. Gorak, Jan. The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams. Literary Frontiers edition, no. 32. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1988. Green, Michael. 'Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies.' Cultural Studies 6 (1975): 31-48.

Wilson Hall, Stuart. 'Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.' Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 37-72. Heath, Stephen, and Gillian Skirrow. 'An Interview with Raymond Williams.' In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana UP, 1986, 3—17. Higgins, John. 'Raymond Williams and the Problem of Ideology.' In Postmodernism and Politics. Ed. Jonathan Arac. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986, 112-22. Repr. from boundary 2 11(1982-3): 145-54Inglis, Fred. 'Culture and Politics: Richard Hoggart, the New Left Review, and Raymond Williams.' In Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory 18801980. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982. Johnson, Lesley. The Cultural Critics: From Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Johnson, Richard. 'What Is Cultural Studies Anyhow?' Social Text 16 (1986-7): 38-80. Lockwood, Bernard. Tour Contemporary British Working-Class Novelists: A Thematic and Critical Approach to the Fiction of Raymond Williams, John Braine, David Storey and Alan Sillitoe.' Diss. U of Wisconsin, 1966. O'Connor, Alan. Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Pinkney, Tony. Raymond Williams. Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales: Seren Books, 1992. Watkins, Evan. 'Raymond Williams and Marxist Criticism.' boundary 2 4 (1975—6): 933-46. Ward, J.P. Raymond Williams. Writers of Wales series. Cardiff: U of Wales P for the Welsh Arts Council, 1981. Zinman, Rosalind. 'Raymond Williams: Towards a Sociology of Culture.' Diss. Concordia U (Montreal), 1984.

Wilson, Edmund (b. U.S.A., 1895-0). 1972) Literary critic and chronicler, social historian, novelist, playwright, poet, diarist, man of letters. After attending university Edmund Wilson worked briefly as a reporter, then served in Europe in the First World War. He became a writer and editor for Vanity Fair (1920-1), was a bookreview editor for The New Republic (1926-31), and a regular contributor to The New Yorker (1944-60). Wilson's relationships with many of the most famous intellectuals of the 50 years between 1920 and 1970, his indefatigible interest in languages, European ""literature, cultures and ideas outside mainstream America, and his massive literary output make him an im-

portant figure in the history of American letters. Although most of Wilson's literary production concerned belles-lettres, his catholic interests encompassed social and political topics as well. Seldom deliberately theoretical except in a few of his earlier works, Wilson's writing is rather in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, Saintsbury and such contemporary critics as V.S. Pritchett: impressionistic but grounded in pragmatic sensibility, it is dedicated to clarity of expression and to reaching the largest possible audience. Wilson's first significant publication of critical essays, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1570-1930 (1931) is a now rather dated but pioneering study of the Symbolist movement, its influence on early 20thcentury literature and on such major figures as Joyce, Valery, Yeats, Proust, Rimbaud, *Eliot, and Stein. The Triple Thinkers (1938), essays largely collected from periodicals, contains some of his most influential work, such as 'The Ambiguity of Henry James' and 'Marxism and Literature/ one of the first American studies of socialist realism. (See *Henry James, *Marxist criticism.) To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), is an account of the rise of socialism from its roots in SaintSimon, Michelet and Taine to the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and the social movement that changed the world. The Wound and the Bow (1941), essays on such diverse figures as Dickens, Kipling, Hemingway, and Sophocles, emphasizes the Freudian concept of creation and neurosis. (See *Sigmund Freud.) The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It (1943), a collection of essays about famous American literary figures by other famous figures, includes such classics as Mark Twain's 'Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences' and pieces by Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot and others. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (1950) displays the diversity of Wilson's interests about European literary and artistic figures such as Dali, Kafka and Waugh - then littleknown in the U.S.A. - in addition to his famous essay on the paucity of literary production from the American West Coast writers, 'The Boys in the Back Room.' The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (1952) remains a significant contribu-

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Wilson tion to American criticism and literary history, especially because Wilson was so intimately associated with many of the major literary figures of those periods including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties (1958), although largely compiled of articles on social events, is also important as a literary history of the times, as is Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), a study of such then littleknown American literary figures as Bierce, Cabell, Lanier, and Chopin. The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-65 (1965), another collection of Wilson's essays largely from The New Yorker, also contains two now-famous essays on Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago which caused a series of vitriolic exchanges between Wilson and Nabokov. Another controversial article, The Fruits of MLA' (1967), satirizes American English department academics as scholars and methodologists, particularly for what he saw as their cumbersome and often ludicrous editing policies. The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1947-6$ (1969) is one of the first attempts to evaluate the theological ideas contained in the scrolls, as well as being a study of methods of biblical exegesis, and of ecclesiastical responses to the texts. Although much of the work was published in The New Yorker, and like many of Wilson's works can be considered a kind of 'journalism,' his facility in relating complex ideas without downplaying their implications and overtones marks his special contribution to the field of literary history and criticism. The final work Wilson published during his lifetime is A Window on Russia: For the Use of Foreign Readers (1972), another collection of essays on Russian writers that Wilson wrote between 1943 and 1971 on Pushkin, Tiutchev, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and others, as well as his essay on Nabokov's four-volume translation of Eugene Onegin, 'The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov.' After Wilson's death in 1972, Leon Edel assumed the task of publishing Wilson's remaining works, the ones most directly connected with literary criticism being The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters (1973), and Letters on Literature and Politics, edited by Elena Wilson (1976). Thanks to the care of Edel, Wilson's diaries, letters and personal journals are being col-

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lected and issued posthumously. The most recent of these collections is The Fifties (1988). Wilson's contribution to literary criticism, intellectual history and most particularly to American letters is complex. He placed the American stamp on the thought of the world as well as broadening the interest of American scholarship. His works remain essential for any student of 20th-century American letters and intellectual history. REED MERRILL

Primary Sources Wilson, Edmund. The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday and Company, 1958. - The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932. - Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-19)0. 1931. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965. - The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. - Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950. - The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. - Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches Among the Ruins of Italy, Greece, and England. Garden City, Nj: Doubleday and Company, 1947. - The Fifties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. - The Forties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. - The Fruits of MLA I. Their Wedding Journey.' New York Review of Books 2.5, 26 Sept. 1968. - The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-69. New York: Oxford UP, 1969. Repub. in Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978- Letters on Literature and Politics. Ed. Elena Wilson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. - The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: 194.0-1971. New York: Harpers, 1979. - O Canada: An American's Notes on Canadian Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1965. - Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 1962. - Red, Black, 'Blond and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations: Zuni, Haiti, Soviet Russia, and Israel. New York, Oxford, 1956. - The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952.

Wimsatt - The Thirties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Farrar, and from then until his death he remained at Straus and Giroux, 1980. Yale, rising from his initial position of instruc- To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and tor to become Frederick Clifford Ford Professor Acting of History. New York: Harcourt, Brace and of English (1965) and Sterling Professor of Company, 1940. English (1974). He established a reputation - The Triple Thinkers: Essays on Literature. New both as an eminent scholar of tSth-century York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938. English "literature and as a radical exponent of - The Twenties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Farrar, , the New Critical theory of 'objectivism,' focusStraus and Giroux, 1975. - A Window on Russia: For the Use of Foreign Readers. ing on the work of art itself, independent of its origins and its effects, as the central concern of New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. - The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. literary criticism. Although inaccurately, WimNew York: Oxford UP, 1941. satt became known as one of the 'Yale formal- ed. The Crack-Up: With Other Uncollected Pieces, ists,' together with *Cleanth Brooks and *Rene Note-Books and Unpublished Letters Together with Wellek. (See *New Criticism.) Letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wimsatt's 18th-century scholarship includes Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos books on Johnson's style and vocabulary Passos and Essays and Poems fry Paul Rosenfeld, (1941, 1948), an edition of a volume in the Clemvai/ Wescott, John Dos Passos, John Peale Yale Boswell papers (1959), articles on AlexBishop and Edmund Wilson. New York: New Direcander Pope and an edition of his selected tions, 1945. works (1951), and studies of developments in - The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who poetry from the Augustan to the Romantic Made It. Garden City, NI: Doubleday Doran and eras. His natural penchant for wit and humour Co., 1943. and his lively interest in style as 'a level of Secondary Sources Castronovo. David. Edmund Wilson. New York: Ungar, 1984. Douglas, George H. Edmund Wilson's America. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1983. Groth, Janet. Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time. Athens: Ohio UP, 1989. Kriegel, Leonard. Edmund Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. Paul, Sherman. Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1967. Ramsey, Richard David. Edmund Wilson: A Bibliography. New York: David Lewis, 1971. Wain, John, ed. An Edmund Wilson Celebration. London; Phaiclon, 1978.

Wimsatt, William Kurtz, Jr. (b. U.S.A., igoy-d. 1975) Literary critic. William Kurtz Wimsatt completed his B.A. (1928) and M.A. (1929) at Georgetown University. From 1930-5 he was head of the English department and a teacher of Latin at the Portsmouth Priory School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island; from 1935-6 he studied and taught at the Catholic University of America before embarking on a Ph.D. in English at Yale. He gained his doctorate in 1939 with a dissertation on The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson'

meaning' (The Verbal Icon xii) inform all his practical criticism. His concern to demonstrate the iconic status of representation ranges from a compilation of all the known portraits of Pope (1966) to repeated investigations into the nature of verbal "mimesis, the subject of his final published paper. Here he argues, against *Ferdinand de Saussure's contention that language is merely conventional, that language has 'natural' powers, 'both imagistic and diagrammatic' (Day of the Leopards 73). Wimsatt's discussions of the metrics and sound-patterns of poetry are undergirded by this same belief in the inseparability of form and meaning (Hateful Contraries 240) and in the essential reference of language to reality. Wimsatt's stance is remarkably consistent over the 3o-odd years of his published work, perhaps partly as a result of his constant awareness of the historical contexts of literary criticism. His longest book, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), on which he collaborated with Cleanth Brooks though writing 25 of the 32 chapters himself, is a narrative history of criticism from its classical origins to contemporary times. All of Wimsatt's major concerns are suggested here: he insists on the principle of 'continuity and intelligibility in the history of literary argument' (vii) because of 'the continuity and real community of human experience' (viii); he declares that the historian 'believes that he has in fact a coherent, a real and une491

Wimsatt quivocal subject matter' (ix) and offers 'the history of one kind of thinking about values' (vii). Thus although Wimsatt is often considered the foremost exponent of the American New Criticism which flourished in the late 19305 and 19405, he is both historical and resolutely referential in his convictions. He did not himself adopt the name of New Critic but described himself variously as an 'objective' or 'modern' critic concerned with 'cognitive' and 'explicatory' literary criticism in order to 'defend literature as a form of knowledge' (The Verbal Icon xii). Although he affirmed the famous New Critical dogma that 'a poem should not mean but be/ he qualified it by declaring that a poem is a human act of knowing rather than a literal object (The Verbal Icon 50), and that its relation to the real world is determined by a complex of interactions between 'dramatic speaker' and audience, consisting in a 'discourse ... about the emotive quality of objects' (The Verbal Icon 38). Most of Wimsatt's essays are collected in three volumes roughly a decade apart: The Verbal Icon (1954), Hateful Contraries (1965) and Day of the Leopards (1976 - a posthumous publication). Wimsatt himself stressed the historical sequence of these titles, in that the notion of the poem as a verbal icon must be understood to contain conflicting parts held in a tension whose potential imbalance is as destructive as its maintenance is creative (Day of the Leopards xi). The two most influential papers in The Verbal Icon are 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1946) and 'The Affective Fallacy' (1949), written in collaboration with Monroe Beardsley; together these papers are seen as the fullest account of the doctrines of New Criticism and their arguments are ones that Wimsatt continued to expound and clarify throughout his career. Wimsatt contends that since the intentional fallacy centres on the sincerity of the poet and the affective fallacy centres on the sincerity of the critic, in both cases the poem itself tends to disappear (The Verbal Icon 29). Critical inattention to the relation of technique to content, he suggests, has often led to these fallacious approaches to the poem; the first 'begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism/ whereas the second 'begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism' (The Verbal

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Icon 21). Neither biographical inquiry nor audience response is true literary criticism, which must focus on evidence internal to the poem with the addition, however, of the 'intermediate evidence' offered by an awareness of the associations particular words may have had for the poet. In this sense 'historical causes [may] enter in a pronounced way into the very meaning of literary works' (The Verbal Icon 2 54)Wimsatt is essentially and significantly synchretistic: T find no embarrassment/ he declares in the introduction to Day of the Leopards, 'in having taken both sides of the debate' (xi). The central tenet of his poetics is perhaps most clearly diagrammed in 'Horses of Wrath' (Hateful Contraries 36): he locates his 'tensional' theory of literary criticism at the midway point of two intersecting poles: one, the pole separating contentual, didactic criticism from formal, stylistic criticism; the other, the pole separating intentional, speaker-based from affective, audience-based theories. He therefore sees metaphor as 'the principle of all poetry' (The Verbal Icon 49), since its 'logical impurity ... is a ready slant, a twist, of abstract idea toward the inclinations of speaker or audience or of both' (Hateful Contraries 41) - the locus of the essential relationship between poetry and the real world. (See ""metonymy/metaphor.) Wimsatt's understanding of art as tension has a moral as well as a formal base because the tensional element is part of the moral quality of experience and can therefore justly be repeated in art (Hateful Contraries 47). He sees poetic and moral value as distinct, insofar as poetic value inheres in the 'imaginative power of [poetry's] presentation' (The Verbal Icon 98) so that what is wrong with a bad poem is that it does not make sense, either in explicit statement or in implicit suggestion through image (Explication as Criticism 16). However, both poetic and moral value are related to the notion of evil as negation or a gap in order and to good as positive - 'in the natural order the designed complexity of what ... most has being' (The Verbal Icon 100), so that 'the complexity and unity of the poem is also its maturity or sophistication or richness or depth' (The Verbal Icon 82); 'the greatest poetry will be morally right' (The Verbal Icon 100). In the conclusion to his critical history, Wimsatt confesses to his Christian stance in locating the ultimately satisfactory metaphysical expres-

Wimsatt sion of tension in the mix of suffering, optimism and mystery inherent in the Incarnation (Literary Criticism 746). The relation of Wimsatt to other literary critics demonstrates his considered eclecticism. He offers guarded affirmation of *I.A. Richards' concern for explication, for literary value and for moral significance, but rejects Richards' separation of emotive and referential meaning (Day of the Leopards 236). He applauds the structuralists' defence of the literary object, but warns against their absolutism (Day of the Leopards 201-2). (See *structuralism.) He appreciates the verbal energy of *Northrop Frye while berating him for using it as a cover for the illogicality of his ahistoricism and fanciful megalomania (Day of the Leopards 90, 93). He denounces the *Geneva School for their subjectivity, the Chicago critics for their overemphasis on poetic species rather than specifics, and those who hold to the doctrine of 'autonomous visionary imagination' for subscribing to a solipsistic 'antidoctrine' that cannot yield 'a valid account of the relation between poetic form and poetic meaning' (Hateful Contraries 243-4). (See *Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago School.) Day of the Leopards expresses his distress over what in the 19605 he sees as the kidnapping of poetry for political ends and the surrender to unreason in academic criticism, most specifically and p a i n f u l l y for him among the Yale deconstructionists. (See *deconstruction.) As he had said from the beginning of his career, he is concerned t h a t once emotion overrules the cognitive qualities of the context, 'the sequence of licenses is endless' (The Verbal Icon 27). Such a sequence he would have perceived in *poststructuralism, schools of criticism which Wimsatt would argue 'batter the object' (Dai/ of the Leopards 183). D\l B O R A H BO W E N

Primary Sources Wimsatt, W.K., Jr. Dan of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 197(1. - Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism. [With an essay on English meter written with Monroe C. Beardsley.] Lexington: U of Kentucky P, i 465. - Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the 'Rambler' and 'Dictionary' of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1948. - The Portraits of Alexander Pope. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, i «.>(-,s.

- The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1941. - The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. [With two preliminary essays written with Monroe C. Beardsley.] Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. - and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Knopf, 1957. - ed. Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose. New York: Rinehart, 1951. Rev. ed., 1972. - Explication as Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute 1941-52. New York and London: Columbia UP, 1963. - and F.A. Pottle, eds. Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. London: Heinemann, 1959. Secondary Sources Bagwell, ]. Timothy. American Formalism and the Problem of Interpretation. Houston: Rice UP, 1986. Beardsley, Monroe C. 'Textual Meaning and Authorial Meaning.' Genre 1.3 (July 1968): 169-81. Berman, Art. From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Borklund, Elmer. Contemporary Literary Critics. London: Macmillan, 1977, 526-32. Bradbury, Malcolm, and David Palmer, eds. Contemporary Criticism. London: Edward Arnold, 1970. Brady, Frank, John Palmer and Martin Price, eds. Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1973. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1947. de Man, Paul. 'The Rhetoric of Temporality.' In Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. C.S. Singleton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1969. Fish, Stanley. 'Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.' New Literary History 2.1 (Autumn 1970): 123-62. Graff, Gerald. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1967. Krieger, Murray. The Play and Place of Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1967. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lodge, David. 'Review of Hateful Contraries.' Modern Language Review 61.4 (Oct. 1966): 647-8. Pagliaro, Harold E. 'The Affective Question.' Bucknell Review 20 (1972): 3-20. Pradhan, S.V. 'The Positivist Fallacy: "Cognitive Translatability" in Criticism.' British Journal of Aesthetics 27.2 (Spring 1987): 138-44.

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Winters Richards, I.A. Principles of Literary Criticism. 1924. Repr. ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1959. Robey, David. 'Anglo-American New Criticism.' In Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. Ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey. Totawa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982, 65-83. Wellek, Rene. 'The Literary Theory of William K. Wimsatt.' The Yale Review 66 (Winter 1976): 178-92.

Winters, (Arthur) Yvor (b. U.S.A., igoo-d. 1968) Poet and literary critic. At the University of Chicago (1917-18), Yvor Winters joined the Poetry Club and met fellow poets Glenway Westcott, Elizabeth Maddox Roberts and Harriet Monroe, who published some of his earliest work in her Poetry Magazine. After three years in a tuberculosis sanitorium, he taught school for two years in the mining communities of Madrid and Los Cerillos, New Mexico. He gained his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Romance languages with a minor in Latin at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and then taught at the University of Idaho. Following marriage to the poet Janet Lewis, Winters began doctoral work at Stanford on the post-romantic reaction in lyrical verse, completing it in 1935. Winters spent the rest of his teaching and writing life at Stanford from where he retired as Albert Guerard Professor of English in 1966. Winters' importance in literary criticism in the U.S.A. during the middle decades of the 2oth century lies in his revaluation of the romantic-modernist aesthetics he originally espoused. In his Imagist manifesto The Testament of a Stone, Being Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image' (1924), he argues that a poem 'is a stasis in a world of flux and indecision, a permanent gateway to waking oblivion, which is the only infinity and the only rest' (Uncollected Essays 195). However, his wish to emulate the poets he regarded as the best recent practitioners - Baudelaire, Valery, Bridges, Hardy, Dickinson, and Stevens - led Winters to reject free verse and return to the traditional forms in which these poets had written their best work. Winters provides a definitive statement of his mature view of the poem in 'Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature' (1956): 'I believe that a poem (or other work of artistic literature) is a statement

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in words about a human experience ... In each work there is a content which is rationally apprehensible, and each work endeavors to communicate the emotion which is appropriate to the rational apprehension of the subject. The work is thus a judgment, rational and emotional of the experience - that is a complete moral judgment in so far as the work is successful' (The Function of Criticism 26). Winters' criticial views of poetry emanate from his own practical experience as poet and were also influenced by his many contacts with other poets, including Marianne Moore and Hart Crane. His marriage to Janet Lewis was a lifelong critical and poetic collaboration. Crane's suicide in 1932 became for Winters frightening evidence of the bankruptcy of Emersonian-Whitmanian romanticism; Crane was 'a Gawayne who succumbed' (New Republic, 2 June 1937, 104). At Stanford, William Dinsmore Briggs (an editor of Ben Jonson) became a strong influence on Winters, leading him to read St. Thomas Aquinas and to deepen his interest in American ""literature and in the English poetry of the Renaissance. Winters wrote several poems in honour of Briggs, most movingly his 'Dedication for a Book of Criticism' (Collected Poems of Yvor Winters 145). During his years as a teacher at Stanford (1928-66) Winters himself influenced many students who became colleagues and fellow poets, some of whose work he included in two series of Poets of the Pacific (1937; 1949). His last critical act was to co-edit with Kenneth Fields Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), the companion volume to Forms of Discovery (1967). Winters' revaluation of his original romanticmodernist aesthetics led him to become an Aristotelian-Thomist who followed the progress of scholastic logic into Renaissance short poems in the plain style. Also, he became a sharp critic of the degeneration of New England Calvinism into Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Winters' final view of the development of the short poem in English was that 'the two great periods in the poetry of our language are the period from Wyatt to Dryden, inclusive, and the period from Jones Very to the present, and the second period does not seem to have come to an end' (Forms of Discovery 358). Winters believed that of these two periods the second, which he terms 'post-Symbolist/ with its 'carefully controlled association' 'offers the possibility, at least, of greater

Wittgenstein flexibility and greater inclusiveness of matter (and without confusion) than we can find in the Renaissance structures; the post-Symbolist imagery provides a greater range of thinking and perceiving than we have ever had before' (Forms of Discovery 253). Winters has been characterized as an antimodernist; but he is a defender of reason and a critic of the Shaftesburian sentimentalism, associationism and deism that led to romanticism. He shows himself in the vanguard of those who sought to revolutionize the teaching of literature in America. Though associated with the *New Criticism, Winters was reluctant to accept association with its 'learned paraphrasing' (The Function of Criticism 81). Writing of Winters, Terry Comito quotes Winters' characterization of Sturge Moore as applicable to Winters himself. He attempted 'to understand the tradition into which he was born, and, at one and the same time, to save himself from it and to make something of it' (Forms of Discovery 249). JOHN FERNS

Primary Sources Winters, Yvor. The Anatomy of Nonsense. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1443. - The Bare Hills. Boston: Four Seas, 1927. - Before Disaster. Tyron, NC: Tyron Pamphlets, 1934. - Collected Poems. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1952. - The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters. Intro. Donald Davie. Manchester: Carcanet, 1978; Athens: Swallow P, U of Ohio P, 1980. - Edwin Arlington Robinson. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1946. - Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. Chicago: Alan Swallow, \ 967. - The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises. Denver: Alan Swallow, 19S7- In Defense of Reason. Denver and New York: Alan Swallow P and W. Morrow, 1947. - Maitle's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1438. - Pritmtivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry. New York: Arrow Editions, '937- The Proof. New York: Coward-McCann, 1930. - Twelve Poets of the Pacific. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1937. Repr. Poets of the Pacific. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1949. - Uncollected Essays and Reviews. Ed. Francis Murphy. Chicago: Swallow P, 1973. - and Kenneth Fields. Quest for Reality: An Anthol-

ogy of Short Poems in English. Chicago: Swallow P, 1969.

Secondary Sources Comito, Terry. In Defense of Winters: The Poetry and Prose of Yvor Winters. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986. Davis, Dick. Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983. Lohf, Kenneth A., and Eugene P. Sheehy. Yvor Winters: A Bibliography. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959.

Parkinson, Thomas, ed. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Powell, Grosvenor. Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980. - Yvor Winters: An Annotated Bibliography 1919-1982. Metuchen, Nj: Scarecrow P, 1983.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (b. Austria, iSSq-d. England, 1951) Philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein was educated at home until the age of 14. After three years in school, he entered the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1906 to study engineering. From 1908 to 1911 he worked as a research student at the University of Manchester, conducting kite-flying experiments and designing a propeller for a jet turbine. Becoming interested in the foundations of mathematics, he read Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics and some of Frege's logical writings. On Frege's advice he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1912 to study with Russell. From late 1913 until the outbreak of war in 1914, he lived in an isolated hut in Norway. During the First World War Wittgenstein saw action on the eastern front. Soon after the war, he renounced his inheritance, trained as an elementary school teacher and spent 1920-6 teaching in remote mountain villages in Lower Austria. In 1926 he worked as a gardener's assistant in a monastery and then returned to Vienna, where he designed and oversaw the construction of a modernist house throughout 1927-8. During this time he discussed philosophy, mathematics and poetry with Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and other members of what would become the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, where he submitted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (written in prison camp) as his Ph.D.

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Wittgenstein thesis, in 1930 becoming research fellow of Trinity College. He was made professor of philosophy in 1939. His writings during this period were extensive and some, notably The Blue Book of 1933-4 and the The Brown Book of 1935, were circulated in stencilled copies. Revisions of The Brown Book formed the first part of Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein prepared for publication but did not complete to his satisfaction. He became a British citizen in 1937, after Austria's annexation by Germany, and served as a hospital orderly during the Second World War. Returning to Cambridge he soon resigned his post in order to live in a seaside hut in Ireland but later returned to England once again. Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously, followed by a steady stream of published notebooks, manuscripts, lecture notes, and memoirs. The Tractatus is a severe modernist work, concerned with marking out strict distinctions among disciplines. Its positions originate in the criticism of the philosophies of logic of Frege and Russell, particularly of the idea that there can be discoveries in logic that are of the order of discoveries in the natural sciences. Unlike science, Wittgenstein argued, the propositions of logic say nothing, are senseless; instead they show how certain propositions may be substituted for others that are tautologically equivalent. Logic is the framework of thought, language and the world. It does not describe arrangements of objects in the world. The distinction between description of the world and other kinds of language was extended to characterize ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and the rest of philosophy as nonsense. Goodness, beauty, the metaphysical subject, and the will stand outside the world and experience. They may, in a way, suffuse it or stand as its absolute presuppositions, but about how this is so nothing can be said. These things 'are what is mystical' (6.522). Though its castings of science as concerned with facts, logic and mathematics as concerned with frameworks, and all of traditional philosophy as nonsense were congenial to and influential upon the Vienna positivists, it is doubtful that Wittgenstein himself ever shared their scientism. Throughout the 19305 he came to doubt that truth-table analysis, which he had invented in the Tractatus, could elucidate all the framework principles to which we keep in ordinary speech. This doubt led him to in-

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vestigate various, more specific Satzsysteme or discourse schemes employed in ordinary language, the precursors of the languagegames (Sprachspiele) of Philosophical Investigations. Like the Tractatus, Philosophical Investigations distinguishes philosophy from other systems of thought and seeks to curb its pretensions. Philosophy's aim is clarity, not discovery. It has no privileged relation to the essence of the world, for the world has no essence. It cannot guide practice on the basis of deep knowledge, for practices and languagegames are autonomous. At best it can uncover and dismiss nonsense. 'Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is' (sec. 124). These metaphysical theses are combined with patient and trenchant criticism of paradigmatic types of traditional philosophical confusion about thinking, representation, the mind, and the will. The paradoxical aim of these criticisms is to chasten us, perhaps ceaselessly, into a kind of naturalness and away from seeking explanations of our humanity or experience in general. The anti-foundationalism and moralism about the ordinary in Wittgenstein's later philosophy have received a number of interpretations. Four are distinctive and significant. (1) *Richard Rorty has affiliated Wittgenstein's antifoundationalism with the *deconstruction and *poststructuralism of *Jacques Derrida, allying Wittgenstein in this with *Martin Heidegger and John Dewey as critics of philosophical theorizing. Here changes in languagegames are seen as things that just happen, at best for local reasons and never in response to the deep nature of things. Unconstrained proliferation of language-games is seen as valuable expansion of human possibilities. It is doubful whether this line of development is faithful to Wittgenstein's impatience with nonsense and tendencies to criticize scientism, European culture and casualness in life. (2) *M.H. Abrams has argued that Wittgenstein's account of language-games offers us a pragmatic refutation of poststructuralism. Within language-games, for example, the language-game of literary criticism, there are constraints upon what we can sensibly say, even though no language-games themselves have any absolute foundation. One difficulty here is that Wittgenstein himself left little indication

Wittgenstein of the way the borders of language-games are to be traced, so that it is not clear how criticism is to be distinguished from sociology of •"literature or psychoanalysis or creative revision. (See ""psychoanalytic theory.) (3)*Terry Eagleton has noted that Wittgenstein's concentration on practice has affinities with the Marxist tradition and he has traced similarities between Wittgenstein's remarks about language and the antiscientific Marxisms of *Mikhail Bakhtin and *Theodor Adorno. (See •"Marxist criticism.) Despite his emphasis on practice, however, Wittgenstein's philosophical writings show little specific historical consciousness and no concern for class. The confusions that occupy him are more on the order of perennial temptations. (4) Stanley Cavell has suggested that Wittgenstein's unending criticisms of and fascination with philosophical explanation-seeking enact and make us conscious of our persistent ambivalence toward language and community. Language, community and ordinary practice are necessary backgrounds for human thought and individuality and they are, at the same time, when ossified, inimical to them in their stereotypings of human responsiveness. Here Cavell sees in Wittgenstein the Kantian *theme of human reason endlessly warring with itself. Human avoidance and acknowledgment are the intertwined effects of this ambivalence. This way of receiving Wittgenstein has yet to gain wide currency.

- Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Engelmann, Paul. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967. Secondary Sources

Abrams, M.H. Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory. Ed. Michael Fischer. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989. Anscombe, G.E.M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1959. Baker, Gordon. Wittgenstein, Frege, and the Vienna Circle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. - and P.M.S. Hacker. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning - An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations. Vol. i. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. - and P.M.S. Hacker. Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity - An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations. Vol. 2. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Bartley, William Warren, in. Wittgenstein. London: Quartet Books, 1974. Block, Irving, ed. Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Bloor, David. Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Bogen, James. Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. RICHARD ELDRIDGE Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. Primary Sources - This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, NM: Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. OxLiving Batch P, 1989. ford: Basil Black well, 1958. Eagleton, Terry. 'Wittgenstein's Friends.' New Left - Culture and Value. Ed. G.H. von Wright and Review 135 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 64-90. Heikki Nyman. Trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Edwards, James C. Ethics Without Philosophy: WittBlackwell, 1980. genstein and the Moral Life. Tampa: U Presses of - Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, PsycholFlorida, 1982. ogy, and Religious Belief. From notes taken by YorFann, K.T. Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy. ick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor. Ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. - On Certainty. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Fogelin, Robert J. Wittgenstein. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976. Wright. Trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Griffin, James. Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism. LonOxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969. don: Oxford UP, 1964. - Philosophical Grammar. Ed. R. Rhees. Trans. A.J.P. Grayling, A.C. Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, Kenny. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. 1988 - Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe Hacker, P.M.S. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the and R. Rhees. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Rev. ed. Oxford: ClarOxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. endon P, 1986. - Philosophical Remarks. Ed. R. Rhees. Trans. R. HarJanik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein's greaves and R. White. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. 1975.

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Woolf Kenny, Anthony. Wittgenstein. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1973. Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982. Luckhardt, C.G., ed. Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979. Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford UP, 1958. - Nothing is Hidden: Wittgenstein's Criticism of His Early Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. McGinn, Colin. Wittgenstein on Meaning. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. McGuinness, Brian, ed. Wittgenstein and His Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. - Wittgenstein: A Life - Young Ludwig, 1889-1921. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Pears, David. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987, 1988. - Ludwig Wittgenstein. New York: Viking, 1970. Pitcher, George, ed. Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Books, 1966. Rhees, Rush, ed. Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. Rubinstein, David. Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Praxis and Social Explanation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Specht, Ernest Konrad. The Foundation of Wittgenstein's Late Philosophy. Trans. D.E. Walford. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1969. Stenius, Erik. Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1960. Vesey, Godfrey, ed. Understanding Wittgenstein. London: Macmillan, 1974. von Wright, Georg Henrik. Wittgenstein. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, undated.

Woolf, Virginia Stephen (b. England, i882-d. 1941) Novelist, literary critic and feminist. Adeline Virginia Stephen was educated by tutelage at home; although she had the unusual freedom, for a woman, of uncensored access to an extensive family library, she was acutely aware of the effects of exclusion from the university education naturally acquired by her brothers and their male friends. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf with whom she later founded the Hogarth Press. As a novelist, Woolf was noted for her

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innovations in narrative technique, and her reputation as one of the leading modernists became securely established with the publication of To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). In keeping with her principle of remaining outside the patriarchal ""hegemony, Woolf refused all honours, including honorary degrees from Manchester and Liverpool universities and a nomination for Companion of Honour. As a critic and theorist, Woolf has been considered in relation to her Victorian heritage and to other members of the Bloomsbury group (especially to the novelist *E.M. Forster and art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell); more recently, discussions of Woolf relate her to various women writers and artists and to an increasing number of postmodernist critics. (See *feminist criticism, ""postmodernism.) Virginia Woolf's career as a literary journalist began with the publication of an unsigned review in the Guardian in 1904; she rapidly became established, especially after 1916, as a prolific reviewer and essayist for the Times Literary Supplement. In total, she published over 500 pieces in more than 30 periodicals. Woolf published two collections of essays in her lifetime, The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932); two longer feminist works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938); plus several pamphlets issued separately by the Hogarth Press. Several volumes of essays have been published posthumously; beginning in 1986, Andrew McNeillie has been editing and publishing the complete essays. To study Woolf as a literary critic means to go beyond traditional categories of genre. (See *genre criticism.) Much of her fiction conveys literary theory, while her non-fiction employs fictional techniques. Self-reflexive and metafictional elements in her novels comment upon theoretical issues. Jacob's Room (1922), for example, is significant for ideas about the nature of character; Orlando (1928) for theories of biography and the relation of style to historical context; and Between the Acts (1941) for the relation between writer and audience, and the concept of decentred *text. (See *centre/decentre.) In a similar conflation of genres, the essay-lecture A Room of One's Own employs multiple fictional narrators and embodies much of its argument in anecdote and image. In its theoretical implications, this style attests

Woolf to Woolf s rejection of the authoritative stance of the author and her commitment to a suggestive and pluralistic, rather than definitive and monologic, use of language. (See *monologism.) Woolf's essays also convey theory through rhetorical strategy; they can best be described as metacritical, since they examine and comment upon their own form, their own thought processes. (See *metacriticism.) The style Woolf most frequently employs is dialogic, or as Woolf herself once called it, a 'turn and turn about method.' The method allows her to be evaluative and to formulate general principles yet, at the same time, to undercut her theories with the contradictory impulse or to situate them clearly with regard to her subject position. Not surprisingly, two opposite impulses inform her critical approach: one must attempt to formulate general laws or one will be, like Mr. Priestley, merely an 'appreciator' ('Appreciations'); one must also situate such 'rules' as individual philosophy or one will, like Mr. Patmore, run the danger of elevating the 'freaks of prejudice and partisanship' into infallible 'oracular' doctrine ('Mr. Patmore's Criticism'). Woolf's statement that 'we think back through our mothers if we are women' (Room) is a fitting comment on her significance for feminist literary criticism. Her essays on various women writers begin to chart a female literary tradition; in turn, she herself has become a generative mother-figure for contemporary feminist thought. As a feminist critic, Woolf directs attention to the ways in which material conditions economic and social - have limited the possibilities for women as artists. She advocates the emancipation of both women and men from restrictive gender roles and she points out how ideological bias in social and political terms affects the interpretation and evaluation of *literature. (See ""ideology.) It is her consistent claim that the values of life are inseparable from the values of art; prevailing values influence a critic's response both to the subject-matter of a literary work - we have taken for granted that there is more importance in 'what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small' ('Modern Fiction') - and to the style - facts have been privileged over feeling, logic over the unconscious, linearity over pluralism. Woolf was also a pioneer in what is now

known as 'Images of Women' criticism; one particularly influential image embodies her view that female characters in novels written by men represent not women, but projections of male fantasies, desires and fears: 'Women have served all these centuries as lookingglasses' (Room). Finally, Woolf was one of the first to suggest what has been more recently termed ecriture feminine, or a distinctive style of women's writing. Debate continues about the extent to which Woolf considers women's writing to be inherently distinctive and the extent to which she attributes differences to socially prescribed gender roles, advocating instead the greater freedom of the androgynous mind. But what is clear is that she challenges conventional thinking by exposing the fallacy of assuming certain values to be universal and absolute, when in reality they reflect a specifically patriarchal and imperialist tradition; to this end, much of her work directs attention to an opposing but neglected female tradition with its 'own inheritance - the difference of view, the difference of standard' ('George Eliot'). (See *universal.) In addition to her pioneering role in feminist criticism, Woolf's rejection of the authoritative writer and the univocal text, her focus on the active role of the reader, and her analysis of social and historical contexts place her as forerunner of *deconstruction, ""reader-response criticism and *New Historicism. Connecting Woolf with postmodernism adds a new dimension to traditional assessments of her critical position. Initially, Woolf was regarded as an impressionistic critic; however, although she praises 'enthusiasm' as the Tife-blood' of criticism ('Winged Phrases') and describes novels as 'not form which you see but emotion which you feel' ('On Re-reading Novels'), her approach is not to record impressions but to analyse the reading process. Certain of her essays ('Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown/ 'Modern Fiction') are often treated as modernist manifestos. In these essays, Woolf indeed defends writers who portray the inconclusive inner world of consciousness against writers whom she considers to be 'materialists'; yet her argument is not for one true style but for the style most appropriate to the age. In other contexts, she analyses the strengths of the representational mode ('"Robinson Crusoe"'). Woolf has also been seen as influenced by aestheticism, but again the connection should be qualified. When Woolf suggests that we read to grasp a

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Woolf work's 'perspective' and that the best works present us with a single vision, she seems to approach each work as an autonomous organic unity; nevertheless, her reading is never ahistorical, impersonal or divorced from nonliterary issues. Overall, her approach is that literature grows out of and is informed by its total context: 'Masterpieces are not single and solitary births' (Room). In discussing literary history, Woolf thus approaches the text as a collaborative production involving the writer, the reader and their social, political and cultural contexts. She considers fluctuations in writers' reputations in relation to changes in the historical reader and relates changing conditions of production and consumption to developments in style ('The Patron and the Crocus'). Her analysis frequently emphasizes the interrelatedness of art-writing and life-writing ('The Fastens and Chaucer'); she rejects the predominance of 'historians' histories' - those defining history as great acts by great men - and focuses instead upon the history encoded in such forms as letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals. In doing so, Woolf exposes the *textuality of history, showing that the selection of historical evidence is an act in itself expressive of ideology. Radical for her time, she treats all forms of writing as significant, breaking away from established notions of genre hierarchies: while the critic must be 'exacting' in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each style, the crucial goal is not the assigning of merit; each work has significance as a stage in the development of an individual writer or of a culture. Woolf's analysis of reading is similarly contextual: she explores difference in attitudes and emotional response in different historical periods; she discusses the effects of national character and geography, for 'the mind takes its bias from its place of birth' ('The Russian Point of View'). Again her analysis avoids establishing hierarchies. An earlier period, such as the Elizabethan, implies a 'different' but not a more 'elementary' stage of reading development ('Notes on an Elizabethan Play'). Another antihierarchical aspect lies in Woolf's advocacy of the 'common reader.' For Woolf, the common reader is distinct from the professional reader, being motivated by pleasure and a desire for broader human experience, not by the need to propound a theory or advance an argument; furthermore, the common reader's knowledge of literature is far-ranging and

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catholic in its scope, rather than narrow and specialized. Woolf's reader is not the ordinary person in the street but the person informed by a passion for reading; nevertheless, her literary model is democratic not elitist. Emphasizing readers' differences, she assumes not that readers share a common view but that they stand on common ground; thus the relationship she establishes with her reader is one of interactive exchange not of authoritarian instruction. Since Woolf is acutely aware of the connection between literature and ideology, her construct of reading likewise may be seen to have political implications. Communal rather than colonialist in its dynamics, Woolf's imaging of the relationship between writer and reader expresses her fundamental opposition to imperialism, fascism and indeed all totalitarian and totalizing regimes. (See "totalization, *patriarchy.) MELBA CUDDY-KEANE

Primary Sources Woolf, Virginia. '"Anon" and "The Reader": Virginia Woolf's Last Essays.' Ed. Brenda Silver, zoth Century Literature 25 (1979): 356-441. - Books and Portraits. Ed. Mary Lyon. London: Hogarth P, 1977. - The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth P, 1950. - Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. 4 vols. London: Hogarth P, 1966-7. - The Common Reader: [First Series.] London: Hogarth P, 1925. - The Common Reader: Second Series. London: Hogarth P, 1932. - Contemporary Writers. Ed. Jean Guiguet. London: Hogarth P, 1965. - The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth P, 1942. - The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 3 vols. to date. London: Hogarth P, 1986-. - Granite and Rainbow: Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth P, 1958. - The Moment and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth P, 1947. - A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth P, 1929. - Three Guineas. London: Hogarth P, 1938. - Women and Writing. Ed. Michele Barrett. London: Women's P, 1979.

Secondary Sources Bell, Barbara Currier, and Carol Ohmann. 'Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface.' In Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Ed.

Zholkovskii Josephine Donovan. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1975, 48-60. Brewster, Dorothy. The Uncommon Reader as Critic.' In Virginia Woo//. New York: New York UP, 1962, 32-78. Caughie, Pamela. 'Virginia Woolf as Critic: Creating as Aesthetic, Self-Reflexive Criticism.' In Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991, 169-93. Daiches, David. 'The Uncommon Reader.' In Virginia Woolf. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1942, 124-92. Ferebee, Steve. 'Bridging the Gulf: The Reader in and out of Virginia Woolf's Literary Essays.' College Language Association Journal 30 (1987): 343-61. Gillespie, Diane. The Common Viewer: Virginia Woolf's Published Art Criticism.' In The Sisters' Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New York: Syracuse UP, 1988, 63-103. Goldman, Mark. The Reader's Art: Virginia Woolf as Literan/ Critic. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Good, Graham. 'Virginia Woolf: Angles of Vision.' In The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge, 1988, i 12-34. Guiguet, Jean. 'Analysis and Argument.' In Virginia Woolf and Her Works. London: Hogarth P, 1965, 124-92. Hill, Katherine C. 'Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution.' PMLA 96 (1981): 351-62. Humm, Maggie. 'Virginia Woolf.' In Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics. New York: St. Martin's P, 1986, 123-54. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theon/. London: Methuen, 198=;. Novak, Jane. The Artist as Critic: Judging the Balance.' In The Razor Edge of Balance: A Study of Virginia Woolf. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1975, 35-?°Rosenbaum, S.P. 'Intellectual Backgrounds.' In Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. New York: St. Martin's P, 1987, 21-34. Silver, Brenda R. 'Introduction: The Uncommon Reader.' In Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks. Ed. B. Silver. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983, 3—31. Sharma, Vijay L- Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic: A Reevaluation. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1977Wellek, Rene. 'Virginia Woolf.' English Criticism, 1900-7950. Vol. 5 of A History of Modern Criticism: 3750-1950. 6 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986, 5: 6^-84.

Zholkovskii, Aleksander K. (b. U.S.S.R., 1937-) Specialist in Russian and comparative literature, Somali studies, theoretical linguistics, and poetics. Aleksander Zholkovskii attended Moscow University, where he completed a Diploma in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1969 in African studies. His doctoral dissertation was on the deep and surface structures of Somali syntax. From 1959 to 1970, he was a research fellow in the Laboratory of Machine Translation at the Institute for Foreign Languages (Moscow). For part of this time (19635), he held a cross-appointment as a visiting professor of Somali Language at Moscow University's Institute of Oriental Languages. From 1970 to 1978, he was a senior research fellow in Computational Linguistics, first in the Institute for Foreign Languages and then in the Computational Linguistics Department of the Informelectro Institute (also in Moscow). After teaching for two years (1979-81) as a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, Zholkovskii migrated to the U.S.A. and took up an appointment as professor of Russian ""literature at Cornell University. In 1982 he was appointed chairman of Cornell's Department of Russian. Zholkovskii is best known for his work on poetics, particularly for a theory of literature developed in collaboration with lurii K. Shcheglov, the *poetics of expressiveness. This theory (which in its early stages of development was referred to as 'Soviet generative poetics' and the 'Theme-Text' model of literary structure) combines certain structuralist notions of the Russian formalists and of modern linguistics with a systematic elaboration of the insights of the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein concerning the various *expressive devices that can serve to organize artistic form and make it engaging. (See also Russian *formalism, *structuralism, *theme.) Although most of Zholkovskii's recent work has been in the field of literary theory, he has also made important contributions to the field of computational linguistics. Specifically, he collaborated with LA. Mel'cuk to develop the concept of lexical functions and, more generally, the 'Meaning-Text Theory' of language a semantically based dependency grammar that offers solutions to syntactical problems left unresolved by formalist, transformationalgenerative theories. In certain respects, the

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Zholkovskii poetics of expressiveness is analogous to the multilevelled 'Meaning-Text' model of primary natural language; in other respects, it complements the natural-language model by a offering a delicate metalanguage for describing a secondary (that is, literary) use of the language system. JAMES STEELE

Primary Sources Zholkovskii, Aleksander. 'Levels, Domains, Invariants: A Format for the Analysis of Poems.' The Proceedirigs of the 8th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. - 'On Three Analogies Between Linguistics and Poetics (Semantic Invariance, Obligatoriness of Grammatical Meanings, Competence vs. Performance).' Poetics 6 (1977): 77-106. - Themes and Texts: Toward a Poetics of Expressiveness. Ed. Kathleen Parthe. Trans, from the Russian by the author. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1984. - and LA. Melcuk. 'Towards a Functioning Meaning-^Text Model of Language.' Linguistics 57 (1970): 10-47. - and lu. K. Shcheglov. 'Poetics as a Theory of Expressiveness: Towards a "Theme-Expressiveness Devices-Text" Model of Literary Structure.' Poetics 5 (1976): 207-46. - and lu. K. Shcheglov 'Structural Poetics Is a Generative Poetics.' Soviet Semiotics. Ed. D. Lucid. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. - 'Generating the Literary Text.' Russian Poetics in Translation 1 (1975): 1-77. - Poetics of Expressiveness: A Theory and Applications. Linguistic and Literary Studies in Eastern Europe,

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vol. 18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987. Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1957. - The Film Sense. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1957. Fokkema, D.W., and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch. Theories of Literature in the 20th-century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics. London: C. Hurst and Company. Lotman, Ju.M. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans. Ronald and Gail Vroon. Michigan Slavic Contributions, no. 7. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, U of Michigan, 1977. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York/Toronto/London: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Seyffert, Peter. Literary Structuralism: Background Debate Issues. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1985. Steele, James, ed. Meaning-Text Theory: Linguistics, Lexicography, and Implications. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. - 'Re-constructing Structuralism: The Theme-Text Model of Literary Language and F.R. Scott's "Lakeshore."' In Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature. Ed. John Moss. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1987. Tallis, Raymond. Not Saussure: A Critique of PostSaussurean Literary Theory. London: Macmillan, 1988.

3 TERMS

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Actant

Actant The term actant (literally 'that which accomplishes or undergoes the action') refers, in *semiotics, to the great functions or roles occupied by the various characters of a narrative, be they humans, animals, or simple objects. In the initial state of the Greimassian theory, these functions form three sets: Subject-Object, Sender-Receiver, Helper-Opponent. *AJ. Greimas borrowed the concept of actant from the French linguist Lucien Tesniere, for whom this term designates a syntactic function which can be subject or object. In accordance with a principle already asserted by *Roland Barthes, following which a narrative may be considered as 'a long sentence,' Greimas postulated that this 'global utterance can be decomposed into a series of concatenated narrative utterances (=Propp's "functions")' ('Les actants' 162). (See *Propp.) He then defined the utterance as 'a relation between the actants that constitute it' and borrowed from two sources in order to make an inventory of the actants in the narrative. A first source was the seminal work of Vladimir Propp. In his Morphology of the Folktale, Propp identified in the Russian folkloric tale 31 basic functions, each function designating the action of a character, defined from the point of view of its signification in the unfolding of the plot. He then regrouped these functions into 7 spheres of actions: the villain, the donor (provider), the helper, the princess (and her father), the dispatcher, the hero, the false hero. Taking his inspiration from this model and from the model of Emile Souriau, Greimas proposed a more compact and more powerful model constituted by three pairs of actants. The axis made by the first pair of actants, Subject-Object, refers to the person who is doing the action and what he/she wants to win or acquire. The Sender-Receiver axis refers to the person who gives a mission to the hero and the person for whose benefit this mission is accomplished (the Receiver may be the same as the Sender, or it may be a very general entity, like Humanity, Power or Happiness). The Helper-Opponent axis refers to the support available to the Subject (fairy godmother, horse, sword, magical ring) and to the obstacles he or she will have to overcome (traitor, labyrinth). In a later version of his theory, Greimas lim-

its the actants of the narrative to the two axes Subject-Object and Sender-Receiver, which he sees as fundamental and from which various others may be derived. Each of these four actants is seen as a category which may be projected on the semiotic square and thus unfold following its positive or negative poles. (See *seme.) The most common example of this functioning may be seen with the axis formed by the Subject and the Anti-Subject, this latter actant playing the role formerly attributed to the Opponent. This reorganization of the theory makes more visible the essentially polemical structure of the narrative and the fact that the so-called Opponent is in competition with the Subject for the possession of a same Object. One should be careful not to confuse the actant, which is a narrative function based in the deep structure, with the actor. The actor is the name given to the concrete manifestation of an actant in a given narrative. For example, at the actorial level, which depends upon the superficial discursive structure, one could read a narrative sequence such as 'King Arthur sends Perceval to kill the Dragon in exchange for a beautiful diamond.' One recognizes here the actors Arthur, Perceval, the Dragon, and the Diamond. At the deep level, this corresponds to an actantial sequence in which a Sender sends a Subject to kill an Opponent in exchange for an Object. However, the relation actant-actor is not necessarily one-to-one. The same actor may, at various moments of a narrative, personify various actants and, conversely, the same actant may be embodied by various actors. As Greimas puts it, 'an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; a structure of actants constitutes a genre' (Semantique structurale 175). The concept of actant has proved its efficiency in the analysis not only of a narrative but also of a great variety of texts - be they philosophical, religious or scientific. (See *text.) By focusing only on the forces responsible for the action, regardless of their moral or psychological connotations, the notion of actant enabled critics to break away from the traditional emphasis put on the psychological status of the characters. As such, this concept is probably one of the most widely used in semiotics today. (See also *narratology.) CHRISTIAN VANDENDORPE

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Affective stylistics Primary Sources Greimas, AJ. Semantique structural. Paris: Larousse, 1966; Repub. PUF, 1986. Structural Semantics. Trans. D. McDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1983. - 'Les actants, les acteurs et les figures.' In Semiotique narrative et textuelle. Ed. C. Chabrol and J.C. Coquet. Paris: Larousse, 1973, 161-76. Repr. in Du Sens II. Paris: Seuil, 1983, 49-66. On Meaning. Trans. Paul Perron and F.H. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. - and J. Courtes. Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie du langage. Paris, 1979. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Trans. L. Crist, D. Patte et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

Secondary Sources Propp, V. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 1928-68. Souriau, E. Les zoo ooo situations dramatiques. Paris: Flammarion, 1950.

Affective stylistics Affective stylistics is a critical method and theory of literary meaning developed by *Stanley Fish in the late 19605 and early 19703. A version of ""reader-response criticism, affective stylistics is based on the idea that a work's meaning is to be found not in its formal architecture but in the sequence of interpretive decisions which the *text elicits in its reader. The most concise statement of the method and its underlying theoretical assumptions can be found in the 1970 manifesto 'Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics/ reprinted with Fish's other theoretical articles from the same period in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980). (See *literature.) The central tenet of affective stylistics is that a work's meaning inheres in the experience of its reading. In opposition to formalist practices which consider the work as a unified structure, Fish examines the parts of the text as they succeed each other in time, concentrating on what the sequence of words does to the reader who attempts to make sense of it. Beneath the surface thematics, he seeks the second-level messages about language and intelligibility which the work promotes subliminally by forcing various decisions, attitudes, judgments, and reversals on its reader. (See also Russian *formalism, *New Criticism, *theme.)

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Fish used this approach most impressively in his interpretation of Milton, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in 'Paradise Lost' (1967) and his collection of readings of lyth-century texts, SelfConsuming Artifacts: The Experience of iyth Century Literature (1972). In the latter work especially, he focused on what he called 'dialectical' works, which bring about a questioning of the reader's opinions and ways of knowing, rather than reinforcing them. However, in subsequent writings Fish became increasingly convinced that such textual effects were themselves conditioned by the critical strategies which even the most unbiased readers unwittingly deploy. Persuaded that even the simplest, most literal meaning is filtered through an interpretive matrix which can never be known, if only because it is the ground of knowing, he ultimately moved away from the cause-effect paradigm that characterized affective stylistics as originally formulated. WILLIAM RAY

Primary Sources Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980. - 'Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.' New Literary History 2 (1970): 123-62. - Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of i?th Century Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. - Surprised by Sin: The Reader in 'Paradise Lost.' New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Anxiety of influence Anxiety of influence is a theory of poetic influence first formulated by *Harold Bloom. Bloom developed his theory in a major tetralogy The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976). It has since provided the theoretical foundation for his practical criticism. Although his debts are esoteric and many, Bloom borrowed primarily from *Freud to devise a theory of influence stressing the paralysing, oppressive burden of the past on later or 'belated' writers. By highlighting not collaboration but literary contestation, the anxiety of influence represents a new, more embattled approach to *intertextuality. According to Bloom, literary influence features

Aporia not a benign interaction of the present with the past, but the Oedipal struggle of belated poets to conquer or 'transume' their predecessors. Through an act of *misprision - a defensive misreading rendering their precursors less intimidating - 'latecomers' seek to clear a space for their own creations. Wallace Stevens' poetry, for instance, must be read as an anxious struggle against the formidable wealth of Emerson and Whitman. Stevens found their prophetic affirmations so powerful, Bloom maintains, that his own disposition toward the prophetic had to be chastened into poetry of severe, ascetic discipline. The anxiety of influence does not, however, result in merely arbitrary and random misreadings. Patterns of misprision are always determinate; Bloom had 'mapped' an exotic catalogue of six 'revisionary ratios' or defences. Most 'strong poems,' he argues, enact three successive dialectical substitutions or 'poetic crossings.' That is, the poet first withdraws before the precursor's influence; strong poets counter these 'tropes of limitation' with 'tropes of restitution.' (See *trope.) Clinamen, for instance, is the 'swerve' or revisionary misreading proper to all misprision; it marks the ephebe 's (young poet's) initial disordering of the precursor's vision. In tessera, the ephebe attempts to 'complete' or piece together these broken fragments. Kenosis opens the second dialectical movement; it involves the humbling or emptying out of the precursor by the ephebe. Bloom explains: ' "Undoing" the precursor's strength in oneself serves also to "isolate" the self from the precursor's stance ... ' (Anxiety 88). In daemonisation, the ephebe's 'Counter-Sublime' is positioned before the Sublime of the precursor. After the sublime expansion of daemonisation, askesis begins the final crossing with another movement of contraction or limitation. Askesis, like kenosis, involves the precursor's purgation, but by 'curtailing' influence and not denying it outright. In apophrades, the precursor is no longer repressed but in fact seems to return; the ephebe has so staged this return, however, that the precursor is re-introduced not as an important predecessor but as the ephebe 's own ephebe.

PAUL ENDO

Primary Sources Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. - Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1975. - A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. - Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

Aporia Aporia is a Greek word used to identify an insoluble philosophical problem which nevertheless continues to draw thinkers not so much because it is a challenge but because it is built into the train of thought which philosophers have taken. To bring the question face to face with an aporia is the goal of the Socratic method: only then does the questioner realize that he does not know; the realization of notknowing is the beginning of concerted searching (Meno 8od-86c). For Aristotle the aporia consists in the equal validity of contrary arguments; the methodological function of positing these arguments is to sharpen the statement of the problem and to prepare a solution (Topics 6.145.16-20). In contemporary thought aporia represents a dead-end to a line of thought which calls for the mediation of new ideas or perhaps the reformulation of the questions asked. For example, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981) *Paul Ricoeur refers to an internal aporia of hermeneutical reflection which calls for a reorientation of *hermeneutics through *semiotics. The hermeneutical inquiry after *Martin Heidegger and *Hans-Georg Gadamer has overcome the aporia of *subject/object through the concept of Being-in-the-world as linguistically constituted, but the aporia has been displaced and not eliminated. Heidegger has displaced the arena from 'how do I know the other' (epistemology) to 'the primacy of belonging in language' (ontology). After Gadamer the aporia becomes how does my world fuse with the text's world? The mediation of the textual sciences offers a possibility of shared meaning not only within language but also within textual analysis. (See also *text.) MARIO J. VALDES

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Archetype Primary Sources Aristotle. Topics. Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Plato. Meno.

Archetype A literary archetype (from the Greek arche, a beginning, first cause, origin, and typos, pattern, model, type) is a typical or recurring image, character, narrative design, *theme, or other literary phenomenon that has been in ""literature from the beginning and regularly reappears. Because archetypes are present in all literature, though most easily seen and recognized in popular or naive writings, they provide a basis for connecting one work with another and enable readers to integrate and unify literary experience. The term archetype came into literary criticism from cultural anthropology (James G. Frazer) and from psychology (*Carl G. Jung). Frazer's encyclopedic 12-volume The Golden Bough (1890-1915) traced archetypal myths and rituals in the tales and ceremonies of diverse cultures. Frazer's work provided criticism (see ""archetypal criticism, *myth, *Northrop Frye) with an extensive collection and description of the kinds of communal human actions that are the content of drama. His account of ritual patterns also proved useful in understanding the structure and generic principles of drama. Jung employed the term archetype to designate primordial images inherited in the collective unconscious of the human race, from where they emerge into myths, religions, literature, the visual arts, dreams and private fantasies. Jung's impact on literary studies has been primarily on the understanding of the dream basis of romance literature. In From Ritual to Romance (1920) Jessie Weston described how archetypal rituals concerned with the victory of fertility over the wasteland provide the imagery of the quest romance. *Maud Bodkin (Archetypal Patterns in Poetry 1934) was one of the earliest critics consciously to use the concept of the archetype. Since her preliminary attempts, Robert Graves, G. Wilson Knight, Joseph Campbell, and Northrop Frye, especially the last of these, have played significant roles

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in making the study of archetypes an important part of literary criticism. Consideration of certain verbal phenomena as archetypes takes criticism beyond historical explanations to the study of genres and conventions (see *genre criticism), and to questions of what literature as a whole is. Since the archetype by definition is perennial and recurrent, it has shaping, communicating force and so is important in considerations of the social aspects and uses of literature. Acceptance, moreover, of the archetypal or conventional elements in literature makes possible the linking of one work with another, thus facilitating coherent imaginative training through the reading of literature. ALVIN A. LEE Primary Sources Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination. London: Oxford UP, 1934Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949. Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 12 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1890-1915. Abr. in i vol., 1954. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. - Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Graves, Robert. Greek Myths. London: Cassell, 1958. - The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myths. Amended and enl. ed. New York: Vintage Books; London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Jung, Carl G. Collected Works. 20 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953-79. Knight, G. Wilson. The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision. London: Methuen, 1959. Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.

Arche-writing: see Differance/ difference, trace

Aura Aura is a term used by Marxist critic *Walter Benjamin to characterize the subjective experience of a work of art or the conditions of production and exhibition that help to generate such an experience. (See *Marxist criticism.) Benjamin first mentions the aura in his 'Kleine

Authority Geschichte der Photographic' ['Short History of Photography' 1931], in which he associates it with the aesthetic qualities of uniqueness and 'fullness/ as well as with the peculiar luminosity of early photographs. The essay contains the first hints of what will become the two dominant themes of Benjamin's later writings on the aura. (See *theme.) The first suggestion has to do with the experience of the aura. Whatever the objective basis for the phenomenon, cognizance of the aura, Benjamin suggests, does not arise from formal analysis but occurs in a moment of distraction. Experiencing the auratic object thus involves a 'strange weaving of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be' (One-Way Street 250). The second suggestion has to do with the plight of the aura in an industrial world. According to Benjamin, producing multiple copies of an auratic object through technological means destroys the aura by divesting the object of its uniqueness. The mixture of intimacy and distance, time and space, is lost as the object is treated as no more than a commodity to be possessed and reproduced over and over again. Benjamin develops this latter theme in his most famous essay, 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' ['The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' 1935], in which he uses aura to designate not any formal feature of a work of art, but a special cult value or authenticity that has been attributed to the work because of its rarity, some aspect of its history or the context of its exhibition. In this way, the experience of the aura, though it may still involve feelings of reverence, brings into play a set of responses that have been shaped by ritual, religion or some other form of communal behaviour. An object acquires aura and, by extension, *authority by being inserted into a *canon of equally hallowed works: 'The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition' (Illuminations 223). Yet this authority is undermined in an industrial world, in part because social relations have been so altered as to inhibit any sense of a traditional community, in part because the aura cannot survive mechanical reproduction. Though Benjamin related the destruction of the aura with some regret, he generally welcomed what he saw as the democratizing effects of mechanical reproduc-

tion, a position which earned him the censure of *Theodor Adorno. In other works, in particular his unfinished 'Arcades Project' of the 19305, Das Passagenwerk, Benjamin deplored modern efforts to create a bogus aura through glamour, fashion and what Benjamin felt was the false religiosity of aestheticism. In these works, Benjamin seems to suggest that the maintenance of the aura is incompatible with the experience of modernity and that any attempt to restore the aura in art or in life must be rejected as either illusory nostalgia or exploitative despotism. T R E V O R ROSS Primary Sources Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser. 6 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-85. - Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. - One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979.

Authority The term authority is used in three closely related ways in contemporary criticism and critical theory. Most commonly, authority designates that quality of a literary *text which ensures its worth as a credible and reliable expression of meaning. Traditionally, a work acquired authority - and was subsequently granted canonical status - by means of the perceived virtue, enlightenment or grace of its author (auctor). The endowment of authority was earlier concomitant with a favourable judgment of the author's substantial agreement with the system of values deemed correct by the endowing party. Thus, the canons of authoritative writings have fluctuated with changes in social and political climates. (See *canon.) In the Middle Ages, the Bible was thought to be the quintessential authoritative text, a direct transcription of the meaning of a supreme Auctor against whose word the authority (auctoritas), or truth, of all subsequent writing was measured. This kind of understanding of authority is premissed on the existence of a determinate, divinely informed meaning and the possibility of the recovery of that meaning. The erosion of such an es-

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Authority sentialist epistemology, of the possibility of absolute truth, by the religious and political turbulence of the 15th and i6th centuries was attended by the questioning of the nature of authority and by the search for sources of worth and credibility beyond the scope of medieval Christian doctrine. In large measure, this search continues to dominate modern theorizing on the nature of authority. No longer confident of the existence of a stable core of truth, literary theorists have not so much discarded the notion of authority as redefined its criteria according to their particular convictions about the source of linguistic meaning. For instance, New Critics systematically divest the author of authority and assign it instead to the text, convinced that the text itself is the only legitimate field of literary study and that it discloses its meaning to the properly trained and suitably distanced reader. (See *New Criticism.) For the hermeneutical critic (see *hermeneutics), centrally concerned with the nature of interpretation and the transmission of tradition(s), authority is thought to be either a quality of the tradition instinctively and universally recognized in the very act of cognition (*Gadamer) or the interested and self-legitimating product of systems of social domination (*Habermas). Not unlike the view of Habermas is that of Marxist and feminist critics, who deliberately refrain from assigning authority to any particular component of the hermeneutic process in the belief that authority is always ideologically charged, that it invariably promotes the interests and perpetuates the dominance of a self-selected group of individuals. (See *Marxist criticism, *feminist criticism, *ideology.) For critics like *E.D. Hirsch, who follow generally the hermeneutical approach in stressing the need for some objective measure of validity in interpretation, authority is restored to authorial intention and the task of criticism is the recovery of this intention with a minimal intrusion of the critic's own historical situation or interpretative bias. By contrast, the proponents of *reader-response criticism maintain that authority rests finally in the reader whose bringing to bear upon a text of the very interpretative bias Hirsch wishes to exorcise is the actual determinant of textual meaning. Finally, and perhaps most radically, critics who practise *deconstruction paradoxically submit that there is no authority in texts or anywhere else, that any configuration of letters which we label a text,

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or indeed an interpretation of a text, is already self-subverting, already speaks of the silent 'other' which undermines its own claim to authoritative utterance. (See *subversion, *self/ other.) For all these schools of criticism, however different their approaches to the nature of meaning, authority is a key concern. (See also *metacriticism.) Stemming from these theoretical issues is the related concern with the nature of interpretative authority within the institution of literary criticism. Here the concern is defining the extent to which an expert (or 'authority') in the study of "literature can claim authority in writing about or teaching the interpretation of texts in a critical climate where determining meaning itself is under debate. In view of the recent developments in the theory of verbal communication, literary theorists are turning their attention to re-evaluating the professional practice of literary criticism. The term authority is also used more narrowly in literary criticism (as distinct from literary theory) to denote the source of *power within the societies depicted in texts. In this usage, the critic emphasizes relationships of force and obedience with a view to exposing the oppressive actions of individuals or social groups seen to control the discursive, conventional and institutional spheres of their respective societies. Authority in this sense is rather inaccurately synonymous with power. MARTA STRAZNICKY Primary Sources Arendt, Hannah. 'What is Authority?' Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, 91-141. Cain, William E. 'Authors and Authority in Interpretation.' Georgia Review 34 (1980): 617-34. Docherty, Thomas. On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing 1500 to the Present Day. Sussex: Harvester, 1987. Fraser, John. 'Playing for Real: Discourse and Authority.' University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (1987): 416-34. Miller, Jacqueline T. Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Newton, K.M. 'Interest, Authority, and Ideology in Literary Interpretation.' British Journal of Aesthetics 22 (1982): 103-14.

Ricoeur, Paul. 'Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology.' Trans. John B. Thompson. The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Ed. Gayle L.

Bracketing Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. Syracuse: SUNY P, 1990, 298-334. White, Hayden. 'Conventional Conflicts [Authority and the Profession of Criticism].' New Literary History 13 ( 1 9 8 1 ) : 145—60.

Primary Sources

Binary opposition

Bracketing

Binary opposition is a term which is central to dialectic logic and is widely used in theoretical argument. Binary oppositions provide a way of bringing dynamics and process into theory. In a binary opposition the two poles must not only be opposed to each other but must also be in exclusive opposition to each other; in other words, they are bound in polar opposition like the positive and negative charge of an electric current. Some of the most influential examples are sense/reference (Gottlob Frege); synchronic/diachronic, paradigmatic/syntagmatic (*Ferdinand de Saussure); signifier/signified (French *structuralism); *subject/object (Rene Descartes); noumena/phenomena (Immanuel Kant); explanation/understanding (*Wilhelm Dilthey; *Hans-Georg Gadamer; *Paul Ricoeur). (See also *signified/signifier/ signification.) To use the last as a model, explanation is a social act of making some state of affairs known to another person, understanding is an individual act of comprehension and appropriation. When the two concepts are coupled together in binary opposition, the result is a process of interaction between the individual and society. Structural linguistics, which defines language as a system of functional relations, presupposes binary oppositions of the phonological elements of language as the basis and model of its analysis. The advantage of binarism in structuralist studies, 'but also its principal danger/ as *Jonathan Culler (Structuralist Poetics 15) notes, 'lies in the fact that it permits one to classify anything.' The oppositions posited as functional in a given analysis ignore qualitative distinctions which are not functional - but nevertheless real - and for this reason binary analysis often operates on a level of misleading abstraction from the way in which phenomena present themselves to us.

A term developed by the German philosopher *Edmund Husserl bracketing refers to the process of suspending judgment about the existence of the world around us, by placing in abeyance or parentheses our commonsensical presuppositions about the world and the relationship between the perceiving consciousness and objects in external reality ('Phenomenology' 125, 130). (See also *phenomenological criticism.) Also known as epoche or reduction, this suspension of the natural attitude extends past the unthinking, unconsidered hypotheses of the common human being to encompass those comparable attitudes specific to the sciences, especially the natural sciences and the science of psychology ('Philosophy as Rigorous Science' 173-9; Kockelmans 50-2). Bracketing involves as well, then, the suspension of presuppositions about the knowable implicit in these sciences ('Phenomenology' 136-8; Sinha, 35-9). In this view (sometimes called scientificobjectivist), both the objects in the external world and the relationships between them are thought to have meaning in and of themselves, with little or no account being taken of the constitutive role of the perceiving consciousness. (See *subject/object.) In his search for what he called 'the Archimedean point/ the source of absolute certainty which would eliminate the purely contingent aspects of objects perceived in the natural attitude and which would, in turn, serve as the foundation for human knowledge, Husserl fixed upon the process of bracketing ('Phenomenology' 130). As the purifying of one's perspective of the natural attitude, bracketing enables the subject to accomplish the aim of phenomenology: the suspension of the non-essential, purely contingent and metaphysical implications of the natural attitude and the subsequent identification and description of the universal structures of human consciousness, or essences ('Phenomenology' 125, 126-8). As this description indicates, the final aim of bracketing is not simply the unprejudiced description of pure

MARIO J. VALDES

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

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Bracketing phenomena: it is also the intuiting of and reflection upon the essential, invariant features of these objects held in consciousness and the essential structures of consciousness itself, in those intentional mental acts which reveal these essences ('Phenomenology' 123-4). Simply, in bracketing, reduction or epoche, Husserl believed that one could arrive at the essence of objects, experiences and consciousness itself. As such, it is the central method of phenomenological investigation ('Phenomenology' 124). (See *intention/intentionality.) Bracketing, epoche or reduction, however, is not a denial of the external reality of the objects posited in the natural attitude in favour of a system of ideal forms or abstractions which are beyond our perception. Neither is bracketing a process of radical subjectivism, where the objects in the external world are categorically stated to exist only as projections of the subject's consciousness. The bracketing . of the external reality of these objects as they exist in the natural attitude is a process of exclusion, of delimiting which objects are suitable for phenomenological investigation and which are not. It is the process through which phenomenologists from Husserl to Pfander to Scheler prepare the field for the investigation and description of phenomena and the universal structures of human consciousness (Schmitt 140). Since bracketing aims at bringing the realm of pure phenomena to the focus of consciousness, phenomenologists are perfectly willing to consider non-existent objects (that is, objects of mental acts which have no correlates in the 'real' world) as suitable objects of investigation. In their view 'nonexistent objects have [both] properties and relations' and can be the object of intentional mental acts, just as existent ones do and can (Grossmann 140-1). Bracketing is, then, the general term for a set of reductions which have as their aim the production of a non-empirical, and 'unprejudiced' (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 36) series of statements about phenomena, the production of a knowledge of essences (Schmitt 1369). In its goal of seeing and fixing essences in bracketing, phenomenology suggests the accompanying process of free-imaginative "Variation. In this process, the existence of objects having been bracketed, the subject arrives at the essence of a phenomenon through the process of exemplification. One first posits and then varies the description of an example of the said phenomenon held in consciousness by

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adding to or subtracting from the characteristics of the example. Each deletion or addition is tested against the question of whether it transforms the object so that it is no longer an example of the same phenomenon that one began with in one's mind (Schmitt 141). In this way, the subject discovers the essence of an object in consciousness, by identifying both the 'necessary and invariant' (Schmitt 141) as well as the contingent and variant features of an object (Cartesian Mediations 29; Hammond et al. 75-8; Schmitt 140-4). This process which allows for the identification, investigation and description of the essence of phenomena and the correlative description of the essential, universal structures of human consciousness is known specifically as eidetic reflection, and requires a particular kind of bracketing: eidetic reduction or eidetic abstraction ('Phenomenology' 126-8). Taken from the Greek, eidos, meaning 'idea' or 'ideal/ the adjective 'eidetic' indicates Husserl's debt to Platonic philosophy and its distinction between the ideal (eidos) and the particular for his own comparable distinction between essence and instance. Through the eidetic reduction, we are able to bracket the perceived instance and attend to the object's essence. In addition, eidetic reduction allows us to 'perceive/ in phenomenological terms intuit, the connections between various essences. Eidetic reflection does not simply concentrate on essences alone but on their interrelationships (Grossmann 103). Although probably the most important reduction in Husserlian phenomenology, eidetic reduction is only one among many different forms of reduction. Each of these other reductions, variously called the psychological reduction (the bracketing of the natural ego and the claims of the science of psychology to the possession of certainty), the phenomenological reduction, and the philosophical reduction, has as its aim to allow the subject to pass from the world of 'realities' posited in the natural attitude to the world of their ultimate presuppositions ('Phenomenology' 122-3, 125; Kockelmans 133-4, 107-8). Since it is obvious, for example, that the natural ego cannot be the consciousness which constitutes or intuits the essential meanings of objects, it is the performance of bracketing upon the natural ego which leads to the transcendental-phenomenological consciousness or ego (Kockelmans 163-4). Husserl expected that the transcendental ego, in its ability to intuit the essences of

Bracketing objects and to thereby establish the universal structures of human consciousness, would provide the grounds for procuring absolutely certain and valid knowledge about things and events (Kockelmans 162-3). m this kind of reduction, we perform a reflection upon consciousness itself, concentrating not on specific mental acts, but on their essences. In eidetic reflection we are, for example, interested not in a description of loving any particular thing, but in the essential, invariant features displayed in 'loving-of itself ('Phenomenology' 122-7). As a result of these reductions, a field of original experiences, what Husserl will later describe as the *Lebenswelt or life-world, is opened up to philosophical investigation (Kockelmans 252-3, 278-9). In historical terms, Husserl's concept of bracketing is akin to the systematic doubt common to other philosophic approaches like scepticism and Cartesianism, but with several important differences. Husserl indicates his link with ancient Greek scepticism through his adoption of the term epoche from this very school (Sinha 28). For the sceptics, this term referred to a kind of radical doubt as a method for achieving certain knowledge. This doubt involves a provisional suspension of any judgment about the validity of an idea until all available evidence has been gathered and examined. In addition, Husserl himself stresses the strong similarities between his procedure of bracketing and the methodical or systematic doubt characteristic of the work of Rene Descartes, going so far as to say that 'phenomenology might almost be called a new, a 20th century Cartesianism' (Pan's Lectures 3). He also emphasizes, however, the vast difference between Descartes' radical doubt about existence and his own suspension of belief in existence (Schmitt 140; Cartesian Mediations 29-31, 35-6). Unlike in Cartesianism, phenomenology's own peculiar form of methodical doubt 'does not necessarily lead to a system of indubitable metaphysical truths' (Sinha 28); its orientation is more epistemological, since it concentrates primarily upon providing a methodology through which the universal structures of human consciousness can be examined (Paris Lectures 11-12; Sinha 26-8; Kockelmans 72-6). While the work of *Martin Heidegger is heavily influenced by Husserl's methodology, he finds bracketing to be a procedure not wholly suited to his philosophic project. Heidegger's main interest lies in the unique hu-

man phenomenon, defined in terms of the inherently intentional nature of the Dasein (being-in-the-world): 'For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction ... is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness ... in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being' (Basic Problems of Phenomenology 21). Heidegger's ontological orientation leads him to revise radically Husserl's phenomenological reduction, denying it centrality and primacy in philosophical investigation and suggesting that there are really 'three basic components of phenomenological method: reduction, construction, destruction' (21). In construction, our vision is not simply guided back from beings to being (as in reduction) but 'guided forward towards being itself (21). Destruction is 'a critical process in which traditional concepts (of ontology), which at first must necessarily be employed, are de-constructed down to the sources from which they were drawn' (23). Like Husserl, Heidegger insists upon a philosophical radicalism, but one which will ensure 'the genuine character of [ontology's] concepts' (23). Phenomenological literary criticism (particularly of the Husserlian-influenced *Geneva School) adopts and adapts the concepts of bracketing, eidetic reduction and the intuition of essences. Just as the phenomenologist proper places in parentheses the world as perceived in the natural attitude, so the critics of the Geneva School, which includes such theorists as *Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard and Marcel Raymond, analogously attempt to suspend all presuppositions and to bracket any personal commitment to a particular *ideology or metaphysic (Magliola 8-9, 28-9, 39-42). By placing in brackets such ideology, whether it be Marxist (see *Marxist criticism), feminist (see *feminist criticism) or humanist, the phenomenological literary critic lays claim to a methodology and type of interpretation which is both 'intrinsic' and *universal: 'intrinsic' in that it claims, through bracketing, to treat that intentional object - the *text - alone, the aim of this critical practice being to experience,

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Canon describe and explicate what is actually in the text, not to place extrinsic categories or expectations upon it; universal in that, in focusing solely upon the text, such criticism claims that any text is an expression of consciousness (defined in terms of intentionality, as 'the reciprocal implication of self and world' [Magliola 35]), a thesis which at least gives the appearance of a thoroughly unbiased approach. (Magliola 29-30, 39-41). Consequent to the critic's bracketing of all ideological and metaphysical assumptions is the employment of a kind of phenomenological reduction where the text is isolated from its historically and culturally specific milieu, although later phenomenological critics believe such a move unnecessary (Magliola 43-4). As the Husserlian subject then intuits the essential features of the bracketed object, so the Geneva critic intuits the essential structure of the literary work, the unified group of intentional subject-object relations which are part of the 'author's Lebensivelt and which he or she imaginatively transforms into the fictive universe of the text' (Magliola 28). The practice of criticism for phenomenological critics is then, in its broadest sense, comparable to the kind of minute description of an object's essence undertaken by Husserl. It is an 'intuiting' of the text in order to experience and then describe as fully as possible 'the text's Lebensivelt [or] phenomenological consciousness' (Magliola 42). MARIE H. LOUGHLIN

Primary Sources Grossmann, Reinhardt. Phenomenology and Existentialism. London: Routledge, 1984. Hammond, Michael, Jane Howarth and Russell Keat. Understanding Phenomenology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans., intro. and lexicon, Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Mediations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. - The Paris Lectures. Trans, and intro. Peter Koestenbaum. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. - 'Phenomenology.' In Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. - 'Philosophy as Rigorous Science.' In Husserl: Shorter Works. Ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1981, 166-97.

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Kockelmans, Joseph J. A First Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1967. Magliola, Robert. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 1977. Schmitt, Richard. 'Phenomenology.' In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 5. Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967, 135-51. Sinha, Debabrata. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1974.

Canon A canon is a body of writings or other creative works that have been recognized as standard or authoritative. An ancient Greek word, canon originally meant either of two things, a measuring rod or a list. From the first is derived the idea of a model or standard, in particular a standard which can be applied as a rule, law or principle. This sense survives in the notions of 'canon (or ecclesiastical) law' or 'canons of criticism.' From the second comes the concept of canonization, the Roman Catholic practice of admitting an individual to a Tist' of saints. One who assembles such a list or presents the case for canonization is called a postulator. These two original senses of canon have since become fused, in part because list-makers and postulators have routinely claimed value or *authority for their lists. The idea of a canon of writings first developed in relation to the Bible, in the 4th century of the modern era. Though formed over a long period of time, and often at the service of local secular interests, the biblical canon comprises all the books that the Christian church considers Holy Scripture. The apocrypha, or 'hidden' books, is the term given to a set of writings that relate to the Scriptural canon in form and matter yet whose authenticity has not been officially recognized: the Roman Catholic Bible includes 11 books that Protestants reject as apocryphal. A critical reading that emphasizes the unity of the Bible is sometimes called a canonical interpretation; in contrast, a historical interpretation assumes that the books of Scripture bear the inscriptions of their divergent authors and of the very dissimilar circumstances in which they were produced.

Canon The first applications of canon to a body of secular writings date, in English at least, from the late i6th century. This secular variant initially develops by analogy not, as might be expected, with the Scriptural canon but with the practice of canonization. Elizabethan authors, most notably Donne in his poem 'The Canonization,' express their hope of being canonized, in the sense of achieving fame comparable to that of Catholic saints. William Covell, in his tract Polimanteia (1595), is the first to advocate the canonization of secular *literature under the auspices of England's universities. The analogy with the biblical canon comes into play much later, when critics first use the term to designate all the works that can be legitimatelyattributed to a given author, as in 'the Shakespeare canon.' Works inconclusively attributed to that author are dubbed apocryphal, again by analogy with the biblical example. Here the merging of the dual senses of canon becomes particularly apparent: though establishing the canon of an author's works may seem to involve only a listing of proven attributions, the successful ascription of a particular *text to a major author such as Shakespeare will dramatically increase the critical attention lavished on that work and may thus help to increase its value over time. The idea of 'major' authors brings up the most familiar current usage of canon, as a collective term for the totality of the most highly esteemed works in a given culture. It differs from other collective epithets such as 'World's Classics,' 'The Great Books' or 'Masterpieces of Western Literature' in that its usage is not usually honorific or commendatory. Indeed the term is most often used by critics who wish to emphasize the affinities between the exclusive character of the literary canon and the highly institutionalized and monolithic nature of its biblical equivalent. A literary canon is usually perceived as a static if 'open' totality; hence it is not identical to a tradition, which usually implies a historical scheme. The latter term denotes a series of works or set of customs that manifest formal or thematic resemblances, or lines of influence, that have been maintained over multiple generations. A tradition is also a neutral term and may be used to refer to works that are not necessarily highly esteemed, such as 'the oral tradition.' Yet, as *T.S. Eliot argued in his most famous essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), the literature of the present cannot be truly

appreciated if it is not understood in relation to its antecedents. (See *anxiety of influence.) The qualities or circumstances that make a work eligible for inclusion in a canon constitute its canonicity. Another term, canonformation, names the process whereby authors become recognized or valued as standard. The intricacies of this process are a matter of much current debate, as are the criteria of canonicity. The conventional view is that the canonicity of a work is established by a consensus of successive generations of readers, critics and educators, as well as by the extent of its influence on later literature. According to this view, a work deserves a place in the canon if it continues to be read and prized in changing contexts; the work, it is said, must pass 'the test of time.' How much time is unclear: it has been a critical commonplace since Horace's day to set a term of 100 years, but critics have rarely observed the term, as the meteoric canonizations of Proust, Joyce and others in our century may indicate. There are a number of problems with this belief in a critical consensus. Canon-formation may involve a host of contingencies, not all of which can be directly related to the attitudes of critics and scholars: the accidents of survival in the period before printing, the effects of censorship and the fluctuating availability of published works. Moreover, despite the efforts of literary historians, including the ""Constance School of Reception Aesthetics, it is almost impossible to measure with any accuracy the range and relative weight of the divergent values that make up this consensus. It is not always clear, for example, whether later critics are revising the views of earlier generations or merely reiterating received opinion. Above all, this consensus has rarely if ever embraced the values of a broad cultural diversity. On the contrary, canon-formation has frequently been under the control of an official culture that valorizes only those works that in some way assert or reveal its dominant *ideology. Many of our notions of the European canon were developed at the turn of the century and reflect the strong nationalist feelings and prejudices that were current during this period. Our sense of the early English canon, for example, has been heavily influenced by the work of early German philologists, whose nationalistic biases led them to claim an Anglo-Saxon culture superior to the equally substantial Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin cultures.

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Carnival Recent critics have stressed how the literary canon favours works by white European men from the middle and higher classes to the exclusion of most works by women, popular artists or writers from other cultures or races. These critics advocate either a broad revision of the canon to reflect a more pluralistic set of values or the institution of separate canons for each of these literary subgroups. It is now possible to speak of the canon of women's writings, the canon of proletarian literature, and so on. Some critics have even suggested abandoning the idea of the canon altogether because it is inherently exclusive and elitist. The danger in such wholesale rejection of the canon is that it assumes that criticism can do without evaluation, when in fact evaluation is implicit in all forms of interpretation. There is a danger as well in such relativistic arguments of underestimating the complexity of canonformation; critics who reject the canon as elitist often muddle the question of value by confusing the quality or merit of a work, the attitudes it may express, the ideological functions it may have served in the past, and its relevance to our immediate concerns. Though the canon may serve hegemonic interests, canonical works themselves, as Dominick LaCapra suggests, 'have complex, internally divided relations to their contexts of creation and use' (5). Though it is often identified with the pedagogical curriculum, the canon is in fact loosely structured and is more akin to the repertoire in drama or music. The process of revising the canon may be slow but it is not impossible. The recent ascendancy of the deconstructionist critics (see *deconstruction) has meant a higher critical standing for the authors they habitually discuss, including the English Romantic poets, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and *Friedrich Nietzsche. In general, it is a simpler task to revise received interpretations of a major author than to attempt to alter that author's status in the canon. The situation may differ for marginal authors or authors unduly overlooked but, on the whole, it may take more than a generation to adjust the relative rankings of canonical authors. T R E V O R ROSS

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Primary Sources Barr, James. Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1983. Fiedler, L., and H. Baker, eds. English Literature: Opening Up the Canon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Fowler, Alastair. 'Genre and the Literary Canon.' New Literary History 11 (1979): 97—119. Guillory, John. 'Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate.' ELH 54 (1987): 483-527. Harris, Wendell V. 'Canonicity.' PML4 106 (1991): 110-21.

Kermode, Frank. Forms of Attention. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Kibel, Alvin C. 'The Canonical Text.' Dedalus 112 (1983): 239-54. LaCapra, Dominick. Soundings in Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Lindenberger, Herbert. The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Robinson, Lilian. Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon.' Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2 (1983): 83-98. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. Von Hallberg, Robert, ed. Canons. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Carnival While isolated usages of the word occur in European "literature as early as the medieval period, carnival is a term first used systematically by the Russian scholar *Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin used the example of late medieval and early Renaissance folk culture in developing his theory of laughter. In Rabelais and his World (1965; trans. 1968), he offers a new reading of the novels of Francois Rabelais as embodying the essence of carnival, 'a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed [to] the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture' (Rabelais 4). The life of the people parallels official culture, at once radically subverting state "ideology and offering an outlet for the ongoing role of repression and of elite cultural practices in the unfolding of human history. Focused on the body and on bodily realities such as eating, drinking, evacuation, sex, birth, and death, the carnival possesses its own ritu-

Carnival als, whose status as agency and whose mimetic function both remain open to question. (See also *mimesis.) Bakhtin's notion of the carnival implicitly addresses his own experience and understanding of Stalinism. Originally written in the 19305 as his Ph.D. thesis at the Gorky Institute, Rabelais and His World remained unpublished in Russia for three decades. In historic context, its deployment of the concept of carnival has been described as 'a denunciation of what the revolution had become, and a plea for understanding revolution in another way' (Holquist 8). For Linda Hutcheon, 'in discussing the particular case of the medieval carnival, Bakhtin seems to have uncovered [an] underlying principle of all parodic discourse: the paradox of its authorized transgression of norms.' (See *paradox, *disclosure.) Carnival, like *parody, 'posits, as a prerequisite to its very existence, a certain aesthetic institutionalization which entails the acknowledgement of recognizable, stable forms and conventions' (Hutcheon 74-5). *Umberto Eco, like *Julia Kristeva and *Fredric Jameson, offers a psychoanalytic reading of the comedy of carnival as suspect: it means 'enjoying the murder of the father, provided that others, less human than ourselves [i.e., wearing an animal mask], commit the crime' (Eco 2). Thus 'Bakhtin was right in seeing the manifestation of a profound drive towards liberation and *subversion in medieval carnival. The hyper-Bakhtinian ideology of carnival as actual liberation may, however, be wrong' (Eco 3). Some have queried Nietzschean or Christian traces in Bakhtin's thought; feminist perspectives on Bakhtin criticize his vision of carnival as unconsciously patriarchal and essentialist, especially in his treatment of the female body and the voices of women. (See *Friedrich Nietzsche, *feminist criticism, *patriarchy, *essentialism.) Laughter occupies a pre-eminent role in Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque. Ritual language and gesture of a theatrical caste explicitly employ the grotesque, exaggeration and transgression in order to parody accepted beliefs and rules in celebrations such as the feast of fools, the feast of the ass, the reign of the boy bishop, and Mardi Gras. (See *grotesque, theories of the.) Carefully wrought literary inversions and spontaneous speech together exhibit 'the social consciousness of all the people' (Rabelais 92). The body, foregrounded by means of grotesque realism, re-

veals a universal levelling tendency, eradicating distinctions not only between classes but also between actor and spectator (Rabelais 27). As street theatre, carnival implicates everyone in simultaneous performance, observation, reflection, and celebration. Linguistically, carnival also resists order, closure and the sacrosanct; its language is identifiable by its oaths, billingsgate and the polyglot *heteroglossia of the marketplace. Bawdy parodies of sacred words, texts, rituals, and narratives mark the temporary suspension of all other prohibitions and hypocrisies. Contradiction is acknowledged in Bakhtin's linguistic understanding of carnival in Rabelais, where laughter is marked by expansiveness and excess: by the moment of recognition and the recognition of important moments in individuals' and communities' sense of time and mutability. Laughter and its carnivalesque manifestation are, for Bakhtin as for Rabelais, no less significant philosophically than the tragic, and closely related to it. According to Eco, Bakhtin succeeds in theorizing and recontextualizing Aristotle's missing, apocryphal *text on comedy. Class conflict, linked to the emerging cultural hybridization of the carnivalesque with and within highbrow culture in Renaissance theatre, has been the focus of Shakespearean scholars in both Europe and America. Robert Weimann was one of the first to argue that 'the popular tradition itself assimilated wholly disparate elements (including classical, courtly and humanist materials) until it became part of a vastly larger cultural and aesthetic synthesis: the 'mingle-mangle' of which John Lyly spoke when he noted that 'the whole worlde is become an Hodge-Podge' (Weimann xviii). Michael Bristol adopts a more theoretical approach, arguing that 'the problem of authority cannot be fully elucidated by focusing exclusively on the relationship between what purports to be a virtual monopoly of significant political power and a few individual centers of avant-garde consciousness uneasily balanced between alternatives of affiliation or critical rejection of the imperatives of a ruling elite' (Bristol 6). In his reading of its politics, 'carnival is a general refusal to understand any fixed and final allocation of authority,' for example in the distribution of social wealth according to an immutable sense of natural order (Bristol 212). (See *authority.) Thus carnival laughter is public as well as popular, structural as well as transgressive, 517

Centre/decentre linked to the feast and the fair. It can be wholly or partly located in art, literature and folklore in many variants. Literary images of carnival are present in the fabliaux; in Sancho Panza's relation to Don Quixote; in Ben Jonson's Falstaffian table talk; in the Shakespearean fool; and in the 'Don Quixote in Nighttown' sequence of James Joyce's Ulysses, to name only a few examples. Visual representations of carnival are contained in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breugel and Marc Chagall, while mythology and folklore exemplify the carnival in Saturnalia, the charivari, cross-dressing, and the mock wedding. Spontaneous and institutionalized practices ranging from student riots to Melanesian cargo cults all possess strong links with carnival. MICHELE LACOMBE

Primary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT P, 1968.

Secondary Sources Bristol, Michael. Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, 1985. Eco, Umberto. 'The Frames of Comic "Freedom."' In Carnival. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984. Holquist, Michael. 'Bakhtin and Rabelais: Theory as Praxis.' In boundary 2 2.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1982): 12-17. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Kinser, Samuel. 'Bakhtin's Discovery.' In Rabelais' Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Morson, Gary Saul, ed. Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Ed. Robert Schwartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Centre/decentre Each society tends to perceive reality in more or less coherent ways and maintains generally systematic and systemic values. These constitute its foundations or centres and are often viewed as the firm structures which are part of

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a closed system. If the existence of a centre is assumed, other ways of seeing reality and other values must be ignored, repressed or marginalized. (See *margin.) In other words, reality and values ('presences') are not *universal but are conditional upon specific cultural, social, economic, and political perspectives. Through rethinking of these perspectives, an existing centre can be destabilized, denaturalized, deconstructed, or 'decentred.' (See *deconstruction.) Much poststructural criticism takes as its mandate the decentring of values and perspectives in ""literature and the contexts that give birth to it. In *Michel Foucault's words, 'there is no center, but always decenterings, series that register the halting passage from presence to absence, from excess to deficiency' (Language 165). (See *poststructuralism.) In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault speaks of three formative ideas that have heavily influenced ways of rethinking dominant concepts of society and self (see *self/ other); these include the economic, social and political theories of Karl Marx, the irrationalist and antiteleological philosophy of *Friedrich Nietzsche, and theories of the subject (see "•subject/object), self-identity, and self-expression in psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethnology proposed by *Sigmund Freud and *Ferdinand de Saussure, among others. (See *psychoanalytic theory, *structuralism.) To these, ""Jacques Derrida adds the Heideggerean critique of metaphysics (Structure 250). (See ""Heidegger.) In these instances, 'centres' or 'myths, kinship systems, languages, sexuality, or desire' (Archaeology 14) are opened up by exploring discontinuities, ruptures and inconsistencies. (See *myth.) Derrida was among the first of the new breed of French literary and philosophical theoreticians to define the centre and demonstrate the value of decentring. One of his primary essays which achieved general acceptance in North American academic circles was 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' delivered at the Johns Hopkins symposium on structuralism held in 1966. Remarkably, this conference and its published proceedings brought structuralism and poststructuralism to North America almost simultaneously. In 'Structure, Sign, and Play' Derrida speaks of the centre as 'a point of presence, a fixed origin' whose function is 'not only to orient, balance, and organize the struc-

Centre/decentre ture ... but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the free play of the structure' (247-8). (See theories of *play/freeplay.) By 'centre' he means the organizing principles, the precepts, the 'fundamental immobility and ... reassuring certitude' (248), the assumptions universally held to be true, and the beliefs that create normatives and that cohere to provide a certain opinion or view a privileged position. Centres, Derrida argues, have been traditionally viewed as part of the structure - its focus, coherence, and raison d'etre - but yet outside of it and separate from the mechanisms of structuring as such. Being both inside and outside, centres achieve a transcendent status and, having no apparent origin or end, are thought to be unassailable. Indeed, they preclude opposing viewpoints. Sometimes they are hard to name, so absorbed by culture have they become, but Derrida believes that we can locate these centres by looking at the hierarchizing of one term over another in the typically binary pairings of our social system: speech over writing, game over play, male over female, and nature over culture, for example. (See *game theory, *binary opposition.) By analysing these centres, exploring them as foundations and especially as structures of language, and finding their fault lines, gaps and fissures, Derrida puts the concepts 'under erasure'; that is, he cannot erase or destroy the governing ideas of our culture, but he can situate, rupture or disrupt them by showing how they have been constructed and how certain facts, views or contrary opinions have been left out, pushed aside, relegated to the margins, or 'marginalized.' He is able, by such means, to decentre our positions, to argue persuasively that human beings are themselves structures without centres. To decentre or dislocate is to show how and when 'the structurality of structure' occurs and thereby to deprive the centre of its transcendency (249). Since Derrida assumes that centres are constituted by language and 'that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique' (254), his task is to find the weaknesses in the arguments that give privilege to certain views. Derrida undertakes this decentring with a full awareness of his own limitations as an analyst: he is dependent upon the same structures of language and argumentation that he seeks to expose. He also acknowledges that his task is limited insofar as he has no other

centre to install. Consequently, as he states, for example, in Dissemination, Of Grammatology, Positions, and Writing and Difference, in calling into question Plato's privileging of *logocentrism (values and forms of expression, like speech, that are said to be 'natural'), he does not do so in order to implement graphocentrism (values and forms of expression, like writing, which are said to be characterized by artifice) or to introduce a privileged third area or term. His is not another invigoration of binarity or a new incarnation of a paradoxical dialectic. The deconstructive process calls into question all centres and cannot rest with one centre simply replacing another. Decentring is an unending process for Derrida, not only with respect to the opinions of others but also with respect to his own. Foucault is also no stranger to the process of decentring, though he relates it less to the structures of logic and argumentation than to the processes of *power. Nearly all of his works take as their subject the nature of knowledge as related to, controlled by, and disseminated through the channels of power. Power, he says, is never simply a matter of governor and governed or, more negatively, of oppressor and oppressed, but it is, nevertheless, centred and focused within a given domain and subordinated to a certain ""ideology. Ideology recognizes certain mechanisms of power and constrains others, to make the power relations seem continuous, though power is finally 'something which circulates' or 'functions in the form of a chain/ something that is 'employed and exercised through a net-like organisation' (Power/Knowledge 98). Power consists of many different attributes and forms but, as it is exercised through the mechanisms of ideology, only some of these are given prominence. By analysing the network, Foucault decentres the structures of power, shows the growth of power to be discontinuous, dismantles hegemonic practices, and recuperates lost or hidden manifestations of power and knowledge. (See *hegemony.) Some manifestations of power that he has deformed and decentred include criminality and delinquency, the penal system, madness and psychiatric care, and sexuality: while the body politic is ripe for his critique, so is the sexualized body. Some critics, too, have noted that Foucault's own use of language is as decentring as his attack on public institutions and morals. As *Hayden White remarks of Fou-

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Character zones cault: 'there is no centre to Foucault's discourse. It is all surface - and intended to be so. For even more consistently than Nietzsche, Foucault resists the impulse to seek an origin or transcendental subject which would confer any specific "meaning" on human life. Foucault's discourse is wilfully superficial' (82). Another who reflects upon centre is *Jacques Lacan, who hypothesizes that individuals no more have centres than does society at large. One of the longest-standing myths, according to Lacan, is that the human subject has a certain essence or self-identity. This liberalhumanist myth presupposes either that humans are born with a certain individually definable totality or that they develop one as they mature; the end result is the same in either case - an emphasis upon the wholeness, balance, rationality, and consistency that supposedly characterize each of us. Lacan speculates that, on the contrary, each person has no centre - only perceptions based on images of others, ranging from early impressions of the mother to others more external to the home. These images constantly shift and change and with them one's view of oneself. The self, then, is fragmentary, constantly shifting, and dependent upon images of other equally fragmentary selves. Each of us desires to have a coherent, centred self and attempts to meet this goal throughout life, but none of us will ever achieve this desire. Until recognizing our conflicting goals, ideas and drives - our very fragmentation, self-division and self-alienation - we can never fully enter the realm of shared social discourses, institutional observances and communal language practices - those things that supposedly mark us as coherent, rational, objective, and centred personalities. There is, for Lacan, no centre of one's self; there is no logical, unified self but only a constantly displaced signifier in search of a signified. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) According to these views of language, social *discourse, and the self, there is no essential centre. Centres have been artificially created over time, and may even seem permanent in many respects, but are in constant need of *subversion and decentring. To recognize the arbitrariness of their creation and perpetuation is to begin to allow new possibilities to exist, to permit a new awareness of the limitations and possibilities of one's self, and to permit a

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new tolerance of others, no matter how different. GORDON E. SLETHAUG

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans, and intro. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.' In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donate. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972, 247-72. - Writing and Difference. 1967. Trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 1972. - Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. - Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: The Harvester P, 1980. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977. White, Hayden. 'Michel Foucault.' In Structuralism and Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida. Ed. John Sturrock. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1979, 81-115.

Character zones Character zones are territories or fields of action for a character's speech which encroach in various ways upon the author's voice. Such 'zones' produce many different kinds of *double-voicing (dialogism) in the novel. The sphere of influence of a character zone is not limited to the character's actual words but may begin early in the *text and extend far beyond the boundaries of his direct *discourse. *Mikhail Bakhtin calls the dialogic interaction between the distinct voice of a character and that of the author within a single utterance a 'hybrid construction.' In such a discourse, the words of the author and his character are changed as they pass through each other's sphere of influence and are therefore 're-

Chora fracted' (modified) in the dialogic interaction. For Bakhtin, there are no empty zones in the novel but instead disputed territories where double-voiced relationships occur. When the idiosyncratic speech of a character combines with that of the author, it results in 'that special type of novelistic dialogue that realizes itself within the boundaries of constructions that externally resemble monologues' ('Discourse in the Novel' 370). Bakhtin examines character zones in the context of a discussion of the comic novel and subsequently analyses a number of examples in Turgenev. The various languages of the characters are not only concentrated in direct speeches but are also 'diffused throughout the authorial speech that surrounds the characters, creating highly particularized character zones' ('Discourse in the Novel' 316). These zones may be formed in various ways - from 'fragments of a character's speech, from various forms for hidden transmission of someone else's word and from scattered words and sayings belonging to someone else's speech' (ibid.). Character zones describe one more way in which *heteroglossia may be incorporated within the novel. Oblique and subtle traces of a character's voice may be perceived in varied examples of hybrid, internally dialogized, double-voiced discourse. (See also *dialogical criticism.) PHYLLIS MARGARET PARYAS

Primary Sources Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. - Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Chora The term chora is developed by *Julia Kristeva in order to account for the pre-sign or extralinguistic functioning which she thinks distinguishes language from other sign systems, and which marks the subject's condition in language as dialectical or double. (See *sign, *subject/object.) Kristeva takes the term from

Plato's Timaeus, which refers to a receptacle which is hybrid and anterior to identity and naming. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), she uses the Platonic term in two different but related ways. First, the chora signifies a hypothetical space or phase which precedes the child's acquisition of language, and which is prior to the psychoanalytic "'mirror stage. Kristeva describes this preverbal chora as rhythmic, nourishing, maternal, and as formed by what *Sigmund Freud defined as instinctual drives. She emphasizes that because these drives are always already ambiguous, simultaneously assimilating and fragmenting, the chora cannot be thought of as an originary unity. In a second use of the term, Kristeva associates the chora with the extralinguistic functioning which she contends is a dimension of all ""signifying practice. For Kristeva, the child's acquisition of language necessitates a rupture, which is at once a conscious-unconscious division of the emerging subject, and its detachment from the pre-symbolic chora. Yet the chora re-emerges whenever its drives decentre the positioning of a transcendent subject and open language to unconscious heterogeneity. (See *centre/decentre.) According to this use, the term chora is synonymous with what Kristeva calls the semiotic modality of signification, experienced as jouissance. (See *semiotics.) Kristeva suggests that Freud points to the idea of the chora both through his theory of the drives and through his postulation of a rupture or break upon which society is founded. In her development of the term, she also relies on the work of *Jacques Lacan, particularly his theory of the mirror stage. More generally, Kristeva's elaboration of the term chora involves her critique of *Edmund Husserl's phenomenological subject, and her reworking of Hegel's concept of negativity. (See ""phenomenological criticism.) In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva suggests that ""Jacques Derrida's concept of the ""trace is suggestive of the choric space or place which escapes structure. Derrida has criticized Kristeva's use of the term and recently ('Comment ne pas parler: Denegations' 1987) has begun to elaborate his own treatment of the place-space of the chora. DAWNE McCANCE

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Classeme Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. 'Comment ne pas parler: Denegations.' In Psyche: Inventions de I'autre. Paris: Galilee, 1987. 'How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.' In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Trans. Ken Frieden. Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. La Revolution du langage poetique: L'avant-garde a la fin du XIXe siecle. 1974. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Classeme In Greimassian *semiotics, the classeme is a contextual *seme, that is, a general and abstract category by means of which a nuclear seme takes on a specific meaning in a given context. (See *AJ. Greimas.) The classeme combines with the seme to form a sememe: this term refers to the minimal effect of meaning produced by a specific appropriation of a lexeme (that is, an object-term) in a given context. Unlike the nuclear seme, which is a semantic property inherent to a lexeme, the classeme manifests itself only in a discursive unit superior to the word, whether this be a syntagm, a sentence or a *text. The classeme is 'the denominator common to a whole class of contexts' (Greimas, Semantique 45). The concept of classeme appeared necessary to explain the variations of meaning of a same term according to the context. For example, the phrase 'X is barking' can be read as referring to an animal or to a human being, the verb 'bark' being able to apply to any of the classemes animality or humanity virtually present in the word X. When the content of the subject is made more precise (for example, 'X, the dog, is barking'), the meaning of the verb 'barking' and that of X can be stabilized with the help of the classeme animality and thus form an unequivocal sememe. One can see by this example that the recurrence of a same classeme in a given phrase or *discourse allows the reader to characterize the text as 'a semantic micro-universe closed on itself (ibid., 93). This characteristic of the text is the necessary condition for a reader to be able to make a uniform and coherent reading of it, once its *isotopy has been recognized. At a more general level, classemes lay the

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foundations and the frame of the semantic universe. The outside world is pictured through the general paradigmatic frames of reference that are the basis of classemes (for example, animate and inanimate). The term 'classeme' is derived from the studies in componential semantics of Bernard Pottier (dating back to his doctoral thesis in 1955), from whom Greimas borrowed it in order to explain the elementary structure of meaning. Greimas' particular appropriation of this term has been criticized and rejected by various semioticians, notably Pierre Lerat and Francois Rastier. These critics prefer to adopt Pottier's definition of the classeme as 'the set of generic semes in a sememe.' CHRISTIAN

VANDENDORPE

Primary Sources Greimas, A.J. Semantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Repub. PUF, 1986. Structural Semantics. Trans. D. McDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1983. - and J. Courtes. Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie du langage. Paris, 1979. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Trans. L. Crist, D. Patte, et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Pottier, B. Linguistique generale. Paris: Klincksieck, 1974-

Secondary Sources Lerat, P. Semantique descriptive. Paris: Hachette, 1983. Rastier, F. Semantique interpretative. Paris: Hachette, 1987.

Closure/dis-closure Perhaps the notion of literary closure, or the sense of an ending (to borrow *Frank Kermode's phrase), originated with Aristotle's statement in the Poetics that a poetic work should be 'whole' and 'complete.' However, the term closure emerged in the early 2oth century from the *discourse of Gestalt psychologists such as Kurt Koffka who, in Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), examined the nature and significance of the human tendency to perceive wholeness. In The Sense of an Ending (1966), the literary critic Frank Kermode suggested that creating endings is a human tendency, evident not only in "literature but also in

Closure/dis-closure life's fictions. As one example of this human desire to impose order, Kermode pointed to the long history of disconfirmed apocalyptic predictions. More specifically, the term closure gained new currency in the late 19605 as a way of describing textual resolution, most notably with the publication of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Poetic Closure. For Smith, closure is produced by a *text when it creates a sense of 'appropriate cessation' for its reader, when it 'announces and justifies the absence of further development.' That is, closure is a direct result of the text's formal structure: its coherence, integrity and completeness. As such, Smith's use of the term is reminiscent of Aristotle's notion of textual integrity and of Kant's sense of 'internal purposiveness,' both of which proved central to the New Critical concept of the text as closed aesthetic object. (See *New Criticism.) Although limited to poetry, Smith's study breaks the ground for subsequent analyses of closure, most notably of closure in the novel. However, the potential open-endedness of what *Mikhail Bahktin calls the 'postmythic' novel (The Dialogic Imagination 1981) frustrates the formalist desire to find closure integral to the structure of the work, and the corollary assumption that texts can and do achieve closure. One solution to the dilemma is offered by David Richter in Fable's End (!974)/ when he separates the notion of completeness from that of formal closure (the sense of an ending established by the author through such a device as summary). Richter argues that rhetorical or thesis-driven novels (such as Joseph Heller's Catch 22) differ fundamentally from plot-driven novels, where thought is subordinate to action. Although potentially open in form, such intentional fictions achieve completeness and closure in the adequate illustration of a particular thesis. Looking beyond the novel's formal structure to its ethical and sociohistorical context, other critics argue that the defining feature of the 'modern' novel is not its closure but rather its open-endedness. Common to their analyses is the assumption that the novel is not closed off from but is part of its sociopolitical moment, and that novelistic form is not a fixed structure but rather one in 'process.' One such critic was David Daiches who, as early as 1939, positioned himself as a 'maximum-context critic,' and argued that the novel was a form in tran-

sition because of the profound impact of the erosion of the public belief in Western civilization (The Novel and the Modern World). In the 19605, Ihab Hassan (Radical Innocence) and Alan Friedman (The Turn of the Novel) suggest not only that the form of the novel is still in process but also that the form is one of process. Dominated by what Hassan calls 'the spirit and shape of irony/ and what Friedman calls the 'flux of moral experience/ open-endedness of design in the novel takes on ethical as well as structural and aesthetic dimensions. (See *irony.) Feminist critic Rachel Blau du Plessis, also interested in the ideological implications of novelistic closure, explores the way contemporary women writers have sought alternatives to the traditional endings of romance (marriage or death) in Writing Beyond the Ending (1985). (See *feminist criticism, *ideol-

°gy-)

Twentieth-century communication theorists also use the term closure, or more particularly ideological closure, to identify the way in which a text's rhetorical strategies direct reading. (See *rhetorical criticism, *communication theory.) Although ideological closure is used most frequently in media analysis (to refer to the 'slant' of a newspaper article, for example), it is perceived to be a property of all texts. That textual closure is not so much a product of literary texts themselves as the result of the reader's desire to master or apply closure to them was an approach to critical closure that also gained a hearing in the late 19605. Here, the term closure is a product not of the literary text but of the act of interpretation itself. *Stanley Fish, for example, places characteristic emphasis on the reader's role in the production of meaning and suggests that the reader performs a kind of perceptual closure in the act of reading, irrespective of the text's formal structure (Is There a Text in This Class?). (See also ""reader-response criticism.) The most radical challenge of textual closure is voiced by the deconstructionists and, in particular, by *Jacques Derrida in 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Language of the Human Sciences' (1966) and, more generally, in Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. (See *deconstruction.) Arguing that we exist within the enclosure of language ("/'/ n'y a pas de hors texte'), Derrida asserts that interpretation is without end. If there is no locus of meaning outside the world of language, as Derrida suggests with the concept of *differance, then the

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Closure/dis-closure meaning of a literary text can never be fixed. Without a centre to ground the play of meaning, the text is opened to infinity; the critic's attempt to assert closure is an illusion. (See *centre/decentre, theories of *play/freeplay.) In this second sense, closure is used to qualify a verb (for example, to perform closure), its meaning approximating *totalization. For the deconstructionists, and especially for Derrida, the impulse to assert closure is a temptation that must be avoided. Although some deconstructionist critics lament the impossibility of textual closure as anything other than a heuristic ideal (*Paul de Man), or explore the labyrinthine complexity of a critical language that is continually displaced or borrowed (*J. Hillis Miller), or explore the disintegration of textual and interpretive frames (Barbara Johnson), their discussions reveal the kind of radical dis-closure that they find at the heart of all creative and critical texts. Indeed, the deconstructionist challenge implies not only that texts illustrate disclosure but, as J. Hillis Miller argues, the instability of meaning makes it impossible to demonstrate closure at all. One significant celebration of dis-closure is William V. Spanos' 'Breaking the Circle: Hermeneutics as Dis-closure' (1977), which analyses and extends *Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). (See *hermeneutics.) Spanos refers to the work of the New Critics, but also to the myth criticism of *Northrop Frye, the *structuralism of *Tzvetan Todorov and *Roland Barthes, as well as to what he calls the phenomenological criticism of consciousness of *Georges Poulet' (see also *Geneva School, *phenomenological criticism), all of which share a desire to focus on the formal or spatial aspects of a literary work at the expense of exploring its temporal and processual implications. (See *spatial form.) They 'see' and chart the text, in other words, rather than 'hear' and experience it. The subsequent analysis becomes a kind of vicious circle, whereby the reading merely confirms the reader's expectation that the text is a unified whole that can be perceived in spatial terms. Instead, Spanos asserts that a literary work must be experienced as an event. In this way, 'phenomenological hermeneutics becomes a process of discovery in the sense of dis-closing - opening out - the hermeneutic possibilities that the inauthentic spatial impulse of the Western literary consciousness closes off, conceals, and

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ultimately forgets in coercing the temporality of the text into a circle.' Rather than a kind of closure, then, such a phenomenological hermeneutics allows for a reading that, as the title of Spanos' article suggests, is a kind of disclosure. Worthy of note, however, is that Spanos finds that Heidegger's own essays on poetry, language and thought do not present a method 'radical enough' to break out of the enclosure. As a result of the deconstructionist and other assaults on structuralist notions of closure, critics began to think differently about the integrity of a literary text. In 'An Apology for Poetics,' for instance, *Murray Kreiger (1981) moves away from a New Critical stance with its characteristic 'commitment to formal closure as the primary characteristic of the successful literary object.' Instead, he describes closure as the illusion of 'sealing off which results from both the author's and the reader's 'habit' of seeking closure. As a definition of closure, the word 'sealing' (also used by *Geoffrey Hartman in Saving the Text) deliberately lacks the kind of formal authority carried by Herrnstein Smith's 'integrity' or Richter's 'completeness.' N A T H A L I E COOKE

Primary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Texas: U of Texas P, 1981. Blau du Plessis, Rachel. Writing Beyond the Ending. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modern World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1939. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - Writing and Difference. 1967. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Harvard: Harvard UP, 1980. Friedman, Alan. The Turn of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. Hartman, Geoffrey. Saving the Text. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Johnson, Barbara. 'The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida.' Yale French Studies 55.6 (1977): 457-505. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. Koffka, Kurt. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New

Code York: Paul Trench and Trubner, 1935. Repr. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Krieger, Murray. 'An Apology for Poetics.' In American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age. Ed. Ira Konigsberg. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1981. Miller, J. Hillis. 'Ariadne's Thread.' Critical Inquiry 3 (Autumn 1976): 56-77. - 'The Problematic of Ending in Narrative.' Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33.1 (June 1978): 3-7. O'Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders and John Fiske, eds. Key Concepts in Communication. London and New York: Methuen, 1983. Richter, David. Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. Spanos, William V. 'Breaking the Circle: Hermeneutics as Dis-closure.' boundary 2 2 (Winter, 1977): 421-57.

Code A code is the sign-system from which any given message is generated. It consists of a set of signs and the rules that govern their combination. (See *sign.) The code may be a simple set of equivalences (Morse code or machine language, for example), or it may be a highly complex structure with rules which are not explicitly formulated and which are operated largely unconsciously. A spoken sentence in a natural language, for example, is produced from the set of syntactic, semantic and phonological rules that constitute a code. In linguistics the term was first used by *Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics ( 1 9 1 6 ) in a sense which corresponded approximately to his concept of langue in the opposition *langue/parole (language system/individual speech act). *Roman Jakobson later adopted the notion from '"communication theory where it referred simply to a repertory of signals. He set out a six-part model of communication in his well-known 'Closing Statement' to the Indiana Conference on Style (1958). In this model, an addresser sends a message to an addressee through some physical channel - the contact. The message requires a context to which it refers, and must use a code sufficiently familiar to both parties for the message to be understood. The opposition code/message derived from this model thus corresponds nearly to Saussure's langue/ parole.

In *semiotics the term has a broader sense, applying not just to communication but to any system that can be considered a signifying system. Animal tracks, medical symptoms, patterns of DNA in cells, for example, may all be considered as elements in a code. In an even broader application, the notion has been extended to include cultural systems. In his work in anthropology, *Claude Levi-Strauss proposed that aspects of social life not directly pertaining to communication (kinship systems, for example) could be understood using linguistic models. Human cultural activities such as the cooking and serving of food or modes of dressing could be analysed as the products of cultural codes. Many current studies in semiotics undertake to identify and explain the codes that underlie everyday life. As well as giving impetus to semiotics, Levi-Strauss' work greatly influenced the development of *structuralism, one of the foremost tenets of which is that every aspect of human experience is inevitably coded. The concept of code has several applications in literary theory. Structuralist critics such as *A.J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov attempted to describe a system or 'grammar' which generated texts. They saw the *text, to use Saussure's terms, as the parole of a langue composed of the transformational rules that generate literary texts. *Michael Riffaterre, focusing on poetry, used a theory of codes to describe the conventions which underlie a text, emphasizing the special significance of the reader's recognition of these codes. *Roland Barthes argued that the text is not the 'accomplishment of a code' but is 'traversed' by various codes. In S/Z, his reading of Balzac's Sarrasine, he identified five codes (hermeneutic, semantic, symbolic, proairetic - pertaining to action and cultural). His description of these codes has proved too vague for his work to provide the basis of a more general application to other texts. Yet his study, implying that it is the reader rather than the text who is the product of codes, marks an important departure from the structuralist perspective. (See also ""reader response criticism, ""narrative code.) MELANIE SEXTON

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Jakobson, Roman. 'Closing Statement: Linguistics

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Communicative action and Poetics.' In T.A. Sebeok, ed. Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1960, 350-77. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Lingusitics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Competence/performance

Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.

Communicative action Communicative action is the central concept from which *Jurgen Habermas builds his version of contemporary *critical theory for the *Frankfurt School tradition, a tradition which also includes Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, * Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse. Communicative action is predicated on the notion that the structuring of meaning between social actors or speakers is a pragmatic task at both the micro and macro levels. In micro communicative action, the speaker, in the process of structuring an utterance, assumes a rational response from the listener. This exchange requires, first of all, the intelligibility of the utterance as well as socialization in the correct communicative competence and the safe transmission of the previous stock of knowledge about communicative competence. On the macro level, social systems or societies also produce objective meanings. Through mass-diffused communicative actions, the coexistence of conflicting communication communities or life-worlds within the same social system remains possible. (See also "communication theory.) GREG NIELSEN

Primary Sources Habermas, Jurgen. The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. I. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon P, 1984.

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- Vol. II. Life-world and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon P, 1988.

'Competence' and 'performance' are terms developed by the American linguist *Noam Chomsky. They are central to transformational generative grammar and have become widely used in linguistics as a whole as well as in psychology, philosophy and literary studies. 'Competence' refers to the implicit knowledge or tacit mastery which adult speakers and hearers have of their native language. It involves an extensive amount of varied linguistic knowledge, including the ability to produce and understand an indefinite number of novel utterances (the creative aspect of language); to recognize relationships between sentences; to resolve ambiguities; and to identify and interpret certain mistakes or deviations in grammatical form. This knowledge is conceived as deriving from a set of mentally represented principles which are in part innately determined rather than learned, a position known as the Innateness Hypothesis. From this perspective, the study of language structure is linked to the study of human psychology and biology, and human nature in general; and linguistics may thus be viewed as part of cognitive science. For Chomsky, competence must be innately determined at least in part because it constitutes a complex cognitive system mastered quickly and effortlessly by children in spite of the relative poverty of the data they are exposed to in the process of first language acquisition (Plato's problem). Therefore it appears implausible that the required principles are acquired through inductive learning. Rather, a rich innate component or Universal Grammar controls the growth of language in each individual. Competence interacts with other cognitive systems such as memory and logic to determine performance, that is, our linguistic behaviour, or the specific use of language in concrete situations. Linguistic theory addresses itself to the explicit characterization of competence rather than to the study of actual performance per se. In literary criticism, "Jonathan Culler has extended the meaning of competence to include literary competence: an under-

Critical theory standing of the conventions, genres and rules which are required for an understanding of ""literature (Structuralist Poetics). (See also *genre criticism.) MARIA-LUISA RIVERO

Primary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, !97S.

Concretization A term first used by *Roman Ingarden, concretization designates the activity by which the "text is put together in reading which leads to the reader's cognition of it as meaningful experience. The implicit ground for this concept is that the work of "literature as a written *code is virtual until it is read and imaginatively realized, that is, concretized. The most important critic to demonstrate the concept of concretization is *Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading. Iser develops an extensive analysis of the way the virtual text is concretized in the act of reading. He has given literary criticism such important concepts as textual blanks or gaps (built-in situations that demand reader participation in concretization) and consistency building (the essential coherence a reader must give a text in order to progress in reading). Concretization is also related to *Paul Ricoeur's term 'configuration' (Time and Narrative, I 1984), but the latter adds a strong historical and social component. The term is sometimes used synonymously with realization, but concretization still carries the strong implication of making actual what was only virtual. (See also *reader-response criticism, *Constance School of Reception Aesthetics.) MARIO J. VALDES

Primary Sources Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. 1976. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. - The Implied Reader. 1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984-8.

Critical theory The term critical theory has been developed by successive generations of the *Frankfurt School tradition, where it has taken on a particular significance. While critical theory is the term that best describes the general approach of the tradition, it should not be confused with its meaning as the generic term for literary criticism. The Frankfurt School would define most literary criticism as either a form of *hermeneutics founded on the practical interests of interpretation and the critique or recovery of hidden or deferred meaning in texts (*deconstruction, ""reception theory), or as a positivism founded on the technical interests of explanation (""semiotics, ""narratology, ""genetic criticism) (cf. ""Jurgen Habermas). As defined by the Frankfurt tradition, critical theory is seen to respond to the specifically emancipatory interest in aesthetic and social practices. It was first defined by Max Horkheimer around 1932 as an approach that sees all knowledge, be it scientific, moral or aesthetic, as rooted in some set of social interests. Critical theory is thus allied with all those approaches in the humanities and social sciences that seek to provide a theory which will explain the emancipatory interest that enters the order of social practice (cf. Geuss). In this contemporary sense, critical theory argues that all knowledge is rooted in some set of interests that inform the social and communicative practices of the subjects of class, gender, ethnicity, and race (Fraser). These interests do not remain fixed, singular or static; they may clash, overlap or work together and are in a constant process of change. Critical theory proceeds by juxtaposing possible alternative explanations of the subject of the social practices it is studying. It negates claims of universal explanation made within each approach while gathering and synthesizing explanations from each that help formulate a normative theory of what ought to be done to emancipate the subjects of social practice from domination. Social practices are reasoned forms of action. They are derived from either the critical or instrumental reason that subjects enter into in their practices (Horkheimer). Instrumental reason is on the side of domination while critical reason is on the side of emancipation. Critical theory seeks to negate instrumental reason and free subjects by bringing them a knowledge 527

Defamiliarization about themselves and especially about what they might become. By contrast, instrumental reason seeks an identity between the subjects and the domination that is visited on them. An example of instrumental reason at work is society's attempt to dominate nature, to reduce it to its own interests and to transform it to suit human needs. Critical theory refuses instrumental truth claims based on theories of objectivity that seek to explain human phenomena through the methods of the natural sciences (cf. Adorno et al.). It is also separate from the purely practical interests of the hermeneutic sciences that seek to recover meaning strictly by interpreting the representations of social practices. Critical theory is a self-reflexive but explanatory approach to theorizing because it maintains an interest in the emancipation of the subject of social practices and not simply in its representation. It is therefore always in part about itself and always rooting itself in the processes of change. (See also *subject/object, ""universal, *Adorno.) GREG NIELSEN

Primary Sources Adorno, Theodor, et al. De Vienne a Frankfurt: La Querelle allemande des sciences sociales. Paris: Editions Complexes, 1979. Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 1981. Habermas, Jiirgen. Knowledge and Human Interest. Boston: Beacon P, 1971. - The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1987. Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory. New York: Seabury, 1972. - Critique of Instrumental Reason. New York: Seabury, 1974.

Dasein: see Heidegger, Martin; Geneva School; Bracketing; Intention/Intentionality; Lebenswelt; Phenomenological criticism

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Defamiliarization Defamiliarization is one of several English renditions of the Russian term ostranenie, a concept introduced and developed by *Viktor Shklovskii in 'Iskusstvo kak priem' ['Art as Device'], published in the second formalist publication Poetika: Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka [Studies in the Theory of Poetic Language 1917]. (See Russian *formalism.) Shklovskii developed the concept of defamiliarization in opposition to *Aleksander Potebnia's theory of art as thinking in images and his arguments that the images are clearer and simpler than what they signify. According to Shklovskii, the opposite is true. The meaning of art is based on the ability to 'defamiliarize' things, to show them in a new, unexpected way. In everyday life, we do not see things and their texture, since our perception has become habitual and automatic. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art 'defamiliarizes' objects by making forms strange, and by increasing the difficulty and the length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. As applied specifically to ""literature, defamiliarization, according to Shklovskii, operates on three levels. On the level of language, it makes language difficult and deliberately impeded, as, for example, in the accumulation of difficult sounds and the use of rhythm in poetry. On the level of content, it challenges accepted concepts and ideas, by distorting them and showing them from a different perspective. For example, Leo Tolstoy's story The Strider' shows the illogicality of the human world from the point of view of a horse. On the level of literary forms, it 'defamiliarizes' literary conventions, by breaking with the dominant artistic canons and introducing new ones, elevating some subliterary genres such as farce or detective story to the status of fine art. (See ""canon, ""genre criticism.) The concept of defamiliarization proved extremely useful in literary criticism. It described a process valid for all literature and distinguished literature from other verbal modes. It allowed the establishment of a hierarchy of elements within the literary work itself, with the principle of defamiliarization acting as the central one and subordinating all other ele-

Demythologizing ments to itself. Finally, it led to a new concept of literary history based not on the continuity of tradition but on abrupt breaks with the past and the introduction of new artistic rules. Shklovskii's theory of defamiliarization influenced Bertold Brecht's notion of Verfremdungs-Effekt[the alienation effect], which stressed the need in theatre to alter the events to be presented in order to induce a critical attitude in the spectators towards what they see. NINA KOLESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Shklovskii, V.B. 'Iskusstvo kak priem.' In Poetika: Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka. 1919. 'Art as Device.' In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. L. Lemon and M.J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963.

Demythologizing Taking their cue from the French left and the *Frankfurt School, cultural materialists argue that there is a tendency within society to insist that things are inherent, natural, 'the way they are/ and commonsensical, without admitting that the 'natural' is in fact an artefact or process of cultural ""ideology, subject to social usage. (See *cultural materialism.) For whatever reasons (and the Marxists, who first used the term 'mystification,' assume those to be linked with capitalism), culture perceives a given thing, act or process as natural rather than cultural, and 'mystifies' it. (See *Marxist criticism.) Moreover, what has been mystified usually conforms to rational-humanist views of absolute values, totalized cultures and unified and stable selves - what *Jacques Derrida calls 'transcendental signifieds' and *Paul de Man calls the self-mystified symbols based upon the coherence of God, self and the word. (See ""totalization.) In fact Biblical 'myths' were among the first to come under scrutiny by a German scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, who used the term Entmythologisierung or demythologization to refer to the hermeneutical process by which conventional interpretations of Christianity could be reassessed in terms of existential categories. (See *hermeneutics, ""metacriticism.) One of the responsibilities of anthropologists, semioticians and cultural materialists is, then, to discover the ways meaning is structured and presented in a given culture, to see

how signs pervade every aspect of life, and to demonstrate how these signs can be regarded as cultural artifices or myths and, consequently, be 'demythologized' and 'demystified.' (See *sign, *myth, ""semiotics.) Such pairs of concepts as nature/culture and mythologize/demythologize (demystify), which are intricately related, have been subjected to scrutiny by a number of thinkers, including the structural anthropologist ""Claude Levi-Strauss, who sees these as part of a relational structure or system of differences and explores their general importance, classifies them and assesses their symbolic associations within that system. Perhaps the most influential 'demystifier' has been ""Roland Barthes, who finds language less an instrument of self-expression and communication than a social means of repression and alienation by the bourgeoisie. Assuming that language maintains the structure of ""power over an indefinite period of time and, consequently, that it enforces a certain ideology, he argues that the task of the analyst is to read against the grain of history and culture and expose the production of meaning, to critique cultural myths, to 'unlearn' orthodox social values or doxa, and to establish more pluralistic perspectives. Although all of his works to some extent accomplish this task, two of his earliest are dedicated to it: Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Mythologies (1957). In the first, he writes of ecriture bourgeoise or classical French writing from the mid-i6oos to the mid-19005. The predictability of this style makes it easy to read or, as Barthes puts it, to consume, rendering it 'natural.' Denaturalizing it by investigating how style is produced lessens its inherent power and control. In the second book, he looks at other kinds of social myths in mass culture (writing being one) in order to decipher their mode of operation on people. The myths include sports, cinema, food and drink, advertising, automobiles, photography, and many others, which are not just innocent by-products of our culture but ways in which the dominant ideology asserts itself. Jacques Derrida explores language systems, argumentation and logic in order to demystify or deconstruct cultural practices and beliefs. (See ""deconstruction.) In general, he says, the beliefs of Western cultures cluster around primary transcendent concepts that he calls logocentric: some ultimate spoken word, presence, centre, fixed origin, truth, or reality. (See *lo-

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Demythologizing gocentrism.) To demystify these, he examines some of the important texts that have produced a Western metaphysics, including Plato's Phaedrus, Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked. (See ""metaphysics of presence, *Ferdinand de Saussure.) By reassessing their supposedly solid assumptions, cohesive structures and foundational values, he discovers the aporiatic moments in which texts demonstrate their own flaws and weaknesses; he finds their ruptures and opens them up to new interpretations (see *aporia). He argues that these texts and conceptions are not really unified but rather consist of self-contradictions, unnoticed oppositions and conflicting statements. Derrida suggests that everything is self-contradictory and self-differing (difference)e) and hence will never yield to a single, socially warranted conclusion; ultimate meaning, if it exists at all, is perpetually deferred (*(*differance). Like Barthes and Derrida, *Michel Foucault ventures into the arena of language and significant social practices to discover what constitutes knowledge, who controls it, how it is coded, and where ideology hides amidst discourses and discursive practices. (See *discourse.) His role and that of others who investigate the relationship of language and cultural ideology is to discover the genealogy (roots) of a culture's main goals and tenets as embedded in language and to decentre them. (See *centre/decentre.) Since 'desire and power' always cling to discourse, it is difficult to demystify, but the difficulties can be overcome in part by accepting the arbitrariness of language and all social conventions. All discursive modes are culturally constructed, systematized, ordered, and given their function and value (their *episteme) within a specific culture and period. (See also *desire/lack.) Although *Jacques Lacan is known more for his 'return to *Freud' than for pronouncements on demystification, his analysis of personality development depends upon a concept of the self as structured according to images of others. (See *self/other.) It is Lacan's position that just as these images as well as culture change, so does the self. When a child enters the socalled post-*mirror stage at about 18 months and accedes to the Law-of-the-Father (the social and linguistic codes that constitute a given culture), it recognizes the necessity of having to adapt to changing conditions and paradigms. (See *Name-of-the-Father.) The self,

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then, is always in flux. For Lacan, the notion of a unified, transcendent self is a myth; the subject is self-divided or split between a wish for wholeness (the Imaginary) and the reality of fragmentation (the Symbolic) and is, consequently, as arbitrary as other cultural norms and institutions. (See ""imaginary/symbolic/ real.) Since, however, culture clings to a view of a coherent, unified, transcendent self, that view needs demythologizing. Myths, then, encompass every aspect of existence, including language, conceptions of the self, and social patterns and institutions. All of these, according to the structuralists and poststructuralists, need to be demystified and seen as arbitrary and constituted upon conditions unique to a particular society at a certain time. (See *structuralism, *poststructuralism.) Some critics, however, see the concept of arbitrariness as arbitrary in itself. The relativism that underlies the process of demythologizing is neither attractive nor acceptable to those who believe in enduring values or the need for unifying cultural constructs. GORDON E. SLETHAUG

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. Ed. and intro. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. - Elements of Semiology. Trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. - Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. London: Paladin Books, 1973. - Writing Degree Zero. Trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. Culler, Jonathan. Barthes. Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983. de Man, Paul. 'The Rhetoric of Temporality.' In Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. C.S. Singleton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1969. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans, and intro. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.' In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donate. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972, 247-72. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 1972. Lacan, Jacques. 'Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis' and 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language

Desire/lack in Psychoanalysis.' In Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. J.H. Bell and J.R. von Sturmer. Ed. R. Needham. Boston: Beacon P, 1969. - The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. J. and D. Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. - The Savage Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966. White, Hayden. 'Michel Foucault.' In Structuralism and Since: From Lcvi-Strauss to Dcrrida. Ed. John Sturrock. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1979, 81-11 5.

Desire/lack According to *Jacques Lacan, the onset of the post-specular (post-mirror) phase in a child's development marks a psychological dialectic or a sustained tension between an Ideal-I and necessary social constructions. (See *mirror stage.) The child adapts to arbitrary and socially constructed cultural practices and yet the formative influences from birth to \ 8 months cannot be expunged. The first object of desire, the mother (a), cannot be wholly replaced by an Other object of desire (a'): to embrace the ego ideal is to be alienated and to experience 'lack.' As the child grows and cultivates its special skills, it longs for the recollected or imagined feelings of unity and harmony, as well as a stable, unchanging meaning. But, to remain wilfully in the realm of an idealized Imaginary and to avoid adaptation to the cultural when faced with a knowledge of the Symbolic would be a primary form of narcissism. (See *self/other, *symbolic/imaginary/ real.) The post-specular child is a split subject. For Lacan the split subject is constituted upon a gap, both an absence of what was once believed to be truly meaningful and a lack of any assurance of present values - unquestioned, transhistorical social meaning or 'presence.' (See ""metaphysics of presence.) In an attempt to fill this gap and to replace what has been lost (the Imaginary), subjects go from one experience to another, trying unsuccessfully to recover the sensation of fullness. What Lacan calls 'demand' is the articulation of desire, a substitution of a set of finite objects for the denied infinite object of desire, the (m)other,

who in more Freudian terms has always desired the phallus. (See *Sigmund Freud.) In 'The Signification of the Phallus/ Lacan remarks that 'if the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire' (Ecrits 289). The mother's thwarted desire for the phallus is a mirror image of the child's frustrated desire for the mother. Driven by desire, the subject is ever split. This split also characterizes the relationship between the id, ego and superego or the conscious and unconscious. The relationship between the Imaginary and Symbolic, or for that matter the conscious and unconscious, is not tidy. If the Imaginary is repressed, it acts like the unconscious, which is likewise repressed, and will negatively affect the subject in strange, incomprehensible ways, because the unconscious is never discernible or wholly interpretable by the conscious. Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language with a system unique to itself (Ecrits 234). Hints may be given to the conscious through parapraxis, jokes, dreams, and free associations, but the significance of the unconscious is still enigmatic. Despite this gap, there is, in effect, some exchange of information, knowledge and understanding so that the relative position of the conscious and unconscious is never fixed but always undergoing change. The continual dialectic or process of transference and countertransference between personality areas or between subjects is uncertain but insistent, always changing with new conditions and knowledge. This ongoing dis-ease of the subject, forever caught in a dialectic between the Imaginary and Symbolic, the fantasized and socially acceptable, and the Self and the Other, provides the clue to the processes of both psychoanalysis and textual interpretation. Since the subject is always defined by language(s) split between the conscious and the unconscious, and since language and context are always arbitrary, the 'I can be identified only in terms of the actual moment of the discourse' and 'is sustained by the discourse as such - that is, by the chain of signifiers' (Richardson 60). (See *discourse, *signified/signifier/signification.) The self, then, is itself a signifier and, like the process of signification, is marked by constant metonymical displacement. (See "'metonymy/metaphor.) As Lacan argues in 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since 531

Desire/lack Freud/ this intersubjective approach characterizes both psychoanalyst and textual analyst, for psychoanalysis is closely related to, if not an extension of, literary interpretation; each analyst engages in a dialectic with an object of analysis or 'text/ in which one changes the other and itself in the process. (See *text, *psychoanalytic theory.) An objective reading of patient or text is neither possible nor desirable, and the emergence from the mirror stage (not just a phase but the site of a drama as well) becomes both the activity of this dialectic and a metaphor for it. This view of the split subject, driven by desire, constituted upon lack, and characterized by transference, has been used as the basis for interpretations that go well beyond psychoanalysis and textual study. The exploration of language is one such area. Indeed, one of Lacan's first commentators, Anika Lemaire, considers Lacan a structuralist who adapted the linguistic model to psychoanalysis (3). (See *structuralism.) When Lacan posits that the mirror stage forms the dividing line between the child's personal language and private communication with the mother (the Imaginary) and the shared language of public discourse represented by the father (the Symbolic), he enters the debate about language practices. The Imaginary represents our wish for a stable sign system in which meaning is totalized, transparent, fixed, and unitary, whereas the Symbolic is a fluid system in which meaning is contextually derived, hazy, slippery, and self-divided. (See *sign, ""totalization.) In the Symbolic, signifiers bear meanings that are constantly elusive and floating - hence the terms 'shifters' and 'floating signifiers.' (See *floating signifier.) Indeed, the emphasis here is always on the word or signifier rather than on meaning or signification: Lacan has taken the well-known Saussurean formula for the primacy of meaning and the unity of signifier and signified (s/s or signified/signifier) and changed it to S/s (Signifier/signified) to suggest the primacy of the signifier, the play of language per se, and the bar or gap between signifier and meaning. Lacan's formulation announces that language and meaning cannot be known and mastered and that Saussure's notions of representation and the referentiality of language need to be replaced by an awareness of the chain of empty signifiers. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure, theories of *play/freeplay.) The desire for unitary meaning of the Imagi-

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nary, as opposed to the ever-elusive values of the signifier in the Symbolic, is analogous to the problems inherent in the strictly analytical mode. Lacan himself initiates this discussion when, in 'The Agency of the Letter/ he develops a link between logical positivism and the desire to discover 'the meaning of meaning' (Ecrits 150). The desire to master and control knowledge and to perceive unchanging structure and meaning is believed to characterize the Western imaginary ideal of logic and reason. Logic, reason and analysis, especially as employed by ego psychology, are consequently considered by some Lacanians as inferior tools in coming to terms with reality. A better way, and one more in keeping with the uncertainty principle of the Symbolic, is based upon a less abstract process and upon a principle of negotiation and transference within a particular situation. While we might 'desire' the apparent absolutes of a given system of logic, the reality of changing circumstances and positions and the inadequacy of strict logical rules must finally be acknowledged and utilized. Some semioticians have taken such a concept of 'desire' as the single most important motivating factor in the practice of advertising. (See *semiotics.) Advertisements generally appeal to an idealized style of life supposedly attainable if a certain product or service, for example, is purchased. This goal is, however, falsely founded upon a gap. The ad itself conveys a desire for something that the consumer wishes to believe in or to acquire but that the product cannot deliver. The ad is simultaneously constituted upon lack and desire - the lack of any 'real' meaning and satisfaction and the desire or demand for something that stands in the place of primal satisfaction, the wish to possess the (m)other. As *Roland Barthes has pointed out in many texts, but especially Mythologies, advertising often presents itself as 'natural' but is wholly constituted upon, and coded by, culture. (See also *code, *myth.) GORDON E. SLETHAUG

Primary Sources Lacan, Jacques. 'Desire and Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.' Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52. - Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977.

Diegesis - The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. - The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. - 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter."' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York and London: Longman, 1989, 301-20.

Secondary Sources Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan. Trans. David Macey. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Richardson, William J. 'Lacan and the Subject of Psychoanalysis.' In Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983, 139-59.

Dialogism: see Double-voicing/ dialogism; Polyphony/dialogism

Diegesis Diegesis is a term used in narrative study to distinguish the narrator's voice from the speech of the characters or, to use *Henry James' functional definition, to distinguish the 'telling' function from the 'showing' function of a narrative. The word is derived from the Greek word meaning 'narration' and has its roots as far back as book 3 of The Republic, where Plato sets out two narrative modes by which he believes reality is imitated verbally. He calls these 'mimesis' and 'cliegesis' and attributes to the first the representation of action in the words of the characters, and to the second the representation of action in the poet's own words. The former has obvious immediate dramatic implications, while the latter includes the more mediated and controlling aspects such as authorial report, summary and commentary. (See *mimesis.) The distinction between immediacy and controlling distance raises questions of narrative authority, and a glance at the history of the relationship of mimesis and diegesis shows the changing part that diegesis has played in such questions. As *David Lodge has noted in After

Bakhtin (25-44), pre-novelistic *discourse was characterized by a predominance of diegesis, probably arising out of Plato's moral and ethical disapproval of mimesis and his subsequent advocacy of the need for a controlling authorial hand. In this type of discourse, all voices were assimilated to the dominant linguistic register of the author. This linguistic homogeneity was challenged by the rise of classical realism, which brought with it a more even distribution between mimesis and diegesis, as can be seen in the history of the novel. Although the rise of the English novel in the i8th century began in some cases (Richardson, Defoe) with an emphasis upon the ostensively mimetic portrayal of the act of diegesis ('writing to the moment' in the epistolary form and pseudo-autobiography), other authors such as Fielding and Scott restored the diegetic emphasis, advocating a balance between realistic illusion and immediacy and authorial distance and evaluative control. The classic igth-century novel did the same but, through the extensive use of indirect reported speech, broke down the clear distinction between the two. This emphasis upon the intermingling, at times fusing, of authorial voice with the voices of the characters was followed by Henry James' privileging of mimesis over diegesis, reported speech over authorial speech, showing over telling, in his famous aesthetic of impersonality. The modernist suppression of the author's voice in an aesthetic of impersonality which implies complete authorial control while giving the illusion of a lack of explicit narrative authority, has been followed in *postmodernism by a renewed foregrounding of diegesis. Impersonality has been replaced by a self-conscious emphasis upon the act of narration itself, what the Russian formalists have called 'exposing the device' in which the narrator's voice can be identified with that of the author. (See Russian *formalism.) This highlighting of the diegetic act as a rhetorical construct carries with it a sense of mitigated narrative *authority. Diegesis can be seen to have lost its original authoritative status. The narrator's (and author's) voice no longer retains its privileged evaluative role but has become a function of the fiction, a rhetorical and textual construct that is itself open to interpretation. (See '"rhetorical criticism.) Although the concept of diegesis has always existed in the history of novel and narrative study, the term itself has only recently been

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Differance/differnce reintroduced into critical discourse from the Greek by way of Etienne Souriau's cinematographic theory in L'Univers filmique (5-10). In the field of narrative study, narratologists have adopted the term from film theory, but in both cases the meaning has undergone considerable distortion, as *Gerard Genette has pointed out. (See *narratology.) Whereas the original Greek meaning emphasized the formal or verbal aspects of narrative, one of several techniques in the telling of a story, the semiologists of the cinema have redefined it in what they term its 'denotative aspect.' (See *semiosis, *semiotics.) It is, as the film theorist Christian Metz defines it, 'the distant significate e of the film taken as a whole' ... 'the film's represented instance' as distinct from the 'expressed, properly aesthetic, instance' (Film Language, 144, 98). The distortion of meaning from the original Greek becomes more apparent when the structuralist story/discourse distinction (to use *Tzvetan Todorov's formulation of the fabula/siuzhet, histoire/discours model) is invoked. (See *structuralism, *story/plot.) In film theory, diegesis has moved out of the level of discourse to the story plane of a narrative, the 'deep structure' out of which discourse evolves; it is mimesis in its wider, more familiar sense of the represented world. The 'diegetic time' is the signified time of what is narrated, primarily because the telling is always the result of the invisible camera. In his Narrative Discourse, Genette introduces the term to narrative theory in this redefined sense. He equates the term 'diegesis' with Todorov's 'story' (27, n.2), discussing it in the context of 'mood,' what he defines as 'the points of view from which the life or the action is looked at' (161). For him, diegesis and mimesis are not two distinct narrative modes, but rather varying degrees of mimetic representation which differ according to the distance between informer and information; diegesis is defined by a maximum of the presence of the informer and a minimum of the quantity of information, and mimesis by the opposite (166). Genette's elaborate discussion of the diegetic, metadiegetic and pseudodiegetic planes of a *text and heterodiegetic and homo- or autodiegetic levels of discourse is a manifestation of his preoccupation with this modal aspect of narrative. Yet, it would seem that his self-proclaimed emphasis upon what he terms 'narrative in the limited sense' (27), that is, only discourse which is directly available to textual analysis, limits his treat-

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ment of the diegetic aspects of a narrative. True to the structuralist enterprise, there is no place for a discussion of the context of telling; Genette's diegetic analysis always remains within the confines of the written text. Perhaps more recent poststructuralist transactive models of narrative, which emphasize the contextual situation between text and reader, and which see semantic possibilities in the telling as well as the told, will allow for a wider understanding of the place of diegesis in the field of narrative theory. (See *poststructuralism.) LINDA HAUCH

Primary Sources Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford UP, i974.Souriau, Etienne. L'Univers filmique. Paris: Flammarion, 1953.

Differance / difference A term used by *Jacques Derrida to designate the production of difference(s) and endlessly deferred meaning which belongs to language or any signifying system understood as a system of differences. It is the term for which Derrida is probably most famous and is indeed perhaps the most important 'non-concept' in his work. The subject of the essay 'La Differance' (1968), this term is of central importance in De la grammatologie [Of Grammatology 1967] and is prominently used in the closing passages of La voix et le phenomene [Speech and Phenomena 1972]. (See *grammatology.) In 'La Differance,' the aberrant spelling of the French word difference e makes Derrida's point about writing and difference: the difference in spelling is 'written,' for it can only be read not heard; when spoken the difference is lost. By altering the spelling he wishes to combine the Saussurean idea of diacritical difference with the sense of an active production of difference(s) as well as delay and deferral. (See *Ferdinand de Saussure.) It is as though the word differance were a fusion of difference and the French present participle - with its active sense - of the verb differer, r which can mean to differ as well as to defer and delay. Derrida

Discourse accepts the Saussurean idea of language as a system of differences but extends the principle to its ultimate consequences: if there are only differences then meaning is only produced in the relation among signifiers not through the signified; the signified is thus endlessly deferred and delayed through the differential network. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) This deferral and delay is finally not simply a consequence of an already existing system of differences but represents the active production of differences. This production takes the form of both a temporal delay and what Derrida calls espacement or 'spacing/ the temporalization and spatialization which are inconceivable before the advent of the differential mark or writing. Differance, however, cannot be eradicated through the recovery of an undivided state of immediacy. Differance produces presence as one of its effects, as the desire of presence. No presence is conceivable without differance, this simultaneous effect of difference, production of difference(s) or spacing, deferral, and delay. (See ""metaphysics of presence, *supplementarity.) Derrida's differance e has proven very useful in literary theory. One important case of immediate influence is *Roland Barthes' emphasis in S/Z (1970) and elsewhere on deferred or delayed meaning and the dilatory expansiveness characteristic of literary texts. There is also a widespread recognition of the relevance of differance - the idea of the textual productiveness of delayed and ever-deferred resolution - in numerous recent approaches to narrative and temporal structures in epic, romance and the novel. (See also *text, *textuality.) JOSEPH ADAMSON

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1970. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. 1967. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - La Voix et le phenornene. 1967. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.

Discourse Discourse is a term whose currency in the humanities and social sciences has greatly increased since the 19605. In linguistics, it can serve as the rough equivalent of speech, that is, language as actually used by the speaker (parole), as opposed to language as a system of signs (langue). (See *langue/parole, *Ferdinand de Saussure, *Emile Benveniste, *sign.) Discourse analysis studies the syntactic or semantic structures of texts (or of language units longer than one sentence) and considers both their linguistic and sociocultural dimensions. (See *discourse analysis theory, *text.) Anglo-American research has usually concentrated on conversational patterns, speech acts and other forms of oral communication, and this work has led to considerations of the distribution of *power and *authority in verbal exchanges (Coulthard). (See also *speech act theory, "communication theory.) For *Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, discourse is the proper object of a new science, metalinguistics (translated by *Tzvetan Todorov as translinguistics), the study of utterances, that is, of actual sentences (or texts) in their context of enunciation. (See *enonciation/ enonce.) This theoretical perspective was elaborated partly through a critique of Saussurean linguistics, which assigned the study of the sociohistorical dimensions of sign systems to semiology, and chose to limit its field of inquiry to the language system as a separate entity. (See *semiotics, *semiosis.) This strategy was denounced by the Bakhtin circle as amounting to the *reification of actual attempts by the State to impose a common, national language in order to centralize and consolidate its power (Bakhtin and Voloshinov). For the circle, the social context is an integral part of any verbal communication: the meaning of an utterance includes the position of the speaker (as social subject, refracted in the other), the horizon (the meaning and values) of the listener, and the historical materiality of language itself (the multiple meanings of words as they are used in other discourses, past, present, and future, for other ends). (See *self/other.) As intrinsically social phenomena, utterances present certain regularities of production and distribution; they are organized by types (discursive genres), working as modelling systems which make sense of the world through structured

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Discourse finalization: 'every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality'; 'the artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre' (Bakhtin and Medvedev 133, 134). Irreducibly diverse, discursive genres clash and compete in the production of knowledge and this dialogical process constitutes society. (See also *dialogical criticism.) Thus discourse is the space and process where *intersubjectivity is established, objects of knowledge produced, and values assigned: for Bakhtin, discourse is 'almost the totality of human life.' *Michel Foucault's work in the history of systems of thought explores the articulation of knowledge and power in discourse: 'power and knowledge directly imply one another ... there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations' (Discipline and Punish 27). Power-knowledge matrices are established in discourse, that is, in the vast network of conflicting and inter-validating discursive practices constituting reality (ibid., 194). Discursive practices (comprising institutional bases, qualified members and normalized production procedures) assign subject positions for their practitioners and determine their objects of knowledge. (See *subject/object.) Power-knowledge matrices are thus both intentional and non-subjective: pursued by individuals for specific purposes, relations of power remain non-subjective, as the subjects and objects of knowledge, the modes of argumentation, and the rules of validation are imposed by discursive practices. (See ""intention/ intentionality.) The French School of Discourse Analysis [L'Ecole franqaise d'analyse du discours] works within the perspectives developed by both Bakhtin and Foucault and therefore bears practically no relation to the Anglo-American tradition, in spite of the similar labels for their enterprises (Maingueneau). The French school considers utterances as intrinsically sociohistorical and linguistic phenomena, and studies the elaboration of subjects and objects of knowledge in discourse. Dominique Maingueneau defines discourse as the relation between the discursive formation (the set of historical constraints determining proper semantic production) and the historical dispersion of actual (or virtual) utterances produced according to these

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constraints: the concept therefore requires textual analyses, a dimension excluded from Foucault's archaeological research. The French school considers its object to be the space of exchanges between several discourses (rather than any single practice), as the interdiscourse (the network of relations between discursive practices) overdetermines the identity of any particular instance. Marc Angenot defines social discourse as 'all that is said and written in a given society ... or rather than this empirical totality ... the generic systems, the repertories of topics, the rules of utterance formation which, in a given society, organize the sayable - the narratable and the verisimilar - and insure the division of discursive labour' (Angenot 13; my trans.). (See *overdetermination.) His analyses demonstrate how social discourse generates both regulated public opinion and marginal originality, how it produces 'current events' and excludes the unsayable, how it selects addressees and functions as a market. Such analyses of discourse cross disciplinary boundaries and thereby participate in a general reorganization of knowledge now taking place in the humanities and social sciences (Geertz). (See also *sociocriticism.) M A R I E - C H R I S T I N E LEPS

Primary Sources Angenot, Marc. 1889. Un Etat du discours social. Longueuil, Que.: Preambule, 1989. Bakhtin, M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. V.W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. - and P.M. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. 1928. Trans. A.J. Wehrle. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1985. - and V.N. Voloshinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 1929. Trans. M. Ladislav and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1973. Coulthard, Malcolm. Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman, 1979. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. - Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction. 1976. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. - 'Orders of Discourse.' Trans. Rupert Swyer. Social Science Information 10 (April 1971): 7-31. Repr. as 'Appendix: "The Discourse on Language."' In The

Double-voicing/dialogism Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Geertz, Clifford. 'Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought.' The American Scholar 49 (1980): 165-79. Maingueneau, Dominique. Initiation aux rnethodes de I'analyse du discours. Paris: Hachette, 1976. - Nouvelles tendances en analyse du discours. Paris: Hachette, 1987. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Trans. W. Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984,

between the disnarrated and the unnarrated that which, in a narrative, remains unsaid, passed over in silence either temporarily or forever. (See *narratology.)

Disnarrated

Sareil, Jean. 'La Description negative.' Romanic Review 78 (1987): 1-9.

Proposed by *Gerald Prince in 'The Disnarrated' (1988), the disnarrated reveals itself in the terms, sentences and passages that express events that do or did not happen, both from the perspective of the *narrator and the narrative, and from that of the character and his or her actions. The disnarrated is used to evoke purely imaginary worlds, desired or simply suggested, and also to express broken dreams or unjustified beliefs, failures, lost hopes, false assumptions, miscalculations, mistakes, lies, and so on. The disnarrated has many functions. It can be used, for example, as a means to slow down the narrative, to describe a character, or to define the narrator and narratee as well as their relationship. It may also be used to develop a *theme, create suspense and articulate the story in hermeneutic terms. (See *story/ plot, *hermeneutics.) Still, its most important function is unquestionably rhetorical. (See *rhetorical criticism.) When applied to the act of narration rather than narration itself, the disnarrated brings to the foreground the means available for constructing a situation or ordering an experience, and it underscores the reality of the representation as opposed to the representation of the reality. In addition, when applied to that which is told rather than to the person doing the telling, the disnarrated serves to emphasize the quality and value of the former. In this way, the disnarrated serves as an important vehicle through which the novelist may identify, by negation, that which is worth telling. Accordingly, we must distinguish between the disnarrated and that which, for various reasons, cannot be narrated - that is, the unnarratable. The distinction must also be drawn

FRANCOIS GALLAYS

Primary Sources Prince, Gerald. 'The Disnarrated.' Style 22.1 (Spring 1988): 1-8.

Secondary Sources

Double-voicing/dialogism *Mikhail Bakhtin uses the term double-voicing or dialogism in two senses. In the first sense, double-voicing is a characteristic of all speech in that no *discourse exists in isolation but is always part of a greater whole; it is necessarily drawn from the context of the language world which preceded it. Because language is a social phenomenon, it can never be neutral and free from the intentions of others. Bakhtin uses an architectural metaphor to describe this intrinsic complexity of language. That component of the word which reveals that it has already been cited or talked about in the past is termed 'scaffolding.' The linguistic categories available to analyse speech before Bakhtin's innovative formulations concerning the unique nature of prose are clearly inadequate to account for a phenomenon such as double-voicing which occurs within the word. Bakhtin's creation of a 'prosaics' (Morson and Emerson 15), which enables analysis of the particular qualities of novelistic prose, reveals speech to be 'metalinguistic' (beyond linguistics). Bakhtin's second sense of the term doublevoicing is especially relevant to a study of novelistic prose. Here double-voicing is an element discernible in discourse when the speaker wants the listener to hear the words as though they were spoken with 'quotation marks.' The novel is constructed almost exclusively with this kind of internally dialogized language, that is, language which contains two voices within a single grammatical construction. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin distinguishes between utterances spoken

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Double-voicing/dialogism without 'quotation marks' (monologic and single-voiced) and those accented with 'quotation marks' (dialogic and double-voiced utterances). The single-voiced word is spoken without 'quotation marks' and is perceived by the listener as direct and unmediated. The speaker says directly what he wishes to say without any recognition within the utterance that there is another perspective on his discourse, a contesting or different language of *heteroglossia which might be an equally valid way of addressing the 'referential object' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 185). Professional language is an example of single-voiced discourse. It pronounces authoritatively on the object by suppressing both the scaffolding of pre-existing language which is necessarily cited in any speech as well as the awareness of an alternative point of view which might render the utterance ironic or qualified. Consequently, it is not possible for the listener to detect the 'quotation marks' which indicate another discourse within the utterance, although all speech is inescapably 'shot through with intentions and accents' ('Discourse in the Novel' 293). Conversely, the double-voiced word includes the pre-existing scaffolding of another's voice and allows it to sound as part of the 'architecture' of the utterance, so that it is perceived by the listener. The second voice is part of the intention of the speech and therefore deliberately incorporated into its construction. Words spoken ironically provide examples from everyday speech. Within the novel, in order for a discourse to be truly double-voiced, the character who speaks must be aware of the second voice within the utterance and enter into dialogue with it. The character may agree or disagree with this second voice but it must be perceptible and a part of the 'project of the utterance.' Bakhtin views the capacity to account for such constructions as crucial to any adequate analysis of prose discourse. Bakhtin further distinguishes among the different kinds of double-voiced words which exist in the novel. For example, he identifies both passive and active double-voiced discourses but finds the active type of most interest. In the passive variety, the author allows the second voice to sound but is essentially in control of the other's speech within the utterance. Nevertheless, dialogism is present; though the speaker or author may be in control and even ultimately agree with the second voice, the very act of interrogating it and thus

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putting it to the test changes the nature of its *authority and produces authentic dialogism. There is a wide 'spectral dispersion' ('Discourse in the Novel' 277) of infinite gradations in the relationship between the speaker and the other in passive double-voicing. (See *self/ other.) However, if the author is more or less in agreement with the second discourse, the utterance is said to be stylized. Disagreement, on the other hand, produces *parody. In stylization, the author's intention is 'to make use of someone else's discourse in the direction of its own particular aspirations.' The author's thought 'does not collide with the other's thought but rather follows after it in the same direction' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 193). Bakhtin terms stylization 'uni-directional' double-voicing. Conversely, parody or ironic discourse sets up an opposition and thus 'varidirectional' double-voicing. (See also "irony.) Whenever there is an appreciable tension or struggle within the utterance, however, whereby one voice vigorously contests and resists the other's attempt at parody and where it escapes authorial control, the speech becomes a variety of active double-voicing. Such speech is intensely internally dialogized and close attention must be paid to style, syntax and tone in order to locate the competing point of view. Moreover, an essential difference between parody in passive double-voicing and active double-voicing is that in the latter case the other discourse is actually beyond the utterance and thus 'exerts influence from without' (ibid., 199). Bakhtin discusses many kinds of active double-voicing but his first example should be noted, as it introduces two important attributes - that of 'hidden polemic' and the 'sideward glance.' Here, the author's discourse 'is directed towards its own referential object' but at the same time 'a polemical blow is struck at the other's discourse' (ibid., 195). The speaker is anticipating an antagonistic response from the listener; he seems to 'cringe' or take a 'sideward glance' at another's hostile point of view. This type of discourse is common in everyday speech whenever we employ 'barbed' words, 'make digs at others' or use 'self deprecating overblown speech that repudiates itself in advance' (ibid., 196). Bakhtin's exemplar of this and of many other kinds of double-voicing in the novel is Dostoevsky's Underground Man, who resists dialogically all attempts to fix or finalize him.

Embedding The most radical application of double-voicing becomes the word with a loophole. In this formulation, such a word can never be said to be ultimate and final because it retains the potential for another meaning. When a character like the Underground Man possesses a 'loophole of consciousness/ he has the capacity to change the final meaning of his own words. The word with a loophole can be identified by a close examination of its structure because its 'potential other meaning, that is, the loophole left open, accompanies the word like a shadow' (ibid., 233). When double-voicing attains this 'heroic' quality in the polyphonic novel, it approaches Bakhtin's ideal of the unfinalizability of human life and discourse. (See *polyphonic novel, *dialogical criticism.) PHYLLIS M A R G A R E T PARYAS

Primary Sources Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. - Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Trans. Andrew R. Mac Andrew. New York: Signet, 1961. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Ecriture: see Derrida, Jacques; Deconstruction;Differance/ difference; Intertextuality; Logocentrism; Textuality Ecriture feminine: see Cixous, Helene; Irigaray, Luce; Kristeva, Julia; Feminist criticism, French, Quebec; Polyphony/dialogism

Embedding

the character. *Mikhail Bakhtin notes that the epistolary form in the novel is best suited to embedding or 'the reflected discourse of another,' as the writer is clearly shaping his speech in anticipation of the response of a specific person (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 205). Bakhtin cites an example from Dostoevsky's Poor Folk. The hero, Makar Devushkin, is writing a letter to Varenka Dobroselova in which he is defensively engaged in a hidden polemic as he confesses the humiliating fact that he lives in a kitchen. It is possible to detect the anxious 'sideward glance' of Devushkin as he anticipates Varenka's negative response to the news of his humble living accommodations, as well as his 'cringe' before the expected rejoinder, 'here he is living in the kitchen.' Thus, the speech of another, Varenka Dobroselova, invades Devushkin's discourse; he recognizes its power to 'fix' or finalize him in a humiliating position and so tries to escape its limiting implications. Consequently, his speech becomes convoluted. Embedding, as a kind of *double-voicing, then, allows the character's concept of himself to be penetrated by 'someone else's words about him' (209). This, in turn, gives rise to the characteristic style of the 'sideward glance,' in which a character's speech becomes halting and interrupted by qualifiers and reservations. Embedding is an element of double-voicing that is only perceptible through dialogic analysis and helps to illustrate the subtle complexities of novelistic prose. (See *dialogical criticism.) PHYLLIS MARGARET PARYAS

Primary Sources Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. - Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Embedding is a strategy of dialogic (doublevoiced) prose *discourse in which the speech and accents of another person are inserted in the speaker's utterance. The second voice is implied and need not be physically present to

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Enonciation/enonce

Enonciation/enonce The terms enunciation [enunciation] and enonce [utterance] are used in French linguistic and semiotic theory to distinguish between the act of producing an oral or written utterance and the resultant utterance itself. (See *semiotics.) While linguistic studies of the *structuralism period were largely confined to developing underlying laws and features that characterized *Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of langue, post-Saussurean linguists have investigated the domain of parole (individual acts of *discourse), formerly considered too chaotic and difficult to systematize. (See *langue/parole.) One of the consequences of this interest in parole was the development of theories of enonciation, as theorists recognized the need for a linguistics that would go beyond the sentence (as its maximal unit of study), and the need to account for dimensions of the *text unexplained by purely structuralist goals and methods. *Emile Benveniste, who can be credited with much of the early work on enonciation, defines this term as an individual act of the use of language (Problemes 2: 80). Enonciation is thus to be understood as the act of producing an utterance or text, an act which leaves behind its traces in the resultant utterance. (See *trace.) The enonce is the linguistic object, the oral utterance or written text, which is produced by every individual act of enonciation. What is emphasized in most descriptions of the enonce is its closed, static, completed nature, whatever its length may be (Dubois et al. 191). The enonciation/enonce *binary opposition encompasses several others: the dynamic movement and activity of enonciation contrasts with the static, completed nature of the enonce, and the openness of enonciation is opposed to the closure of the enonce. These definitions demonstrate the interdependence of the two terms, not simply because of the circularity of the definitions (that is, each concept is unavoidably explained in terms of the other) but also because of their mutual necessity: any act of enonciation always produces an enonce, which exists solely because of a foregoing enonciation. Given the fleeting character of enonciation as a process, as an individual act which never recurs in an identical manner, theoreticians have noted the problem of studying enonciation in the strict sense of the term. Since the listener/

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reader can never arrest an act of enonciation in progress or seize hold of its continuous movement in order to observe it, he or she is simply left with the enonce, the object created by this act. Examining enonciation in the original sense of the term is consequently a methodological impossibility, an impasse which has resulted in the equation of the term with the traces of this act within the enonce (KerbratOrecchioni 29; Ducrot and Todorov 405). A second semantic slippage of the term is also noted by Kerbrat-Orecchioni, who claims that enonciation is often synonymous with the presence of the speaking or writing subject within her or his discourse. (See *subject/object.) The study of enonciation is thus effected in terms of the enonciation enoncee, the investigation of the traces of the act of enonciation within the enonce, traces which constitute the markers of subjectivity in language. An analysis of an utterance from this perspective focuses on the linguistic traces of the speaker or writer within the enonce, emphasizing the various possible relationships between the speaker or writer (the locuteur), the act of enonciation, the resultant enonce, and the listener or reader (the allocutaire). The two major sites of subjectivity in language are modalization and deictics, each of which is expressed by a series of specific linguistic forms or constructions. Modalization indicates the speaker/writer's attitude, be it disbelief, doubt, uncertainty, and so forth, towards the enonce, expressed during an act of enonciation and imprinted within the utterance by means of markers such as modal verbs, adverbs of opinion (for example, 'perhaps,' 'certainly'), modalizing transformations (such as the optional use of the passive voice and impersonal constructions), verbs of opinion, the mood of the verb (the conditional, for example, often expresses uncertainty), evaluative expressions indicating the subject's attitude towards the enonce ('appreciative modalities'), and indicators of doubt (for example, 'so-called,' 'seem'). *A.J. Greimas, who understands modalization as the subject's modification of the predicate (Du Sens 67), focuses on the study of modal verbs and their functioning in the syntagmatic progression of the narrative *actant (a structural role in the action of a narrative that may be performed by one or more individual characters or 'acteurs') in the quest for a particular object of value. Greimas has integrated his theory of modalities within the larger framework of his

Enonciation/enonce actantial theory and the semiotic square. His study of modalities bears an affinity to modal studies in logic and semantics and locates the functioning of modalities at both deep- and surface-structure levels of the text. The other major site of subjectivity in language is that of deictic signs (also known as shifters or indicators), whose meaning and referent varies with each act of enunciation. (See "reference/referent.) While *C.S. Peirce integrates deictic expressions into his more general category of the indexical *sign, *Roman Jakobson considers deictics as indexical symbols which are situated at the point of coincidence between *code (here, the language in which the message is communicated) and message ('Shifters' 131). (See *index, "communication theory.) According to Benveniste, deictic signs are created in and by an act of enonciation, as they exist only in relation to the 'here' and 'now' of the speaker/writer (Problemes i: 252-4). Unlike other terms and expressions used for purposes of reference, deictics are doubly referential, indicating simultaneously the act of enonciation in which they were produced and the designated object(s), the nature of which can solely be determined within the context of the particular instance of discourse containing the deictic expression. Included within the category of deictics are personal pronouns, demonstratives (for example, 'this,' 'that'), certain temporal and spatial adverbs (such as 'here,' 'now,' 'there'), verbal tense (especially the present tense), and, in some instances, the definite article. In their capacity to refer, deictics also reinforce the link between speaker/writer and the addressee/reader, insofar as deictic terms focus the latter's attention on the object, time, place, or person designated by the speaker/writer, provided that addressee/reader can recognize the centre of the deictic field of the utterance (that is, the point of convergence of 'I,' 'here,' and 'now'). Benveniste's studies of pronominal deictics (Problemes de linguistique generate i, 2) have been particularly instrumental in the understanding of the linguistic and semiotic behaviour of the ']' and 'you' pronouns and their integral role in the creation of the subject. The relative presence or absence of these markers of the act of enonciation within the resultant enonce allows for the characterization of the enonce in terms of its transparency versus opacity (Recanati). A transparent text or utterance contains few or no obvious markers

of its enonciation, is virtually devoid of modalizers and deictics, and is characterized by the relative effacement of the speaker/writer from the utterance, and hence by a maximal distance between speaker/writer and text, producing an effect of objectivity for the reader. The highly opaque text, on the other hand, is imbued with numerous enunicative markers, clearly indicating the presence of the speaker/ writer within the enonce and her or his minimal distance from this utterance, is self-reflexive, and produces effects of ambiguity and subjectivity. There is, then, a marked difference between studying a specific text from the point of view of its enonciation, an analysis which views the text as movement and process and which accounts for the presence and functions of the enunciative markers as described above, and an analysis of a text from the perspective of its status as an enonce. This latter perspective would consider the text as an entity apart from any referential system or context (its situation of enonciation) and separate from the speaking/writing subject w r hich produced it, neglect the role of subjective markers, and emphasize the text's structural divisions, syntactic structures, types of lexical denotation and connotation, modes of description, and so on (Fuchs). Many theoreticians now believe this latter type of analysis to be incomplete and reductionist, and argue for the inclusion of the enunciative, discursive dimension in the study of texts or oral discourse. The passage from the study of the enonce alone to that of its enonciation thus involves the consideration of the semantic (the relationship between the utterance and its referents) and pragmatic dimensions (the discursive relationship between the interlocutors, the utterance and the context of the situation of enonciation) of the enonce. In this sense, then, studies of enonciation are related to the Anglo-Saxon speech act theories of *J.L. Austin and *John R.Searle and to their investigation of the performative and illocutionary aspects of the utterance. (See *speech act theory.) In addition to the continuing linguistic research into enonciation and the enonce (Culioli; Danon-Boileau, Enonciation), applications of the theories of enonciation and the enonciation/ enonce distinction in various disciplines have been numerous and fruitful. The description of enunciative markers has enabled the delineation of various typologies of discourse, often

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Enonciation/enonce motivated by Benveniste's distinction between the histoire (objective) and discours (subjective) registers of enonciation (Problemes i: 237-50), a distinction modified for the study of literary texts by critics such as J.-M. Adam, *Gerard Genette, J. Simonin(-Grumbach), and "Tzvetan Todorov. In this sense, theories of enonciation have made important contributions to theories of *narratology. Enunciative analyses of literary texts are particularly pertinent in the case of many contemporary novels (such as those in the French 'New Novel' category), texts that are highly imbued with enunciative markers (for example, frequent shifts in narrator from first- to third-person and vice versa, secondperson narrators, the layering of several situations of enonciation) (cf. Van den Heuvel's study of selected Robbe-Grillet texts). Political speeches, as well as written reports of political events in newspapers and journals, have provided fertile material for enonciation analysis, since certain political texts are frequently the rewriting of or the commentary on a previous discourse (Guespin 23). In this metalingual reformulation of a previous discourse according to the beliefs and attitudes of the political analyst or journalist, the markers of the second enonciation depict the speaker or writer's attitude towards the original enonce. (See "metalanguage.) Examples of such analyses include Maldidier's study of the Algerian war press coverage, and Courdesses' typology of polemical versus didactic political oratory, where the absence or presence of enunciative markers indicates a particular ideological stance on the part of the speaker. Concepts relating to enonciation and the enonce have also played a significant role in certain psychoanalytic theories, particularly in *]acques Lacan's work. (See *psychoanalytic theory.) Throughout his writings, Lacan emphasizes not simply the crucial role of language as the mediator of all other signifiers and the subject's participation in signification only after the acquisition of language, but he also claims that the unconscious comes into existence with the subject's access to language, that is, her or his ability to enunciate. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The Lacanian subject is constituted by the division between the speaking suject (le sujet de I 'enonciation) and the subject of the utterance (le sujet de I'enonce) (also evident in the division between unconscious and conscious discourse), and is thus simultaneously speaking and spoken. Fur-

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ther, the Lacanian conception of subjectivity is relational, as it is formed of a dialogue between ideal representations of the T and 'you' subject positions. The concepts of enonciation and the speaking subject as a split subject (here again, the difference between the grammatical subject, the sujet de I'enonce, and the speaking subject, the sujet de I'enonciation, is crucial) are basic to "Julia Kristeva's formulation of semanalysis, according to which semiotics must go beyond meaning as a sign system, to study language as a signifying practice, as a discourse produced by a speaking subject ('Le Mot/ The System'). Drawing upon linguistic, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories, Kristeva emphasizes the subject in process (le sujet en proces: 'Le Sujet,' 'D'une identite'), demonstrating how heterogeneity and the unconscious shape any process of signification, and the importance of the role of poetic language as the site of the irruption of the semiotic dimension into the symbolic (La Revolution). Kristeva also proposes a typology of literary discourse, based on the various types of coincidence or non-coincidence of the subject of enonciation, the subject of the enonce, and the addressee, in terms of *Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic/monologic categories ('Le Mot'). (See *dialogical criticism, "monologism, *polyphony/dialogism.) Also working within the framework of linguistics and psychoanalysis, *Luce Irigaray uses the relative presence and absence of enunciative markers to describe the discourses of the hysteric and the obsessive patient ('Approche') (see also the work of Danon-Boileau in linguistics and psychoanalysis: Le Sujet). Specific contributions of enonciation theory have also been adapted to the study of cinematic enonciation: the enonciation situation in filmic discourse has been investigated in terms of the speaking/spoken subject distinction (Silverman), the larger cultural context and the technological apparatus of film-making (de Lauretis and Heath), and the traces of subjectivity in the image (Jost), and by the adaptation of Genette's theories of narrative discourse to cinematic narration (Gaudreault and Jost). Finally, the apparently transparent discourse of scientific writings has been analysed to reveal its underlying and often hidden enunciative markers of subjectivity (Ouellet). BARBARA HAVERCROFT

Enonciation/enonce Primary Sources Adam, Jean-Michel. Linguistique ct discours litteraire. Paris: Larousse, 1976. Benveniste, Emile. Problemes dc linguistique generate. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 1974. Selections trans, in Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, Fla.: U of Miami P, 1971. Courdesses, Lucille. 'Blum et Thorez en mai 1936: Analyse d'enonces.' Langue fran^aise 9 (1971): 22-33. Culioli, Antoine. 'Sur quelques contradictions en linguistique.' Communications 20 (1973): 83-91. - 'Valeurs modales et operations enonciatives.' Le Francois moderne 46.4 (1978): 300-17. Danon-Boileau, Laurent. Le Sujet de I'enonciation: Psychanalyse et linguistique. Paris: Ophrys, 1987. - Enunciation et reference. Paris: Ophrys, 1987. Dubois, Jean, et al. Dictionnaire de linguistique. Paris: Larousse, 1973. Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov. Dictionnaire cncyclopedique des sciences du langage. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Trans. Catherine Porter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Fuchs, Catherine. 'Variations discursives.' Langages 70 (1983): 13-33. Gaudreault, Andre, and Francois Jost. Le Recit cinernatographique. Paris: Nathan, 1990. Genette, Gerard. 'Frontieres du recit.' 1966. Communications 8, L'Analyse structural du recit. Collection Points. Paris: Seuil, 1981, 158-69. 'Frontiers of Narrative.' In Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 1982, 127-44. - Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Trans, (in part) in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Greimas, A.J. Du Sens U. Paris: Seuil, 1983. Selections trans, in On Meaning. Trans. Paul Perron and Frank Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Guespin, Louis. 'Problematique des travaux sur le discours politique.' Langages 23 (1971): 3—24. Irigaray, Luce. 'Approche d'une grammaire de I'enonciation de 1'hysterique et de 1'obsessionnel.' Langages 5 (1967): 99-109. Repub. in Parler n'est jamais neutre, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985, 55-68. Jakobson, Roman. 'Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb.' In Selected Writings. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Vol. 2: Word and Language, 130-47. Jost, Francois. 'Narration(s): En dec.a et au-dela.' Communications 38 (1983): 192-212. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. L'Enonciation: De la subjectivite dans le langage. Paris: Armand Colin, 1980. Kristeva, J u l i a . 'D'Une identite a 1'autre.' In Poly-

logue. Paris: Seuil, 1977, 149-72. 'From One Identity to Another.' In Desire in Language. Ed. Leon Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980, 124-47. - 'Le Mot, le dialogue et le roman.' Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969, 143-73. 'Word, Dialogue, and Novel.' In Desire in Language, 64-91. - La Revolution du langage poetique. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. - 'Le Sujet en proces.' Tel Quel 52 (Hiver 1972): 12-30. - 'The System and the Speaking Subject.' In The Tell-Tale Sign. A Survey of Semiotics. Ed. Thomas Sebeok. Lisse, The Netherlands: Peter de Ridder P, 1975, 47-55. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. de Lauretis, Teresa, and Stephen Heath, eds. The Cinematic Apparatus. New York: St. Martin's P, 1980. Maldidier, Denise. 'Le Discours politique de la guerre d'Algerie: Approche synchronique et diachronique.' Langages 23 (1971): 57-86. Ouellet, Pierre. 'La Desenonciation: Les instances de la subjectivite dans le discours scientifique.' Protee 12.2 (1984): 43-53- 'Le Petit fait vrai: La construction de la reference dans le texte scientifique.' In Les Discours du savoir. Ed. Pierre Ouellet. Montreal: Les Cahiers de 1'ACFAS, 1986,

37-57.

- 'La Voix des faits, approche semiotique du discours scientifique.' Protee 11.3 (1983): 29-41. Recanati, Francois. La Transparence et I'enonciation. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Simonin, Jenny. 'Les Plans d'enonciation dans Berlin Alexanderplatz de Doblin.' Langages 73 (1984): 30-56. Simonin-Grumbach, Jenny. 'Pour une typologie du discours.' In Langue Discours Societe. Ed. Julia Kristeva, J.-C. Milner, and Nicolas Ruwet. Paris: Seuil, 1975, 85-121. Todorov, Tzvetan. 'Les Categories du recit litteraire.' 1966. Communications 8. Special issue. L'Analyse structurale du recit. Collection Points. Paris: Seuil, 1981, 131-57Van den Heuvel, Pierre. Parole, Mot, Silence: Pour une poetique de I'enonciation. Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1985.

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Episteme

Episteme An epistetne is a historically specific, dynamic field of representations of knowledge. *Michel Foucault defines it in The Archaeology of Knowledge as 'the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems' (191). In short, an episteme constitutes the discursive conditions of possibility of an epistemology. The notion of episteme is most fully developed in Foucault's works of the late 19605, notably The Order of Things [Les Mots et les chases 1966] and The Archaeology of Knowledge [L'Archeologie du savoir 1969]. In the former he attempts a history or an 'archaeology' of the human sciences that avoids producing the traditional sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit or a period. (See *subject/object.) The history of knowledge thus theorized is represented as a dynamic, constantly changing totality. Foucault argues that this non-unitary, de-centred totality of relations among the human sciences can be discovered through analyses of their discourses. (See *centre/decentre, *discourse.) The analysis of a range of fields at a given historical moment demonstrates a set of discursive practices common to all the fields. This analysis of an episteme uncovers the set of constraints and limitations that are imposed on the range of discourses in the human sciences and, by extension, other knowledge practices. Foucault's description of the 17th-century episteme serves as an example of the kind of analysis carried out in The Order of Things: T simply noted that the problem of order ... , or rather the need to introduce an order among series of numbers, human beings or values appears simultaneously in many different disciplines in the seventeenth century. This involves a communication between the diverse disciplines, and so it was that someone who proposed, for example, the creation of a universal language in the seventeenth century was quite close in terms of procedure to someone who dealt with the problem of how one could catalogue human beings' (Foucault Live 76). Foucault's notion of episteme contributes to a shift from the traditional historical inquiry into 'what' was known at a given moment to the discursive practices that rendered something knowable. Analysis of an episteme dis-

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places epistemology's theorization of the grounds of knowledge by attending to the representational paradigms which organize that theorization. DANIEL O'QUINN

Primary Sources Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. - Foucault Live. Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989 - The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Essentialism The recent feminist concern with essentialism arose particularly during the importation of Continental French writing to the United States. Essentialism is a label for certain theoretical and artistic attempts to explore the specificity of 'the feminine.' These explorations usually take place within a literary or psychoanalytic framework. (See *psychoanalytic theory.) As a strategic choice, these writings hope to escape the patriarchal straitjacket of sexual difference through an emphasis on the positive worth of either a biological, linguistic or philosophical female essence. (See *patriarchy.) Although there is a significant difference between writings which concentrate on the female/feminine as a given, and those which attempt to pry gender loose from sex, to allow masculinity and femininity to float free from male and female, all are often branded essentialist. Essentialist is thus both a descriptive and a prescriptive term, and refers as much to a kind of writing and body of thought as it does to a judgment of the success or failure of this strategic posture. In the United States, most of these efforts are associated with 'New French Feminists,' Continental French theorists like *Luce Irigaray, *Julia Kristeva and "Helene Cixous who work within a psychoanalytic framework following *Sigmund Freud and "Jacques Lacan. (See French *feminist criticism.) Lesbian writer Monique Wittig has also been included, rather against the grain, in their company. The literary texts of writers like Annie Leclerc and Chantal Chawaf are considered exemplary of this strategy, while Cixous' 'Laugh of the Medusa/ seductive yet problematic, is the best

Expressive devices known. These various writings concentrate on a difficult exploration of female sexuality and subjectivity through the concept of jouissance, through a metaphorization of fluidity and of 'the mother' or motherhood, by delving into the languages of irrationality, and especially of the hysteric, and by 'writing (with) the body.' They often use *irony and *parody to mock the phallus and patriarchal discourses. (See *discourse.) During these exchanges a polarization developed which characterized the French feminists as essentialist, reliant on 'male theory' and overly obscurantist, and U.S. feminists as crudely empiricist, naive and caught up in patriarchal forms of discourse. Because of this polarization, the writings of more materialist French feminists were often overlooked, and significant theoretical and strategical differences between 'New French Feminists' themselves were suppressed. As well, this split obscured the extent to which theories of difference and the valorization of 'woman's' biological or cultural essence as a force for change had become part of feminist thinking about gender on both sides of the Atlantic. Judy Chicago's 'The Dinner Party,' or the work of Nancy Chodorow would be American versions of this 'French' strain of thinking in the U.S.A. Jane Gallop's The Daughter's Seduction and essays in the special issue of Signs 7.1 (1981) devoted to French feminist theory give a sense of the issues involved in this question of essentialism. Questions concerning the nature of sexual difference and women's equality range widely, and pass through 'literature and psychoanalysis to philosophy and legal studies. When women make demands for better maternityleave legislation, can they argue on grounds of equality, or of the special worth of female difference, or on entirely different terms? In opening a gap between being female and what is feminine, these imported texts and this debate on essentialism have changed the terrain of the question of gender. Is there a specifically female subjectivity? Can we separate the bodies of men and women from the discourses of masculinity and femininity? These questions on sexual difference have been addressed in recent writing by Men in Feminism and more interestingly through questions of difference between women, questions of race, class an-

dethnicity. It is here that one should look for the continuation of this highly charged debate. WENDY WARING

Primary Sources Cixous, Helene. 'Le Kire de la Meduse.' L'Arc 61 (1975): 39-54. 'The Laugh of Medusa.' Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93. Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974. Jardine, Alice, and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.

Expressive devices In the *poetics of expressiveness, a theory of literary structure advanced by *Alexander K. Zholkovsky and Yuri Shcheglov, expressive devices are types of transformation that make a work's '*theme' engaging. Zholkovsky has identified ten elementary expressive devices: augmentation, combination, concord, *concretization, contrast, division, preparation, repetition, reduction, and variation. Each device is a precisely defined type of rule and each produces a certain effect or combination of effects. The device of concretization, for example, typically involves a transition from the general to the particular or from an abstraction to an example. It is 'the substitution for an entity X of a more concrete entity Xi which contains all the properties of X together with some accession P.' Thus an 'animal' becomes a 'smiling cat,' with the added property of self-satisfaction; or 'to touch' becomes 'to embrace/ with the added property of love. One possible effect of this kind of transformation is an increased ease of perception as a result of the greater palpability of Xi. Augmentation, another type of transformation, is the 'substitution for [an entity] X of its "big" variant X!, exceeding X in some respect (such as size or intensity).' 'Love' thus becomes Tove at first sight'; or 'a shout' becomes 'a scream.' An obvious effect of this second type of transformation is to increase the force of what is being said through stress or emphasis (Zholkovsky 274-5). Certain expressive devices have variant forms (for example, preparation is a general type of transfor-

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Floating signifier mation that includes presentation, presage or recoil); others may be combined to form devices of a 'complex' kind. JAMES STKHI.E

Primary Sources Shcheglov, Yuri, and Alexander Zholkovsky. 'Poetics as a Theory of Expressiveness: Towards a "Theme-Expressiveness Devices-Text" Model of Literary Structure.' Poetics 5 (1976): 207-46. - Poetics of Expressiveness: A Theory and Applications. Linguistic and Literary Studies in Eastern Europe, vol. 18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987. Zholkovsky, Alexander. Themes and Texts: Toward a Poetics of Expressiveness. Trans, by the author. Ed. Kathleen Parthe. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1984.

Floating signifier In his Course on General Linguistics, *Ferdinand de Saussure maintains that signs are combinations of forms and concepts, of signifiers and signifieds, operating together. (See *sign, *signified/signifier/signification.) Like two sides of a sheet of paper, they are inseparably bound so that meanings (signifieds) are intricately related to given sounds (signifiers). Since Saussure chooses for the purposes of analysis to consider language as a closed, stable system (though arbitrary and subject to change), these signs are defined as constant and can be scientifically analysed through differentiating signifiers and meanings. Other structuralists of the period agreed with Saussure, but *Roman Jakobson asserted that some signifiers were not marked in the same way as others and that, as a result, the meaning depended upon the context. Hence, they could not be objectified. These signifiers were called 'shifters.' 'I,' 'you/ and 'she' are good examples, for much more must be known about the situation and personae to identify referents. (See also *structuralism.) Jakobson's identification of shifters highlighted a weakness in Saussure's linguistic theory, and before long others were observing that the signifying process is much more elusive than previously envisaged. Signifiers include any linguistically or culturally 'marked' units - whether sounds, inscriptions or cultural objects. The meaning of a signifier is rarely

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known apart from a given cultural context or system of spoken and written relations. To describe this phenomenon anthropologists like *Claude Levi-Strauss refer to 'mythemes,' culturally coded social units, and linguists refer to phonemes, culturally coded units of sound: these are signifiers whose meanings depend upon particular discursive situations and cannot be given totalizable meanings. (See *code, "totalization.) In a certain sense, all these signifiers are 'floating' because no sign remains diachronically or synchronically constant. When cultures change, so do the values attributed to signifiers, and within a given culture no sign is denotative of one thing only; its connotative value depends upon context. A recent development in the history of the floating signifier is the notion of *Jacques Lacan. A neo-Freudian, Lacan is aware not only of the slipperiness of self-identity but, since the self or subject is always constituted by language, also of the slipperiness of language. (See *self/other, *subject/object.) Lacan argues that the successful development of the ego brings the child from a narrow dependency upon the mother into the arena and laws of culture at large, from a limited, nearly narcissistic "discourse, to the generally prevailing discursive practices of society. Still, this is the discourse of the ego, and behind or underlying that is the id, which, Lacan says, is not only constituted like a language, but seems to have a mode of expression of its own; this language of the unconscious or discourse of the Other is hinted at through parapraxis, through dreams and slips of the tongue, places where the armour of the conscious reveals a chink. In these slips Lacan locates human subjectivity, which depends upon the particular relations of the conscious and unconscious. This image of the self provides an analogy that becomes important for Lacan's conception of floating signifiers: the conscious (ego) can be known only in relation to the unconscious (id), just as the language of the conscious can only be known in relation to the language of the unconscious. Since, however, the unconscious and its language are only marginally comprehensible, the self can never be mastered or totalized. At the heart of the self and the language of the self is a split. This split or rupture characterizes signs as such. Between the signifier and the signified one does not find the glue of Saussure's sheet

Genotext/phenotext of paper, but the slash or bar, which renders them unendingly separable. The signified can never be one with the signifier; hence positivistic, transhistorical, or transcendent meaning is never possible. La can provides a useful example of this phenomenon in his analysis of Foe's 'Purloined Letter.' The content of the stolen letter is never known, and its value depends upon who holds it, whether the noblewoman from whom it is stolen, the Minister who steals it, Dupin who retrieves it, or the Prefect of Police who organizes the retrieval. As form without inherent meaning, the letter continues to circulate, to be exchanged, or to float, and the signification or meaning is dependent upon who holds it, as well as the context in which it is found. Its 'meaning' is split among the various characters and situations. This notion of floating signification has been successfully applied to narration. Text (the conscious) and subtext (the unconscious) may never be one and can never be totalized. The language of the text says one thing, but the subtext says another, so that a gap or slash exists between the two. This split is also true of the acts of writing and of reading a tale. All language, narrative, and conversation is, then, floating, and the 'real' signification of an illocutionary act is only known some time afterward, or indeed never known. In short, no sign or text is transparent but carries within it a latent subtext that may change or undermine the manifest meaning. The function of narratologists and psychoanalysts is, then, to portray the relation of text to possible subtexts and identify the places where intention and consciousness break down and disclose a further meaning. Such critiques can point out instances of floating signification, and reasons for them, but cannot reveal total, undivided meaning where none exists. (See *narratology, *psychoanalytic theory.) G O R D O N E. S L E T H A U G

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans, and intro. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - Of Gramniatologtt. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 11.176. - 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the H u m a n Sciences.' In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.

Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donate. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972, 247-72. — Writing and Difference. Trans, and intro. Alan Bass, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Ehrmann, Jacques. The Death of Literature.' In Surfiction: Fiction Now ... and Tomorrow. Ed. Raymond Federman. Chicago: Swallow, 1981, 229—53. jakobson, Roman. Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. Lacan, Jacques. 'Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis' and 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.' In Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977. - 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter."' French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis. In Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38-72. Laplanche, Jean, and Serge Leclaire. 'The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study.' French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis. In Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 118-75. Leitch, Vincent. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Melman, Jeffrey. The "Floating Signifier": From Levi-Strauss to Lacan.' French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis. In Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 10-37. - ed. French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis. In Yale French Studies 48 (1972). Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.

Genotext/phenotext In Semeiotike (1969), "Julia Kristeva notes that she borrowed the terms genotext and phenotext from the Russian linguists Saumjan and Soboleva. Kristeva employs the term genotext to signify the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in a spoken or written text. The use of the term presupposes her *psychoanalytic theory of the "text as engendered through a ceaseless and dynamic oscillation between unconscious drive process and social or structural law. The genotext corresponds to the activities of the unconscious, emanating from what she terms the *chora underlying the text. The text is constituted as the drive process which simultaneously adopts and exceeds structural law. The linguistic structure or surface text which results from this dynamic Kristeva terms

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Grammatology the phenotext. According to her, the latter represents only the structural phase of textual practice, whereas the genotext is the process which both adopts and exceeds the structuring of the phenotext, Kristeva suggests that inscriptions of the genotext in the phenotext open textual theory to the generating process, and thereby displace ideas of fixed meaning and unitary self. In particular, she points to the writings of the avant-garde (Mallarme, Artaud, Joyce, Bataille, Lautreamont) as exemplifying a revolutionary practice of the text. DAWNE MCCANCE

Primary Sources Kristeva, Julia. Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

Grammatology A term coined by *Jacques Derrida in De la Grammatologie [Of Grammatology 1967] as the name for a 'science of letters or writing' (logos, 'science,' and gramme, 'letter') no longer governed by *logocentrism, by the metaphysical opposition between speech and writing (see *Ferdinand de Saussure) and the privileging of speech and voice over the written word. In Derrida's very broad interpretation, writing refers to the dependency of meaning on a system of differential marks which includes speech. Since the 'fallen' features traditionally attributed to writing are recognizable in all acts of signification, Derrida points to the existence of something he calls 'arche-writing,' an originary activity presupposed by the global effects common to both writing and speech. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The new definition Derrida gives to writing does not apply exclusively to what is traditionally denoted as writing; it applies to all meaning and is the necessary, unalterable condition of signification in general. Although Derrida has continued to concern himself consistently with the question of 'writing/ the idea of grammatology as a program for an actual science of writing is something which, for whatever reason, he has not pursued in his later work. (See *deconstruction, "trace.) JOSEPH ADAMSON

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Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. 1967. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.

GyTlCSiS Gynesis is a neologism coined by Alice Jardine (from the Greek gyne, woman, and the suffix sis, action or process) to describe the metaphorizing of woman in contemporary French theory. (See "metonymy/metaphor.) Jardine, who works at the intersection of French and Anglo-American thought, argues that the postmodern interrogation of European master narratives (history, philosophy, religion, science) produces a rhetorical space that is gendered as feminine within those narratives, a recurrent preoccupation with 'woman' that is called gynesis. (See "postmodernism.) The epistemological crisis since the Second World War made visible the linkage between structures of knowledge and cultural oppression, and the sense of legitimacy offered by traditional conceptual paradigms serves to underwrite not only culture but a specifically patriarchal culture. The rethinking of these master narratives has tended to take attention away from identity and unity and to focus it on difference, concentrating its energies on language and theories of the speaking subject. (See *subject/ object, *differance/difference.)It has required an examination not only of the classical foundations of Western thought and the binarities or oppositions that sustain them, but also of the way these dualisms are implicitly gendered (man/woman and thus active/passive, spirit/ matter, time/space, soul/body). The resulting critiques are preoccupied with areas that have been excluded from or marginalized within traditional thought, uncontrollable spaces that have been coded as feminine or represented as woman. (See *margin, *binary opposition, *code.) Texts that study gynesis employ metaphors of the female body or designate social and epistemological structures as feminine, as, for example, ""Jacques Derrida's work on writing (his references to the 'invaginated' text, the hymen, or his consideration of the feminine imaging of Truth); "Jacques Lacan's discussion of *desire

Hegemony and subjectivity; *Jean Baudrillard's writings on seduction; *Roland Barthes' analyses of gender and eroticism; and *Michel Foucault's examination of madness and sexuality. Thus, the valorization of the feminine and the metaphorization of 'woman' have become identifying marks of postmodern thought. Yet because the 'feminine' (or woman) is a conceptual category, constructed in opposition to the 'masculine' (or man), there is often a complex relation to or a divergence from biological femaleness and the historical, economic, racial, and sexual diversities of women. Gynesis is not necessarily feminist, for many of the texts are male authored and at times seem to reinscribe traditional representations of the feminine rather than interrogate them. Further, there is no necessary connection between the concept of woman as it appears in the texts of gynesis and the political and historical positioning of actual women. Nevertheless, gynesis offers powerful and important insights for feminists, since it provides alternative ways of understanding the systems of knowledge and representation that have oppressed and may continue to imprison female subjectivity. A number of French women have used gynesis in their feminist theorizing, as, for instance, *Helene Cixous' use of Derrida's work on writing, *Luce Irigaray's interrogations of *Freud and Lacan, and *]ulia Kristeva's work on linguistic phenomena and *psychoanalytic theory. Because gynesis emerges from a French theoretical matrix that questions the possibility of transcendent truth and human essence, it emphasizes the linguistic basis of subjectivity and the way gender is constructed by language and culture. (See *feminist ""criticism, AngloAmerican, French; *patriarchy.) ELIZABETH HARVEY

Primary Sources Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Hegemony The concept of hegemony, developed from the work of the Italian Marxist philosopher *Antonio Gramsci provides a tool for analysing the relations of ""literature and society. The concept has been used both to situate writers and in-

tellectuals in relation to society and to analyse the play of social forces within literary texts. Lenin's emphasis on the consent of subordinate groups to the leadership or hegemony of the proletariat is central to Gramsci's elaboration of the concept in his Prison Notebooks (1929-35, English selections 1971). For Gramsci the bourgeoisie exercises hegemony over other classes in capitalist states. While the bourgeoisie may dominate society through political and juridical institutions (its rule enforceable through the police and the military), it leads through hegemony in the private realm by presenting itself as representative of the 'universal' advancement of society. (See *universal.) To the division between the state and civil society, Gramsci assigns the oppositions of force/consent, authority/morality, coercion/persuasion, domination/hegemony. A subordinate group, its identity established in economic terms, will achieve intellectual, ethical and political fulfilment by realizing that its own interests 'transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic class, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups too' (181). If the leading group is fundamental to the stage of economic development and if it allies itself with other subordinate groups by making economic sacrifices to them, it will achieve hegemony as a step toward state power. Hegemony is established and maintained at the intellectual, cultural and ideological levels. Gramsci defines intellectuals as those who perform a directing and organizing function. This definition includes 'traditional' intellectuals attached to superseded social orders; however, 'organic' intellectuals, directly connected with a social class, organize 'the "spontaneous" consent' of the populace to 'the general direction imposed on social life' by that class (12). Organic intellectuals define 'customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality' (242), ensuring that individuals govern themselves in accord with political society. A dominant class has achieved hegemony when its 'world view' is suffused throughout society. Hegemony is not coextensive with ""ideology since it is also manifest in non-discursive forms - work ethics, habits, personal relations. Gramsci presents hegemony as a dynamic process with degrees of completion. A hegemonic group, in its drive to incorporate ever more elements of society, must continually make compromises. Hegemony nonetheless re549

Hermeneutic circle mains selective in terms of which experiences, meanings and values it is able to absorb. Developing this aspect of the concept, *Raymond Williams emphasizes that no society can ever encompass all of human potential. As practices existing outside the dominant order, Williams identifies the residual (attached to a previous social order) and the emergent (generated by the lacunae of the present society). A dominant culture may try to incorporate both residual and emergent, but they may become nuclei for the coalescence of counter-hegemony. The concept of hegemony is particularly suited to the analysis of modern representative democracies where force is seldom used as a means of social control. The development of civil society in such areas as education and health care, mass media and entertainment, political organizations and trade unions contributes to the regulation of hegemony by the dominant capitalist class, especially since the state has expanded inextricably with these areas. Gramsci's analysis of hegemony thus accords with the work of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse on the 'culture industry' as a mechanism through which dissidence is pacified and integrated, and radical ideas are diffused or nullified. Hegemony may also be related to *Michel Foucault's analysis of the articulation of knowledge and *power. By the 19803 the term had such wide currency and was used in such disparate contexts that it began to lose some of its specificity as a concept. *Edward Said uses hegemony to develop his concept of affiliation through which, in the narrowly cultural sphere, writers and critics establish systems of relationship based on shared beliefs and values as alternatives to those relationships they inherit through birth (The World, the Text, and the Critic 1983), but also uses hegemony to clarify the dominance of European culture over what it represents as the Orient. Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) shows how the development of aesthetics is central to middle-class hegemony, but also uses hegemony as a synonym for any type of dominance achieved through consent and coercion. The value of hegemony as a concept would seem to depend on maintaining its connections with both social class and cultural production. JOHN THURSTON

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Primary Sources Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Hermeneutic circle Modern *hermeneutics passes through at least three avatars: it is the art and methodology of interpretation (Friedrich Ast; Friedrich Schleiermacher); a general theory of the conditions of possibility of the Geisteswissenschaften (*Wilhelm Dilthey); and it allies itself with phenomenology to offer a fundamental ontology of the structures of human being (*Martin Heidegger). (See *phenomenological criticism.) Later developments, especially by *HansGeorg Gadamer and *Paul Ricoeur, derive from Heidegger's re-orientation of hermeneutics toward language and therefore take the historical inscriptions of human being in the languages of cultural production as the object of their hermeneutic phenomenologies. Interpretation moves in a circle. In order to understand the word, the sentence must be understood and vice versa; striving to understand an author's work, we attempt to unfold it sentence by sentence; but the sentence remains opaque unless we have already grasped, by a leap in advance, its rhetorical function in the whole of the work. The work begins to render up its sense when we have glimpsed the movement of the author's entire corpus; and the oeuvre is focused in the perspectives of many works. The author's texts are themselves woven into a historical context; "text and context together inscribe aspects of one, unified design. The act of interpretation oscillates between the part and the encompassing whole on this historical level of investigation, as it does on the grammatical, stylistic and rhetorical movements of interpretation, which the historical comprehends. The circle of understanding within which interpretation comes into play must, moreover, comprehend the historical situation and con-

Heteroglossia sciousness of the interpreter, the present of the act of interpretation, and the past of the work interpreted in order for the work to be comprehensible at all. In the act of interpretation, we leap into the circle of our being in which we already, largely unknown to ourselves, more or less securely stand. This prior unity, which is more fundamental than the opposition of subject and object, is grasped in the hermeneutics of Ast, Schleiermacher, and especially Dilthey, as the animating Geist [Spirit] common to the mind of the historian and the mind which has been recorded in the work. The interpretor understands himself or herself only by encountering, in a process of self-discovery, his or her own being through the historically determined, in each case finite and particular manifestation of Spirit. Here, too, understanding moves in a circle: human being, far from being a static essence, is determined and determines itself by grasping its own, present being out of the projected horizon of the whole which the past unveils; and the undiscovered country of the past, the whole of the inscription of Spirit, emerges out of the living, analogical being of the interpreter's participation in Geist. The way forward - the question posed, the project of self-discovery is the way back. Heidegger's philosophy shifts the centre of hermeneutics from the presupposition of a unifying Geist which manifests itself through language, to the movement of being-as-language in its radical historicity. Heidegger's hermeneutics of Dasein has the interpretation of the structure of human being-in-the-world as its goal. This interpretation is circular inasmuch as it presupposes a preconceptual understanding of being as the condition of its possibility; the interpretation works out in explicit conceptual detail what is already 'known' in the sense of being existentially enacted in the structures of our world without being conceptually articulated. Without moving 'back' into what we already understand, existentially and preconceptually, we cannot move 'forward' into what we seek to know conceptually; but the reverse is also true. Because the work of art, according to the analysis of Being and Time, offers preconceptual evidence of our understanding of the modes of being which it, no less than conceptual thought, reveals, the experience of art and the labour of conceptual thought not only complement each other but inscribe the movement of understanding: art is

the existential enactment of the stand in the midst of being that a historically rooted people has taken; 'criticism' is the understanding which brings this 'stand' into the light of conceptual reflection; conceptual thought remains dependent on the preconceptual in which it is rooted, and art nourishes itself on the concept which it bears. (See also *metacriticism.) BERNHARD RADLOFF

Primary Sources Ast, Friedrich. Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik. Landshut: Thomann, 1808. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 'Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften.' In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1968. - Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding. Trans. Richard M. Zaner and Kenneth L. Heiges. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. - 'Poetry and Experience.' In Selected Works, vol. 5. Ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Trans. Rudolf Makkreel et al. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. - Selected Writings. Trans. H.P. Rickman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Sheed and Ward Ltd. London: Sheed and Ward, 1975Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM P, 1962. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation. Trans. Paul Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Herrneneutik. Ed. Heinz Kimmerle. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1959. - Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Ed. Heinz Kimmerle. Trans. James Duke and Jack Forstmann. Missoula: Scholars P, 1977.

Heteroglossia Heteroglossia (reznorechie, reznorechivost') is a term created by *Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the myriad discursive strata within all national languages and the ways in which these strata govern the operation of meaning in any utterance. Bakhtin develops the implications of this term most fully in his essay 'Discourse in the Novel' (The Dialogic Imagination). Every individual utterance is unitary and concrete, the expression of a particular person at a particular non-recurring moment in time. Yet every utterance also articulates extrapersonal forces, derives from what Bakhtin calls the 'socio-

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Horizon of expectation ideological' languages in the culture at large. Because heteroglossia is concerned with the contextual overtones of any given utterance, it is the enemy of systematic linguistics. As Bakhtin puts it, 'it is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradictionridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language' ('Discourse in the Novel' 272). Heteroglossia provides Bakhtin with a conceptual scheme for categorizing - and judging - individual authors, schools and genres. All can be characterized according to their allegiances in the struggle between the centripetal and centrifugal forces in language. Those which most fully embrace heteroglossia are consistently valorized in Bakhtin's writings. Thus Dostoevsky is superior to Tolstoy; Romanticism to Classicism; the novel to poetry. The novel is potentially the ideal form for the literary embodiment of heteroglossia, since it allows for the fullest artistic representation of the diversity of social speech types and individual voices in a given culture. But Bakhtin identifies two traditions in the history of the novel, one of which suppresses heteroglossia. This 'monologic' tradition is typified by such forms as the Greek romance, the chivalric romance and all genres which privilege respectable language, such as the idyll, the pastoral and the 18th-century sentimental novel. Heteroglossia is present in these narratives but functions primarily as a kind of linguistic background. Beginning with Rabelais and Cervantes another tradition emerged in which prose narrative foregrounds, intensifies and dramatizes heteroglossia. For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky is both heir and supreme master of this 'polyphonic' tradition. (See *polyphonic novel, *polyphony, *monologism.) Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia supplements rather than supplants the authorialintention tradition of Jamesian formalism. (See *Henry James.) Bakhtin would replace traditional stylistics, for instance, with 'sociological stylistics/ which he claims is the only stylistics capable of dealing with the novel as a genre. (See *genre criticism.) Whatever the artistic intention of a given author, he or she must make use of a pre-existing language that is already informed by the social intentions of other speakers: 'Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are

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populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word' ('Discourse in the Novel' 293). Bakhtin grants the author the power of 'orchestrating' this diversity of social speech types and thereby creating a distinctive style, but he also insists that because of its social, temporal nature, there is something in language outside of the control of the author that influences the meaning of any artistic utterance. This emphasis on multivocality in fictional discourse has achieved the status of a kind of hermeneutic given, as when Alan Singer writes that 'novelistic voice is inherently and notoriously multiple ... Novelistic voice subverts the unitary imperative of the very metaphor of human speech which otherwise endows its rhetorical aptitude' (173). Moreover, the recent proliferation of sociological and ideological analyses of literary texts can be traced to Bakhtin's theoretical example, which has served to foreground the extraliterary dimensions of all literary *discourse. JAMES DIEDRICK

Primary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. 'Discourse in the Novel.' In The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981, 259-422. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Singer, Alan. 'The Voice of History/The Subject of the Novel.' Novel: A Forum on Fiction 21 (1988); 173-9.

Horizon of expectation The horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont) is a term employed by *Hans Robert Jauss, a central figure in the ""Constance School, in his aesthetics of reception (Rezeptionsasthetik). Although Jauss is responsible for the popularization of the term, it is not his invention. Both the philosopher Karl Popper and the sociologist Karl Mannheim had used the concept before Jauss. It had also appeared in the work of the art historican *E.H. Gombrich who, under Popper's influence, defined the horizon of expectation in Art and Illusion (1960) as a mental set which registers deviations and modifications from a norm with exaggerated sensitivity. Jauss' usage, which is

Hypogram similar to Gombrich's, is more likely derived from the phenomenological and hermeneutical heritage, in which *Edmund Husserl, *Martin Heidegger and *Hans-Georg Gadamer had recourse to the notion of a horizon. (See *phenomenological criticism, *hermeneutics.) For Gadamer, Jauss' teacher and the most important intellectual influence on his early work, the horizon is an essential part of every interpretive situation. It represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision, resulting from our necessary situatedness in the world. Yet it is neither a fixed standpoint, nor is it static, but rather it is a continuously evolving vantage point into which we move and which moves with us. It is intimately linked to the prejudices we bring to any situation, since they represent a 'horizon' over which we cannot see. Finally, Gadamer defines understanding (Verstehen) as a fusion of one's own horizon (Horizontverschmelzung) with the horizon of the other, whether the other be *text or person. (See *self/other.) Jauss uses the term in a related but slightly different fashion. In his work the horizon of expectation refers to an intersubjective system or structure of expectations that a hypothetical reader might bring to a given text. (See *intersubjectivity.) It is essential for both the interpretation and the evaluation of a literary work. The critic must establish the horizon of expectations for a particular historical moment. This is accomplished most readily with parodistic texts since they often foreground their own horizon. (See *parody.) With other texts the critic must rely on internal features of genre, literary history and language. Once the horizon has been objectified in this fashion, the aesthetic value of a work can be measured by its distance from the horizon. Works that do not deviate from expectations are considered of lesser aesthetic merit; those that violate or break the horizon of expectations are aesthetically more valued. A good indicator of the horizon of expectations is the audience response, the literary criticism and the scholarship for any given period. (See also *reader-response criticism.) Jauss' more recent work has largely abandoned the horizon of expectation as a negative foil for the innovative qualities of literary work. Although it no longer functions in an aesthetics of negativity, the horizon of expectation has nonetheless been retained in his work during the 19705 and 19805 and applied pro-

ductively to analyse different perceptions of literary texts. Still a tool for historical contextualization and interpretation, the horizon of expectation has ceased to be the sole measure for aesthetic value. ROBERT C. HOLUB

Primary Sources Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion. Oxford: Phaidon P, 1960. Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. - Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.

Hypogram The hypogram is related to the anagram and the paragram and is most readily understood in relation to these. An anagram is the process of the transposition of the letters of a given word or string of words to make a new word or string of words (e.g., given word: 'cat'; anagram: 'act'). 'Anagram' may also refer to the word so derived ('act'). In literary theory the anagram owes its recent popularity to *Ferdinand de Saussure's study of anagrams (published posthumously by *Jean Starobinski) in which he shows how, in a series of Latin poems, sounds obey the same principle as anagrams, since the sounds or letters of a proper name are to be found scattered in random order throughout the poems. 'Paragram' is the name given to the type of anagrammatic distribution described by Saussure. Saussure's anagram (the paragram) is seen as a network which provides the text's structure. (See *text.) This structure is unusual, for instead of being linear, it is paragrammatic: that is, the paragram's first sound, or group of sounds, does not lead to its second then to its third, as the text unfolds from beginning to end. Rather, the anagrammatic elements scattered throughout the text are linked in a nonlinear network. These paragrammatic elements coexist in time and space regardless of any pre-established order. The very notion of any fixed order (linear or otherwise) is irrelevant, since the anagram destroys order by separating and isolating the constituent elements, placing them in a diagrammatic arrangement, or disarrangement - one where all elements exist in

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Hypogram direct relation to both the key word and one another. Henri Meschonnic's definition of the activity of creating a paragram (paragrammatism) is useful, since it describes the central role of the original 'theme word.' For him paragrammatism is the 'prosodic organisation of a text by the complete or partial diffraction of the voiced or written elements of a "theme word" within its [textual] context outside the order of these elements in time.' *Julia Kristeva sees in paragrammatism a new structuring principle, a new dynamic akin to *Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogical perception of the literary text. Dialogism enables contradictions to coexist in a text, for it construes them as voices in dialogue with each other within a dynamic and centrifugal system. A text's paragrammatic structure allows its contradictory aspects to come to the fore, thus enhancing the text's *polyphony. For Starobinski, the hypogram is another word for the paragram or Saussurean anagram. Saussure defines it thus: 'a hypogram highlights a name or word by artfully repeating its syllables, thus giving it a second, artificial mode of existence, added, as it were, to the word's original form.' For *Michael Riffaterre, however, the hypogram is not a paragram. Though both are a non-linear, scattered redistribution of a given pretextual entity, both are not made of the same type of components. Whereas the paragram redistributes the 'graphemes' or 'lexemes' derived from the keyword and embeds them in the words of the text, the hypogram involves an altogether larger scale: whole words are embedded in sentences. Furthermore, the hypogram implies the supremacy of form, since it is the hypogram's structure which is evoked by the way words are embedded in sentences and by the very organization of these sentences. (See *embedding.) Riffaterre defines his hypogram as a structural pre-text, a generator of the poetic text, that is, one in which the poetic function dominates. The hypogram may be a cliche, a quotation, a group of conventional associations, or a thematic complex. It may be a single word, such as 'monster,' and all its associations, or an entire text. For example, Riffaterre sees the linking of 'flower' and 'abyss,' referring to the cliche of the flower on the edge of the abyss as a hypogram in the following texts: This meadow flower growing peacefully ... in the

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heart of Paris, between two streets, in the midst of passersby, shops, cabs and omnibuses ... this flower of the fields beside the cobblestones opened up an abyss of reverie' (Victor Hugo Choses vues). 'Vice in him was not an abyss, as in some old men, but a natural flowering, for all to see.' (Emile Zola, La Curee). The distinctive feature of this particular hypogram is an oxymoron linking opposites and reducing them to equivalents. Thus, in Hugo's example, the 'abyss' is not negative (dark, horrifying, hell-like, evil), but positive; here it suggests infinite reverie. The author's conscious or unconscious use of a hypogram generates a matrix or keyword, which in turn generates a model (its primary actualization) and series of variants. 'Matrix, model, and text are variants of the same structure,' that is, hypogram, according to Riffaterre. (See "Variation.) An adaptation of Riffaterre's analysis of the following, by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, provides a brief example: 'Tibi vero gratias agam quo clamore? Amore more ore re.' (How shall I cry out my thanks to Thee? [The Almighty replies:] With thy love, thy customs, thy words, thy deeds.) The hypogram might be termed 'prayer,' implying the latter's dialogic self-generating structure. The matrix is thanksgiving; the question clamore (the crying out) is the model for the reply amore, and amove, is a model for the sequence more, ore, re, which are its variants. The variants echo the model's syntax (all use the ablative) and morphology (all being a diminishing repetition of clamore). Thus clamore provides a paradigm which is projected on the syntagmatic axis reinforcing the signification of the matrix. The reader's *praxis is the reverse of the writer's as he attempts to solve the puzzle of textual significance. Faced with apparent 'ungrammaticalities' (Riffaterre's term), incongruities which block mimetic or referential meaning, he seeks a common element in these variants and thereby the generating model and matrix. When he finally solves the puzzle, everything points to one symbolic focus, one unifying matrix, which itself refers to the pretextual generator: its hypogram. Since this hypogram is perceived as a deeper unifying structure than its different levels of textual manifestation, it seems that Riffaterre also prefers the suffix hypogram for its implication of ultimate 'deep-level' meaning, for the prime

Icon/iconology structuring generator is indeed far more deeply buried than the elements of the less complex paragram from which he distinguishes it. ANNA WHITESIDE-ST. l.EGER LUCAS

Primary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostocvsky's Poetics. Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1978. Kristeva, Julia. Semeiotike. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1978. Starobinski, Jean. Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Secondary Sources Meschonnic, Henri. Le Signe et le poeme. Paris: Gallimard, 197=1.

Icon/iconology The icon is one of three types of *sign (including symbols and indices) in "Charles Sanders Peirce's classification, based on the type of relationship between the sign and the extralinguistic world. In the case of the icon the relationship is based on likeness: an icon displays the same property as the object denoted. For example, a road sign depicting children at a crossing displays a visually recognizable silhouette of children; a simplified drawing of an ice cream on a menu denotes ice cream as one of the desserts available in that restaurant. According to Peirce, the icon, as distinct from the "index and symbol, is 'a sign which refers to the object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses ... Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it' (CP 2.247). In other words, an iconic 'thing' ranges from the hypostasized to the most abstract and may refer to an equally broad range of referents. The governing principle in iconic signs is, then, similitude: similitude which may be recognized according to Peirce's three fundamental categories of 'firstness/ 'secondness' and 'thirdness,' and thus as a 'qualisign/ a 'sinsign' or a 'legisign.' Three categories of icon are, then, theoretically possible. However, the first - the pure iconic qualisign - is a conjectural

hypothetical entity since, were it to exist, it would, by its very existence, become a sinsign rather than a qualisign. Thus, for Peirce, there are in fact two and not three categories of icon: the iconic sinsign and iconic legisign. These may, nevertheless, evoke three categories of similitude of quality, existence and law. In keeping with Peirce's self-perpetuating triadic system, these icons may, in turn, be perceived as falling into three classes: the image, the diagram or the metaphor. (See "metonymy/metaphor.) Peirce's theory of the icon has proved most useful in applications to concrete or representational texts, such as the ideogram in poetry, and to theatre and drama. In the latter case, Keir Elam discusses how stage props, decor and actors playing characters become icons of what they represent. (See also "communication theory.) Iconology is quite distinct from Peirce's semiotic theory of the icon. The term was first proposed by Erwin Panofsky to distinguish his broader approach to the analysis of meaning in the visual arts from iconography, which merely identifies subject-matter (e.g., painting X is a portrait of Y, a scene from such and such a battle, a view of such and such a place). According to Panofsky, iconology seeks to understand the total meaning of a work of art in its historical and cultural context. Thus a work of art is to be treated as a concrete historical document in the study of a civilization, or period, to bridge the gap between art history and other historical studies. Critics argue that this is a dangerous method unless allied with aesthetic sensibility and a sense of historical relevance. More recent work on iconology has been done by W.J.T. Mitchell, who examines the links between "ideology and iconology and reveals the fears about imagery, expressed in a 'rhetoric of iconoclasm,' based in notions of class, race and gender. ANNA WHITESIDE-ST. LEGER LUCAS

Primary Sources Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1931-58.

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Ideal reader Secondary Sources Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London and New York: Methuen, 1980.

Ideal reader The ideal reader does not exist either in reality or in the *text. The concept is a construct of the imagination, a mental creation that can be attributed, according to Didier Coste in Trois conceptions du lecteur' (1980), to an author or interpreter, but is usually ascribed to a producer of fiction. For that producer, the ideal reader is nothing more than a projection of a mode of production in a mode of reception. Isaac Babel expresses this accurately in 'Mes premiers honoraires' (1972), where he states, 'My reader is intelligent and cultivated, with hearty and demanding tastes ... He exists within me, but has been there for so long that I have managed to fashion him in my image and semblance. He may have ended up confusing himself with me.' FRANCOIS GALLAYS

Primary Sources Babel, Isaac. Mes premiers honoraires. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Coste, Didier. 'Trois conceptions du lecteur et leur contribution a une theorie du texte litteraire.' Poetique 43 (September 1980): 354-71.

Ideologeme An ideologeme is the smallest intelligible unit of ""ideology. The term is a parallel construction to, for instance, 'phoneme,' 'philosopheme' or '*seme/ which are the smallest units of phonetics, philosophy and semantics, respectively. An understanding of the ideologeme is a function of an understanding of ideology itself. One of the most developed discussions of the concept occurs in *Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious. Jameson defines the ideologeme as 'a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a 'value system' or 'philosophical concept,' or in the form of a protonarrative, a private or collective narrative

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fantasy' (115). For Jameson, ideologemes are the 'ultimate raw material' of cultural products, and ideological analysis seeks to understand cultural products as 'a complex work of transformation on ... the ideologeme in question' (87). By means of a 'radical historicization,' the 'essence,' 'spirit' or 'world-view' of a text can be understood as an ideologeme implicated, finally, in the class struggle. In The Political Unconscious Jameson attempts to rewrite or restore the class horizon organized, in certain texts, around ideologemes like the Victorian concept of ressentiment. According to Jameson, ressentiment was a way to 'explain' the phenomena of revolution in Europe by attributing it to a '"psychological" and non-material ... envy the have-nots feel for the haves' (201). According to the concept, those who incited resistance to the dominant social order did so not out of a legitimate political analysis, but out of 'private dissatisfactions'; they were always 'unsuccessful writers and poets, bad philosophers, bilious journalists, and failures of all kinds' (202). In ""literature, ressentiment is mainly embodied in characters whose revolutionary tendencies are explained away as symptoms of psychological imbalance. In contemporary fiction, the ressentiment motif can still be seen in, for instance, the novels of Robertson Davies, which contain many minor characters that might be called left-wing or feminist 'buffoons.' These characters - Denyse Hornick and the 'penniless scheme-spinners' in Fifth Business, Murray Brown in The Rebel Angels, Ismay Glasson and Charlie Fremantle in What's Bred in the Bone, Wally Crottel and Al Crane in The Lyre of Orpheus - link social activism or criticism of class privilege with ignorance, meanness of character, personal spite, and/or psychological disorder. Linking criticisms of the present order to such discreditable individuals works to discredit the criticisms themselves. The 'buffoon' characters, then, may be read as signs implicating Davies' novels in a wider reactionary ideology; in this sense they, and the concept of ressentiment which they embody, operate as ideologemes. (See *sign.) Jameson's description of the ideologeme is consistent with the semiotic description of the relationship between the sign and the sign system that produces signification. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) In *semiotics, an

Ideological horizon element of signification functions not by its intrinsic power but because of the network of oppositions that distinguishes and relates it from and to another. As a sign, the ideologeme is also articulated by difference. Individual 'value systems/ 'philosophical concepts' and 'protonarratives' only achieve a signifying force in opposition and relation to other systems, concepts and protonarratives. Moreover, the 'same' ideologeme could have radically different effects depending on the wider ideological system within which it is articulated. Jameson exploits the political possibilities in this complexity by emphasizing the 'dialogical' character of the ideologeme - a term he borrows from *Mikhail Bahktin. For Jameson, the 'normal form of the dialogical is essentially an antagonistic one' (84). Ideologemes, then, like individual texts or cultural phenomena in general, are sites upon which opposing discourses (particularly class discourses) struggle for position. (See *text, *discourse, *dialogical criticism.) A related use of the concept of ideologeme has been made by the Tel Quel group of critics. In her contribution to their Theorie d'ensemble, *Julia Kristeva emphasizes the close relation between the ideologeme and *intertextuality: 'We call the ideologeme the communal function that attaches a concrete structure (like the novel) to other structures (like the discourse of science) in an intertextual space' (313). In Le Texte du reman, Kristeva describes the ideologeme as both an organizing function within a text and a function that indicates the text's implication in a wider social and historical text. As an organizing function, the ideologeme is materialized at different levels in the structure of a text; it is a thematic or conceptual nexus around which the transformations effected by the text's enunciations can be seized as a whole ( i 2). (See enonciation/enonce.) At the same time, the ideologeme indicates the social and historical coordinates of the text, the implication of the text in the impersonal order of other texts called the 'intertext' (12, i 02). J A M I E DOPP

Kristeva, Julia. Le Texte du roman: Approche semiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. [Tel Quel]. Theorie d'ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Ideological horizon Ideological horizon is a term first employed by *Pierre Macherey in his 'Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy/ which forms part of his work known in English as A Theory of Literary Production. Macherey uses the term to explain Lenin's reference to mirror and reflection in his analysis of Tolstoy. *Marxist criticism is commonly attacked for its simple reflection theory, in which the critic treats fiction as a direct mirror of the material conditions of history but Macherey asserts that 'Lenin uses the mirror to refer to a concept rather than an image.' Macherey views this concept as an understanding of contradiction: 'It would therefore be incorrect to say that the contradictions of the work are the reflection of historical contradictions: rather they are the consequences of the absence of this reflection.' Thus, the critic searches not for a direct representation of history but for the ideological horizon which refers 'to that abyss over which ideology is built. Like a planet revolving around an absent sun, an ideology is made of what it does not mention; it exists because there are things which must not be spoken of.' The ideological horizon is therefore the critic's description of the ""ideology which informs the *text but never quite appears in it. For example, a Canadian novel of exploration which makes no reference to Native peoples might be examined in light of that absence. Although not a synonym for *Louis Althusser's concept of the '""problematic/ the ideological horizon also deals with the revelation of ideology through contradiction. TERRY GOLDIE

Primary Sources Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Primary Sources Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Ait. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

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Ideological State Apparatuses

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAS) The designation of such apparently private institutions as the family and the schools as Ideological State Apparatuses with the public function of constituting subjects suited to perform in specific ways within society has enabled much recent cultural theory. According to French Marxist philosopher "Louis Althusser, *ideology is embodied in the actions of subjects through 'the material existence of an ideological apparatus' (168). Building on *Antonio Gramsci's concept of ""hegemony and his own concept of the *social formation, Althusser divides the superstructure into 'two "levels" or "instances": the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.)' (134). The first level, the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), contains 'the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.' (142-3). Among Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAS) constitutive of the second level, he identifies churches, schools, the family, political parties, trade unions, the media and cultural institutions, all unified under the dominant ideology. He rejects the allocation of these two levels to the public and private domains as a distinction 'internal to bourgeois law' (144). The reproduction of the relations of production is secured through the superstructure. The RSA, functioning through force (actual or potential), secures 'the political conditions' (149). The ISAS 'largely secure the reproduction specifically of the relations of production' (150). The ISAS perform this function through "interpellation or hailing whereby individuals who are addressed in this manner (mis)recognize themselves as subjects with attributes necessary to the dominant relations of production. The concept of ISA has been widely used in socialist and feminist literary theory and criticism, and in the semiotic analysis of the cinema and advertising. (See "feminist criticism, "semiotics, "Marxist criticism.) JOHN THURSTON

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben

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Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971, 127-86.

Ideology Though much used in recent literary and cultural criticism, ideology is as slippery a term in criticism as it is in the social sciences. Some critics, including "Raymond Williams have even questioned its usefulness (Marxism and Literature 71). In use, the term is often nearly synonymous with Georges Sorel's 'myths,' Vilfredo Pareto's 'derivations' (intellectual systems of justification), "Sigmund Freud's 'rationalization,' "Antonio Gramsci's '"hegemony/ and "Roland Barthes' 'mythologies.' (See also "myth.) Critics who practise ideological criticism usually discuss texts with reference to issues of political "power, sexuality and class. (See "text.) They assume that a text reflects or embodies, to some degree, the ideologies prevailing in its society. They tend to define ideology either descriptively as an explicit or tacit sharing of certain attitudes, values, assumptions, and ideas; or, more often, evaluatively as a covert means of social oppression and exploitation because it offers 'concepts and categories that distort the whole of reality in a direction useful to the prevailing power' (Scruton i23). In the latter context, ideology is one of the means, perhaps the dominant one, by which a society maintains its economic and political status quo. Because ideology is usually seen as mystifying or distorting or concealing the relations of power within society, an ideological reading of a text is usually contestational and involves revealing lacunae, omissions and distortions. (See also "demythologizing-) The word was first used by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in his Elements d'Ideologie (1801-5) to refer to a new science of ideas (an idea-logy) involving a rational investigation of the sources of ideas in order to distinguish knowledge from opinion and science from metaphysical and religious prejudices. Much more influential on contemporary Marxists and non-Marxists alike, however, has been the set of definitions offered by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (especially in The German Ideology 1845-6 and in Engels' letter to Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893). (See "Marxist

Ideology criticism.) They used the term disparagingly to refer ( i ) to the idealism of the Young Hegelians, which was ideological because it disregarded the material origins and determinants of their ideas; (2) to any complex of attitudes and ideas concealing the real nature of social relations and thus helping to justify and perpetuate the oppressive social dominance of one class over others; and (3) to what Engels described as 'false consciousness/ which is any process of thought in which 'the real motive forces impelling [a thinker] remain unknown to him' (Engels to Mehring). In Marxist usage, ideology has pejorative connotations and, more often than not, refers to the thought of others. The term has also been used more generally to refer in a value-neutral sense to any system of norms or beliefs 'directing the social and political attitudes of a group, a social class, or a society as a whole' (Nuth 377). In this sense one can speak of a feminist ideology or working-class ideology or American ideology. Also worth noting is the usage, less frequent today, which 'identifies ideology with the sphere of ideas in general' (Nuth 378). It is no exaggeration to say, however, that most subsequent criticism concerned with ideology has been shaped by Marx and Engels' passing remarks on the topic. Many critics who are not Marxists (for instance, "Lionel Trilling, Roland Barthes and many contemporary feminists like *Sandra Gilbert and Mary Jacobus) nevertheless reflect the hermeneutics of suspicion' (*Paul Ricoeur's phrase) inseparable from the classical Marxist view of ideology as signifying 'the values, ideas and images which tie [individuals] to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole' (Eagleton Marxism and Literary Criticism 17). (See also "feminist criticism, "hermeneutics.) While critics concerned with ideology and "literature argue that the latter is inevitably ideological, they nevertheless tend to assume a privileged epistemology for literature to the extent that they think of it as simultaneously marked by ideology and transcending it. However, with the exception of "Terry Eagleton and "Fredric Jameson, both heavily influenced by the French Marxist philosopher *Louis A1thusser, few critics have indicated on what theoretical basis they make such an assumption. Developing Marx's insights, Althusser sees ideology as a 'social practice' which helps

conceal the true nature of social reality - economic and political. It is 'a system of representation - composed of ideas, concepts, myths, or images - in which people live their imaginary relations to the real conditions of existence' (Lenin and Philosophy 162). For Althusser, art's roots are in ideology but it isn't purely ideological because its aesthetic forms and devices offer a distance from and perspective on ideology. Where science offers 'knowledge' of reality, art 'alludes' to it (Lenin and Philosophy 204). Thus, for Althusser and his followers, art presents ideology in a non-ideological form. The critic's task is to offer a 'symptomatic' reading that, beginning with the surface of the text, attempts to find its lacunae and contradictions in order to locate the text's 'problematic' (the body of concepts restricting what can be said). Such a reading is important because it reveals how ideology helps construct ('interpellate') the individual as a social subject willing to accept a particular view of what is, what is good, and what is possible (Thompson 16). (See "symptomatic reading, "interpellation, "problematic.) In Jameson's criticism, such an analysis is seen as a prelude to the creation of a more just society. Although indebted to "Georg Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1923) and to the work of "T.W.Adorno and the "Frankfurt School, Jameson goes far beyond their pessimistic comments on ideology's complicit function in capitalist society and art to suggest that 'a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper' must deal with the Utopian impulses within ideological cultural texts' (The Political Unconscious 296). Almost alone among critics of ideology, Jameson insists on seeing a Utopian dimension within it. A theoretical problem less often acknowledged in cultural criticism than in the social sciences pertains to the question of how the intellectual or critic, of whatever political persuasion, is able to escape ideological consciousness (what Engels, though not Marx, called 'false consciousness'). In other words, how does the critic find a point of view outside ideology to observe ideologically marked social discourses and practices in order to judge them ideological? (See "discourse.) If ideology is as pervasive as some critics suggest, how is anyone able to step outside it and avoid the tu quoque response from texts and other critics judged ideological? Marxist critics

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Imaginary/symbolic/real like Eagleton and Jameson suggest that Marxism is less ideological or 'truer' than other critical approaches because it 'subsumes' them (Jameson i o). Non-Marxist and non-deconstructionist critics of ideology tend to avoid a theoretical engagement with the issue. (See *deconstruction.) Were they to confront it squarely the debate would probably be similar to the one in the social sciences over Karl Mannheim's now discredited suggestion that intellectuals, because they constitute a classless stratum, are able to achieve disinterested, nonideological knowledge (Ideology and Utopia). It is worth noting that writers as different as de Tracy, Marx, Mannheim, Daniel Bell, Adorno, *Jiirgen Habermas, and Jameson have all speculated about the possibility of an end to ideology. For feminists and Marxists, for instance, ideology will end when ideological criticism has done its work. In 'semiotics, this assumption has resulted in a debate between those, like Roland Barthes and *Umberto Eco, who think that applied semiotics (or text semiotic studies) can demystify ideologies by studying the sign systems transmitting them, and those who argue from a metasemiotic or theoretical viewpoint that an escape from ideology is impossible. (See also *sign, *metacriticism.) SAM SOLECKI

Primary Sources Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury, 1972. Althusser, Louis. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.' In Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books, 1971. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology. New York: Free P, 1960. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. London: New Left Books, 1976. - Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991. - Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. .'Ideology.' In Aspects of Sociology. London: Heinemann, 1973. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Kavanagh, James H. 'Ideology.' In Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank l.entricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936.

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Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon P, 1964. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1970. McLennan, David. Ideology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Niith, Winfried. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Plamenatz, John. Ideology. London: Macmillan, 1970. Scruton, Roger. 'Ideologically Speaking.' In The State of Language. Ed. Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Thompson, Kenneth. Beliefs and Ideologies. London: Tavistock, 1986. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford UP, 1977.

Imaginary/symbolic/real *Jacques Lacan's three major terms - the imaginary, the symbolic and the real - are best understood in conjunction as forming a topology of subjectivity and a radical revision of *psychoanalytic theory. Early in his career, Lacan derived inspiration from Melanie Klein's object relations theory. For Klein, the notion of an object suggests both things in the world and the goal or target of aggressive, inner drives. This dual function of the object, as striding some middle ground between the subjectivity of desire and the 'objectivity' or otherness of the real, defines the realm of the imaginary. (See *desire/lack, *self/other, *subject/object.) As Lacan remarks in his first seminar (1953-4), 'when Melanie Klein tells us that the objects are constituted by the interplay of projections, introjections, expulsions, reintrojections of bad objects ... don't you have the feeling that we are in the domain of the imaginary?' (74). Klein's pioneering work derived from the psychoanalysis of children; in Lacan's case the imaginary has an empirical base in what he calls the "mirror stage. Sometime between the ages of 6 and 18 months, the infant is able to recognize its own image in a mirror, that is, as an external relation. Thus, the formation of an I concept, the ego, occurs within the realm of the imaginary: the subject assumes an image, or, as in another Lacanian formulation, 'the subject becomes object.' In other words, in order for the ego to be a subject, it must internalize a principle of otherness as a consequence of its own desire to be a desiring subject. This is the meaning of another puzzling

Imaginary/symbolic/real Lacanian formulation: desire is the desire of the Other. Lacan is so determined to separate sex drives from any natural or instinctual base - the Other is an effect of *signification - that it is sometimes difficult to know how radical Lacan wants his ontology to be. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) It is nevertheless clear that human desire cannot be satisfied by its objects: the Lacanian system is not Utopian. The full implication of Lacan's 'imaginary' marks human identity as endlessly fragmented: 'It is the nature of desire to be radically torn. The very image of man brings in here a mediation which is always imaginary, always problematic, and that is therefore never completely fulfilled' (Seminar Book II 166). The instability of desire, however, reaches a limit of sorts in the realm of the symbolic. Lacan's stress on the symbolic order is based on his post-Saussurean analysis of the linguistic signifier. The signifier is meaningful not because it refers to a definite signified that determines it, but because it stands in opposition to another signifier. Language, for Lacan, is a system of signifiers that form a closed, autonomous order. To this extent, he is a structuralist. (See *structuralism.) Human subjectivity is caught within this system or chain of signification because (a) language is a self-sustaining, closed system and (b) the unconscious is structured like a language. The human subject will thus remain within 'the prisonhouse of language,' except that in Lacan's understanding of it, language is no ordinary prison. In 'The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis' (1953), Lacan claims not just that 'it is the world of words which creates the world of things' but that 'man speaks ... because the symbol has made him man' (39). The subject is an effect of the symbolic, decentred within the play of signifiers. (See *centre/decentre.) The psychoanalytic consequence of the symbolic order involves a move away from biological or instinctual motivation towards a consideration of particular symbols that rule over and cripple the subject. Freud's Oedipus complex, as primal Law of consciousness, is linked by Lacan to its equivalent signifier in the symbolic order: *the Name-of-the-Father. Although the Oedipal situation involves both imaginary and real relations, it is the symbolic relation which constitutes it essentially. (See also *Sigmund Freud.) Lacan's notion of the real must be understood within the dictates of his complex and

often contradictory theories of subjectivity and signification. The real initially signifies the domain outside of symbolization (spatial metaphors and topological diagrams are heuristically indispensible for Lacan), a space distinct from imaginary relations and language. (See also *spatial form, ""metonymy/metaphor.) The real is, to some extent, a problem that Lacan creates for himself when words are given the power to create things and desire rules over all object relations. The real is equally a problem for Lacan's entire post-Hegelian project of placing desire and lack at the core of human subjectivity. Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, defines Lacan's real as 'something that cannot be negated ... because it is already in itself, in its positivity, nothing but an embodiment of a pure negativity, emptiness' (170). The real implies that lack itself is not an illusion or an imaginary relation. Since language is constituted as a system of opposing signifiers for Lacan, the symbolic order by its very nature evokes a certain level of unreality or distortion, equivalent perhaps to the meconnaissance of imaginary relations. It is the insistence on the real, therefore, that preserves Lacan's thought from simply being yet another 20th-century 'prisonhouse of language' philosophy. Critics of Lacan, however, may wonder if his notion of the real is unnecessarily vague and too high a price to pay for his theories of language, reference and subjectivity. (See also *reference/referent.) GREGOR CAMPBELL

Primary Sources Lacan, Jacques. 'The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis.' In Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. - Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

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Implied reader

Implied reader The implied reader is a term developed by *Wolfgang Iser, one of the foremost members of the "Constance School, to describe the interaction between "text and reader. It is an adaptation of the concept of 'implied author' which *Wayne Booth had discussed in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). For Booth the implied author is different from the persona or "narrator; the term refers rather to the secondself of the author, the literary, created version of the real person. Iser's implied reader is similarly a construct. As it appears in the book Der implizite Leser (The Implied Reader 1972), the implied reader designates the active participation of the reader in the reading process. In keeping with Iser's interactive approach to the production of meaning, the term implied reader does not belong to either the text or to the reader but rather to both. It incorporates both the prestructuring of the text which allows or facilitates the production of meaning and the reader's actualization of potential meaning during the reading process. Iser thus seeks to distinguish the implied reader from the various types of readers employed by reader-response critics. (See "reader-response criticism.) Iser wants to account for the reader's presence but seeks to avoid both real or empirical readers and abstract readers whose qualifications have been determined before their encounter with any specific literary text. His model is thus transcendental or phenomenological since his implied reader embodies all the predispositions necessary to cope with a given text while excluding empirical interference: (See also *phenomenological criticism.) On the one hand, we may think of the implied reader as the particular role offered to any reader of a text. This role is prestructured by three basic components: the differing perspectives of the text, the vantage point from which the reader links these perspectives and the meeting place where the perspectives converge. According to Iser, during the reading process readers are forced out of their habitual vantage point and made to assume a standpoint from which they can produce textual meaning. The reader is carried through various perspectives defined by characters and narrative voices and must ultimately fit the diverse perspectives into a gradually evolving pattern. But we may also think of the implied reader as

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the structured acts accomplished by the reader. In Iser's theory readers fill in blanks or gaps (Leerstellen) and thereby eliminate *indeterminacy. While the textual perspectives are given, the final meeting place of these perspectives has to be imagined. This process of mental action, the creative side of our encounter with texts, is the other aspect of the implied reader. Every empirical interaction with a text will produce a slightly different result; no two readers will form images or fill in blanks in precisely the same way. But each actualization by individual readers partakes in the implied reader, whose own structure provides a framework within which responses can be compared and communicated. ROBERT C. HOLUB

Primary Sources Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Augmented ed., 1983. Iser, Wolfgang. Der implizite Leser. 1972. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

Indeterminacy Indeterminacy is a term associated primarily with the phenomenological tradition of literary criticism. (See "phenomenological criticism.) "Roman Ingarden, a student of "Edmund Husserl, presents an extensive discussion of indeterminacy in his analysis of literary cognition. According to Ingarden, a literary work consists of four interrelated strata - word sounds, meaning units, represented objects, and schematized aspects - and the two further dimensions of aesthetic value and temporality. Indeterminacy arises because of the peculiar way in which these layers and dimensions fit together. In contrast to objects in the real world, which are always determinate, objects as represented in a literary work of art exhibit points or places of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) between aspects or dimensions. Although indeterminacy may take several forms, it occurs primarily whenever it is impossible for the reader to determine precisely an attribute of a particular object. For example, we may never be able to describe exhaustively a room in the real world, but no part of it is theoretically indeterminate. A room represented in a work of "literature, by

Index contrast, may be described in voluminous detail but some portion will always escape description and be left to the imagination or ideation of the reader. The central activity of the reader for Ingarden is to eliminate indeterminacy by way of *concretization. By filling in the indeterminacies, the reader thus creates (or co-creates) the literary work. (See ""reader-response criticism). Basing his theory of reading in part on Ingarden's phenomenological model, *Wolfgang Iser has recast indeterminacy in the form of blanks or gaps (Leerstellen) in the *text. Blanks occupy a central position in the communicative function of a literary work, defining and delimiting the role of the reader. In their interaction with texts, readers are implicitly called upon to remove or complete various blanks on several levels, from the simplest connections in plot to the more complex relationship between themes that stand out against an implicit horizon. (See *horizon of expectation, *theme.) Iser's theory of the nature of indeterminacy and determinacy in literary works has been challenged most forcefully by *Stanley Fish. From a metacritical perspective Fish claims that the distinction between the two opposed notions is theoretically incoherent. For him indeterminacy presupposes a free subjectivity operating outside of all interpretive constraints. Since we are always reading a text from within conventions determined by the interpretive community to which we belong, Fish argues that the notion that we are at liberty to supply a meaning is an illusion. Although we can use indeterminacy as a method to generate interpretations of texts, it is ultimately based on an untenable epistemological confusion. (See *metacriticism.) ROBERT C. HOLUB

Primary Sources Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. - Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980. Ingarden, Roman. O poznawaniu dziejia literackiego. 1937. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. English trans, from the German trans. Ruth Ann Crowly and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang. Der implizite Leser. 1972. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

Index The index is one of three types of *sign (*icon, index and symbol) in *Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of *semiotics. Peirce defines all three in terms of their relationship to the object for which they stand. In the case of the index this relationship is 'natural' and metonymical rather than conventional (as with the symbol). (See *metonymy/metaphor.) We may distinguish two types of index, each expressing a different aspect of metonymy: (i) the relationship between an index's signifier and signified indicates causality (for example, symptoms are indices, just as fever is an index of illness); (2) the index also implies a relationship of contiguity (for example, dark clouds are an index of impending rain, since they are naturally associated with, and so 'point to/ rain; smoke is an index of fire). (See *signified/signifier/signification.) In literary *discourse, style is often seen as an index of the author's sociocultural background (real or assumed) or of a character's milieu. In descriptions by, say, 19th-century writers like Flaubert or Dickens, the long detailed descriptions of material things (e.g., decor, costume) may be seen as indexical in a variety of ways. They may indicate a character's wealth, taste, milieu, social success or lack of it. For the modern reader such descriptions may also indicate a literary convention which holds that detailed 'realistic' description is an asset. In science fiction, strange things, people, ways, modes of communication serve to remind us that the context is not our own. Elsewhere, repetition might be an index of obsession; gaps or omissions in, say, an autobiography, an index of a desire to hide something, loss of memory, or the lack of importance the writer attaches to the events omitted. ANNA WHITESIDE-ST. LEGER LUCAS

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. 'The Reality Effect.' In French Literary Theory Today. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1931-58.

Secondary Sources Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

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Intention/intentionality Prieto, Luis. Pertinence et pratique. Paris: Minuit, 1975-

Intention/intentionality Although intention and intentionality have a long history as philosophical terms, the German philosopher *Edmund Husserl first gave them their specifically phenomenological orientation. Often called the key concept in the phenomenological analysis of knowledge and experience, for Husserl, being intentional is not only a characteristic of acts of consciousness: it is the essential characteristic or fundamental structure of consciousness itself. The intentional nature of consciousness means that it is always relational or always has a referent: consciousness is always consciousness of something. Every intentional act of consciousness, then, has its intentional object, that towards which consciousness is directed; every act of consciousness has its own particular directedness towards the object it constitutes and is constituted by ('Phenomenology' 122-3). In keeping with phenomenology's aim of intuiting or grasping the essences of objects and, as well, the essence (or essential structures) of human consciousness in this act of intuition, the presented object in this relation need not be actual. Indeed, as long as the object is aimed at in any cognitive (judging, evaluating) or emotive (desiring, hating and so forth) mental act, it is of no consequence if the object of any such intentional experiences exists only in the context of these mental acts (Grossman 140-1). In short, the concept of intentionality focuses attention upon consciousness as a relational act rather than a faculty (Sinha 45). The act which 'intends' and the object which is 'intended' are therefore correlates of one another, emphasizing that phenomenological reflection's main concern is with the intentional consciousness' various and different modes of referentiality ('Phenomenology' 123-4; Sinha 44-7). (See *phenomenological criticism, "'reference/referent, *subject/object.) Although used by Jeremy Bentham in the ordinary non-philosophical sense of 'done purposely' or 'deliberately' (Schmitt 144), the first specialized usage of intentionality must be traced back to the medieval scholastics. According to R.D. Chisholm, for these thinkers intentionality has to do with the nature and

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status of objects in thought which have no correlates in the actual world known through sensory perception. Such an object, since it can clearly be the object of an intentional act (such as believing, desiring, loving) as much as any object which has a correlate in the 'real' world, cannot simply be dismissed as meaningless. On the other hand, such a non-existent object must have a mode of being which differentiates it from those objects of intentional acts which do have such correlates. The aim of positing this particular mode of being ('intentional inexistence' or 'immanent objectivity') for objects which exist strictly in the context of mental acts, as does the object in the sentence 'I am thinking about a dragon,' is primarily ontological. If the properties of an intentional object match up with an actual object, then the mind can be said to have correctly seen and described the truth of this object (201). Intention/intentionality were first introduced in terms of consciousness by Husserl's teacher, the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano, one of the founders of the science of psychology, in his book Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint (1874). In desiring a purely descriptive psychology, proceeding without any prior assumptions or established hypotheses, Brentano refined the concept of intentionality to the point where it became the hallmark of all mental phenomena and psychological processes, where these phenomena and processes have their own intrinsic relational character: all have their own particular reference to some content or direction towards some object (Chisholm 202-3; Brentano 53-8). Intentionality, Brentano further argues, is that which separates mental from physical phenomena (Chisholm 203). While Husserl takes from Brentano the concept that all mental phenomena are directed and that, in addition, they all have a peculiar and intrinsic reference character, for Husserl the phenomenological appropriation and reworking of this term empties it of its psychological-empirical orientation. For Husserl, the placing of this term within a phenomenological methodology transforms what was a way of describing particular psychological processes into a way of identifying and investigating the essential, universal structures of human consciousness, structures upon which an absolutely sure foundation for human knowledge could be established (Sinha 44-6). In this way, the referential nature of consciousness is more than the statement of the

Intention/intentionality simple psychological fact that all thoughts have their objects; it has for Husserl an important and largely epistemological aim, since it is this 'kind' of consciousness which allows us to reflect upon our own mental acts and arrive at an unprejudiced description of their essence. As Grossman notes, while Brentano and many of his students had problems with the inclusion of non-existent objects with existent ones as things which can be the objects of intentional acts, Husserl adopts the scholastic view, with some refinements, to the point where such inclusion becomes one of the hallmarks of phenomenological intentionality and a fundamental principle of his definition of the relations between subject and object (49-50, 140-1). While all phenomenologists and existentialists accept, in some form, the thesis of intentionality, these schools disagree within and among themselves about intentionality's scope and aim. In the works of both *Martin Heidegger and *Maurice Merleau-Ponty the notions of consciousness and intentionality are altered and enlarged. Heidegger's conception of intentionality is particularly influential in that he expands intentionality so that it no longer applies simply and solely to consciousness, to the mental world of humans, but to the Dasein, the whole physical as well as mental reality of human beings in the world. Heidegger avoids the mind-body dualism which many critics feel is always a latent feature in Husserl's formulation of intentionality: 'Because the usual separation between a subject with its immanent sphere and an object with its transcendent sphere - because, in general, the distinction between an inner and an outer is constructive and continually gives occasion for further constructions, we shall in future no longer speak of a subject, of a subjective sphere, but shall understand the being to whom intentional comportments belong as Dasein' (64). Indeed, intentionality is 'one of the Dasein's basic constitutions' (64). For Heidegger, common psychological and philosophical definitions of the intentional subject are 'utterly deficient' since the definition of the subject frequently precedes attempts to define intentionality which is 'the essential ... structure of the subject itself (65). Intentionality, for Heidegger, is not only the fundamental characteristic relatedness of human being to the world (what he calls Dasein); it is also that feature which distinguishes between being and human being, or Existenz.

Only a human being can be intentionally related to the world: 'A distinguishing feature between the existent and the extant is found precisely in intentionality ... A window, a chair, in general anything in the broadest sense, does not exist, because it cannot comport toward extant entities in the manner of intentional self-directedness-toward-them' (64). The crucial nature of intentionality as characterizing the entire Dasein (being-in-the-world) and not just human consciousness (as in Husserl) is indicated by Heidegger's claim that 'the constitution of the Dasein's comportments is precisely the ontological condition of the possibility of every and any transcendence' (65). The *Geneva School's definition of the literary *text itself and its relationship both to the author and the reader/critic reflects the strong links with Husserlian intentionality. Critics such as *Georges Poulet, Marcel Raymond and Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as later American critics like Paul Brodtkorb and the early *J. Hillis Miller, generally agree that the meaning of a literary text hinges upon the Husserlian thesis that the relationship between subject and object is characterized by its mutual referentiality. Just as Husserl asserted the mutual referentiality of subject and object, just as Merleau-Ponty asserted their analytic inseparability (Magliola 13), so phenomenological theory offers the possibility of erasing the dichotomy between subject and object, of eliminating the necessity of choosing a locus of meaning which is either exclusively within the text or outside of it. Phenomenological literary theory posits the text as an author's imaginative transformation of his or her own personal lifeworld (ibid. 28). As such, it is often said to display a unique phenomenological ego or consciousness. This 'fictive universe' not only contains representations of various intentional acts, but it and all these intentional acts are also dominated and organized by the intentional act of imagining, frequently the privileged intentional act in terms of phenomenological criticism (ibid. 36). The author's *Lebenswelt and its unique 'network' (28) of subjectobject relations become embodied in the literary text in two ways; those intentional acts which are largely cognitive (thinking, remembering, reasoning) are embodied 'in the conceptual layer of language,' while 'nonconceptual modes are embodied' through the use of symbols (36). In the theory of the symbol, 'experience embodied in poetic language some-

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Interpellation how represents all the modes of consciousness/ that is, all intentional acts whether emotive or rational (37). In addition, 'the expressions of the nonconceptual modes receive their fundamental embodiment in rhyme, rhythm and other phonemic values; in figurative language and all stylistic traits; and in the whole range of the connotative' (37). The description of the author's consciousness and the discovery of his or her intention vis-a-vis the text is not, however, the goal of phenomenological literary criticism. Critics of this school are careful to make the distinction between the author's ' "actual ego" which is inaccessible' to the reader/critic and his or her 'phenomenological ego/ which is 'immanent in the work' itself or, as some critics put it, between the 'author's empirical ego' and the 'text's phenomenological ego' (67). Even so, critics of phenomenological literary criticism point out that this distinction does not alter the fact that there are aspects of the author's consciousness which are reflected in the literary text. As Magliola argues, 'the patterns of experience sublatent in the former "pass over" into the latter. In this sense the author's "deep self" remains the fans et origo of his or her literature' (67).

The thesis of intentionality in terms of phenomenological literary criticism and later reader-response theory raises important questions concerning the process of interpretation, particularly concerning the status of reading as intentional act and text as intentional object. (See "reader-response criticism.) For Georges Poulet, the influential Belgian critic, reading is an experience of 'interiority' where the boundaries between subject and object are dissolved and where subject and object are shown to exist in a dynamic and 'continuous field of experience' (Con Davis 346). Poulet, however, in asserting that 'reading is the act in which the subjective principle, which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another, and this other feels, suffers and acts within me' (354), also distinguishes between the intentional acts of reading and critiquing. While aiming at the same experience of 'giving way ... to a host of alien words' and 'to the very alien principle which utters and shelters them' (352), the critic nevertheless does not entirely disappear into the mind of the text. M A R I E H. L O U G H L I N

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Primary Sources Brentano, Franz. The Distinction Between Mental and Physical Phenomena.' In Realism and the Background of Phenomenology. Ed. Roderick M. Chisholm. Glencoe, 111.: Free P, 1960, 39-61. Chisholm, Roderick M. 'Intentionality.' In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 4. Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967, 201-4. Con Davis, Robert. 'The.Affective Response.' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Post-Structuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986, 345-9. Grossman, Reinhardt. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans., intro. and lexicon, Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Husserl, Edmund. 'Phenomenology.' In Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986, 121-40. Iser, Wolfgang. 'The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Post-Structuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986, 376-91. Magliola, Robert. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 1977. Poulet, Georges. 'Phenomenology of Reading.' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Post-Structuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986, 350-62. Schmitt, Richard. 'Phenomenology.' In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 6. Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967, 135-51. Sinha, Debabrata. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. Calcutta: Free P, 1974.

Interpellation Interpellation, or hailing, is associated with the thought of French Marxist philosopher *Louis Althusser, who employs it as part of his theory of *ideology in order to explain how ideology constitutes and 'centres' subjects in the social world. (See *centre/decentre.) Originally a legislative term in France describing an interruption of the order of the day that demands from a minister explanation of a matter pertaining to his department, interpellation appears to have entered the discourse of literary theory with the account of "myth provided by French semiotician *Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957). (See *semiotics.) As Barthes describes it, myth is characterized by its 'inter-

Interpellation pellant speech' (parole interpellative), that is, by the way in which it addresses itself directly to the subject in order to appear both natural and devoid of history. (See also *subject/object.) In ""Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1969), Althusser develops the term in order to demonstrate how ideology is not simply an illusion or false consciousness masking the 'real' nature of society but is instead a material system of social practices (what he calls 'ideological apparatuses') producing certain effects upon individuals and providing them with their social identities. Ideology 'naturalizes' or 'makes obvious' the ways in which people live their lives in society; it is 'a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence' (152-3). Interpellation functions in this theory as the ongoing process by which subjects are constituted in ideology. In order to describe this process, Althusser employs insights into the construction of the subject provided by French psychoanalyst "Jacques Lacan. Lacan describes how the infant ego is constituted by the child's identification with or misrecognition (meconnaissance) of his own mirror image, which provides him with an imaginary picture of his own autonomy and self-presence. (See *mirror stage, *psychoanalytic theory.) Althusser suggests that such recognition and misrecognition work as well in the social world at the level of the ideological; the human subject is given back, through ideology, an imaginary construction of his own autonomy, unity and self-presence. He argues that ideology 'recruits' individuals and transforms them, through the 'ideological recognition function,' into subjects. This recognition function is the process of interpellation: ideology 'interpellates' or 'hails' individuals, that is, addresses itself directly to them. Althusser gives as his example a policeman hailing an individual by calling, 'Hey, you there!' The hailed individual will turn around, recognize himself as the one who was hailed, and in the process become constituted as a subject. All hailed individuals, recognizing or misrecognizing themselves in the address, are transformed into subjects conceiving of themselves as free and autonomous members of a society that has in fact constructed them. Although Althusser argues that the structure and functioning of ideology is always the same, the practices which he includes as per-

forming ideological roles have varied with the development of his theories. Prior to his introduction of the concepts of interpellation and ideological state apparatuses, Althusser emphatically stated, '1 do not rank real art among the ideologies.' Without defining what he meant by 'authentic art/ he specified that certain works of "literature achieve an 'internal distantiation from ... the very ideology in which they are held.' Whereas 'art makes us see' ideology, it needs to be supplemented by science which alone can produce the same object 'in the form of knowledge' ('Ideology' 223). This privileging of art derives partly from the literary criticism of *Pierre Macherey. Althusser formulates as a goal for criticism the need 'to produce an adequate (scientific) knowledge of the processes which produce the "aesthetic effect" of a work of art.' Macherey is the first to attempt to enact this formula in his Pour une theorie de la production litteraire [A Theory of Literary Production 1966; trans. 1978]. Althusser's essay on the ideological state apparatuses incorporates his rethinking of the categories of both art and science and places art and literature within 'the cultural ISA.' Subsequently, in collaborative work on literature and society, Macherey and Etienne Balibar denote literature to a position among the ideological apparatuses that constitute subjects. Literature functions as a material practice that interpellates individual readers, furnishing them with an image of their place as subjects in the social world. The absorption of Althusser's and Macherey's work within English literary theory, beginning with Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1976), has been marked by the hope of endowing literary criticism with a scientific status through the analysis of what literature does with ideology, and by an ambivalence about the position of literature within the *social formation. (See also *Eagleton, "•materialist criticism.) ROSS K I N G Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1977, 127-86. - 'A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre (April 1966).' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 221-7. Balibar, Etienne, and Pierre Macherey. 'On Literature

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Intersubj activity as an Ideological Form.' In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, 79-99. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Grafton, 1973. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. London: New Left Books, 1976. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. 1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Intersubj activity Intersubjectivity is a key term in phenomenological "hermeneutics that designates the interaction of communication between subjects. The impasse of Romantic hermeneutics which reached its climax in the works of *Wilhelm Dilthey is the impossibility of accounting for how one subject can know another if all means of knowing must proceed from the knowing subject to others in a dualistic paradigm of *subject/object. The breakthrough came with *Martin Heidegger's concept of Being-in-the-world. Before the subject can know anything, it already belongs to the world whose being is language. Intersubjectivity therefore is the escape from the confines of subjectivism through language to a process of communicative interaction. The more one attempts to explain one's experience the more will the speaker or writer move away from subjectivity and into intersubjectivity. The source aim of explaining to another is to draw on the common ground of language in such a way that experience can become shared meaning. *Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) and *Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981) provide fundamental treatments of intersubjectivity. (See also *phenomenological criticism.) MARIO J. VALDES

Primary Sources Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Garret Barden and William G. Doerpel. New York: Seabury, 1975. Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

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Intertextuality Although intertexo, to intermingle while weaving, was used in both proper and figurative senses in Latin, 'intertextuality' (intertextualite) is a recent creation of *Julia Kristeva to elaborate a theory of the *text as a network of sign systems situated in relation to other systems of signifying practices (ideologically marked sign usage) in a culture. By 'situ[ating] the literary structure within a social ensemble considered as a textual ensemble' ('Problemes' 61) intertextuality would overcome the limitations of formalism and *structuralism by orienting the text to its sociohistoric signification in the interaction of the different codes, discourses or voices traversing the text. In short, a text is not a self-sufficient, closed system. (See *sign, *semiotics, *code, *discourse, 'signifying practice.) Kristeva introduced intertextuality as a 'permutation of texts' ('Pour un semiologie des paragrammes') within the semiotic project of textual stratification and typology to specify different textual arrangements within historical and social texts. The point of intersection of semiotic practices and utterances is the 'ideologeme/ 'the intertextual function read as "materialized" at the different structural levels of each text.' ('The Bounded Text' 36). (See *ideologeme.) Borrowed from members of the Bakhtin circle, ideologeme describes sign production ('social intercourse' or 'semiotic interaction') in a specific social reality as the 'materialized ideological horizon' (The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship). (See "ideological horizon, "materialist criticism.) In developing interaction into intertextuality, Kristeva significantly changed "Mikhail Bahktin's theory of dialogism (Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics), which focused on the utterance rather than on the text as dynamic milieu of interchange among diverse social speech genres, a concept also conveyed by his terms ^polyphony/ 'double-voiced word/ ""heteroglossia/ and the carnivalesque. While intertextuality developed from Marxist critiques of Russian formalism's theories of literariness as Mefarniliarization (making strange) that neglected diachrony (historical change), in France intertextuality was divorced from the co-term ideologeme, dehistoricized, and came to function synchronically alongside universals such as text and society. (See Russian "formalism,

Intertextuality *carnival, *double-voicing/dialogism, *universal.) For Kristeva, intertextuality was first associated with the 'ideologeme of the sign' which, though an advance over the medieval 'ideologeme of the symbol/ she rejected for its *closure. Between 1966 and 1974 intertextuality was an important concept through which she theorized the text as negativity in a 'redistributive' relationship to the bound structures of novel and sign. Her analysis of the intersection of the subject, signifier and cultural practice in the text focuses on the formulation of the logical rules for the transformations that the producing text makes in its intertext, those of 'opposition/ 'permutation' and 'indefinite transformations' (La Revolution). Kristeva is concerned with text generation, with genetics, as suggested in the related concepts 'genotext' (signifiers and speaking subject, dislocating tissue of language) and 'phenotext' (grammatical and semantic surface, residue or trace of this psychic and historical activity). Subsequently, she concentrated on the concept of the self as an intertextual site. (See *subject/object, *genotext/phenotext, *signified/signifier/signification, *self/other.) Intertextuality functioned as a slogan indicating a certain position taken in the critical debate in France by the Tel Quel group in their critique of structuralism through combination and extension of the work of *Ferdinand de Saussure, Karl Marx and *Sigmund Freud: the challenge to the referent, the death of the author, the death of the subject. (See ""reference/referent.) Textual analysis would no longer be concerned with meaning, with the relation of language to a referent, but with signification, the relation of signs and texts in *semiosis (sign interaction) to other signs. The 'fetishism' of meaning was thought, in Marxist terms, to have obscured the *trace of the use value and the work of textual production. Kristeva's concept of text as 'productivity' (Troblemes de la structuration du texte') was equated with intertextuality as the 'junction of several texts of which it is simultaneously the rereading, accentuation, condensation, displacement and depth' (Sellers 75). Translinguistic 'productivity' as dialectical decentring developed such explanatory force that for *Roland Barthes 'the concept of intertext is what brings to the theory of text the volume of its social dimension: not according to the path of an identifiable filiation, of a voluntary imita-

tion, but according to that of dissemination' ('Texte' 1015). Intertextuality is the untying of the text, the infinite play of semiosis, which effects a 'revolution in poetic language' (Kristeva, La Revolution) against the closure of the signifier in representational discourse. While all texts are potentially heterogeneous, the transgressive force of such shattering of symbolic unity is realized only in specific historicosocial conjunctures. (See *centre/decentre.) The term 'intertextuality' migrated quickly in French circles in the 19705, acquiring conflictual definitions, including the inaccurate, 'banal sense of "study of sources'" (Kristeva, La Revolution 59-60). Contradiction is implicit in the concept: the theory of intertextuality is unable to recognize intertextuality: the illimitable can only be known through a missing phenomenon that is measurable (Culler 1382). Consequently, the term developed in divergent contexts, in some emphasizing the disruptive force of pure *textuality as illimitable intertextual transformation, in others seeking to classify the processes of production/reception in the text whereby the rule breaking can be known. Exponents of 'general' intertextuality, unlimited semiosis or 'dissemination/ follow *Jacques Derrida who proclaims, 'there is no outside text' ('Grammatology' 158). Intertextuality is associated with a concept of the text as 'hyphology' or spider's weaving (Barthes, Pleasure 101), a conceptual heterogeneity that violates logical rules of non-contradiction. *Deconstruction is a theory of the necessary intertextuality of all discourse since each text or utterance is an interweaving or 'textile of signifiers' whose signifieds are by definition intertextually determined by other discourses (Positions). Most scholars who use the term have developed a 'restricted' intertextuality which focuses on the relations between several texts. Ironically, this may involve little more than the philological tradition of influence tracing which the term sought to displace. In others, this develops within a frame of a semiotics of non-linear text production, rejecting evolutionary theories of history for a triadic relation among signs that function semiotically. *Umberto Eco considers intertextuality a mode of 'over-coding' (A Theory of Semiotics) that sets up frames for relating texts to other similar texts. The related concept 'presupposition' is, however, termed 'extra-coding.' *Michael Rif-

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Intertextuality faterre develops this approach to text production/reception opposed to both deconstruction and historicism by treating the relationship of text to intertext as parallel to that of sign to interpretant in *Charles S. Peirce's theory of semiosis, which demands an interrelational reading. Riffaterre makes a distinction between 'intertext' (the totality of texts that may be related to the text being considered) and 'intertextuality' (the reader's perception of significance, that is of the literariness of the text). Riffaterre's concept combines a semiotic transformation and the inference a reader draws from it when, reading and rereading to locate discrete units in a system, she or he discovers ungrammaticalities (deviations not accountable in the rules of ordinary language), the 'hypogram' or 'matrix' (the hypothetical structure) of a hidden intertext. (See *hypogram.) Riffaterre's formulation of the *problematic addresses the *paradox of intertextuality, that it is only operative in the indissoluble union of 'rule and rule-breaking' ('The Interpretant in Literary Semiotics' 43), but posits undecidability as a passing stage in the reader's progress to interpretation ('Interpretation and Undecidability' 238). The activity of production is displaced from text to reader, whose compulsion to repeat is a tropological rather than psychoanalytical drive in response to an enigma or gap - an epistemological process ('Compulsory Reader Response' 77). (See *trope.) This extension of the concept ultimately results in a restriction of its implications, since the relationships so clarified are microstructural, on the order of a word or phrase, an allusion to another literary text - questions of literary stylistics. Intertextuality is the normal mode of textual production for Riffaterre as it is also for *Gerard Genette, who describes ""literature as a 'second degree' construct made out of pieces of other texts and sets out a generic map for reading. He limits the term 'intertextuality' to quotation, plagiarism and allusion - 'intratextuality' involves these relationships within the work of a single writer - then distinguishes these types of 'transtextual' relations from 'architectuality' (interrelations of types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres) and 'paratextuality' (relations between a literary text and its social text through its title, prefaces, cover, illustrations). (See *enonciation/ enonce.) A fourth type of transtextual relation occurs between 'hypotext' (A) and 'hypertext'

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(B) mediated through the third point of a generic model or universal, relations on the order of *parody and pastiche. While the concept of 'palimpsest' is a conceptual advance in terms of the range of textual arrangements it encompasses and the rigour of Genette's taxonomy, through its formalist stance on the classic genus-species model of text production it narrows the interpretive power of the term. It too limits the implications of 'intertextuality' to questions of stylistics and neglects the social (and conflictual) overlapping of texts. Though his approach to the question is very different, through the hidden libidinal investments of the work of the text, *Harold Bloom develops a theory of influence with a typology of tropes of textual transformation or 'revisionary ratios.' Six types of 'misreading' or 'misprision' map out the possibilities of 'intrapoetic relationships.' The metaphor of 'family romance' makes clear that, in taking up the issues of intentionality and psychologism shunned by other theorists of textual relations, Bloom has reaffirmed, rather than critiqued, the evolutionary model of literary history challenged by the view of literature as a synchronic system of signs. Author/work/tradition are the operative terms in Bloom's theory of textual relations, not text/discourse/culture. (See also ""misprison, ""anxiety of influence, ""intention/ intentionality, ""metonymy/metaphor.) German theorists working with the French concept of intertextuality have critiqued its emphasis on textuality by foregrounding Bakhtin's dialogism as a materialist theory of the utterance. They stress the instance of enunciation, especially the activity of reading or interpretation, the ""concretization of the play of allusion, parody or motif. Linked to semiotics either through pragmatics (Schmid 141) or through C.S. Peirce's 'interpretant' as 'signifiance' (Stemple 89), intertextuality is located in the process of the reader's actualization of the text, the intertextual relation understood as a hermeneutic relation, 'the moment of the identity of texts' (Stierle 23, 16). It is not only to be studied as a 'Produktionsasthetische' as Kristeva suggests, but must also be elaborated as a 'Rezeptionsasthetische' (Stierle 9) within a theory of communication. Critiquing the supposed materialism of Kristeva's theory of the subjectless text and its claims to decentre the identity of the work, Stierle reframes the question of textuality in terms of identity and *intersubjectivity. (See ""communication theory.)

Intertextuality The work of the "Tartu School, especially of *Iurii Lotman in developing a semiotics of culture and theorizing the hierarchization of different levels of structuration that make a 'text/ are different developments of the synchronic view of textual relations. Lotman's concept of 'extratextual' is connected to the conditions of readability of a culture, in the relations of 'the ensemble of fixed elements in the text to the ensemble of elements from which the choice was made' (The Structure of the Artistic Text 89-90). 'Parody' and hidden polemic are considered under the term extratextual, which is thus linked to Bakhtin's 'dialogism.' The term 'intertextuality' is surprisingly absent in the work of a number of theorists of social discourse working on overlapping issues, notes Marc Angenot. Linking 'intertextuality' (circulation and transformation of ideologemes) with 'interdiscursivity' (interaction of contiguous axioms under a *hegemony), he aims to reorient the analysis of textual interrelations toward the location of rules or tendencies defining a particular historical configuration in a social discourse ('Intertextualite, Interdiscursivite, Discours social' 107). Texts are heterogeneous fragments cut from the social discourse which is the juxtaposition within a field of languages marked by a given hegemony. Intertextuality is extended here to multidisciplinary interdiscursivity. With the increasing importance of textual analysis in many disciplines, intertextuality is being associated through the interconnection of historicity and systematicity with the actualization in oral performance of textual structures (Zumthor), the complexities of ethnographic text construction in anthropology (Tyler), the reception of music (Karbusicky), the theorization of heterogeneous art forms such as the illustrated book (HansenLove) or film (Reader) and the transferential relation in psychoanalysis (Hand). (See also *discourse analysis theory.) Intertextuality is currently used less frequently and more critically, the concept of textuality having in many cases been abandoned for that of discourse (in the Foucauldian sense of an ontologically impure mix of textual structures, practices, institutional sites, and rules of application). (See also *Michel Foucault, *hermeneutics, "metacritictsm.) BARBARA GODARD

Primary Sources Angenot, Marc. 'Intertextualite, Interdiscursivite, Discours social.' Texte 2 (1983): 101-12. Bakhtin, M.M. Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. 1929. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. - and Pavel M. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. 1928. Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975- Texte (theorie du).' Encyclopedia Universalis. Vol. 15. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1973, 1013-17. 'Theory of the Text.' Trans. Ian Macleod. Untying the Fext. Ed. Robert Young. Boston/London: Routledge, 1981, 31-47. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein, eds. Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1991. Culler, Jonathan. 'Presupposition and Intertextuality.' Modem Language Notes 91.6 (1976): 1380-97. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grainmatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - Positions. 1972. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Genette, Gerard. Palimpsestes: La Litterature au second degre. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Groupe Mu, ed. Revue d'esthetiqtie 3/4 (1978). Hand, Sean. 'Missing You: Intertextuality, Transference and the Language of Love.' In Worton and Still, 79-91. Hansen-Love, Aage A. 'Intermedialitat und Intertextualitat: Probleme der Korrelation von Wort-undBildkunst-Am Beispiel der russischen Moderne.' In Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur hitertextualitat. Ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Sonderband 11. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1983, 291-360. Karbusicky, Vladimir. Tntertextualitat in der Musik Hinweise zu den Autoren.' In Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualitat. Ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Sonderband 11. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1983, 361-98. Kristeva, Julia. The Bounded Text.' In Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980, 36-63. - 'Pour une semiologie des paragrammes.' Tel Quel 29 (printemps 1967): 53-75. - 'Problemes de la structuration du texte.' La Nouvelle Critique. Special issue. 'Actes du Colloque de Cluny, 16-17 avril 1968' (1968): 55-64.

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Irony — 'La Productivite dite texte.' Communications i1 (1968): 59-83. — La Revolution du langage poetique. Paris: Seuil, i974. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. Abr. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Jenny, Laurent, ed. Poetiques 27 (1976). Lotman, Juri. The Structure of the Artistic Text. 1971. Trans. Donald B. Johnson. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977Morgan, Thais, ed. American Journal of Semiotics 3.4 (1985). Oliver, Andrew, ed. Texte 2 (1983). Reader, Keith A. 'Literature/Cinema/Television: Intertextuality in Jean Renoir's Le Testament du docteur Cordelier.' In Worton and Still, 176-89. Riffaterre, Michael. 'Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive.' In Worton and Still, 56-78. - The Interpretant in Literary Semiotics.' American Journal of Semiotics 3.4 (1985): 41-55. - 'Interpretation and Undecidability.' New Literary History 12.2 (1981): 227-41. Schmid, Wolf. 'Sinnpotentiale der diegetischen Allusion: Aleksandr Puskins Posthalternovelle und ihre Pratexte.' In Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualitat. Ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Sonderband n. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1983, 141-88. Sellers, Philippe, et al. [Tel Quel.] Theorie d'Ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968. Stempel, Wolf-Dieter. 'Intertextualitat und Rezeption.' In Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualitat. Ed. Wolf Schmid and WolfDieter Stempel. Sonderband 11. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1983, 85-110. Stierle, Karlheinz. 'Werk und Intertextualitat.' In Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualitat. Ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Sonderband 11. Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1983, 7-26. Tyler, Stephen A. '"Ethnography" Intertextuality and the End of Description.' American Journal of Semiotics 3.4 (1985): 83-98. Worton, Michael, and Judith Still, eds. Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. Zumthor, Paul. Tntertextualite et mouvance.' Litterature 41 (fevrier 1981): 8-16. La Nouvelle Critique. No. speciale (1968).

Irony The critical history of 'irony' invites a broad distinction between two uses of the term. In its first sense, dominant till the end of the i8th century, the term refers to a rhetorical or verbal mode - the dissimulation of ignorance (Gr. eironeia) by one who says other or less than he

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means (eiron) - as exemplified by Socrates in the Dialogues. Classical rhetoricians defined irony as a figure and a *trope; medieval theorists did likewise, though, typically, as a subcategory of allegoria: 'Allegory is other-speech. One thing is spoken, another is meant' (Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae). Samuel Johnson's single definition (with the illustration 'Bolingbroke was a holy man') conforms with traditional usage in limiting 'irony' to 'a mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words.' Irony so defined and practised is inherently corrective and unambiguous, normative and referential: spoken statements are dominated by intended meanings, falsehoods by truths, surface appearances by underlying realities. As recent commentators have emphasized, the 'dyadic ecart' basic to verbal irony 'was only possible in the stable order of representation that characterizes the classical episteme' (Kuzniar 144). (See *episteme.) *Wayne C. Booth's A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) argues for a return to the 'stable irony' enabled by that order. Use of the term irony in its second, and much more complex, sense, was introduced by German romantic theorists in the late i8th and early igth centuries. Friedrich Schlegel's redefinition is pivotal: irony is 'the recognition of the fact that the world in its essence is paradoxical and that an ambivalent attitude alone can grasp its contradictory totality' (Wellek 14). (See *paradox.) Irony so conceived, explains Schlegel, is by nature non-corrective in the sense that, like Socratic wisdom, it is selfregarding and endless: 'No things are more unlike than satire, polemic, and irony. Irony in the new sense is self-criticism [Selbstpolemik] surmounted; it is never-ending satire' (64). Non-normative and ethically indeterminate by virtue of the self-reflexiveness and synthetic balancing that it enjoins, this new, 'situational' irony (Muecke 42) confers the freedom of a divine authority. 'Supreme Irony,' Karl Wilhelm Solger can agree with his opponent Schlegel, 'reigns in the conduct of God as he creates men and the life of men. In earthly art Irony has this meaning - conduct similar to God's' (cited from Sedgwick 17). For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, irony in the Schlegelian sense seems indistinguishable from nihilizing subjective play, while *S0ren Kierkegaard sees in the whole of romantic irony an abbreviation of reality to the self-consciousness of the altogether bored human artist. The romantic no-

Irony tion of the artist as divine amoralist and ironic creator has had wide play in modern literary culture, thanks in some measure to the place it occupies in the writings of such figures as Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, whose irony strives 'to make us at home in indecision' (Burke 104). The ironies that 20th-century scholarship has identified as irony 'of Fate/ 'of events/ 'of Nature/ 'pure irony/ 'cosmic irony/ and 'metaphysical irony' represent, in effect, overlapping extensions or subcategories of the situational irony initially defined by German romanticism. 'Dramatic irony/ a term coined in the igth century, continues to test the wit of ironologists, since it refers to an irony (as in Sophoclean tragedy) that is at once situational and verbal (see Muecke 104-7; Tittler 38-9). Irony's full arrival as a modern critical term coincides with the ascendancy of a *New Criticism disposed to privilege situational over verbal irony. Essential to the best poetry, according to *I.A. Richards in 1924, irony is 'the bringing in of ... opposites' in such a way as to achieve a 'balanced poise' (250). Robert Penn Warren's 'Pure and Impure Poetry' (1942) offers to refine Richards' proposition by replacing 'opposites' with the more inclusive 'tensions.' The New Critical sense of irony is further expanded in *Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn (1947): not only is 'irony our most general term for indicating that recognition of incongruities - which ... pervades all poetry/ it is also 'the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context' (209-10). It follows from Brooks' use of the term that no *discourse can be unironical. Poststructuralist thought tacitly follows the New Critical tendency to value situational at the expense of verbal irony. (See *poststructuralism.) When in his 'The Rhetoric of Temporality' (1969), for example, *Paul de Man dismisses irony, he refers solely to 'the rhetorical mode' (222). In his Metahistory (1973), "Hayden White can affirm the concept of irony that he adapts from *Northrop Frye, but only as 'a mode of thought which is radically selfcritical' (37). More often, perhaps because of irony's association with New Criticism, the poststructuralist response to the term has been virtual silence. Though *]acques Derrida has been read as a master of that irony which consists in 'the power to entertain widely diver-

gent possible interpretations' (O'Hara 362), he rarely uses the term irony, and only in passing. And *J. Hillis Miller, in his discussion of 'undecidability' anthologized in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), can repeatedly refer to irony without 'explicitly' pronouncing 'the word' (Tittler 44 n6). As Joseph A. Dane observes, 'irony, however defined, suggests an authority' - even if limited to that of the romantic artist's successor, 'the postromantic critic' (11). C A M 1 L L E R. LA B O S S I E R E

Primary Sources Allemann, B. 'Ironie als literarisches Prinzip.' In Ironic und Dichtung. Ed. A. Schaefer. Munich: Beck, 1970, i1-37. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1979. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947.

Burke, Kenneth. Counter Statement, and ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1953. Dane, Joseph A. The Critical Mythology of Irony. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991. de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Temporality.' 1969. Repr. in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed., rev. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983, 187-228. Dyson, A.E. The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony. London: Macmillan, 1965. Handwerk, Gary. Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. Jankelevitch, Vladimir. L'lronie. 1936. Paris: Flammarion, 1964. Kierkegaard, S^ren. The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. 1841. Trans. Lee M. Capel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965. Knox, Norman. The Word 'Irony' and Its Context (3500-7755). Durham: Duke UP, 1961. Kuzniar, Alice A. Review of Marike Finlay, The Romantic Irony of Semiotics. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17 (1990): 144-6. Merrill, Reed. '"Infinite Absolute Negativity": Irony in Socrates, Kierkegaard and Kafka.' Comparative Literature Studies 16 (1979): 222-36. Muecke, D.C. The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen and Co., 1969. O'Hara, Daniel. Review of Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (1977): 361-4. Richards, I.A. Principles of Literary Criticism. 1924. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938. Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel: Literary Note-

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Isotopy books, 1779-1801. Ed. Hans Eichner. London: Athlone P, 1957. Sedgwick, G.G. Of Irony, Especially in Drama. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1935. Thompson, A.R. The Dry Mock: A Study of Irony in Drama. Berkeley: U of California P, 1948. Thomson, J.A.K. Irony: An Historical Introduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1927. Tittler, Jonathan. 'Approximately Irony.' Modern Language Studies 15 (1985): 32-46. Warren, Robert Penn. 'Pure and Impure Poetry.' 1942. Repr. in Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment. Ed. M. Schorer, J. Miles and G. McKenzie. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948, 366-78. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism (17501950): The Romantic Age. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

ISAS: see Ideological State Apparatuses

Isotopy Isotopy is 'a redundant set of semantic categories which make possible the uniform reading of a narrative' (*A.J. Greimas; Greimas and Courtes 1970:188). Isotopy depends on 'the permanence of a hierarchical classematic base' (Greimas 1966:96) which one can find in any given text. (See *classeme.) Conceived as a principle of coherence and at the same time as an actual set of features found in any *text, the phenomenon of isotopy is fundamental to explaining the fact that a given message is always understood as a whole of meaning and that, in the face of ambiguities, a reader will try to resolve them by adopting an unequivocal point of view. This search is particularly evident in the case of jokes and puns, where 'the mental pleasure resides in the discovery of two different isotopies within a supposedly homogeneous narrative' (Greimas 1966:71). Such a definition of isotopy is clearly semantic: it applies to content (as opposed to expression) and is linked to the notions of meaning and coherence. There is, however, another definition, proposed by Francois Rastier who sees isotopy as a larger phenomenon

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resulting from 'any iteration of a linguistic unit' (82). Such a definition would authorize many types of isotopies: phonetic, prosodic, stylistic, rhetorical, enunciative, syntactic, and so forth. To avoid confusion, many scholars now add the adjective 'semantic' to the word 'isotopy' in order to refer to isotopy in the strict sense of the word. Greimas and Courtes recognize that 'theoretically ... nothing stands in the way of transposing the concept of isotopy, developed and restricted up until now to the content plane, to the expression plane' (199). But in practical terms they focus their interest on the content plane (which combines, according to Louis Hjelmslev, form and substance). They make a distinction between grammatical isotopy (made of recurrent categories like gender and number) and semantic isotopy. The junction of these two planes is operated by means of actorial isotopy (see *actant). Another distinction is made between figurative isotopy (which is situated at the surface level of discourse) and thematic isotopy (which is embedded at a deeper level and may appear in numerous discourses). This distinction is developed by Courtes (1981) and has been useful in the analysis of narrative. (See *theme, *embedding, *discourse.) The meaning of the concept, nevertheless, has not been stabilized and much discussion has taken place since the publication of the dictionary of *semiotics (Greimas and Courtes) as to whether, for example, isotopy is a paradigmatic phenomenon or a syntagmatic one. See notably Pierre Lerat, for whom 'isotopy is a paradigm' and Francois Rastier, who holds the opposite view. These two authors, along with many others, agree, however, to define isotopy as the recurrence not of classemes, nor of semic categories, but of any specific seme. (See *seme.) One can find in Adriaens a presentation of this extremely rich concept in relation to narrative grammar. Despite its 'natural lubricity' (Kerbrat-Orecchioni) and the terminologic confusion which plagues it, the concept of isotopy has quickly become essential to semiotics. It has also proved to be useful in the analysis of dramatic works in relation to the distinction between isotopy of the action and isotopy of the representation (Pavis). CHRISTIAN VANDENDORPE

Lebensivelt Primary Sources Dubois, ]., F. Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg and P. Minguet. Rhetorique de la poesie: Lecture lineaire, lecture tabulaire. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1977. Greimas, A.J. Semantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Repub. PUF, 1986. Structural Semantics. Trans. D. McDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1983. - Du sens. Paris: Seuil, 1970. - and ]. Courtes. Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie du langage. Paris, 1979. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Trans. L. Crist, D. Patte, and others. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Rastier, F. Semantique interpretative. Paris: Hachette, 1987.

Secondary Sources Adriaens, M. Tsotopic Organization and Narrative Grammar.' PTL; A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 4 (1980): 501-44. Arrive, M. 'Pour une theorie des textes poly-isotopiques.' Langages 31 (1973): 53-63. Courtes, J. 'Contre-note.' Documents du Groupe de recherche en semio-linguistique (Paris) 3.29 (1981): 37-47Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. Troblematique de 1'isotopie.' In Linguistique et semiologie I: L'isotopie. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1976, 11-33. Klinkenberg, J.-M. Le Sens rhetorique: Essais de semantique litteraire, Toronto: Editions du GREF, 1990. Lerat, P. Semantique descriptive. Paris: Hachette, 1983. Pavis, P. Dictionnaire du theatre. Paris: Messidor, 1987. Stati, S. Tsotopy, Coreference, and Redundancy.' In Text and Discourse Connectedness. Ed. M.-E. Conte, J. Petofi and E. Sozer. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989, 207-22.

Jouissance: see Cixous, Helene; Irigaray, Luce; Feminist criticism, French; Pleasure/bliss

Langue/parole *Ferdinand de Saussure made the distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech or utterance) in his Course in General Linguistics. In an effort to define the object of linguistics, Saussure noted that what we think of as

language is something 'unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic sign' (7). The subject of linguistics consists of everything to do with human speech, whereas the object of linguistics is language as 'a self-contained whole and a principle of classification' that functions as 'the norm of all other manifestations of speech' (9). (See *subject/object.) Language as such may be separated from a very large pool of data concerning speech through a concept of system or structure: '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' (15). (See *sign.) As a system, langue is shaped by society - the entire community of language users - and as such, it is 'outside' the control of any individual. Parole, on the other hand, occurs as an individual act within the unassailable confines set up by langue. In contrast to speech (parole) as action, language (langue) is a completely passive storehouse of signs that appear together in *discourse only through the agency of speech. Langue and parole coexist in communication in the sense that parole generates a message and langue understands or interprets it. The langue /parole distinction and its awareness of the social kernel of all individual speech behaviour has been very influential for French *structuralism. GREGOR CAMPBELL

Primary Sources Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

Lebenswelt Lebenswelt, a term created by the German philosopher *Edmund Husserl, means literally 'life-world' and refers to the world of immediately lived, 'pre-scientific experience' of specific individuals, societies and cultures (Kockelmans 252, 256). This immediately lived experience constitutes the most basic field of phenomenological investigation. It is the context within which phenomenology's intuitional exploration and description of phenomena take place. The Lebenswelt is a concern of Husserl's throughout his work of the 19205 but becomes

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Lebeiiswelt a fully developed concept only in his final works. It is described in his last published work in contradistinction to the objectivist world of science, where the relationship between subject and object is imagined as the unproblematic perception of objects and relationships between objects which are themselves wholly determined and determinable by precise scientific rules. (See *subject/object.) In its naive conception of this relationship, where there is no contribution made to this perception by the constituting consciousness of the subject, this scientific-objectivist world-view is similar to that evinced by the natural attitude (see "bracketing). The Lebenswelt can only be described after the world-view of scientificobjectivism or the natural attitude has been bracketed ('Philosophy as Rigorous Science' 172; Kockelmans 256-9, 274-8). As the whole of Husserl's philosophy is concentrated upon the achievement of absolutely certain grounds for human knowledge, it is hardly surprising that he dismisses the scientific-objectivist world-view as one which can provide the necessary a priori conditions for such a foundation. Since scientific theory is given to abstraction and idealization, Husserl argues, there must be some even more prior realm of objects and experiences from which these idealizations and abstractions proceed (Kockelmans 257, 268; Sinha 64). This realm is precisely that of the Lebenswelt. For Husserl, this is one of the telling points which demonstrates that the world-view of scientific objectivism is derivative from and not prior to the Lebenswelt (Kockelmans 252; Hammond et al. 154). In addition, the a priori and certain status of the Lebenswelt is further secured against the claims of science by the allowance of cultural-historical differences between the ways distinct individuals, societies and cultures view the world. If there are as many world-perspectives as there are different cultures and societies at different points in time, then scientific objectivism is reduced to simply one worldview among many (Kockelmans 270-1). As a result, neither science nor any of the other multiple views of the world, whether in agreement with or formulated in reaction to this objectivist stance, can claim certainty (Kockelmans 256-66). Through an initial bracketing, we turn away from the scientific-objectivist world, the world as we (that is, Western post-Enlightenment humanity) have been taught to perceive it through the natural attitude, and in

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this way we have access to the Lebenswelt as the original life-world of our immediately lived, 'pre-scientific' experience (Kockelmans 257). The bracketing of this scientific-objectivist world-view does not, of course, lead to the rejection, denial or negation of science or scientific theories themselves, but to a characteristic suspension of any judgments concerning or any cognitive use of such concepts (Kockelmans 275). Husserl's stress upon the Lebenswelt's character as the world of our immediately lived, 'pre-scientific' experience leads to the lifeworld's essential and radical relativity; it is 'the moving historical field of our lived existence' (Wild 7). To solve this difficulty, since how can the essential features of the Lebenswelt be intuited and reflected upon if there are as many Lebenswelts as there are individuals, Husserl brackets the Lebenswelt itself, brings to bear the method of free-imaginative variation and uses these procedures to arrive at the necessary and invariable features of the Lebenswelt as such (Kockelmans 277). This mental 'stepping-back from' the Lebenswelt permits an examination of its essential structures, and the essential structures of consciousness which intuit them. One arrives at a description of the Lebenswelt itself, 'as a possible world of intersubjective experiences/ the 'actual' existence of which is not an issue, since the structures uncovered are present in every Lebenswelt, independent of historical and cultural contingencies (Kockelmans 277, 278-80). In the philosophies of Husserl's influential followers, such as *Martin Heidegger and *Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the notion of the Lebenswelt has been enlarged and transformed in keeping with a similar, and sometimes quite radical, transformation of the concepts of consciousness and intentionality. Heidegger's Dasein, for example, is similar to the Lebenswelt in terms of its central position in a philosophical-phenomenological system, although its constitution, conception and purpose are quite different. Heidegger undertakes the examination of the Dasein or the mode of existence (Existenz) of a human being in-the-world through a variation of Husserl's phenomenological method. However, while Husserl's philosophy aims at investigating and describing the Lebenswelt in order to arrive at its essential, invariant and universal features, as such, in Heidegger's philosophy, the concept of the Dasein stresses, not the arrival at essence,

Lebenswelt but the investigation of existence as the substance of human being. As such, the Dasein is marked by its uniqueness as a concept, but it also clearly takes Husserl's thesis of intentionality as its starting-point. For Husserl, human consciousness is an important part of the array of phenomena which compose the Lebenswelt; yet, it is still a part of the Lebenswelt. In contrast, for Heidegger, human consciousness or, more specifically, human existence as the Dasein's mode of being is ontologically marked by its difference from everything else which exists; it is not simply a part of a larger lifeworld, not simply a thing among things (Grossmann 170-1). In his redefinition of the oldest problem of philosophy, that of being and in turn that of the relationship between subject and object, Heidegger rejects the traditional conception of this relationship (with its implication that intentionality belongs primarily to inner subjective experience) and turns to the concept of the Dasein, the 'being to whom intentional comportments belong' (64). For Heidegger, the subject-object 'problem' disappears once the Dasein and its mode of being (Existenz) are understood as inherently intentional: 'The statements that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it is, is always already dwelling with the extant ... When ... we give the concise name "existence" to the Dasein's mode of being, this is to say that the Dasein exists and is not extant like a thing. A distinguishing feature between the existent and the extant is found precisely in intentionality' (64). Since there is this stress upon the Dasein and its mode or being - Existenz - as radically different from all other kinds of being, the Dasein is obviously a more ethically oriented concept that the Lebenswelt. Indeed, Heidegger comments that the ability to differentiate between the existent and the extant is exclusive to 'the human soul' (319). (See *intention/intentionality.) Phenomenological literary critics, like those of the *Geneva School, adapt and extend Husserl's concept of the Lebenswelt in their theories concerning both the function of the author and the constitution of the literary *text. (See *phenomenological criticism.) *Roman Ingarden, whose Das literarische Kunstwerk [The Literary Work of Art 1965] was so influential for the Geneva School, was among the first to apply Husserlian reduction or bracketing to the

process of literary interpretation, stating that the reader should aim at 'duplicating] the "sense-bestowing" intentional acts of the author' (Magliola 29). The Geneva School (usually taken to include such critics as Marcel Raymond, *Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard) also conceives of the text as the author's imaginative and selective transformation of his or her personal life-world, and of the intentional acts which comprise it (Magliola 28, 36). The resultant 'fictive construct' (Magliola 28) or textual Lebenswelt is, of course, created through language, but since language is part of the intentional structure of consciousness (in keeping with Merleau-Ponty's extension of the intentional field) and therefore of the individual author's Lebenswelt, the text is stamped with the unique 'network' of intentional acts and relations which comprise the author's consciousness. The presence and critical availability of this unique 'network' of authorial intentional acts which in their textual transformation comprise the 'text's Lebenswelt' or 'phenomenological ego' is a mainstay of phenomenological literary theory (Magliola 42). The exploration and delineation of what Magliola has called the 'author's unique imprint' (28) and what the Geneva School refers to as the 'author's experiential patterns' comprise phenomenological interpretation. This theory of the textual Lebenswelt also allows phenomenological critics to describe an author's oeuvre in terms of the general intentional structures of an entire body of texts (Magliola 32-3). However, this concentration upon the 'author's unique imprint' (28) does not mean that phenomenological criticism is simply a variation on biographical criticism, since the biographical critic treats the author's ego as truly available both outside the text and reflected in it. Phenomenological critics limit themselves solely to the confines of the literary text, specifically, to the confines of the 'text's Lebenswelt.' As a result, phenomenological criticism of the early Geneva School, generally places 'off-limits' an author's personal papers (diaries, letters, journals, and so forth), as well as texts in the work's surrounding cultural and historical field (Magliola 29). This 'intrinsic' method refers as well to the phenomenological critic's practice of bracketing his or her natural attitude, a requirement if one is to perceive and describe the 'text's Lebenswelt' and not mistake the author's actual ego for the text's phenomenological one. When the phenomenological

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Liminality critic is exploring and describing the intentional structure of a 'text's Lebenswelt,' however, this does not mean that he or she is searching for a definitive statement of the intentional acts which the author meant to place there. Instead, he or she attempts to delineate those intentional acts 'which actually appear in the work/ with no regard to authorial intention, in the non-philosophic sense (Magliola 29). In general terms, Husserl's concept of the Lebenswelt proves more productive for the Geneva School than Heidegger's reworking of it. In the view of the Geneva critics, Heidegger's literary criticism is not only rife with metaphysical presuppositions (Magliola 7), but also discounts the importance of the author's Lebenswelt in the production of the text's 'phenomenological ego' (Magliola 57, 62-3). While 'Heidegger insists on the radical absence of the author from the completed literary work' (Magliola 77), on the author's character as a 'conduit which receives Being, delivers it to the written word, and then self-destructs' (Magliola 73), he still finds it hard to avoid treating the text as an imaginative reworking of the author's personal life-world (Magliola 66-9). Consequently, many of the Geneva School criticize Heidegger for not maintaining the distinction between authorial and textual Lebenswelts. MARIE H. LOUGHLIN

Primary Sources Grossman, Reinhardt. Phenomenology and Existentialism. London: Routledge, 1984. Hammond, Michael, Jane Howarth and Russell Keat. Understanding Phenomenology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans., intro. and lexicon, Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Husserl, Edmund. 'Phenomenology.' In Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986, 121-40. - 'Philosophy as Rigorous Science.' In Husserl: Shorter Works. Ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1981, 166-97. Kockelmans, Joseph J. A First Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1967. Magliola, Robert. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 1977-

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Sinha, Debabrata. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1974Wild, John. Preface. In What Is Phenomenology? And Other Essays. By Pierre Thevenaz. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1962.

Leerstellen: see Ingarden, Roman; Iser, Wolfgang; Indeterminacy

Liminality The concept of liminality comes ultimately from Arnold Van Gennep, who synthesized the whole realm of ritual, and in liminality discerned three phases nearly universal: separation or preliminal rites, marge or liminal (threshold) rites, and agregation or postliminal incorporation rites. This tripartite structure links public rites, such as those of territorial passage, with personal rites of passage - initiations, marriages, funerals. Each phase has its signs - separation has death symbols (sacrifices, cutting implements); marge, inertness and indeterminacy symbols (transvestism, mock death); agregation, incorporation symbols threshold crossing, shared meals, handclasps, kisses, sexual contact, gift exchange, symbols such as rings and crowns. As Van Gennep noted, cultures take a special interest in the liminal stage, and anthropologist Victor Turner built on his predecessor's insights to make a veritable specialty of liminality (see especially The Ritual Process). For Turner, liminality is no thin line but an expanded zone, in which liminars may spend much time - as in betrothal or the sequestered life of tribal adolescents awaiting initiation. Liminality involves namelessness, absence of property, nakedness or uniform clothing, transvestism, sexual continence, minimized distinctions of sex, rank and wealth, humility, disregard for personal appearance, obedience, silence, sacred instruction, suspended kinship rights and obligations, invoking of mystical powers, foolishness, acceptance of pain, images of death and rebirth, a sense of comradeship (communitas) with fellow liminars (Turner, Process 106-7). The concept of liminality passed easily into literary study, and students of "literature have used it to explore indeterminate liminal states

Liminality in a wide range of literatures and literary periods. For example, literary journeys show liminal features; that the world's pilgrimage sites are on margins or borders, not in main population centres, emphasizes the separation from the world of those liminal travellers, pilgrims (Turner, Dramas 195-6), thus the communitas of Chaucer's pilgrims (see Pison) and the spiritual instruction in The Pilgrim's Progress. Moreover, pilgrimages are just one of many kinds of journey, and Van Gennep's analogy between journeys and life phases helps account for their ubiquity in folk-tale and literature as analogues of growing up (see Bishop, Rivers). Consequently, besides pilgrims, liminal figures include orphans, children and court jesters (Gilead, 'Victorian Novel'; lijima; Turner, Process). In Shakespeare, liminars and liminality abound. Edward Berry sees the comedies as 'comic rites of passage,' structured like Van Gennep's three-part rites: shipwrecks and banishments effect separation; the 'dislocation and confusions of identity, the ordeals, and the education characteristic of the liminal phase' occur in a green world like 'the sacred forests of initiation'; and agregation shows in 'rites of incorporation prominent in Elizabethan weddings - the exchanging of rings and oaths, kissing, feasting, and dancing.' Berry sees comedic disorientations - dream, error, madness, witchcraft, metamorphosis - as liminal (58; see also Falk); young men's conventional behaviour - 'writing of sonnets, wearing of lovelocks, posturing in romantic attitudes - fulfils many of the conditions of a liminal experience' (30). Like Turner, who notes that tribal rites of passage often involve altered language, Marjorie Garber detects language change at maturity in Romeo, Prince Hal and others (80-115); Brian Vickers notes shifts from prose to poetry at coming of age and onset of courtship (49, 53-4). Lear, divested of the defining roles of king and father, tears off his clothes and enters a hovel, like Turner's African king-elect taken the night before accession to a hut outside of town, stripped nearly naked, insulted, then 'born as a new chief (Process 95, 101). Liminality has been observed in a wide range of other genres. In Beowulf the deer trapped between the hounds and the mere images a kingdom caught between natural and unnatural warfare, and mankind caught in middle-earth between salvation and damnation (Higley). The 'liminality of Jacksonian society

poised between the traditional agrarian and mercantile social order and the new ways of commercial and industrial capitalism' (SmithRosenberg 377) spawned Davey Crockett. In The Turn of the Screw, thresholds are the meeting grounds of waking and dreaming, sanity and insanity (Rust). Liminality is pervasive in Victorian fiction: 'this twilight zone pervades most of Dickens's novels' (Greenstein 276), and so is anti-liminality, where 'covertly present ... are narrative events and symbols antithetical to the liminal myths that appear to emerge triumphant' (Gilead, 'Victorian Novel' 190-1): Oliver Twist spends much of his novel as liminal orphan pauper and underworld denizen but even after re-aggregation into middleclass society, he is denied marriage and thus proper consummation of his rites of passage (Anderson). Jane Eyre persists as liminal until she finally joins Rochester in honourable matrimony at Ferndean, but though this 'completes the rites of passage of Jane and Rochester, and the ritualization of the narrative as a whole, Ferndean remains liminal' (Gilead, 'Bronte's Novels' 311). Liminality and anti-liminality thus coexist, at least in the Victorian era (Gilead, 'Victorian Novels' igiff.). Liminality has also been applied to the material conditions of literary production: Steven Mullaney argues that the Elizabethan sense of the marginal space occupied by drama, in theatres 'outside the walls of early modern London in the "licentious Liberties,"' was quite different from the ancient Athenians' sense of drama as central to the culture, with the theatre centrally located in Athens (vii, 7-8). In language, too, 'the interstitial space between words and objects' is liminal (Urla 102); in comedy the space between word and meaning in a malapropism recreates lovers' liminal space. Riddles, common in liminality, often attend tribal weddings and literary suitor tests (Gorfain). Literary applications of liminality blossomed in the later 19805; the many recent doctoral dissertations using the concept attest to its usefulness, as does its fruitful application to literatures not only in English but also in French, Russian, Hispanic, Caribbean, and Japanese, and to ancient Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Hebrew literature (see Kelsey, Chamier, Tiffany, Walker, Deutsch, Firmat, Charles, Turner ['Liminality'], Fiveash, Perdue). L I N D A WOODBRIDGE and ROLAND ANDERSON

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Literary institution Primary Sources Anderson, Roland F. 'Structure, Myth, and Rite in Oliver Twist.' Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 238-57. Berry, Edward. Shakespeare's Comic Rites. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge UP, 1984. Bishop, Norma J. 'Liminal Space in Traveller's Tales: Historical and Fictional Passages.' Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State U, 1986. Chamier, Suzanne. The Experimental Poetics of Raymond Queneau.' Ph.D. diss., Washington U, 1985. Charles, Henry James. Theological-Ethical Appraisal of the Disclosure of Possibility for the Post-Colonial Caribbean via an Analysis of Selected Literary Texts.' Ph.D. diss., Yale U, 1982. Deutsch, Judith E. The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: Topoi and Change.' Ph.D. diss., Columbia U, 1985. Falk, Florence. 'Dream and Ritual Process in A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Comparative Drama 14 (1980-1): 263-79. Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke UP, 1986. Fiveash, Michael Matthew. The Still Point of the Turning World: A Study of the Metaphors of Liminality in Greek Literature and Religion.' Ph.D. diss., Boston U, 1980. Garber, Marjorie. Coming of Age in Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen, 1981. Gilead, Sarah. 'Liminality, Anti-liminality, and the Victorian Novel.' ELH: English Literary History 53 (1986): 183-97. - 'Liminality and Antiliminality in Charlotte Bronte's Novels: Shirley reads Jane Eyre.' Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987): 302-22. Gorfain, Phyllis. 'Riddles and Reconciliation: Formal Unity in All's Well That Ends Well.' Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976): 263-81. Greenstein, Michael. 'Liminality in Little Dorrit.' Dickens Quarterly 7 (1990): 275-82. Higley, Sarah Lynn. 'Aldor on Ofre; Or, The Reluctant Hart: A Study of Liminality in Beowulf.' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 342-53. lijima, Yoshiharu. 'Folk Culture and the Liminality of Children.' Current Anthropology 28 (1987): 541-8. Kelsey, Aline Suquet. 'Lancelot ou Le Chevalier de la Charrete: Le Trajet initiatique du heros.' Ph.D. diss., State U of New Jersey, 1986. Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988. Perdue, Leo G. 'Liminality as a Social Setting for Wisdom Instructions.' Zeitschrift fur Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 93 (1981): 114-26.

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Pison, Thomas. 'Liminality in The Canterbury Tales.' Genre 10 (1977): 157-71. Rivers, Joseph Tracy in. 'Pattern and Process in Early Christian Pilgrimage.' Ph.D. diss., Duke U, 1983. Rust, Richard Dilworth. 'Liminality in The Turn of the Screw.' Studies in Short Fiction 25 (1988): 441-6. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 'Davey Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America.' Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 325-50. Tiffany, Dana Rodman. The Adolescent God: The Entry of Alfred Jarry into the Symbolist AvantGarde in Paris, 1884-96.' Ph.D. diss., U of California, San Diego, 1984. Turner, Edith. The Literary Roots of Victor Turner's Anthropology.' In Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology. Ed. Kathleen M. Ashley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990, 163-9. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.

- 'Liminality and the Performative Genres.' In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John MacAloon. Philadelphia: ISIH, 1984, 19-41. - The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Urla, Jaqueline. 'New Perspectives in Anthropology and Modern Literature.' Sub-Stance 22 (1979): 97—106. Van Gennep, Arnold. Les Rites du passage. 1908. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Vickers, Brian. 'Rites of Passage in Shakespeare's Prose.' Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Cesellschaft West (1986): 45-67. Walker, Jeanne Murray. Totalitarian and Liminal Societies in Zamyatin's We.' Mosaic 20 (1987): 113-27.

Literary institution The literary institution is the field in which all literary experience is realized (Burger, 'The Institution of Art'). It encompasses two inseparable practices that work together to create a tension in literary modes of production. At one pole, the organizing practices bring together all the materials of the technical and organizational infrastructure of the institution. Here, technologies of reproduction and distribution include the oral, print, electronic, and various other media (cf. Innis). The economics of the institution encompass systems of government

Literature subsidies as well as the various cultural industries that ascribe an exchange value to the products of the institution. In turn, techniques of reproduction determine possible menus of criticism that bestow value on the literary products. This process is carried out through a vast variety of literary promotions that includes literary criticism itself as well as the more formal rituals of the art such as literary prizes, book festivals, publishers' conventions, and the like. In this way the organizing practices of the literary institution help establish critical acclaim and bestow legitimacy on the products of the institution. At the other pole, the imaginative or creative practices bring together all the materials of the aesthetic event that are handed down across the millennia - all the codes, norms, genres, themes, narrative styles, and all those artistic forms that give expression to literary content (Burger Theory; Belleau; Marcotte). Assuming that the author, reader and literary critic are co-creative participants already 'inserted' in the literary work, it follows that the creative practice also in part influences the possibilities of reception and criticism. Themes and narrative styles carry a "horizon of expectation that help form the way in which a story is experienced by a reader; a particular genre may be more familiar to readers of a certain age, national origin, social class or gender; and codes and norms of writing change from one epoch to another. None of the creative practices can be explained by reducing them to the organizing practices, but at the same time the two practices work together, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony, but always within the same frame of reference. (See also *code, *genre criticism, *theme, "metacriticism.) GREG NIELSEN

Primary Sources Belleau, Andre. 'Le Conflit des codes dans 1'institution litteraire quebecoise.' Libertc 134 (1981): 105-18. Burger, Peter. 'The Institution of Art as a Category in the Sociology of Literature.' Culture Critique 2 (1985): 5-33. - The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Dubois, Jacques. [.'Institution de la liiterature. Paris: Fernand Nathan Editions Labor, 1978. Innis, Harold. The Empire of Communications. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1950.

Marcotte, Gilles. 'Institutions et courants d'air.' Liberte 134 (1981): 15-21.

Literature Of all the definitions contained in this volume, the one for literature is easily the most fluid. As the collective term for the many divergent objects of study for most critics and scholars, including most of those named in this work, literature evolves as criticism evolves, and each critical school, as it defines its practice, recreates literature in its own image. That its definition is under constant revision would suggest that the objects it identifies are linked by relationships that are contingent upon historical circumstance or changing critical standards. Yet however much the sense of literature has evolved, there remain many theorists who argue that literary objects are distinctive, that they are conjoined by a defining essence or, at least, by a set of linguistic relationships. Literature has thus all the peculiarities of a sign system, yet one whose workings are as much a matter of disagreement as its referents. (See *sign.) Derived from the Latin litteratura, literature originally denoted either the ability to form letters or, more commonly, the quality of being widely read. The latter sense is intensified in vernacular usages of the term: literature in early modern Europe designated erudition among a broad range of polite learning, while its cognates, literate and, later, literary, referred to the condition of being well-read, what *E.D. Hirsch has recently termed 'cultural literacy.' That it usually implied polite reading meant that literature was identified with a *canon; this normative aspect is to a degree still implicit in the term, as it is unusual in common usage to speak of 'good' or 'bad' literature. Indeed the term is sometimes used honorifically, to denote, say, the most esteemed works within a culture, as in a 'national literature.' Less obvious though no less significant is the degree to which literature still relates to the act of reading. A recent specialized and neutral usage has the term denoting all reading material on a given topic, as in 'campaign literature' or 'computer literature.' Though some anthropologists insist that literature can be present in oral cultures, the term's associations with reading have retarded, in

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Literature common usage at least, such a broadening of its defining boundaries (Finnegan). These associations may also help to explain why, in the late i8th century, literature acquires its most familiar modern sense as an aggregate term for imaginative writings, including poems, plays, novels and short stories. Previously, eloquent writings, including select works of prose, had belonged to the rhetorical category of 'poetry,' a term which, being derived from the ancient Greek word for making or craft, pertained to invention and production. (See ""rhetorical criticism.) Literature, in contrast, has to do with consumption: poetry is composed and spoken, literature read and studied. The shift, then, from 'poetry' to 'literature' as the collective noun for imaginative works reflects a complex cultural change in the way works of art are valorized, a change brought about by, among other phenomena, a growth in readership at all social levels, the rise of the commercial book trade and the subsequent commodification of published works. Invention is still prized, as the modern cults of genius and originality may illustrate, but the social function of written art is rarely understood in relation to the practical requirements of either the author or the immediate occasions such art is designed to address. Literature is valued by and for readers, either for its effects or, as some theorists maintain, for itself, as if it involved a non-instrumental, imaginative act of reading. Modern concepts of literature assume this normative shift from invention to reading in the way they supplement older mimetic or pragmatic theories of poetry by focusing less on the truth-value or social function of a *text than on the text in isolation, or the mode of its comprehension by the reader. Literature, like poetry before it, has been understood to be either a fictive art or a verbal art, or both. Yet where Sidney could defend poetic ""mimesis by asserting that the poet 'nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth/ modern fictive concepts of literature, such as *I.A. Richards' theory of literature's distinctive 'pseudo-statements/ are concerned less with the ethical nature of the poetic utterance than with problems of reading and interpretation. Even speech act theorists, who have done most recently to equate literature with fictiveness, assume that literary works are merely representations of verbal acts, representations that have no 'illocutionary' force and no self-evident cognitive value;

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as such, these theorists claim, literature is an autonomous ""discourse that performs no practical function in society (Ohmann, Woodmansee). (See ""speech act theory.) Arguments on behalf of a fictive concept of literature have the virtue of claiming as literature works from a variety of cultures and classes, from fabliau to popular fiction to ""myth, though they inevitably exclude didactic works, and genres without obvious mimetic properties such as love poetry or the essay. (See ""genre criticism.) Hence such arguments usually stipulate that fiction is a common feature of literary works, though not necessarily their defining essence (Todorov). Verbal concepts of literature are more varied, though most imply a division between the peculiarly refined or figurative character of literary language and the more functional nature of performative discourses such as science or ordinary speech. Versions of this argument include the Russian formalist theory of literariness, whose defining quality is a special selfreflexive or emotive use of language; New Critical and structuralist doctrines of ""irony, ambiguity or verbal structure, doctrines that emphasize the autotelic economy of the literary text; and more recent rhetorical and deconstructionist arguments that apply the term literature to specific verbal features in any text which 'resist' assimilation to conventional meanings or systematic thought. (See Russian ""formalism, *New Criticism, ""structuralism, ""deconstruction.) This last argument suggests, for some, that no absolute distinction can be maintained between literary language and other types of discourse; even ordinary speech, it is claimed, may evince a host of figurative qualities (*Fish). Such thinking may resemble earlier, pragmatic notions of literature, though the emphasis of recent ""critical theory has been less on the instrumentality than the interpretation of literature. Arguments for a verbal concept of literature often recognize as literary a broad range of works, both fictional and non-fictional, though may not adequately account for the significance and attributes of certain works, such as the realist novel, where linguistic or stylistic properties seem of secondary importance to aspects of narrative or referentiality. Opposed, perhaps, to both the verbal and fictive concepts is the claim that literature itself is but a conventional grouping, a separate genre in effect, that includes within loose

Logocentrism boundaries a range of forms and modes (georgic, short story, essay, and so forth) related not by a defining essence but by contingency, including changing notions of literary value (Fowler). Related to this argument are aesthetic definitions that posit certain normative if conventional criteria, such as 'aesthetic pleasure' or 'perceptiveness,' which a work must satisfy in order to qualify as literature (Lyas). Both these definitions, the generic and the aesthetic, imply a return to the pragmatic theories of old, though even in these arguments the priority of consumption over invention, reading over writing, is apparent: whether literature is treated as a category bounded by convention or subjective criteria, it is a category that has to do with how a work may be read and received, and not with how or why the work is produced. From there, it is but a short step to institutional and historicist definitions of literature. Because literature in its modern sense is a relatively recent usage, many critics, including Marxists, literary sociologists and cultural materialists, maintain that the concept makes sense only in the context of modern critical and pedagogical practices, the context, that is, of how literature is read and consumed. (See *Marxist criticism, *sociocriticism, "cultural materialism.) The definition and value of literature, they argue, are primarily determined in accordance with the changing disciplinary interests of academic and cultural institutions, interests that have mainly to do with the reception, preservation and cultural reproduction of literary texts (Bennett, Graff, *Williams). Literature, in this view, is everything that is taught in departments of literature or criticized by literary critics, and hence the category of literature narrows or expands with the way critics and teachers perceive the social purpose of their work. Other critics, including New Historicists, use similar historical and sociological arguments to contest theories of the autonomy of the literary text. (See *New Historicism.) These critics consider literature a social practice, one that can never be absolutely distinguished either from other practices or from other, extra- or non-literary discourses. Their arguments most closely resemble classical, pragmatic claims for the social utility of literary invention. Many of these critics reject the term literature as inadequate and replace it

with its antecedents, notably rhetoric and 'poetics,' in the hope of making explicit the productive, instrumental nature of writing. T R E V O R ROSS

Primary Sources Bennett, Tony. Outside Literature. London: Routledge, 1990. Finnegan, Ruth. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Fish, Stanley E. 'How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?' New Literary History 5 (1973): 41-54Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Hernadi, Paul, ed. What Is Literature? Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Kernan, Alvin. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Lyas, Colin. The Semantic Definition of Literature.' Journal of Philosophy 66.3 (1969): 81—95. Ohmann, Richard. 'Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature.' Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971): 1-19. Reichert, John. Making Sense of Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977. Striedter, Jurij. Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Todorov, Tzvetan. 'The Notion of Literature.' New Literary History 5 (1973): 5-16. Wellek, Rene. The Attack on Literature and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Woodmansee, Martha. 'Speech-Act Theory and the Perpetuation of the Dogma of Literary Autonomy.' Centrum 6 (1978): 75-89.

Logocentrism Logocentrism, a term coined by "Jacques Derrida, was first given publicity in his De la Grammatologie [Of Grammatology 1967; trans. 1976] and has occupied a central place in the polemics of Derrida and his deconstructionist followers ever since. (See *deconstruction, *grammatology.) It denotes the position that words, writings, ideas, systems of thought are fixed and sustained by some "authority or centre external to them whose meaning, vali-

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Logocentrism dation and truth they convey. (See *centre/decentre.) This validation 'from the outside' may consist of something as simple as mere objects 'out there' in the 'real' world beyond language, apparently referred to by words. The everyday, normative logocentric assumption is that language refers and so also does language organized into "text; that signs have referends or signata, that words make present to the reader or hearer ascertainable, decipherable meanings, that is, they contain and convey some 'presence' or presences from outside or beyond themselves. (See *sign, "metaphysics of presence.) Reference is, in this view, transcendent. (See "reference/referent.) This logocentric assumption about how words and thinking operate has, according to Derrida, been the foundation of the whole history of Western metaphysics and has dominated Western thought and linguistics from Plato until the present. Deconstruction is thus a mode of analysis that sets out to help us see through, to historicize and so to undermine this conceptual mind-set which has been the glue binding all of Western thinking and writing. 'Presence' is variously manifested in Western thinking as 'presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/ existence (ousia), temporal presence as point (stigme) of the now or of the moment (nun), the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as an intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth' (Of Grammatology 12). '// n'y a pas de hors-texte/ Derrida's notorious declaration (Of Grammatology 158), commonly, though very roughly, translated into English as 'There is nothing outside of the text/ is the best-known slogan for this principled opposition to presence. One of the most commonly occurring manifestations of presence is in conventional concepts of speech as the words of real speakers who provide an authoritative source and basis of meaning, and of such speaking as the essence of writing - whose meaning is grounded in the authority of 'authors.' This, Derrida has insisted, is the fallacy of phonocentrism, a term he uses interchangeably with logocentrism. Against logocentrism or phonocentrism Derrida opposes ecriture (usually, though not very helpfully, translated as writing). Ecriture is the textual condition that best answers the allegation of "Ferdinand de Saussure in his Cours de

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linguisticjue generale that in linguistic systems 'there are only differences, without positive terms.' "Structuralism borrowed from linguistics the term diacritical to indicate this differential (rather than referential) nature of linguistic systems. Derrida's portmanteau French coinage difference - conveying all at once the relativist, relational principle of perpetual meaning, difference (difference), and also bringing home the perpetual elusiveness or deferredness of meaning - celebrates what is for Derrida the essence of ecriture and the opposite of, and alternative to, logocentrism or phonocentrism. (See*differance/difference.) Ecriture is anti-logocentric not least because it manifestly exists and means apart from the originating, fathering, pen-holding hand or author. Western logocentrism, the 'metaphysics of presence,' is referred back to Plato's condemnation in the Phaedrus of writing as a bastardized and confusing mode of communication precisely because, in writing, the logos or word is separated from the moment or site of origin, the 'father.' It is just this separation that deconstruction celebrates. Derrida's analysis of the founding Platonic concept of the logos, the word, as 'son' of a 'fathering' origin (see 'The Father of the Logos') is designed to place, and accuse, logocentrism as a key aspect of Christian and biblical thought about the Divine Logos, Son of the Divine Father ('In the beginning was the Word'). The term theologocentrism is sometimes used to assert the Christian frame of logocentrism - what Derrida (after "Heidegger) labels ontotheology (just as phatlogocentrism is used by feminists, after Derrida's hostile analysis of Lacan's seminar on Poe's The Purloined Letter in 'Le Facteur de la verite,' to assert logocentrism's phallocentric, male dominant, patriarchal cast of mind about the authority and origins of meaning). (See "Lacan, "phallocentrism.) The persistent annexation of key terms from within biblical "textuality and "hermeneutics and Christian theology - Logos, Father, Son, Genesis, Ecriture (= Scripture), ousia (cf. parousia, a central New Testament term for the Second Advent or 'appearing' of Christ), discussions of the 'Real Presence' of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist - establishes deconstruction as a self-conscious undoer not only of Western metaphysical orthodoxies in general but of Judaeo-Christian orthodoxies in particular. Many of the difficulties involved in anti-

Margin logocentric analysis are well known to Derrida, if not always to other deconstructionists. Indeed the way deconstruction can be observed to contradict and thus undo itself is sometimes heralded as both the proof and the glory of the deconstructive enterprise. From the start Derrida has affirmed his belief that, though he might wish to transcend the hold of logocentrism, to decentre the word, and so on, he and Western metaphysics are simply stuck in and with the logocentricity of tradition. Deconstructionists will also sometimes acknowledge that theirs is a version of the old Cretan Liar *paradox - namely they assert the error of logocentrism and avow the *indeterminacy of meaning by means of a positive lexicon of terms for difference/deferring (not least the central term differance itself) in texts offered as authoritative analyses of the Western tradition, through readings of texts (philosophical, poetic, fictional) that are offered as true and final readings, with all of this analytical work reliant on the absolute, always deferred-to authority of language-systematizing and historically fixing texts such as dictionaries (see Derrida's persistent use of Littre in particular). Anti-logocentric practice is on this reckoning extremely logocentric. Further, and this deconstructionists are more reluctant to acknowledge, there is a good deal of force in Derrida's own awareness (see, for example, 'Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book') that an anti-logocentric, self-deconstructing strain has infected Judaeo-Christian biblicism and theology right from their (putative) origins in Moses' broken Tables of Law, so that the logocentrism under attack is by no means the monolithic conceptual enterprise commonly alleged and, in its theologocentristic aspects, at least, has all the appearance of a polemical straw-man (cf. Handelman). VALENTINE

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Primary Smtrces Derrida, Jacques. De la Crammatologie. 1967. Of Cramniatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - 'Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book.' In L'Ecriture et la differance. 1967. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. - The Father of the Logos.' In La Dissemination. 1972. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - 'La Facteur de la verite.' Poetique 21 (1975). 'The

Purveyor of Truth.' Trans. Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron, and M.-R. L[ogan]. Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 31-113. Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy. Special issue. - Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. - 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.' In L'Ecriture et la differance. 1967. Writing and Difference. 1978. Handelman, Susan. The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany: State U of New York P, 1982. Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.

Margin The term margin has gained theoretical eminence with the work of "Jacques Derrida, for whom centre and margin indicate constructed limitations embedded in a process that exceeds binary and hierarchical oppositions. (See "centre/decentre, "binary opposition.) In a traditional hermeneutic or philological view, the literal margins of a page represent an important if secondary space of understanding and commentary, for annotation and marginalia or correction and censorship. (See *hermeneutics.) While a certain explanatory power is thus attributed to the margin, margin and centre are defined by a clear distribution of boundaries. Against this notion of the margin as a fixed space outside a main "text, Derrida suggests that the excess of the white page over its marks offers but one possible allusion to margins of meaning that operate both inside and outside the marked space. Already in his early De la Grammatologie [Of Grammatology 1967; trans. 1976], analysing the notion of the supplement in Rousseau's texts, he emphasizes 'the power of exteriority as constitutive of interiority: of speech, of signified meaning, of the present as such' (313). (See *grammatology, *supplementarity.) Derrida's concomitant strategy of differance (deferral) challenges the possibility of an identity, sameness, or inside that could be conceived of independently of the altering power of its difference, its other, or its margin (itself depending, in turn, upon further contextual frames of reference), and is related to his critique of the notion of origin (for instance in his book on *Husserl, La Voix et le phenomene [Speech and Phenomena 1967; trans.

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Margin 1973]). (See *differance/difference,*self/other.) Derrida seeks to show that the origin cannot be thought of as such without its derivative which therefore takes on originary powers itself and thus puts the very concept of origin into question; as Vincent Descombes has observed in Le Meme et I'autre [Modern French Philosophy 1979; trans. 1980], 'the second is not that which merely arrives ... after the first, but that which permits the first to be the first' (145). This 'originary delay' already inherent in any primary term 'displaces' rather than inverses the traditional concept of the margin as the place of the commentary, the added, the later and the secondary, since it does not make the marginal into a new origin or centre. The asymmetrical shifting of oppositions, which Derrida aims at the unifying Hegelian contraries, unstructures the dividing-line by which oppositions are determined. Such symmetrical correspondences are typically transformed and mobilized in Derridean texts into a series of incomplete doubles that cannot be arrested or 'grounded' by an ultimate reference (which Derrida calls a transcendental signified). (See *signified/signifier/signification.) In 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' (Writing and Difference 278-93), the essay by which he became first known in North America, Derrida discusses the decentring enterprise of ethnology, and in particular *Claude Levi-Strauss' account of the 'acentric structure' (Writing and Difference 286) of myths in The Raw and the Cooked. (See *myth.) Derrida suggests that the nature of the field of mythology, language, constitutes a 'field of infinite substitutions' that 'excludes totalization' not because it is too large, but because 'a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions' is missing: 'One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the *sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center's place in its absence - this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more' (Writing and Difference 289). (See "totalization.) Derrida's text here extends and displaces a structuralist critique of empiricism - a critique that emphasizes the relational functioning of signifiers among each other while grounding them with respect to the signified. (See *structuralism.) The unlimited movement and play

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of signification motivates the series of mark, march and margin Derrida develops in 'The Double Session' (Dissemination 173-285). (See theories of *play/freeplay.) Since each mark is constituted by its contexts and its limit, it is seen as mediated by a continual process of contextual 're-marking' that undoes the oppositions in which it is - necessarily - first approached. Drawing in particular on Mallarme's fascination with the 'blank' and the 'fold' (blanc, pli), Derrida attributes a destabilizing and de-limiting power of signification to the 'ordered return of the white spaces' (178) that forces continual re-marking and rereading, and runs counter to any thematic critical endeavour. This 'surplus mark, this margin of meaning' (251) and 'onward march' (245) of Mallarme's text occurs in its 'full' white marks (snow, swan, paper, virginity), but finds as well 'one of these representatives representing nothing in the blankness or margins of the page' - without becoming itself a 'fundamental signified or signifier' (252). Textual signification does not occur in the full sense of marks, but enters between them, in the '"blank" meaning,' in the 'non-sense of spacing, the place where nothing takes place but place' (257). Thus a signifying function but not a fixed space is attributed to margins. The liminal role of margins, seemingly outside and yet a part of a text for which they are a medium (a function which Derrida discusses as well in La Verite en peinture [The Truth in Painting 1978; trans. 1987] in terms of the frame and the 'parergon') is also explored in Derrida's minute attention to 'marginal' text types that mark the 'main' text's boundaries, such as titles, epigraphs, signatures (for instance in 'Signature, Event, Context'), or footnotes. (See *liminality.) In the 'Prefacing' to his book Dissemination, 'Outwork/ Derrida shows the multiple temporal and logical position of both introductions and conclusions. Here as elsewhere the study of literal spacing investigates and displaces knowledge as a network of significations that is utterly dependent on the positionality of its marks (Positions is the title of a book of interviews with Derrida). The preface to Derrida's book significantly entitled Margins of Philosophy, Tympan,' again enacting and alluding to its own strategy and uncertain status by a spatial arrangement of 'literary' and 'philosophical' texts, probes the relationship between knowledge and its margins by investigating philosophy as a *dis-

Metalanguage course propelled by the (inherently impossible) effort to master its other, its own limit and margin. Philosophy 'has always insisted upon assuring itself mastery over the limit (peras, limes, Grenze), It ... has believed that it controls the margin of its volume and that it thinks its other ... Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition, its production' (x). Derrida's rethinking (or re-marking) of marginality has emerged in a period that has broadly questioned the relationship between centres and margins, as evidenced, for example, by *Michel Foucault's influential investigations of strategies of exclusion and *power. These inquiries - generally marked by a certain 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and mistrust towards forms of totalization - have increasingly linked questions of class, race, gender, and colonialism to forms of knowledge (savoirs) and its mediations in language as specific discourses. (See "post-colonial theory.) *Edward Said's study Orientalism - although often explicitly directed against Derridean *deconstruction - traces the process by which knowledge and learning can essentialize an exotic geographical margin as object, an other that becomes the medium of a collateral self. (See *essentialism.) Said charges that Orientalism and Orientalist discourse (his usage of these terms has influenced, among other studies, several works on 'Africanist' discourse) construct a relationship between knowledge and geography that both helps to 'produce' the Orient (3) and simultaneously 'has less to do with the Orient than it does with "our" world' (12). (See *Black criticism.) Said diagnoses this distribution of places, roles and power as 'radical realism,' a form of knowledge based on representation and the crucial role of the copula 'is' (72). Homi K. Bhabha has analysed the compulsive repetition of this 'mode of representation of otherness' as a fixity necessary for stereotypes which contain both the alluring and the threatening powers of racial, cultural and historical otherness and marginality. Perhaps the most effective analyses of the relationship between representation, essentialism and marginality have been produced by feminist studies and in particular by those feminisms that have refused to reconstruct representations of 'woman' as a symmetrical answer to marginalizations of woman as other in male-dominated discourses. (See *feminist criticism.) While *Luce Irigaray has

analysed, for example in Speculum de I'autre femme [Speculum of the Other Woman 1974; trans. 1985], the repression of 'woman' as invisible other outside patriarchal representation and its specular, narcissistic logic of the same, "Julia Kristeva rejects 'the very dichotomy man/woman ... as belonging to metaphysics' ('Women's Time' 33) and has problematized representation and identity as a religious 'phantasmic necessity' (32) to be challenged by forms of feminism insisting on difference. (See *patriarchy.) The 'rethinking of margins and edges' (Hutcheon 42) has also played an important role in theories of the postmodern and its decentring strategies. (See *postmodernism.) WINFRIED SIEMERLING

Primary Sources Bhabha, Homi K. 'The Other Question ... Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.' Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. 1972. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - Margins of Philosophy. 1972. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. - Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1984. - The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. - Writing and Difference. 1967. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. 'Women's Time.' Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7.1 (1981): 13-35. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.

Metalanguage Metalanguage is a term first used by the Russian formalists to denote a language that makes assertions about other languages. (See Russian 'formalism.) According to *Roman Jakobson, metalinguistic communicative acts are oriented towards the code of communication

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Metalanguage itself, as when two individuals discuss whether they are understanding each other. (See *code, "communication theory.) The disciplines of linguistics and *semiotics are metalanguages insofar as they each attempt to explain language through a set of coherent and complementary terms and procedures. Literary criticism, in its traditional form, is also a metalanguage - a language that seeks to explain *literature, another language. Metalanguage has become an issue in critical studies in two ways: (i) poststructuralist critiques have vigorously questioned the possibility of metalanguages; (2) discourse analysis has identified the operation of *ideology with the role of discourses that explain and organize other discourses. (See *poststructuralism, *discourse analysis theory, *discourse.) Metalanguages seek to rise above their objects in order to examine them, but poststructuralists have questioned the possibility of such disinterested examination. At the end of The Fashion System, for instance, *Roland Barthes qualifies the structuralist model he has deployed by situating himself, the analyst, as a component within the analytic system. (See *structuralism.) In so doing he qualifies his own 'authority to produce a metalanguage that would explain the sign system of fashion. (See *sign.) The analyst's language is always 'committed,' argues Barthes, which means that its explanation is always preconditioned and hence limited by the analyst's 'historical situation.' As a result, 'the relation between system-object and the analyst's metalanguage does not ... imply any "real" substance to be credited to the analyst, but only a formal validity' (The Fashion System 293-4). Because of the historically limited position of the analyst, there is no ultimate critical metalanguage: one analyst's explanation can be another's object of study, and so on in an infinite regress. The poststructural questioning of metalanguage is best known through the work of "Jacques Derrida. Derrida undermines the claims of metaphysics to be a metalanguage. For Derrida, the problem with metaphysics as with all metalanguage - is that in order to articulate first principles, to be the language of languages, it has to efface its own status as language. Derrida puts into question the authority of metaphysics by insisting on its status as writing - with all the implications the term holds for him. Even the (meta)language of

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'being as such' can only present itself, finally, in language. Certain versions of discourse analysis, while accepting the philosophical impossibility of metalanguages, have maintained the term as part of the ideological study of texts. Colin MacCabe, for instance, argues that classic realist texts work by means of a 'hierarchy of discourses' in which one discourse - the narrative prose - functions as a metalanguage that explains (away) those sections of the text contained in implicit or explicit inverted commas. The authority of the metalanguage is itself assured ideologically, that is, by its appeal to an imaginary 'real' and its simultaneous effacement of its own status as discourse. Writes MacCabe: 'What I have called an unwritten prose (or metalanguage) is exactly that language, which while placing other languages between inverted commas and regarding them as material expressions which express certain meanings, regards those same meanings as finding transparent expression within the metalanguage itself . . . [Metalanguage] is not regarded as material; it is dematerialised to achieve perfect representation - to let the identity of things shine through the window of words' (Tracking the Signifier 35). Though MacCabe concentrates his analysis on classic realism, there is a sense in which all texts construct relations of discursive dominance and subordination. These relations are the effect of the text's rewriting or reproduction of literary and ideological norms. At the same time, it is possible to categorize texts in terms of their greater or lesser insistence on a strict hierarchy of discourses. Roland Barthes' distinction between 'readerly' and 'writerly' texts might be understood from this point of view. (See "readerly/writerly text.) Readerly texts depend very much on the ordering power of a metalanguage. In such texts, the hermeneutic and proairetic codes organize the other textual codes in order to impose their terms 'according to an irreversible order' (S/Z 30). Writerly texts, on the other hand, would resist such an ordering in favour of an unlimited polysemia. A key effect of S/Z is to show that there is no absolutely irreversible textual order. Even the most apparently readable text contains elements that undermine the organizing authority of its metalanguage. J A M I E DOPP

Metonymy/metaphor Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. - S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. 'White Mythology.' In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton P, 1956. MacCabe, Colin. Tracking the Signifier. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.

Metaphysics of presence *Deconstruction, according to *Jacques Derrida, seeks to expose the often hidden workings of what he calls the 'metaphysics of presence.' This phrase refers to the assumptions of the metaphysical and philosophical tradition which are founded on a belief in 'presence/ that is, on a faith in some unifying transcendental reference point that alone can guarantee the ultimate intelligibility and totalizing power of its *discourse. This centre can take many forms: God, truth, origin, arche, finality, or telos. According to Derrida, for example, *Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of the signified functions as a metaphysical centre, as does the phallic 'lack' which *Jacques Lacan identifies as the truth of castration grounding the symbolic order. (See *signified/signifier/signification, *desire/lack, *imaginary/symbolic/real, *totalization.) Derrida points out that the thinking of history has always been grounded in metaphysics and in the West this means that history has always been conceived of as 'a detour between two presences' (L'Ecriturc et la differance [Wn'fing and Difference]), as the interval of an exile from a 'proper' place to which one returns after a period of delay and wandering. In metaphysical terms the 'fall' into history — into time and space and away from original presence - is always at the same time a fall into the order of language and of the *sign. In this 'fallen' realm we dwell in, the signified presence is always absent although both preserved and promised - its advent deferred or postponed until the parousia at the end of time. Derrida uses this Greek word which means 'present' or 'being present' as an interchange-

able term for 'presence'; it has a specific theological significance as well, referring to the advent or second coming of Christ on Judgment Day, a meaning which Derrida is clearly playing on. He also uses the temporal sense of 'present/ as well as the idea of being present, or the idea of the subject's presence to himself in consciousness, all meanings which imply, in one way or another, the immediacy of consciousness to its object. (See also *white mythology, *supplementarity, ""trace, *logocentrism.) JOSEPH ADAMSON

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. L'Ecriture et la differance. 1967. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Metonymy/metaphor When grouped together, metonymy/metaphor refer to the two modes of arrangement involved in any linguistic utterance: (i) combination (metonymy), the linking of one *sign with another in speech or writing to form a context; (2) selection (metaphor), the choice of one sign from among a group of alternatives similar to it in some respects, different in others. Metonymy thus indicates relations among signs based on external contiguity; metaphor refers to relations of internal similarity. In a simple sentence like 'The cat is on the mat/ 'cat' is linked to 'on the mat' as subject to predicate. 'Cat' is itself composed of smaller linguistic units, the phonemes (distinctive sounds) /c/, /a/ and /t/. These are relations of contiguity. But 'cat' is chosen from a set of alternative names such as 'feline/ or 'tabby/ or from names of other animals, such as 'dog' or 'horse/ which could have been used as subject of 'is on the mat.' These are relations of similarity. Until the Russian-American linguist *Roman Jakobson redefined metonymy and metaphor as the two poles of linguistic operation in Fundamentals of Language (1956), the terms had been generally used to designate tropes, or figures of speech. (See *trope.) A metonymy (from the Greek for change of name) is a figure in which the name of one thing is used for another to which it has a relation of contiguity,

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Metonymy/metaphor as the use of 'crown' to mean the king. A metaphor (from the Greek for transfer) is a trope in which the meaning of a word or phrase is shifted to a new domain on the basis of a relation of similarity or analogy, as 'He is a fox,' to mean that he is sly. Jakobson and other Russian formalists had already argued during the 19205 and 19305 that literary styles can be understood in terms of a ""binary opposition between metonymy and metaphor. (See Russian *formalism.) By expanding the meaning of metonymy/metaphor to include all linguistic, indeed all symbolic, functioning, Jakobson asserted that the processes of contiguity and similarity, which traditional rhetoric and poetics had long recognized at work in these figures of speech, form the basis not only of literary styles but also of all language and thought, including everyday speech, even unconscious formations such as dreams. All rhetorical figures can be explained as variations or combinations of these two tropes; romanticism and symbolism are metaphorical styles while realism is metonymic; the 'primary process' mechanisms which the founder of psychoanalysis, *Sigmund Freud, isolated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to account for the operations of unconscious thought are either metonymic - 'displacement' and 'condensation' - or metaphoric - 'identification' and 'symbolism.' (See *psychoanalytic theory.) These latter assimilations were adapted and revised by the psychoanalyst ""Jacques Lacan in his Ecrits (1966). The marriage of linguistics, poetics and psychoanalysis became one of the driving forces behind the recent revival of interest in the formerly-moribund field of rhetoric. The Belgian linguists who call themselves Groupe Mu have undertaken a complete revision of the theory of rhetoric; the historian *Hayden White has used the expanded notion of the trope to analyse historical and cultural writing; the revised rhetoric has stimulated important contributions to the field of literary criticism by scholars such as *Paul de Man, Shoshana Felman, ""Gerard Genette, ""David Lodge, and ""Tzvetan Todorov; the often conflictual relation between ""literature and philosophy has been re-examined in studies of metaphor by *Paul Ricoeur and ""Jacques Derrida; most recently, feminist thinkers have attacked the sexist implications of binary oppositions in general, and of that between

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metaphor and metonymy in particular (Schor). (See also ""feminist criticism.) The connection between rhetoric, mind and language, however, reaches back to antiquity. Aristotle claims that the ability to find metaphors is the mark of genius, 'since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars' (Poetics 14593). Quintilian concludes that all language must be figurative, for rhetoric is the shape (form), or figure, of the linguistic expression, and all thoughts must take on some particular form in order to be uttered (Institutio Oratoria 9.1.12). It was not until the i8th century, however, that the attempt was made to link a small number of tropes to what were then considered the basic processes of thought. According to John Locke and David Hume, there are three fundamental categories of the association of ideas - similarity, correspondence (relation between things associated through habit or custom) and connection (relation between a thing and the class that contains it). (In his treatise On Memory and Recollection, Aristotle had already stated that one is reminded of a thing by something similar, opposite or contiguous.) Using this system of classification, the French grammarian Nicholas Beauzee assigned one trope to each of the categories: metaphor to similarity; metonymy to correspondence; and ""synecdoche to connection. In the igth century Jeremy Bentham revived the ancient notion that all language is figurative in his Theory of Fictions (cf. Ogden). In his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), *I.A. Richards, combining Aristotle, Bentham and Freud, claimed that metaphor is the fundamental property of human thought and life, since Freud's 'transference' is a synonym for the Greek 'metaphor,' and the psychoanalytic process he designated by that name entails the same transfer in human relations that linguistic metaphor effects in relations of thought. Those thinkers like Aristotle, Bentham and Richards who presume that thought takes precedence over language, generally focus their attention on metaphor alone; those who assert the primacy of language over thought, such as Jakobson and Lacan, tend to couple metaphor with metonymy. (See also ""rhetorical criticism.) GILBERT D. CHAITIN

Mimesis Primary Sources Aristotle. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1984. Beauzee, Nicholas. 'Trope,' In Encyclopedic, ou Dictionnaire raisonne ties sciences, des arts et des metiers. Paris: Briasson, 1751-65. Vol. 34: 299-308. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Grammar of Metaphor. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. - The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. 'White Mythology.' In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Felman, Shoshana. Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading, Othenvise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition, vols. 4 and 5. London: Hogarth P, 1955, Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Groupe Mu. Rhetorique generate. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1970. Henry, Albert. Metonymie et metaplwre. Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1985. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1960. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton and Company, 1956. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymu, and the typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 'On Truth and Falsity in the Ultra-Moral Sense.' In The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. Ogden. Charles K. Bentham's Theory of Fictions. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932. Perelman, Chaim, and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1969. Quintilian. The I n s t i t u t i o Oratorio of Quintilian, with an English Translation by H.L. Butler. London: W. Heinemann, 1921-2. Richards, Ivor A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford UP, 1956. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977. Schor, Naomi. Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory,

and French Realist Fiction, New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Sorabji, Richard. Aristotle on Memory. Providence: Brown UP, 1972. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. - Theories of the Symbol. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Frisch. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1948. White, Hayden V. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,

1978.

Mimesis Mimesis is 'the continuous dynamic relation between a work of art and whatever stands over against it in the actual moral universe, or could conceivably stand over against it' (Whalley, Studies 73). Often translated as 'imitation,' mimesis is in fact a transliteration of the original Greek word, rather than a translation, and as such it retains at least a partial independence. That independence is registered in the way the word has never been wholly naturalized in English, despite being listed in most dictionaries, including the OED. It declares insistently its Greek origin, not least in the suggestion of action or activity. Though both terms denote an art of representation or resemblance, the emphasis is different. Imitation, a I,atinate abstraction, implies something static, a copy, a final product; mimesis involves something dynamic, a process, an active relation with a living reality. The precise nature of mimesis has been the subject of age-old debate, its scope set out definitively by Plato and Aristotle and its questions tied invariably to questions concerning the nature of the reality to be represented. Literal mimesis is a copying of the concrete world, accessible to the senses. Plato, in part because he viewed the resulting copy as being at two removes from reality, banished the artists from his ideal state in the Republic (chap. 10). Metaphysical mimesis is a copying of the eternal forms, accessible only to intellect and reason, as Plato explains in the Republic (3, 6) and celebrates in the Timaeus. Discussions of Plato's views, as they bear on art, philosophy and religion, can be found in *Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic (trans. 1980)

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Mimesis and in Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun (1977)Aristotle, in the Poetics, adds a further dimension to the debate and refutes some of Plato's charges against the poets, but there is considerable overlap between his views of mimesis and those of Plato. Like Plato, Aristotle thinks the fundamental business of mimesis is to reveal universals, a process that in his view makes poetry more philosophical than history. (See "universal.) He is, however, more hopeful than Plato about the ability of poets to do this, and he thinks of universals as more inextricably tied to particular concrete events and characters. This fusion of the particular and the universal is a lead followed by modern defenders of realism in "literature such as *Yvor Winters and *Georg Lukacs. Aristotle's distinctive contribution to the topic arises from his special interest in action, not only the action of tragic drama but also the activity of the poet as maker. In organizing the plot, or in orchestrating the dynamic interplay between form and content, the poet makes, as Gerald Else puts it, 'that structure of events in which universals may come to expression.' (See *story/ plot.) The core of Aristotle's view may be described as enactive mimesis, a term applying not only to the impersonations of the theatre, where it is the actors who do the mimesis, but more generally as well. (See *performance criticism.) In the words of Stephen Halliwell, 'Aristotle's guiding notion of mimesis is implicitly that of enactment: poetry proper (which may include some works in prose) does not describe, narrate or offer argument, but dramatises and embodies human speech and action.' Some, like Thomas Twining in the 18th century, have been led by the emphasis on action to argue that only dramatic poetry is fully mimetic. It is more broadly characteristic of literary works, however, to involve the act of reliving, or living into, the human experiences that give body and substance to reality. *Erich Auerbach explores the relations between reality and the various levels of style in many different genres. And *F.R. Leavis emphasizes the realizing force of poetic enactment. The activity of mimesis can be seen as moral in two very broad senses. First, the act of attending to reality implies that it is worth attending to and worth respecting as different from, though not necessarily unrelated to, the perceiver. Second, the enactments of literature

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explore the implications or consequences of human actions and perception. At its best, mimesis is a method of strengthening and deepening the moral understanding, just as it is also a method of exploring and challenging received notions of the real. The process does not rest simply with what any reader or writer happens to know; it may stretch the limits of the real by entertaining the conceivable as at least provisionally real, or as offering a perspective on aspects of the real that cannot otherwise be seen. Reality is sometimes defined in contradistinction to the imaginary. But that Aristotle has a more comprehensive view of reality than this distinction allows is shown by his witty remark about a likely impossibility being superior to an implausible possibility. (One of the great examples of a likely impossibility is the ideal state in Plato's Republic.) This remark also shows that the dichotomy between classic and romantic - as if only the classic were mimetic - needs rethinking. George Whalley argues that Aristotelian mimesis is congruent with what Coleridge calls 'the primary imagination,' which Whalley describes as performing a 'supreme realizing function.' A well-known example from Shakespeare (Hamlet 3.2) illustrates these various senses of mimesis. Hamlet says that the purpose of drama is 'to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature.' Note that the process involves the act of holding as well as of mirroring. In the playwithin-the-play, Shakespeare explores the dynamic relations among the holder (Hamlet), the mirror ('The Mousetrap'), and the beholders: the audience (which includes Claudius). At the climax, one 'Lucianus' pours poison in the ear of the Player-King. At one level, this copies the murder of King Hamlet by Claudius (a past action). But Hamlet interrupts to say that Lucianus is 'nephew to the King' (italics added), so at another level the scene represents the relation between Hamlet and Claudius (and a possible, or conceivable, future action - like, though not altogether like, the action which concludes the larger play). This fusing of images is of the essence of the play's dynamic, and shows simple imitation combining with more complex purposes in a full mimesis. In the words of Harold Jenkins (1982), 'when Lucianus becomes the image of Hamlet he does not cease to be Claudius too.' The scene depicts crime and punishment simultaneously, and the idea of retributive justice merges with the concrete physical acts. The si-

Mirror stage multaneity implies that justice is eternal, not time-bound; but Hamlet's act in pointing to this meaning reveals an intense engagement with the process of the action, which must unfold in time and in the lives of specific individuals. Mimesis, as is seen in this brief example, is a congeries of particular events and their meanings - and of the enactments through which these become manifest. JOHN BAXTER

Primary Sources Aristotle. On Poetry and Style. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953. Boyd, John D., sj. 'A New Mimesis?' Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 37 (1985): 133-210. Else, Gerald F. Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1957. Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle's Poetics. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. Jenkins, Harold, ed. Hamlet. By William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1982. Leavis, F.R. 'Imagery and Movement.' Scrutiny 13 (1945): 119-34. Lukacs, Georg. Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Trans. Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin P, 1970. McKeon, Richard. 'Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity.' In Critics and Criticism. Ed. R.S. Crane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952. Whalley, George. 'The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis.' University of Toronto Quarterly 42 (1973): 93-109. - Studies in Literature and the Humanities: Innocence of Intent. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1985. Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver and New York: Alan Swallow P and W. Morrow, '947-

Mirror stage "Jacques La can first posited the existence of the mirror stage in a paper delivered in 1936, developed it in a published exposition in 1949, and expanded it once again in 1951. The mirror stage is the cornerstone of his psychoanalytic theory and is especially significant as a critique of Freudian ego psychology, which posits a belief in rational, individual self-consciousness. For Lacan early childhood development can be divided into three stages: the pre-mirror, the mirror and the post-mirror, or

pre-specular, specular and post-specular, each marked by certain kinds of meconnaissances, distortions and misrepresentations. (See *psychoanalytic theory, *Sigmund Freud.) Sometime before the age of 18 months, the human infant recognizes its own image in a mirror. What takes place is a prelinguistic identification of selfhood: 'that image is me.' The infant discovers its identity in a libidinally invested or narcissistic act of imagination and is thereafter constituted by a primordial, eternal lack (manque). What the infant sees, in schematic terms, is the Gestalt of a body that is within the world and yet distinct from it: 'that is me.' The image of a body unified and separated by an I-concept suggests a moment when the self creates itself. The mirror is of such importance because the child's ability to recognize his own image somewhat falsely implies the possibility of a certain objectivity, detachment and self-totalization that can lead to the constituting of a self and the ability to distinguish between self and other as well as between subject and object. (See *self/other, *subject/object, "totalization.) The image of the mirror also illustrates how human beings recognize and even create themselves through the images of others, who are, in their own turn, reflections of yet again still others. The mirror, then, is not something in which viewers see an approximately accurate image of self; rather, it figures the way in which we found our identities upon the images of others and the way in which we finally have to recognize otherness and our differences from others. Consequently, while Freud postulates that, once the child has chosen a sexual identity and social role, he or she can grow through the processes of social interaction, Lacan suggests that human beings are an assemblage of ever-changing images mainly without progression. In psychoanalytic experience, disintegration is the norm and finds expression in dreams and images of fragmented bodies; but this is not Lacan's main point. The mirror stage begins a process of meconnaissance or misrecognition that will endlessly circle the primary truth of the subject - lack. After the mirror stage, the subject creates an armour of false identification systems, and even analysis cannot break through them to reveal an authentic, true self; meconnaissance is, to this extent, absolute. The mirror stage occurs within an overall drama of Desire that is the basis of Lacan's system. De-

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Mirror stage sire is always the desire of the Other. The illusion of autonomy and identity exemplified by the mirror stage falls apart under the rule of the Lacanian Other (which is language itself) and with the discovery that the world contains other bodies which rob one's own body of its ideal unity. Lacan's imaginary order necessarily confronts and adopts aspects of the symbolic. This leads Lacan in Ecrits to conclude that one's ego can never be reduced to experiential identity and further that 'I is an other.' (See *imaginary/symbolic/real/ *desire/lack.) Lacan's mirror stage develops the work of Freud by providing a theory about the development of the self, but it has itself been responsible for new thinking in the areas of psychoanalysis, *narratology, linguistics, *semiotics, and feminism. (See *feminist criticism.) In many ways these diverse fields are joined together by common assumptions about the symbolic order and its implications for the signifying process. Many feminists, for example, agree with Lacan that subjectivity is socially constructed and that theories of the mirror suggest in what ways *power and *authority have been restricted to males. They approve of Lacan in part because he describes the process by which people are subjectified and subjugated and in part because he has given women the concepts and the language whereby they can legitimize their position as women. *Luce Irigaray and *Julia Kristeva explore the qualities that have sometimes been identified with the matriarchal - the nonrational, the unconscious, the body, the feelings, love, self-identity, speech, and the special language of intimacy - and that are said to belong to the imaginary and to have been repressed. Those characteristics that have often been referred to as masculine - the reason, the conscious, the mind, logic, analysis, writing, the language of the market-place - belonging to the symbolic have been elevated. In moving from the imaginary to the symbolic, human beings have gone from the implicitly feminine to the explicitly masculine. French feminists especially suggest that the goal of women should be to question the symbolic and reinvigorate the imaginary, as well as to destabilize the conscious and enfranchise the unconscious, in order to reconstitute the self and demystify the cogito. Another area in which the mirror stage has been considered is in the development and structures of prose. The imaginary and sym-

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bolic, feminine and masculine, 'inside' and 'outside' (Innenwelt and Umwelt), and the question of the signifier have become ways of talking about a number of things, especially plot and style. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Lacan himself raises the issue of literary applications in his interpretations of the role of signifiers in Hamlet and Edgar Allan Foe's 'The Purloined Letter.' Shoshana Felman similarly uses Lacanian analysis to develop a theory of narrative based upon the unconscious, while Peter Brooks uses Lacan's ideas of metaphor and metonymy to study the function of desire and the death wish in narrative. (See ""metonymy/metaphor.) Writers such as Kristeva have identified the symbolic with logic, coherency and the Artistotelian pattern of introduction, complication and crisis, and denouement. Kristeva's own writing style provides an alternative to this master-realist, male narrative. As exemplified by her essay 'Stabat Mater,' her prose is sometimes separated into two columns, one strongly metaphoric, sensuous, affective, and without end point (illustrative of what she calls the semiotic or preOedipal) and the other rational and coherent with certain conclusions (illustrative of what she calls the symbolic or post-Oedipal). The juxtaposition of the two columns suggests a dispersal of desire that is equated with the imaginary and feminine. Prose based upon the imaginary or implicitly feminine should, then, supposedly appear less consciously structured and rationally determined and thus allow for the play of possibilities and proliferation of voices. (See also theories of *play/freeplay.) G R E G O R C A M P B E L L and GORDON E. SLETHAUG

Primary Sources Lacan, Jacques. 'Desire and Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.' Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52. - Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977. - The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. - The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. - 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter."' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlei-

Misprision fer. New York and London: Longman, 1989, 301-20.

Secondary Sources Brooks, Peter. 'Freud's Masterplot: Questions of Narrative.' Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 280-300. Felman, Shoshana. Turning the Screw of Interpretation.' Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 94-207. Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Isn't One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1985. Kristeva, Julia. 'Stabat Mater.' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies.' New York and London: Longman, 1989, 186-203.

Misprision Misprision is a concept devised by "Harold Bloom describing the mechanics of poetic influence. According to Bloom, the making of poetry necessitates a creative misreading (misprision) of earlier works. Partially based on *Sigmund Freud's 'family romance' and emphasizing *intertextuality, misprision outlines a poet's violent struggle to overcome the ^anxiety of influence/ that is, the pressure exerted by precursors, through a creative alteration of earlier pivotal works. This is not to say that poets endlessly repeat each other, but that a poem entails a fundamental dialectic between the recognition of the power of the past and the 'swerving' away (Bloom describes this process as clhiameii, a metaphor suggested by Lucretius) from its 'tyranny.' Bloom emphasizes that only 'strong' poets are capable of moving against the pressure of the past and he uses Milton's Satan as an allegory to depict his theory. For Bloom, Milton's Satan (as Fallen Strong Poet), recognizes and rejects the circumscription prescribed by God (the omnipotent precursor) and in the process asserts his own, however provisional, identity. The creation of poetry then is analagous to Satan's position: incapable of extrication from the power of literary influence, it becomes a practice of defiance. Wallace Stevens' 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction' is saturated with the presence of Walt Whitman, particularly his 'Song of Myself,' but Stevens does not replicate his precursor's work. Rather he engages misprision through a creative misinterpretation of the

previous *text, thereby asserting a distinct identity. In effect Stevens' poem may be said to enact a misreading of Whitman, a reading that transforms the earlier poem to such an extent that it appears as though Stevens 'himself had written the precursor's characteristic work.' Borrowing the term 'ephebe' from Wallace Stevens to describe the younger poet, Bloom suggests that there are various stages of progressive mastery that the younger poet must pass through in order to become a strong poet. It is important to note that the relationship between a potentially strong poet and a precursor does not necessarily entail conscious acknowledgment of the precursor's influential power and also that the precursor-figure may be a composite of several writers. What is crucial to this relationship is that the strong poet's works cannot be viewed independently as isolated texts; there are no 'original' works. Through misprision a specific poem is shown to exist in a dynamic interconnection with other poems. Misprision also extends to critical analysis. The practice of criticism involves a wilful misreading of poetic texts and it is Bloom's contention that critical and poetical misprision overlap, blurring the edge between the two forms of *discourse. The concept of misprision traverses much of Bloom's writing. Discussions of misprision take place in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. (1976). The most practical application of the theory of misprision is demonstrated in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (1977). MICHAEL TRUSSLER

Primary Sources Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. - Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1975. — A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

- Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

- Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Secondary Sources Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.

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Monologism

Monologism Monologism is the reduction of multiple voices and consciousnesses within a "text to a single version of truth imposed by the author. The truths of other consciousnesses or ideologies are never treated equally alongside the author's but are instead refuted or reduced to a common denominator. (See "ideology.) Novelistic prose is best able to contest monologic control through dialogism which is antisystemic and polyphonic, thus exerting a centrifugal (subversive) pressure against authorial dominance. (See *polyphony, "double-voicing/ dialogism, 'subversion.) Some genres, claims *Mikhail Bakhtin, like epic and lyric poetry, exemplify monologism because the author retains the power to convey his vision of truth directly; consequently, the author limits the potential meaning of the text. (See *genre criticism.) In his early formulation of the dialogic principle which culminates in the novel, Bakhtin celebrates Dostoevsky as the exemplar of polyphony, while Tolstoy is cited as a monologic novelist. The initial sentence of Anna Karenina is cited as monologic: 'All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Here, the authorial voice is absolute and uncontestable. There is no counterstatement within the text to query the author's truth. Later, Bakhtin comes to see at least the possibility or potential for polyphony in many early texts - the Socratic dialogues, Menippean satire, the medieval mystery play, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Diderot, Balzac, and Hugo. These precursors prepare the way for Dostoevsky's crucial contribution to the polyphonic novel. Bakhtin views all systems of "binary opposition as monologic, either Hegelian or Marxist. (See "Marxist criticism.) Ironically, in setting up the Dostoevsky (polyphonic) / Tolstoy (monologic) opposition, Bakhtin can be seen to construct a monologic binary model of his own. He nevertheless theoretically eschews the dialectics of binary oppositions in favour of dialogism. Monologic belief systems which posit absolutes locate truth 'in a single institution, such as the state, or in a single object, such as an idol or text, or in a single identity such as God, the ego conceived as an absolute subject, or the artist-genius who produces unique texts' (Clark and Holquist 348). For

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Bakhtin, dialogic truth requires two or more contesting voices which are allowed free play within the 'form-shaping ideology' (Morson and Emerson 238) of novelistic prose. The novel, then, contests monologism. (See theories of *play/freeplay.) Bakhtin's final position views monologism as an early stage in the evolution of genres towards the democratic ideal of Dostoevskyan polyphony. Polyphony does not supplant monologism, rather 'each new genre merely supplements the old ones, merely widens the circle of already existing genres' (Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics 271). (See *dialogical criticism.) PHYLLIS MARGARET PARYAS

Primary Sources Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. - Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford UP, 1990. Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. David Magarshak. New York: Signet, 1961.

Myth Myth is a term used widely in literary criticism, especially in historical criticism's accounts of the mythologies used by literary artists and in "archetypal criticism's descriptions of the ways in which certain widespread images, character types and narrative designs persistently recur throughout "literature. (See "archetype.) "Northrop Frye sees myth as the structural foundation of literature and presents a rhetoric of mythology which is similar to "Tzvetan Todorov's grammar of poetic expression. There are many non-literary uses of the concept of myth, perhaps most notably those of "Claude Levi-Strauss in his structural studies of Amerindian mythology. In its most ordinary meaning a myth is a story about a god or some other supernatural being; sometimes it concerns a deified human being or a ruler of divine descent. A collection of traditional myths in a particular culture con-

Name-of-the-Father stitutcs a mythology which illustrates or explains the origin of the world, why the world was as it once was and how it has changed and why certain things happen. Each myth serves its expository or its explanatory function by reference to the thoughts, desires and actions of the gods and other supernatural beings. From ancestral stories or myths human beings of a particular culture or society learn how they are to live and what meanings to attach to their lives. Because many writers use the old stories or myths from their own culture or from others, criticism devotes considerable effort to the identification of these recurrent phenomena and to the explication of ways in which they function in literary works. At times the myth occurs in literature simply as a resonant, powerful story; at other times it simply provides ornamental overtones. Still again, as in its etymological meaning in the Greek mythos (plot, story, narrative), the myth is the narrative structure itself of the literary work. Seen from the perspective of archetypal criticism, myths or mythoi are the structural principles of literature that make possible verbal communication of narrative and meaning. Drawing on cultural anthropology's interest in ritual and analytic psychology's interest in dreams, literary criticism sees myth as the union in verbal form of ritual and dreams that otherwise would remain inarticulate. Ritual cannot account for itself and dream is a set of coded references to the dreamer's life. Verbalization of the myth gives meaning to the ritual and narrative form to the dream, thus making possible social communication. Myths as generic narrative structures - comedy, romance, tragedy, "irony and satire - are structures of imagery in movement. (See *Carl Gustav Jung, *psychonanalytic theory, *code.) In the world of myth, writers find an abstract or purely literary storehouse of fictional and thematic design unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to ordinary human experience. (See *theme, *canon.) Myth provides writers with a world of total metaphor in which everything can be identified with everything else. (See "metonymy/metaphor.) When the writer moves away from the direct use of myth, adaptation to considerations of greater realism emerge. A completely different concept of myth is explored by *Roland Barthes. In Mythologies (1957) he examines the 'myths' or cultural

artefacts of French mass culture, including writing, sports, film, advertising, and food. Regarding language not as a transparent vehicle of communication but as a means of repression by the bourgeoisie, Barthes argues that language enforces a certain *ideology. Studying a variety of texts, Barthes advances a 'paradoxical' mode of reading (Ray 173) in which the reader must search out the 'mythic' or new meaning at odds with the surface logic of the language of a "text. The reader must 'unlearn' traditional social values which have seemed 'natural' and must regain more pluralistic perspectives. (See *paradox, *demythologizing.) ALVIN A. LEE

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Ray, William. Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Name-of-the-Father Language, for *Jacques Lacan, is an abstract realm of signifiers. (See *signified/signifier/ signification.) Human subjectivity takes place in infancy as an effect of language, and even the unconscious is structured like a language. Lacan's interest in language and the symbolic (see *imaginary/symbolic/real) led him to reinterpret Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex in symbolic terms. (See *Freud.) The patriarchal dominance of an actual Oedipal Father translates into the dominance of the Name-ofthe-Father within Lacan's symbolic order. (See *patriarchy.) In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud posited that the historical dominance of the Father must have resulted in his murder, committed by his sons. The incest taboo, or law in general, is thereby sustained by primordial, criminal guilt. The dead Father of culture and memory exerts a stronger force of repression than the living Father, which is a kind of allegory for the power of signifiers and language in general over what is signified. According to Lacan, 'the symbolic Father is, in so far as he

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Narratee signifies the Law, the dead Father.' The Nameof-the-Father is both the source of *authority and the signifier of that authority. Within the symbolic order as a whole, the Name-of-the-Father functions as a governing Law (in French, nom and non are homophonic) in the dual function of restricting and prescribing. The Name, which is a series of names (echoing, perhaps, the Christian liturgy 'in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit'), sustains the structure of desire in the very midst of its prohibition. (See *desire/ lack.) Sometime around the *mirror stage, the subject enters into the symbolic order, leaving behind an undifferentiated relation to the mother's body. The subject finds itself essentially divided under the threat of punishment through castration. The signifier of desire for the subject, who is now bound by the symbolic order, is the phallus, which remains under the authority of the Name-of-the-Father. The exclusion of an essential signifier from the symbolic order, an event Lacan terms foreclosure, will trigger psychosis in the form of a breakdown of the symbolic order and its ability to actually signify. A patient in this condition will attempt to reconnect signifiers to their signifieds through delusional metaphors. (See "metonymy/metaphor.) Within the Lacanian genesis of subjectivity, desire is structured by the laws of language and the semiotic trajectory of the phallus as the image or signifier of desire. (See *semiotics.) The Name-of-the-Father, as pure signifier - signifier of signification - is a stand-in for the *power of language (and culture) to rule through the threat of castration (or foreclosure) and thereby establish boundaries for law, desire, gender, and difference. On the level of *text and *discourse, identifying the Name-ofthe-Father has the potential for revealing the entire structure of law and desire within a particular culture or discursive formation. GREGOR CAMPBELL

Primary Sources Lacan, Jacques. F.crits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. - The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978. - and the Ecole freudienne. Feminine Sexuality. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.

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Narratee The concept of the narratee, first proposed by *Gerard Genette but developed and popularized by *Gerald Prince, is the communicative partner of the "narrator, filler of the receiver position in narrative. As is the case with narrators, narratees are actual individuals in nonfictional narratives but textual constructs in fiction. While the persona of the narrator is constructed on the basis of the question 'Who speaks?' the narratee is the one who hears, the one to whom the narrator is speaking. Both are determined by explicit or implicit textual signs: the use of second-person pronouns, properties attributed by the narrative *discourse to the referent of these pronouns, rhetorical questions, deictics presupposing familiarity with certain objects ('one of those x ...'), allusions to common knowledge (*Prince, Piwowarczyk). Among these however, a distinction must be made between those which refer to a narratee located in the textual world and those which project an *implied reader located in the actual world. 'Reader, 1 married him' (jane Eyre) is addressed by a first-person narrator to a narratee who believes in the existence of Jane Eyre, but '(Reader), these characters I am talking about never existed' (modified version of a sentence from John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman) would be a metafictional comment addressed by the implied author to a hypothetical reader who regards the *text as a novel. So to some extent does this sentence from Balzac's Le Pere Goriot - even though it is widely regarded as a prototypical sign of the narratee: 'You, my reader, now holding this book in your white hand, and saying to yourself in the depths of your easy chair, "I wonder if this will amuse me!'" (See "reference/referent, *sign.) Insofar as utterances may be addressed to either a specific person (in conversation, letters) or to the general public (published texts), narratees may be either individuals or collective entities. Individuated narratees participate in the plot in the same way as do individuated narrators: as uninvolved witness, secondary character or main protagonist (recipients of letters in epistolary novels, or the referent of the second-person pronoun in Butor's La Modification). (See *story/plot.) When the text is addressed to a collectivity, the narratee is con-

Narrative code structed as a set of beliefs presupposed by the text. As is the case with the relations between the impersonal narrator and the implied author, the beliefs of the collective narratee tend to blend with those of the implied reader on all questions other than the truth of the particular narrative facts. The possibility of unreliable narration reveals an ambiguity in the concept of narratee. When a first-person narrator tries to deceive his audience or personal addressee (as often happens in epistolary novels), there are two ways to reconstruct the narratee: (i) the individual projected by the narrator, who takes his deceptive discourse at face value; or (2) the character 'objectively' addressed by the narrator, whose beliefs do not necessarily correspond to the narrator's declarations. The first construct is a projection of the narrator but the second is a projection of the implied author. This potential discrepancy leads Peter Rabinowitz to postulate an 'ideal narrative audience.' The issue of delineating the scope of narratee against these two concepts remains to be addressed. MARIE I.AURE RYAN

Primary Sources Genette, Gerard. Figures 111. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Piwowarczyk, Mary Ann. 'The Narratee and the Situation of Enunciation: A Reconsideration of Prince's Theory.' Genre 9 (1976): 161-77. Prince, Gerald. 'Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.' In Reader Response Criticism. Ed. ]ane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980, 7-25. Rabinowitz, Peter ]. 'Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.' Critical Inquiry 4.1 (1977): 121-41.

Narrative code Narrative *code, a concept first proposed by *Roland Barthes in S/Z - a close reading of Balzac's short story 'Sarrasine' (1973) - is defined inductively through the enumeration and description of the members of the class. Barthes proposes a list of five narrative codes: i. The 'proairetic' code or code of actions which organizes the actions of characters into narrative sequences, subsuming each sequence under a generic term which reveals its strategic

function. Barthes' examples of generic categories are murder, date, leisurely walk. 2. The 'hermeneutic' code or code of enigmas gathers the semantic units which pertain in one way or another to the formulation and solution of a problem: identifying the enigma, scattering clues, delaying the answer, suggesting false leads, forming and discarding wrong answers, revealing the truth. (See "hermeneutics.) 3. The 'semic' or connotative code consists of extracting some of the semantic features, or 'semes/ which are 'connoted' (that is, implied, rather than signified) by text units of variable size. Recurring 'semes' are grouped into thematic configurations which transcend the linear order of the narrative *discourse. For example, in 'Sarrasine' a party at a private hotel in the Faubourg Saint-Honore connotes wealth and is linked to other passages suggesting the same feature. The semic code also collects the various features which are attached to proper names, thus allowing the formation of characters. (See *semee.) 4. The 'symbolic' code links particular events and existents to abstract, universal concepts. (See "universal.) Under symbolic code, Barthes also understands the organization of signifieds into rhetorical figures and spatial patterns, such as antithesis and inverse symmetry. For example, in 'Sarrasine,' the castrate Zambinella represents the inverse concepts of super-femininity and sub-masculinity. (See "signified/signifier/signification.) > The 'referential' or cultural code is invoked whenever the text invites the reader to use his or her knowledge of the real world in the formation of meaning. This knowledge, presupposed by the realistic *text to be natural and immediately derived from experience, is regarded by Barthes as an already codified image derived from textual sources. For example, the implicit allusion in 'Sarrasine' is to a voice of popular wisdom stating what everybody is supposed to know about certain human types: women, Italians, artists. (See "reference/referent.) This repertory of narrative codes raises several theoretical questions: i. Is the list exhaustive? According to Barthes, all lexies (units of reading) illustrate one of the codes and no other code is needed to describe the production of narrative meaning. This claim has been occasionally chal-

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Narrator lenged by exponents of the structuralist doctrine (*]onathan Culler, *Robert Scholes) but there has been no serious attempt to amend the system. (See *structuralism.) 2. Are the codes created by the text and cracked by the reader or is their mastering a prerequisite of narrative understanding? The answer differs with every category: the proairetic code presupposes familiarity with standard scripts and models for the interpretation of human activity; the cultural code precedes the text but is modified by it; the symbolic code is built on conventional associations (white= purity), but the text proposes its own system of symbolic equivalences. 3. Are these five aspects of textual communication really codes and are they narrative? A code is a set of rules whose knowledge regulates certain types of behaviour. A truly narrative code should regulate the production of narrative meaning. As such it should differ from both the code serving as medium (usually the linguistic code) and from the cultural codes signified by the text (for instance the traffic code in the sentence 'she ran a red light'). None of the five categories proposed by Barthes can be associated with a definite set of rules constitutive of narrative meaning. They are not codes in any formal sense of the term but rather basic types of semantic operations: detecting scripts in the behaviour of human referents and rationalizing their gestures into meaningful actions (proairetic code); analysing complex representations into simple semantic components (semic code); gathering all the features of textual referents and building their mental image (semic code, second interpretation); establishing networks of relations among signifieds and linking these networks to universal themes (symbolic code); using worldknowledge to fill in the informational gaps in the text (referential code); assessing the contribution of the information provided by the text to the solution of an enigma (hermeneutic code). Of these operations, some appear to be universals of discourse processing (referential and semic code), some are favoured by literary texts independently of narrativity (symbolic code), some indeed presuppose a narrative message (proairetic code), and some may be associated with particular narrative genres (dominance of the hermeneutic code in detective novels). If the five narrative codes are reinterpreted as aspects of the cognitive activ-

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ity involved in the processing of texts, there is no reason to consider the system exhaustive or its elements definitive. (See also "theme, *narrotology.) MARIE-LAURE RYAN

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. - Textual Analysis of Poe's "Valdemar."' In Untying the Text. Ed. Robert Young. London: Routledge, 1981, 133-61. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Scholes, Robert. Structuralism in Literature. An Introduction. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1974.

Narrator In a narrative "text, the narrator is the speaking 'voice' which takes responsibility for the act of narration, telling the story as 'true fact.' In non-fictional narration, this is the actual speaker who physically produces the narrative *discourse. In fiction these two elements of the communication situation are logically distinct. The actual sender - or author - is located in the actual world and transmits a fiction to another member of the actual world, the reader. The narrator is a part of the textual world and communicates a narrative to another member of the textual world, the so-called *narratee. The communicative pairs formed by author/ reader and narrator/narratee are located in separate systems of reality but the systems are bridged through an accepted convention: the author speaks as if he were the narrator, the reader receives the message as if he were the narratee. (See *communication theory, *narratology.) There may exist a number of different narrators in any narrative text. The various narrative voices are either juxtaposed on the same level or embedded in a hierarchical structure, juxtaposition is exemplified by the turn-taking of conversation or by the exchange of letters of epistolary novels. *Embedding occurs whenever a primary narrator quotes the discourse of a secondary narrator. Narrative embedding structures the text into a series of discrete levels (called 'diegetic' by *Gerard Genette). (See *diegesis.) Narrators of both fiction and non-fiction

Narrator may be classified according to their mode of involvement in the narrated events. A narrator may be a historian of events not witnessed in person (Genette's 'heterodiegetic' narrator), a reporter of events witnessed as a non-involved observer, a secondary protagonist ('homodiegetic' narrator), or main character ('autodiegetic' narrator). Genette also makes a distinction between 'intradiegetic' narrators, who are part of the narrative world and 'extradiegetic' ones, who represent this world from the outside. What Genette means by this last term is the effacement and impersonality of what is commonly called the 'third person narrator.' Intradiegetic narrators are characters who become narrators on another diegetic level. Scheherazade is a narrating character within the frame story of The Arabian Nights and thus an intradiegetic narrator, but within the stories she tells as fiction she loses her identity, to become an impersonal omniscient third-person narrator. Another variable feature of the manifestation of narrators is their ontological status. While the narrators of non-fiction are always presumed to be fully individuated human beings - whether or not their discourse provides explicit signs of their identity - fictional narrators vary from impersonal voices postulated for purely logical reasons to identified members of the textual world sharing with the other characters the ontological status of a fictive character. Individuated narrators differ in turn through the amount of information they provide about themselves: this information is usually proportional to the degree of narratorial involvement in narrated events. These various modes are traditionally reduced by narratologists to an opposition between thirdperson narration, which subsumes both noninvolvement and radical non-individuation, and first-person narration, which accepts all other forms of narratorial identity and distance. This broad partition is supported by pragmatic and phenomenological considerations. Among the differences between the two types of narrator are the following: ( i ) Firstperson narrators are prisoners of an identity, bound to a fixed point of view; their knowledge is limited to what is available to a single human consciousness. Third-person narrators have unlimited knowledge, access to other minds, and the ability to shift their point of view. (2) In first-person narration, the reader

attempts to form a portrait of the narrator on the basis of his or her declarations. In thirdperson narration, the question 'who speaks' is rarely relevant: the impersonal narrator is primarily a logical, not a psychological entity, and the reader does not usually regard his or her discourse as the expression of a personality. (3) The third-person narrator enjoys absolute narratorial authority (Dolezel, MartinezBonati). His or her utterances determine what counts as fact in the narrative world. The firstperson narrator may be unreliable (*Booth); his or her utterances are subject to correction by another narrator or by the implied author. (4) The opinions of the first-person narrator may conflict with the message of the implied author, while the major disagreement between a third-person narrator and the implied author concerns the truth of the facts asserted in the text. The 'dummy'-like character of the thirdperson narrator has prompted some theorists (Hamburger, Banfield, Kuroda) to propose a no-narrator theory for this type of narration: the events are 'telling themselves,' rather than being communicated by a human or humanlike subject. MARIE-LAURE RYAN

Primary Sources Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Dolezel, Lubomir. 'Truth and Authenticity in Narrative.' Poetics Today 1.3 (1980): 7-25. Genette, Gerard. Figures 111. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Martinez-Bonati, Felix. The Act of Writing Fiction.' New Literary History 11.3 (1980): 425-34. - Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Rousset, Jean. Narcisse romancier: Essai sur la premiere personne dans le roman. Paris: Jose Corti, 1973Ryan, Marie-Laure. 'The Pragmatics of Personal and impersonal Fiction.' Poetics 10 (1981): 517-39. Tamir, Nomi. 'Personal Narration and Its Linguistic Foundation.' PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory and Literature i (1976): 403-29. Warhol, Robyn. Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Intervention in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.' PMLA 101.5 (1986): 811-18.

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Overdetermination

Overdetermination

Paradox

Overdetermination is a term first used by *Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to describe those aspects of dreams which have a multiplicity of determinants. Freud developed the concept to cover any aspect of the unconscious which has more than one causal source; and "Jacques Lacan, through his insight that the unconscious is structured like a language, made Overdetermination available to *semiotics. While the term thus has currency throughout the range of "psychoanalytic theory, one of its most forceful usages derives from its absorption in "Marxist criticism, with its emphasis on the material determinants in the production of literary texts, through the work of the French Marxist philosopher * Louis Althusser. Building on Mao and Lenin, Althusser describes the orthodox Marxist contradiction between labour and capital as 'inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found ... determining, but also determined ... by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called overdetermined in its principle' (For Marx 101). (See *social formation.) He insists that the capitallabour contradiction is always 'specified by the forms of the superstructure' and 'by the internal and external historical situation,' and hence is 'always overdetermined' (106). He elaborates a concept of the social formation to situate overdetermination. The concept has been used in literary theory to analyse the way in which economic, political and ideological contradictions may manifest themselves singly or in combination in literary texts through other contradictions conceived of as internal to literary production. For example, the presence of works of mixed genres in colonial literatures may be overdetermined by the primitiveness of colonial economies, the inchoate state of colonial politics and the ideological orientation of colonial societies towards the founding nation. (See "ideology, "text, "post-colonial theory.)

A paradox (Gr. paradoxes, L. paradoxus: 'contrary to received opinion') is an apparently self-contradictory or nonsensical proposition that proves, on close inspection, to be well founded or at least partially true. For example: 'There are none so credulous as infidels' (Richard Bentley); 'What ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert' (G.K. Chesterton). A paradox compressed into two words (e.g.: 'wise fool') is called an oxymoron. As a figure of rhetoric and a figure of thought, it is designed to induce wonder, to surprise or jolt the reader into genuine reflection and insight, or endless bafflement. The early history of paradox in Western culture invites a distinction between two types: the rhetorical - an encomium or formal defence of a subject that, to conventional understanding at least, is unworthy or indefensible (Lucian's praise of the fly, Isocrates' of Thersites); and the logical - an argument or question that problematizes linear reason by selfcontradiction, as epitomized in Eubulides' The Liar ('A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?') and exploited by Socrates, to dazzling effect, in the Parmenides. With Renaissance humanism's return to the classical texts came a conflation of the two types, most notably in Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorcmtia [Of Learned Ignorance], Erasmus' Moriae Encomium [The Praise of Folly], Montaigne's Essais and Donne's Biathanatos ['A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, that Self-homicide is not so naturally a Sin, that it may never be otherwise']. Trace elements of the paradoxical encomium remain discernible in post-Renaissance literary culture - in the mock-epic, certainly, and in ironic Utopian writings such as Swift's A Modest Proposal and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. (See "irony.) It is more to the logic of paradox that modern litterateurs critical of positive science and drabbing convention have understandably been drawn. Wilde's paradox, that 'a Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true' ('The Truth of Masks' in Intentions), goes uncontradicted by a host of igthand 20th-century texts. If the play of self-contradiction in modern "literature tends to the grimly suicidal - as in Carlyle's The French Revolution, Melville's The Confidence-Man, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Hubert Aquin's Neige noire [Hamlet's Twin], and Victor-Levy

JOHN THURSTON

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. 'Contradiction and Overdetermination.' In For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1977, 87-128.

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Parody Beaulieu's Don Quichotte de la Demanche [Don Quixote in Nighttown] - it is not by practical necessity. The paradoxy of Lear, Carroll, Chesterton, Joyce, David Jones, Saint-John Perse, *Marshall McLuhan, Antonine Maillet, and Denys Chabot, for example, is made to induce less quizzical incomprehension than positive wonder. The full arrival of paradox as a modern critical term dates from the period of *Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Following the lead of *T.S. Eliot's criticism, Brooks' study focuses on 'that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations,' which occurs in poetry. 'The language of poetry,' it follows for Brooks, 'is the language of paradox.' A close reading of Donne's The Canonization' in conjunction with Wordsworth's 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge' provides the master case. In the Wordsworthian purpose 'to choose incidents and situations from common life' but so to treat them that 'ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect' (Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads) Brooks reads the intention to paradox intrinsic to all that he considers poetry. So comprehensive is the use of the term paradox in The Well Wrought Urn (and in *New Criticism generally) that it refers, in effect, to virtually any form of *discourse that is expressive and productive of 'awed surprise.' The association of paradox with New Criticism and the Renaissance tradition of Christian humanism which that criticism more or less explicitly invokes has all but excluded the term from contemporary critical theory. As Rosalie L. Colie remarks of Renaissance paradox, it is 'recreative in the highest sense of that term, ever attempting the imitative recovery of a transcendent "truth," with all its ambivalences' (508). For all the aspiration to ontological wholeness that it bespeaks, though, paradoxy so practised does display features familiar to students of contemporary theory, Meconstruction in particular. The paradoxical form, observes Colie, by its very nature 'denies commitment: breaking out of imprisonment by disciplinary forms and the regulations of schools, it denies limitation, defies "sitting" in any specific philosophical position' (38). It is at once 'self-destructive' (37) and 'self-regarding, selfcontained ... self-confirming' (518). C A M I L L E R . L A BO SSI E R E

Primary Sources Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. London: Macmillan, 1953. Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963. Kenner, Hugh. Paradox in Chesterton. Intro. Herbert Marshall McLuhan. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1947Kreiger, Murray. A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. La Bossiere, Camille R. 'The Monumental Nonsense of Saint-John Perse.' Folio 18 (1990): 25-37. - The Victorian 'Fol Sage': Comparative Readings on Carlyle, Emerson, Melville and Conrad. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell UP, 1989. Land, Stephen K. Paradox and Polarity in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. Miller, Henry Knight. 'The Paradoxical Encomium with Special Reference to Its Vogue in England.' Modern Philology 53 (1956): 145-78. Ornstein, Robert M. 'Donne, Montaigne, and Natural Law.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55 (1956): 213-29. Wasserman, Earl. The Subtler Language. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1959. Weisinger, Herbert. Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1 953-

Parody Sometimes considered parasitic of individuality, originality and genius, parody has in the aoth century received a good deal of favourable attention. All adaptation of preceding styles can be considered parody, though in the strictest sense parody is a conscious ironic or sardonic evocation of another artistic model. (See also *irony.) Within classical notions of imitation, writers learned their craft by imitating those works generally considered to be the best, and developed a personal style or voice out of an ability to adopt the styles and voices of others. Writing, then, was taken to be community-based and collective in nature, with individualized new forms and methods not regarded as essential prerequisites for excellence. In this respect, all imitation is parody.

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Parody Many modern theorists use such an understanding as a point of departure. *Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, postulates that all repetition is parodic in nature but he divides repetition into two different types: stylization (unironic parody) and unstylized or ironized parody. Both of these types depend upon 'doublevoiced discourses' or 'the intersecting of two voices and accents' - the author's and another's. (See *double-voicing/dialogism.) In an un-ironic stylization (or what other authors call imitative recasting, allusion, quotation, or pastiche) an author uses another voice for its own projects, while in other kinds of parody 'the second voice, having lodged in the other speech, clashes antagonistically with the original, host voice and forces it to serve directly opposite aims. Speech becomes a battlefield for opposing intentions' ('Discourse Typology in Prose' 184, 185). For Bakhtin, parody (apart from stylization) is implicitly transgressive and subversive of conventional "ideology, although the nature of the *subversion may not be at all clear to the naive observer who lacks an adequate understanding of the context. Both of Bakhtin's variations offer a certain tribute to the original in their embodiment of the original voice. Arguably, both also function conservatively and normatively in perpetuating the host forms, figurations and ideas whether or not the original is the object of irony. Unironized parody seems, for Bakhtin, to stem from the Russian formalists' view that all "literature is quotation: nothing literary exists apart from the language of previous texts. (See Russian "formalism, "text.) Indeed, similarity of form and figuration can produce wonderfully creative works. Such seminal works as Don Quixote, for example, in relying upon and critiquing the conventions of original models, carry the concerns of those models even further. John Earth's depiction of Pocahantas and his evocation of early American colonial history and cultural mythology in The Sot-Weed Factor are simultaneously a tribute to and an exaggeration of tradition, a retelling of old narratives and a creation of new ones. Such evocation and displacement situate the work in a literary tradition and celebrate its intertextual links, even while suggesting that the work is, after all, part of a new and different cultural context. Both stylization and parody, especially postmodern metafictive parodic "intertextuality, mine the vein of literature self-referentiallv; each in its own way is a tribute to a

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previous form and lengthens the broad avenue of literature, while functioning in a unique manner. (See "postmodernism, "intertextuality.) What Margaret Rose calls 'transcontextualized repetition' is just as possible as intertextual repetition and ironizes the copy. Exact imitation or repetition may itself, then, constitute part of the parodic. Theorists such as "Jacques Derrida and "Michel Foucault extend this issue even further, arguing that, regardless of discrepancies in time, all repetition is transgressive. Repetition is excess and excess is dissemination or waste, where the original energy and originality are dissipated. By this argument, Bakhtin's notion of a neutral stylization is impossible; all repetition is parodic and transgressive. Not all imitations or stylizations have been accepted as parody, however. Standard dictionary definitions comment that parodies are pieces that imitate or mimic other works in order to ridicule the original(s) or some other unrelated work, person, thing, or trait. It is even said to be a 'high burlesque' of a famous work or author by the admixture of that style with a less worthy subject (Jump 2). Indeed Dryden's 'Mac Flecknoe' lampoons not only modern writers who are unheroic in their behaviour but also those writers who use heroic literature meanly. Parody sometimes, then, undermines the original form but becomes implicated in satire by targeting poor literary performances or unworthy human actions completely removed from the original work. Such parodies as Dryden's seem to presuppose not only that the reader will comprehend the butt of the satiric attack but also that the reader's derisive laughter will be triggered by comic uses of incongruity, exaggeration and understatement. Models for parody may thus be generally codified forms as well as particular works, features and conventions. These may be drawn from so-called high literature (wellknown and exemplary poems, plays and stories), other generally recognized artisticobjects, or popular culture, even political speeches, advertising, sermons, and journalistic pieces. No longer restricted to 'mere' imitation or to satire, parody in the zoth century reflects new narrative styles, current social patterns and concerns, and modern psychological views, while at the same time drawing comparisons with other texts that have influenced our way of thinking, acting and writing. According to

Patriarchy *Gerard Genette, some kind of obvious intertextual allusion and play creates the parody, though for Linda Hutcheon it depends upon noticeable similarities of text with important ironic differences that signal the intellectual and artistic distance between the copy and the original. She asserts that ironic inversion is a characteristic of all parody and is fully prepared to accept the view that ideology is often a central issue of parody, though she firmly denies that the element of ridicule must be present. Generally speaking, then, most contemporary critics would agree that parody does more than merely reiterate other texts; its textual or contextual difference from the original is reinforced by a generally ironic and mocking tone. It does not often satirize; it does not in any way set out to reform its audience or 'correct' the original of the artistic work at hand; but it often amuses and sometimes ridicules. (See also *kitsch.) GORDON E. SLETHAUG

Primary Sources Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Noi'el as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. - 'Discourse Typology in Prose.' Trans. Richard Balthazar and I.R. Titunik. In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1971, 176-96. - Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1968. Earth, John. The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: G.P Putnam's Sons, 1984. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1967. Dcrrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans, and intro. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. - Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1478. Foucault, Michei. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Koutledge, 1972. Genette, Gerard. Palirnpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Gilman, Sander I... Nietzschcan Parody, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag/Herbert Grundmann, 1976. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen, 1981. Jump, |ohn Davies. Burlesque. London: Methuen,

Rose, Margaret. Parody/Metafiction. London: Croom Helm, 1979.

Patriarchy Literally denoting the rule of the Law-of-theFather(s), the term patriarchy has gained particular significance primarily in Anglo-American *feminist criticism. In this context, a variety of perspectives is offered concerning the origins and manifestations of patriarchy. Generally, feminist criticism regards patriarchy as having arisen from - and continuing to be supported by - the notion that the sociocultural concepts of man and woman and of masculinity and femininity are caused by the biological division of human bodies into categories of male and female. The original connection between sexuality and biology seems to have been established in prehistory as the superiority in physical strength of the male over the female. Most feminist criticism tends to represent the family as the main legacy of this male advantage and therefore as patriarchy's primary model and institution. Consequently patriarchy has been defined in this context as a general organizing structure apparent in most social, cultural and economic practices world-wide, a structure that is considered to promote and perpetuate, in all facets of human existence, the empowerment of men and the disempowerment of women. Because they have as their foundation descriptions and explanations of the dynamics of the family, Freudian psychology, Marxian economics and the kinship theories of *Claude Levi-Strauss often are considered in AngloAmerican feminist criticism to offer significant insights into the workings of patriarchy. *Sigmund Freud's formulation of an exclusive father/son axis of *power has been seen as a framework within which the repression of women in patriarchy - and their compliance and or resistance to this repression - can be examined, and not only in the discipline of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy (Gallop). For example, *Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic adopts a psychoanalytic framework as a means of interpreting the resistance to patriarchy they consider to be characteristic of igth-century literary texts by women. (See 'psychoanalytic theory, *text.) The materialist or more strictly Marxist

1C)'2.

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Phallocentrism framework often found in work by British feminists tends to examine the development and functioning of capitalism as a patriarchal economic system in which the father/capitalist gains by and oversees the production - and reproduction - of the family/factory. (See *Marxist criticism, *cultural materialism, "materialist criticism.) In Women's Oppression Today Michele Barrett offers a comprehensive overview of many Marxist feminist issues. She points out that many works tend either to identify women as constituting a separate class within a Marxist system or to consider the oppression of women separately within each class (29). In addition to class and gender, Barrett examines some of the conceptual problems arising from the challenges of ethnicity and race to the Marxist feminist framework. To some extent a Marxist framework also informs Levi-Strauss' studies. Identifying women primarily as a commodity for exchange in kinship systems organized for the economic and social advantage of males, Levi-Strauss' work often is seen by Anglo-American feminists to be paradigmatic of oppressive anthropological formulations of patriarchy. Precisely because feminist criticism views patriarchy as structuring all the aspects of any given culture, society or economy, many Anglo-American feminist studies of its dynamics combine any or all of these three overarching theories with methodologies derived from a number of traditionally distinct disciplines such as history, literary studies, religious studies, philosophy, archaeology, and medicine. Interdisciplinarity characterizes Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser's A History of Their Own, for example, which traces the establishment of the patrilineal empowerment of men and the suppression of women in various civilizations. In addition, dualisms or binary oppositions often associated with patriarchy - such as good/evil, strong/weak, master/slave, superior/inferior, authority/obedience - structure as masculine and feminine, respectively, in each case not only the relations between men and women but also the roles and relations between those who are empowered or disempowered (feminized) generally: for example, the relations between an imperialistic power and the culture(s) upon which it feeds. (See *post-colonial theory, "binary opposition.) Moreover, frequently considered by feminist criticism to be the central systemic structuring element at work in, for example, traditional

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institutions, common-sense reasoning and the conventions of everyday life, patriarchy appears to render itself invisible, appearing to be part of human nature, part of what is 'natural.' Much Anglo-American feminist criticism concerned with the study of the condition of women attempts to make patriarchal strategies visible, to reveal that they actually are neither natural nor necessary, and thus to enable women and other 'feminized' groups to empower themselves. Recently, gender-based criticism by men, such as Marlon Ross' Contours of Masculine Desire, has begun to analyse the limitations of patriarchal concepts of masculinity for men and to reveal and render problematic the pervasiveness of men's collusion in oppressive practices. Both kinds of criticism presume patriarchy's obsolescence as a power structure. HEATHER JONES

Primary Sources Anderson, Bonnie S., and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Barrett, Michele. Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1988. Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. - Reading Lacan. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Ninetenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984. Ross, Marlon. Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Phallocentrism Derived from the psychoanalytic work of Ernest Jones (cited in Gallop 16-18), this term, in its most general sense, denotes a system of power relations which promotes and perpetuates the phallus as the transcendent symbol of empowerment. In Jones' work the phallus was seen to have a direct correspondence with the penis and thus phallocentrism was seen to denote the exclusive empowerment of men. The "psychoanalytic theory of "Jacques Lacan, however, has dissociated the phallus from the notion of a necessary or natural correspond-

Pleasure/bliss ence to the penis (or the clitoris). Seen in strictly symbolic terms, both men and women experience the phallus in its 'veiled' condition as 'the primal repressed' of the castration complex (Gallop 127-56). Lacan's theory of the phallus primarily as a focus - rather than object - of desire (and thus a possible sense of phallocentrism as indicating the moment of the emergence of the subject in the realm of the symbolic) has tended to be set aside, however, by feminist critics. Consequently, phallocentrism has come to be considered virtually synonymous with *patriarchy, denoting a certain kind of male-centred empowerment, a gender-specific system of power relations. (See also *power, *desire/lack, *subject/object, *imaginary/symbolic/real.) In the work of some women psychoanalytic theorists, such as *Luce Irigaray, who have found the Lacanian theory of the phallus ultimately male-centred and thus oppressive for women, the system of power relations designated by phallocentrism includes, for example, what ""Jacques Derrida has called the master narratives of Western *discourse: the classic works of philosophy, science, history, and religion. Seen as a structuring principle of these master narratives, the phallus appears to denote unity, *authority, tradition, and order; phallocentrism thus denotes the participation in and advocacy of associated assumptions, interests and values. Much empirically based *Anglo-American feminist criticism also tends to equate the Lacanian theory with patriarchy, noting the frequency with which persons who have both the penis and the phallus (only men) appear to be those who are empowered most often. HEATHER JONES

Primary Sources Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

Phonocentrism: see Logocentrism

Pleasure/bliss The linked and, for the most part, opposed terms pleasure (plaisir) and bliss (jouissance) are tendered for discussion (if never entirely

defined) by *Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte [The Pleasure of the Text 1973], a book which builds on Barthes' earlier distinction between the readerly and the writerly, and on the fundamental idea of ecriture or *textuality (writing conceived as process and *text, rather than as object and work). (See *readerly/writerly text.) The text of pleasure offers confirmation of the reader's knowledge, beliefs and expectations; the text of bliss brings loss, rupture and discomfort. The text of pleasure 'comes from culture and does not break with it' the text of bliss 'unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions.' The text of pleasure brings contentment; the text of bliss, a disturbing rapture. The text of pleasure confirms our comfortable relation to language as something stable and limited; the text of bliss 'brings to a crisis [the reader's] relation with language' (Pleasure of the Text 14). Barthes asserts, however, that it is impossible to make a firm distinction between pleasure and bliss. This is because in French the term plaisir sometimes includes jouissance or bliss, sometimes is opposed to it. In the title of Barthes' book, 'pleasure' is used as extending to and including bliss, while at other times the terms are opposed. Barthes declares that he must accept this and proceed in ambiguity and contradiction. The French term jouissance, which has as one of its meanings literally to 'come' in orgasm, cannot be fully rendered into English. Stephen Heath has observed that 'bliss' may be a dubious translation since it 'brings with it connotations of religious and social contentment' which are completely at odds with what Barthes meant in French, 'a radically violent pleasure which shatters - dissipates, loses - [the] ego' (Image - Music - Text 91). Barthes believes that pleasure and bliss are parallel forces that can never meet. Bliss results from 'cutting,' when in writing 'two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge ... and another edge, (underline), mobile blank ... Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so' (6-7). It is, then, this 'site of a loss/ this seam between the expected and the surprising which is erotic and creates bliss. Barthes' idea is paradoxical and, at its very heart, a celebration of contradiction. (See *paradox.) The reader who would experience bliss must keep both readings of pleasure and of bliss in view; this

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Pluralism reader must live in the seam between culture and its destruction, and simultaneously enjoy 'the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and [seek] its loss (that is his bliss)' (14). As the 'site of a loss' bliss is, for all its disruptive intensity, close to boredom. Tragedy, for instance, is of all forms most conducive to bliss, because it is not 'dramatic,' because the end is known from the first, and so 'of all readings, that of tragedy is the most perverse,' offering 'an effacement of pleasure and a progression of bliss' (47, 48). What are the consequences for criticism which would deal with the text of bliss? And how are we to read such criticism? As a "metalanguage, criticism of the text of pleasure or bliss (here again Barthes is using the words synonymously) must be a 'reported' pleasure, and 'how can we take pleasure in a reported pleasure?' (17). Only if we can read this reported pleasure as a primary pleasure of its own. We cannot take this reported pleasure, this critical text, on its own terms; we cannot become 'the confidant of this critical pleasure'; we must become its 'voyeur': 'the commentary then becomes in [our] eyes a text, a fiction, a fissured envelope' (17). Presumably, this is how Barthes wishes us to read his own criticism. It is itself a fiction and must be read as such by the reader as 'voyeur,' the reader willing to see it as itself a text of bliss, a 'site of a loss/ and not a finished object. No critical metalanguage can gain access to the text of bliss, unless it be another text of bliss. Just as the writerly annulled all *ideology, or the valuing of one interpretation, one idea, over all others, so too 'the pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another' (31). (Here, as in the title of his book, Barthes uses pleasure as a larger term that includes bliss.) To the triumphant plural of the writerly, Barthes now adds the 'perversity' of pleasure, the hedonism of 'difference.' In the text of pleasure 'the moral unity that society demands of every human product' is 'overcome, split' (31), and in this text therefore 'the opposing forces are no longer repressed but in a state of becoming: nothing is really antagonistic, everything is plural' (31). This hedonist Utopia, then, builds on the Utopia of the writerly plural posited by Barthes in his earlier book S/Z( 1 9 7 o). Barthes is acutely aware that he must be consistently inconsistent and not himself produce a text of pleasure which will be merely

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confirmatory, comfortable, plagiaristic, or predictable (this is one reason why he refuses to define his terms unambiguously and proceeds in ambiguity and contradiction). Therefore, 'no "thesis" on the pleasure of the text is possible: barely an inspection (an introspection) that falls short' (34). The affirmation of bliss cannot be 'spoken, doctrinal' (44), for bliss depends on no ripening or process of realization. In the text of bliss everything is becoming and nothing is fixed; 'everything is wrought to a transport at one and the same moment' (52). Yet to affirm all this is, of course, precisely to affirm a doctrine, in most seductively virtuosic terms. In his consistent inconsistency Barthes may not have escaped the trap of generating a text of pleasure, a highly confirmatory and comfortable text to the reader who has recuperated its meanings. At the same time, this confirmatory quality in his text may justify his claim that bliss is to be associated with boredom and opposed to the precarious intensities of pleasure. Paradoxically and yet logically, at the extreme of the unexpected, in a site of loss, we find only what we always know. Like the earlier writerly, bliss may very well be a Utopian ideal, never to be glimpsed save from the well-charted shores of pleasure. (See also "recuperation, *intertextuality.) FRANCIS ZICHY

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Selected and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. - The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. - S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974.

Plot: see Story

Pluralism Pluralism is the view that there can be more than one valid reading of a *text; more precisely, especially in the writings of the *NeoAristotelian or Chicago school, it refers to what *Wayne Booth has called 'methodological pluralism,' the view that critical questions and statements are relative to the methodological

Polyphonic novel framework or *discourse which generates them and ultimately to the ends for which this framework is employed. Pluralism is thus a form of pragmatism or instrumentalism, which holds that critical doctrines and methods, rather than being positions to be defended, are merely tools useful for arriving at different kinds of knowledge about texts which we may happen 'at one time or another, or for one or another reason, to want' (*Crane). In this view, some critical methods are useful for some purposes, some for others; they are not reducible to one another. Pluralism is sometimes taken to mean that all critical approaches are equally valid but this is very far from the view of either R.S. Crane or Booth. Rather, critical judgments are relative to the principles and methods of inquiry but these principles and methods may be more or less adequate to the job. Views contrasting with pluralism are dogmatism or monism (the view that only one critical method can be true), scepticism (none are true) and eclecticism (truth is attained by combining the best elements of several systems). Pluralism rejects the notion of a unitary truth implied by each of these views; it would regard whatever theory was produced by the last method (eclecticism) as merely one more weapon in the arsenal of criticism. HOI.LIS R1NEHART

Primary Sources Booth, Wayne C. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Crane, R.S. The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1953. 'Pluralism and Its Discontents.' Special issue. Critical Inquiry 12.3 (Spring 1986).

Polyphonic novel In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) *Mikhail Bakhtin claims that Dostoevsky's novels represented something new and unprecedented in the history of fiction, and coined the term polyphonic novel to describe it. Later, especially in 'Discourse in the Novel' (1934-5), Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky's art is the purest expression of a tendency implicit within the novel genre. What *heteroglossia is to linguistic theory, "polyphony and the polyphonic

novel are to fictional theory. Just as no speaker is free to express his or her linguistic intention unobstructed but must always mediate that intention in relation to other speakers, so the novelist, according to Bakhtin, must grant characters their own intentions, mediate their voices without subsuming them within a single authorial voice. (See "intention/intentionality.) Dostoevsky's novels are not anchored in the ideas, or arguments, of any single character, but in the relation of each character to the words of the others. Their relationship to one another is dialogic, and in fact dialogism and polyphony are virtual synonyms in Bakhtin's vocabulary. As Bakhtin states: 'Every thought of Dostoevsky's heroes ... senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue. Such thought is not impelled toward a well-rounded, finalized, systematically monologic whole. It lives a tense life on the borders of someone else's thought, someone else's consciousness' (Problems 32). Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky's achievement represents a kind of 'Copernican turn' both in the history of fiction and in our understanding of self-consciousness. In place of the traditional fictional unity based on an overarching *theme (the need for and acquisition of 'prudence' in Tom Jones, for instance), unity in Dostoevsky's novels is dialogic, consisting of 'the artistically organized coexistence and interaction of spiritual diversity, not stages of an evolving unified spirit' (Problems 30). Dostoevsky creates 'not voiceless slaves ... but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him' (Problems 6). By the time he wrote 'Discourse in the Novel,' where he defines the novel as 'a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized' (262), Bakhtin had come to see these qualities of Dostoevsky's novels as constitutive elements of the genre itself, and indeed discovers them in a wide range of European novels. The influence of Bakhtin's theory of fictional *discourse has been significant. *Paul de Man writes that 'it would be possible to line up an impressive list of contemporary theorists of very diverse persuasion, all of which would have a legitimate claim on Bakhtin's dialogism as congenial or even essential to their enterprise' (104). Don Bialostosky notes that 'we

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Poly phony /dialogism may practice dialogics, as well as rhetoric and dialectic, without identifying our practice with an art of that name/ and cites several examples of literary analyses indebted to the intertwined concepts of dialogism and polyphony (796). Peter K. Garrett's The Victorian Multiplot Novel is subtitled Studies in Dialogic Form, and employs Bakhtin's conceptual framework to analyse the presence in Victorian novels of 'radical, unresolvable differences, of oppositions that cannot be reduced to stable, abstract antinomies or subjected to dialectical mediation' (9). Whatever the fate of his claims for Dostoevsky, the critical terms Bakhtin initially formulated to account for his novels have entered the mainstream of literary heteroglossia. (See *dialogical criticism.) JAMES DIEDRICK

Primary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. 'Discourse in the Novel.' In The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981, 259-422. - Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Bialoscosky, Don. 'Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism.' PMLA 101 (1986): 788-97. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. de Man, Paul. 'Dialogue and Dialogism.' Poetics Today 4 (1983): 99-107. Garrett, Peter K. The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogical Form. New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1980.

Polyphony/dialogism Polyphony, a term originally derived from music, is a unique characteristic of prose "literature described and illustrated by *Mikhail Bakhtin, whereby several contesting voices representing a variety of ideological positions can engage equally in dialogue, free from authorial judgment or constraint. The author is democratically positioned among or 'alongside' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 6) the speeches of the characters so that no single point of view is privileged. Consequently, the multiple perspectives of unmerged consciousnesses are granted equal validity within the *text; this free play of discourses precludes the dominance of any point of view, including that

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of the author. The concept of polyphony is central to Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. (See *dialogical criticism, theories of *play/freeplay, 'discourse.) Dissonance and tension within the text are not resolved, as the integrity of independent discourses remains irreducible to a single, harmonious world-view which, in the monologic text, is imposed by the author. (See *monologism.) Polyphony retains therefore a capacity for 'surprisingness' (Morson and Emerson 244), the potential for genuine innovation. Moreover, because of its focus on process (dialogic relationships) rather than product (closure or finalizing), polyphony can be described as essentially a theory of creativity. The liberation of the characters from authorial control results in a dialogue that is theoretically unfinalizable. There is no last word which can be spoken, no absolute or single interpretation possible. As long as people are alive there can be no final truth and the work of art can never be finished. Nevertheless, a special kind of unity can be achieved consisting of 'a dialogic concordance of unmerged twos and multiples' (289) which Bakhtin describes as a 'unity of the event' (Problems of Dosloevsky's Poetics 21). This new unity is situated in the dynamic process of creation rather than in the finished product. Bakhtin's conception of polyphony remains problematic because although he describes it he never provides a definition. He also reformulates it at different stages in his career with out reconciling his understanding of its origins and applications at different stages in his career. In Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics, Bakhtin finds his ideal of authentic polyphony in the novels of Dostoevsky. Later, he modifies and expands his conception of the origins of polyphony and comes to understand it as an inherent characteristic of all novelistic discourse. Polyphony now becomes another word for dialogism as Bakhtin begins to formulate the concept of a prosaics, a neologism coined by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson to describe Bakhtin's theory of literature that privileges prose and the novel. His study of the development of the novel in literary history, The Dialogic Imagination, sees the potential for polyphony in classical prose models which include elements of the *carnival, such as the Socratic dialogues or Menippean satires like Apuleius' The Golden Ass. As a result of this revision, Dostoevsky can be seen to have

Polyphony/dialogism made a major, though not necessarily unique, contribution to the evolution of the polyphonic novel. Polyphony is now viewed as a possibility inherent in all novelistic prose and the art of Dostoevsky is cited as a particularly felicitous realization of its potential. Criticism inspired by Bakhtin has applied both his more radical and exclusive description of the origins of polyphony and the subsequent revision. Divisions in *feminist criticism between French and Anglo-American approaches perhaps best demonstrate this dichotomy. *Julia Kristeva, for example, appropriates Bakhtin's earlier Utopian stance for the French school. In The Novel as Polylogue' (1972), she restricts polyphony to the modernist avant-garde text. Kristeva collapses gender in her definition of the 'feminine' as synonymous with all that is marginalized and silenced by the dominant culture, and includes male authors such as Joyce, Artaud and Bataille as creators of I'ecriture feminine, which she equates with the polyphonic text. (See *margin/ centre.) Joyce's Finnegans Wake can thus exemplify a *polyphonic novel. "Helene Cixous and *Luce Irigaray, on the other hand, attempt to theorize (and even produce) the polyphonic text or I'ecriture feminine as a Utopian women's writing. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) or Irigaray's 'When our lips speak together' (1977) can be seen as attempts to inscribe a polyphonic discourse that reflects the splitting of the feminine subject. (See *subject/object.) A recent extension of this application is Anne Herrmann's concept of a 'female dialogic/ which draws upon Bakhtin and Irigaray to formulate a model that accounts for the divisions in female subjectivity. For these feminist critics, then, it is the modernist or postmodernist text that is polyphonic; the realist tradition is explicitly rejected by Kristeva, for example, as monologic. (See *postmodernism.) Many Anglo-American feminists, however, are attracted to Bakhtin's emphasis on the crucial significance of the context of discourse and reject the exclusive appropriation of polyphony by French feminists as exemplified in the radical utopianism of I'ecriture feminine. Joanne S. Frye, for example, speaks for contextual feminists who find the novel's dialogic capacity for 'eternal re-thinking and evaluating' (Dialogic 31) within social contexts an encouraging catalyst for cultural change. She sees these attributes in contemporary novels written in the realist tradition; in such novels female charac-

ters may also 'reject the fixity of meaning' (Frye 34). British author and critic *David Lodge defines prose literature as 'dialogic, or, in an alternative formulation "polyphonic," ' thus equating the two terms (After Bakhtin 58). He finds these characteristics not only present in modernist texts such as Joyce's Ulysses or *D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love but also perceptible in aspects of the classic realist text (George Eliot's Middlemarch) and in modern novelists writing in the realist tradition (Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett). Such works contain 'an amazing variety of discursive texture, and a surprising degree of interpretive freedom for the reader' (Lodge 86). Polyphony is undoubtedly one of Bakhtin's most original and controversial concepts and continues to inspire innovative investigations into the complexities of novelistic prose. PHYLLIS MARGARET PARYAS

Primary Sources Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. London: Penguin, 1990. Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. - Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. - Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New York: Signet, 1961. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Bantam, 1985. Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1986. Herrmann, Anne. The Dialogic and Difference: 'An/ Other Woman' in Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Irigaray, Luce. 'When our lips speak together.' Trans. Carolyn Burke. Signs 6 (1980): 69-79. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. - Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1968. Kristeva, Julia. 'The Novel as Polylogue.' In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice

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Postmodernism Jardine, Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. New York: Viking, 1968. Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, eds. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. - Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1989. Tolstoi, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. David Magarshack. New York: Signet, 1961.

Postmodernism Postmodernism is a period label generally given to cultural forms since the 19605 that display certain characteristics such as reflexivity, *irony and a mixing of popular and high art forms. Although the term first found favour in architecture (Jencks), it is now used to describe ""literature, the visual arts, music, dance, film, theatre, philosophy, criticism, historiography, theology, and anything up-to-date in culture in general. Either seen as a continuation of the more radical aspects of modernism or as marking a rupture with such things as modernist ahistoricism or yearning for *closure, postmodernism has been linked to 'the cultural logic of late capitalism' (*Jameson); the general condition of knowledge in times of informational technology (*Lyotard); the replacing of a modernist epistemological focus with an ontological one (McHale); and the substitution of the simulacrum for the real (*Baudrillard). Postmodern literature has been called a literature of replenishment (Barth), on the one hand, and the literature of an inflationary economy (Newman), on the other. In short, there is little agreement on the reasons for its existence or on the evaluation of its effects. Nevertheless, a study of the overlapping concerns of the various art forms and discourses in which the term is used yields certain common denominators that might be seen to define postmodernism. The first involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness (or formal and thematic reflexivity) and some sort of historical grounding, however ironized. (See *paradox.) For example, what has been called 'historiographic metafiction' (Hutcheon, Poetics) is fiction which is both inward and out-

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ward directed, that is to say, both concerned with its status as fiction, narrative or language, and also grounded in some verifiable historical reality. Postmodern discourses tend to use but also abuse, install but also subvert, conventions, and they usually negotiate these contradictions through irony (Wilde, Horizons) and *parody (Hutcheon, Politics). (See ""subversion.) In employing traditional forms and expectations and at the same time undermining both, postmodern discourses manage to point to conventions as conventions and thus to de-naturalize the things we take as natural or given. Because these include ideological structures such as capitalism, *patriarchy, imperialism, even humanism, postmodern concerns often overlap with those of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and poststructuralist analysis. (See ""Marxist criticism, ""feminist criticism, ""post-colonial theory, *poststructuralism.) These should not, however, be conflated: the Marxist, feminist and post-colonial, in particular, possess theories of political action and agency that the postmodern appears to lack. However, beyond the de-naturalizing impulse, the postmodern also shares their positive valuing of the different, the 'other,' in the face of ideological urges to totalize and homogenize. (See ""self/other, ""totalization.) Postmodern discourses also challenge the fixing of boundaries (Hassan) between genres, between art forms, between theory and art, between high art and mass-media culture. (See ""genre criticism, ""discourse.) The latter connection with popular culture has proved most problematic to Marxist analysts (Jameson; *Eagleton) but is the basis of many postmodern challenges to modernist hierarchies of cultural value (Huyssen). The radically disparate interpretations and evaluations of postmodernism are in part the result of its particular politics and the curious 'middle grounds' (Wilde, Middle) it occupies, inscribing yet also subverting various aspects of a dominant culture: however critical the subversion, there is still a complicity that cannot be denied. This strategic doubleness or political ambidextrousness is the common denominator of many postmodern discourses, and to see only one side - either the complicity or the critique - is to deny the complexity of the enterprise. It is also one of the reasons for the differences of opinion about the validity and value of the postmodern 'problematizing' of issues such as history, representation,

Power subjectivity, and ""ideology. There are other reasons, as well, some rooted in cultural and national differences. Jean-Francois Lyotard's defining of the postmodern as marking the death of the grand master narratives that used to make sense of our world for us comes out of a different intellectual and historical frame of reference than does *Jurgen Habermas' argument that the modernist project of Enlightenment rationality requires completion first, for in Germany and in Eastern Europe it can certainly be argued that modernity was cut short. The postmodern revaluing of not only the different but the local and particular over the universal and general demands that such disagreements about the definition of postmodernism be both respected and historicized, not disregarded or downplayed. LINDA HUTCHEON

Primary Sources Barth, John. 'The Literature of Replenishment.' Atlantic 245 (1980): 65-71. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Eagleton, Terry. 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism.' New Left Review 152 (1985): 60-73. Habermas, Jurgen. 'Modernity - an Incomplete Project.' New German Critique 22 (1981): 3-14. Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. - The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.' New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London: Academy P, 1977. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit, 1979. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Methuen, 1987. Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985. Wilde, Alan. Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

- Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987.

Power The term power is fundamental to a major branch of contemporary criticism and critical theory, the analysis of the political dimension of textual practices. This interest in the connection between texts and the power relations of the society in which they are produced has generated studies of power both as something that is represented and as an extratextual force which structures and limits the nature of representation. Many such studies are directly indebted to the work of *Michel Foucault, himself drawing from the work of *Nietzsche, particularly the Genealogy of Morals. Through his research on the social construction of human subjectivity, Foucault was led to reconceptualize the received view of 'power' as the ability to cause change in the world, as a commodity or a position attributable to an individual human subject. Instead, Foucault understands 'power' as a quality of those relations between individuals in which a given society's systems of control are intentionally put into operation. More specifically, the exercise of 'power' (and for Foucault power exists only when it is exercised) is the action of structuring the possible field of action of others by the deployment of one or more reigning institutional codes or 'disciplines/ be they legal, educational, religious, medical, or political. (See *code.) Moreover, Foucault proposed that 'power' is not simply a by-product of these disciplines but that it is in its own right a productive force, that it makes possible specific conceptions of what one can know about oneself which serve, in turn, to maintain the *episteme of a particular society. In this sense, the etymological relationship between 'subjectivity' and 'subjection' is anything but arbitrary. Contrary to its more familar definition, then, power for Foucault is not attached to an individual human subject, not restricted to state institutions, not one-directional, not essentially prohibitive, and not separable from the social relations in which it manifests itself and through which it achieves its ends. In his attempt to articulate the workings of power as a social and historically determined set of relations, Foucault deliberately resisted

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Praxis giving his combined insights the status of a 'theory' of power. On the contrary, he encouraged his readers always to ground any subsequent study of control relations in detailed historical analysis. This combined emphasis on 'power' and on its historically specific manifestation has strongly influenced the critical practice known as the *New Historicism. For instance, Stephen Greenblatt, the leading theorist and practitioner of New Historicism, has traced significant relationships between the representation of human subjectivity in English Renaissance *literature and the structure of power relations in the monarchical society of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Foucault's concept of 'power' has also been used by Marxist and feminist critics in their efforts to uncover the mechanisms by which class- and gender-based domination is established and maintained. (See *Marxist criticism, *feminist criticism.) MARTA STRAZNICKY /

Primary Sources Balbus, Isaac D. 'Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse.' In After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. Ed. Jonathan Arac. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988, 138-60. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 'Power and Truth.' In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982, 184-204. Foucault, Michel. 'On Power.' In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984.. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988, 96-109. - Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. - 'The Subject and Power.' Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982, 208-26. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Setf-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Maslan, Mark. 'Foucault and Pragmatism.' Raritan 7.3 (1988): 94-114. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. Said, Edward W. 'Foucault and the Imagination of Power.' In Foucault: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Couzens Hoy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 149-55. Sawicki, Jana. 'Feminism and the Power of Fou-

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cauldian Discourse.' In After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. Ed. Jonathan Arac. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988, 161—78. Warren, Mark. Nietzsche and Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1988. Wolin, Sheldon S. 'On the Theory and Practice of Power.' In After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. Ed. Jonathan Arac. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988, 179-201.

Praxis The term praxis plays a pivotal role in dialectical materialism, developed by Karl Marx as a critique of idealism and mechanical materialism. Marx contends in the 'Theses on Feuerbach' ('Feuerbachthesen' 1845) - together with The German Ideology [Die deutsche Ideologic 1845] a turning-point in his work - that philosophy has offered only different interpretations of the world but has not changed it. He defines praxis here as 'human sensuous activity' (Marx 403) and revolutionary praxis as the simultaneous changing of circumstances and of human activity itself (Selbstveranderung). For Marx truth is determined by praxis and therefore is not a question of theory. He argues that the very categories of theory correspond to relationships produced in social praxis. The abstract individual analysed by Ludwig Feuerbach, for instance, is shown to belong to a particular form of society. Marx understands 'human essence' accordingly as the external 'ensemble of the social relations' (404) that result from a distinct, historically determined social praxis, not as an abstract quality pertaining to individuals. This view of praxis contrasts sharply with the Aristotelian tripartite model in which theoria refers to contemplation and is the arbiter of eternal truths (inspired by the regularity of natural phenomena); praxis refers primarily to politics as the second highest form of activity open to free citizens, and poiesis designates the making of objects. The Aristotelian view excludes a theory of praxis, since theory adjudicates truth with respect to determinate objects (and thus is concerned with knowledge in the strict sense), whereas praxis implies freedom and choice between alternatives. The concept of theoretical knowledge as the basis of praxis begins to develop in medieval interpretations of Aristotle. It leads eventually to the idea, expounded by Francis Bacon, that theoretical

Problematic knowledge has its end in practical application and must prove its results in praxis. Idealism will later derive its belief in human self-determination from the trust in a theoretical knowledge of praxis. Kant thus constructs practical reason (ethics) on the basis of theoretical knowledge and Hegel develops experience as the unfolding of the spirit. This sense of human self-determination viewed independently of material circumstances is still present in the early writings of Marx. Marxist literary theory and *Marxist criticism use the term praxis as 'denoting the total process and activity by which men in society (as Subject) act upon and change the world as their object' (Weimann 3), to draw attention to literary production as social praxis. (See *subject/object.) They examine in particular historical aspects of literary production and reception with respect to social and economic factors. The investigation of such categories as the aesthetic, or as ""literature itself, has led in this context to an acceptance of the term literature in an extensive sense, to include texts beyond the established *canon of literary masterworks. The often-related *sociocriticism (distinct from a sociology of literature) seeks to establish the mediations of social praxis and socially produced relationships in the form and structure of literary works. A phenomenological and existentialist usage of the term praxis in the 19505 and early 19605 (*Maurice Merleau-Ponty, *Jean-Paul Sartre), drawing mainly on the early work of Marx (before 1845), insists on a necessarily indeterminate human existence and thus on its ineluctable freedom. (See *phenomenological criticism.) By contrast later theory and criticism in France, such as works by *Louis Althusser, *Pierre Bourdieu or the group Tel Quel, often replace the term praxis by practice (pratique). In Pour Marx [For Marx 1965; trans. 1969], Althusser formulates the concept of a theoretical practice (pratique theorique) as a specific form of a determinate social practice. Theoretical practice thus falls under the general definition of practice as 'transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of 'production')' (Althusser 166). The task of theoretical practice is to transform prescientific abstractions, which Althusser calls ideological, into scientific categories. This particular form of practice submits general concepts to the the-

oretical concepts of a science (as its 'means of production') and elaborates a concrete theoretical knowledge (a Hegelian 'concrete' which is the opposite of an empirical object). *Julia Kristeva, ""Roland Barthes and others subsequently use the term *signifying practice (pratique signifiante) to posit structuring and de-structuring processes of meaning production as a field of semiotic inquiry, and oppose concepts such as *text and ecriture to the notion of the literary work. (See ""semiotics.) Kristeva defines practice as a 'transformation of natural and social resistances, limitations, and stagnations' (Revolution 17). Since for her a signifying practice is 'the establishment and countervailing of a sign system' (Desire 18), the speaking subject appears in texts, which constitute one of the forms of signifying practice, as a subject in process/on trial (sujet en proces) that undergoes phases of socially defined identity as well as disruptive processes of change and crisis. (See also *sign, ""materialist criticism.) WINFRIED SIEMERLING

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. Pour Marx. 1965. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Random House, 1969. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. - Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Lobkowicz, Nicholas. Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx. Notre Dame/ London: U of Notre Dame P, 1967. Marx, Karl. 'Theses on Feuerbach.' In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Selected Works in Two Volumes. Vol. II. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958, 403-5. Weimann, Robert. Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

Presence: see Metaphysics of pressure

Problematic This term, in the strict definition given it by French Marxist philosopher *Louis Althusser,

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Readerly/writerly text has had wide currency in politically committed literary theory and criticism since the early 19705. A problematic is the unity of a body of thought from which its separate elements cannot be isolated. The problematic conditions both what can and cannot be thought within it. For example, since the New Critical problematic rejects considerations of biography and history, it is possible that specific instances of what it sees as wit or *irony may have been generated by psychological conflict or social contradiction. (See *New Criticism.) An ideological problematic, responsive to questions arising from its historical circumstances, is doubly blind, both to its internal assumptions and to its external determinates. (See "Ideology, ""ideological horizon.) Since the problematic of a given social scientific *text is as much a matter of absent problems and concepts - questions it is unable to ask, contradictions it cannot see - as it is of those openly dealt with, it can only be reached through a ""symptomatic reading which focuses precisely on the text's lacunae and blind spots. JOHN THURSTON

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1977.

Readerly/writerly text The distinction between the readerly and the writerly (lisible and scriptible) was argued at length by ""Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970), a protracted, detailed reading of Honore de Balzac's short novel Sarrasine, interspersed with explicit meditations on writing and criticism. As the original French term suggests, the scriptible ('that which it is possible to write') is writing as act and unforeclosed process. The writerly ""text is triumphantly plural and in it therefore ""ideology (the valuing of one meaning over all others) is annulled. The writerly is absolutely plural because language is infinite. The writerly text is not a structure but a structuration, in which 'the reader [is] no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text' (S/Z 4). Because of its triumphant plurality, the writerly completely baffles any criticism or ""metalanguage, any subsequent commentary or

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categories which would seek to cover the text. Only incompletely plural texts can be discussed: 'there may be nothing to say about writerly texts' (4). As virtual object, the writerly may not exist: 'The writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time finding it in a bookstore' (5). This is why, perhaps, Barthes' S/Z is a discussion of a 'classic' or readerly text. Readerly texts are finished objects, products and not productions. The readerly, classic narrative 'is basically subject to the logico-temporal order' (52). It 'sets forth the end of every action (conclusion, interruption, closure, denouement)' and so 'declares itself to be historical' (its plot is Aristotelian) (52). The classical narrative is also an 'image of the sentence,' since it is 'based on the articulation of question and answer' (it is 'hermeneutic') (76). (See *hermeneutics.) The basic requirement of the readerly is completeness. The readerly strives for plenitude, fullness, but denies thorough 'dissemination' (compare ""Jacques Derrida's book, Dz'ssemination). In the readerly, 'dissemination is not the random scattering of meanings toward the infinity of the language [this is the "dissemination" of the writerly]' (182). In the readerly everything is eventually recuperated. (See ""recuperation.) Barthes asserts at the outset that the readerly is the 'countervalue' of the writerly, 'its negative, reactive value' (4). This implies that the relation between the readerly and the writerly is dialectical, that one is inconceivable without the other, that to evoke the writerly, it may be best, or even necessary, to discuss a readerly text. This is in fact exactly what Barthes does in S/Z, which can be described as 'reactive' criticism, reacting to and 'differentiating' the readerly, 'more or less' plural novel Sarrasine. The painstakingly detailed, 'slowed down' reading exposes the gaps in this readerly text and aims to subvert its order or 'chains or causality' (215). (See ""subversion.) Yet it is true that at times Barthes speaks as if certain contemporary texts, of the French poet Phillippe Sellers for instance, really do approach the condition of the writerly and he explicitly asserts that 'this Replete Literature, readerly literature, can no longer be written' (201). In S/Z Barthes remains ambiguous about whether the writerly, as virtual text, actually exists. If the writerly text is 'ourselves writing,' it is perhaps best exemplified in what Barthes himself does in such a virtuoso-like

Recuperation manner in S/Z (the writerly is his activity, not his text, for the 'writerly text is not a thing'). The project is to write about the readerly without oneself producing another merely readerly text, to oppose the 'cultural code' of the classical readerly without substituting yet another *code of one's own: 'how can one code be superior to another without abusively closing off the plurality of codes? [That is, what is to prevent the idea of the writerly from itself becoming part of an all-too-readerly code?] Only writing, by assuming the largest possible plural in its own task, can oppose without appeal to force the imperialism of each language' (206). The writerly is writing as text (texte), as openended process; the readerly is writing as work (oeuvre), as closed object (to borrow terms from Barthes' essay 'From Work to Text' [1979]). The triumph of the 'writerly plural' is the triumph of *textuality, of writing seen as infinite and 'indeterminable' (with no single determinate meaning) because language is. Barthes' concept of the writerly is thus closely affiliated to the concepts of ecriture and "intertextuality as defined by critics like Jacques Derrida, *Julia Kristeva and *Michael Riffaterre. FRANCIS ZICHY

Prim an/ Sources Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans, and intro. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Recuperation In French, the term recuperation means recovery, salvage, rehabilitation. Its use in literary criticism is most fully elaborated by Jonathan Culler in his Structuralist Poetics. Culler defines what is referred to in structuralist criticism as recuperation, naturalization or vraisemblablisation as the reading process which brings the *text 'within the modes of order which culture makes available' (137). (See *structuralism.) For a text to be intelligible, it must be recuperated into the order of comprehensibility available to the reader. Culler gives as an example the possibility of making a text by Robbe-Grillet easier to read by supposing it 'the musings or speech of a pathological nar-

rator' (138). In this case, the *code, or text, through which the novel is recuperated is that of common beliefs about human psychology. Culler describes the processes of recuperation through five such codes: first, that of 'the socially given text, that which is taken as the "real world."' Next there is the socially given text which differs from the first in being a set of assumptions recognized by those who hold them as subject to modification. Third, there is the knowledge of literary conventions or generic expectations which helps us recognize writing as falling into known patterns. Fourth, a text may be read and understood through the codes and values constructed by and within it or which distinguish it from other works; included in this recuperative category would be the expectations readers have of the work of a given author and the ways a text lives up to those expectations or not. Lastly, Culler describes recuperation through recognition of an intertext; a text is assimilated through recognition of another text, or body of texts, to which it is in some way related, or which it evokes or parodies. (See "intertextuality, *parody.) Thus recuperation involves the reading of one text, what is written, through another, and this doubleness leads Culler to say, 'Irony, the cynic might say, is the ultimate form of recuperation and naturalization whereby we ensure that the text says only what we want to hear. We reduce the strange and incongruous ... by calling them ironic' (157). (See *irony.) Culler modifies this statement by claiming that the reader's detection of irony can as easily result in a text which is not foreclosed. The idea, however, that recuperation is the process by which one text is effaced by the text, or code(s) (or knowledge) through which it is recuperated, suggests that *Jacques Derrida's work on metaphor in 'White Mythology' might also apply. (See ""metonymy/metaphor, *white mythology.) Derrida discusses the way in which a metaphor can become so powerful that it erases the reality it represents: an example of this is the way in which a playing-field metaphor might erase the horror of the war for which it is substituted. While the recuperative text, like the metaphor, to some extent erases the material text read through it, it is also the condition which makes signification possible. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The possibility of recuperation is the possibility of *closure of the text; all principles

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Reference/referent of closure are ultimately a limiting of polysemy: 'Each time that polysemia is irreducible, when no unity of meaning is even promised to it, one is outside language' (248). Derrida extends his discussion beyond Culler's (of the purely literary text) to the use of the metaphor in all discursive activities. In biology, for example, observations are made intelligible through such metaphors as that of the cell. The recuperative text is the medium through which the 'real' is read, simultaneously effacing it and making it accessible, and is thus comparable to the notion of ""ideology found in the work of *Louis Althusser. For Althusser, ideology is a means of knowing the world, a 'code,' reproduced through such institutions as schools, and also the form of knowledge which makes it possible to recognize ourselves as subjects. It thus serves as a principle of closure in the recuperation of the text of our experience. While, for Derrida, what is not recuperated through metaphor is 'outside language/ for Althusser, 'what seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology' (163). It must be pointed out that recogniton of the process of recuperation depends on a theory of language that claims that 'real' meaning, like the material text, is always effaced, beyond reach, until naturalized, or rewritten, within some pre-existing text. The critic may not be fully conscious of the recuperative codes which separate her from 'language itself but must admit the possibility of their existence. All criticism is recuperation. The following is an example of the use of the term: 'What was neither observed by Europe nor documented by it was therefore "lost" until, at some later date it too could be incorporated by the new sciences of anthropology, political economics, and linguistics. It is out of this later recuperation ... that a still later disciplinary step was taken, the founding of the science of world history' (Said 101). JULIE BEDDOES

Primary Sources

Derrida, Jacques. 'White Mythology.' Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Said, Edward. 'Orientalism Reconsidered.' Cultural Critique \ (Fall 1985): 89-107.

Reference/referent 'Reference' is the activity of calling attention to something or to some state of affairs as relevant to the context at hand. 'Referent' is that object which is called to the recipient's attention as being relevant. The term reference has been central in modern philosophy of language from Gottlob Frege to *Paul Ricoeur. There is no problem with ostensive reference; for example, when one points to the door and asks another person to open it. The semantic problem arises with non-ostensive reference in written language and can be examined at the level of the sentence and at the level of the *text. In Frege, reference is coupled with the term sense; sense is what the proposition states and reference is that about which the proposition is stated; the problem arises out of the lack of a one-to-one relationship between sense and reference in ordinary language. *Emile Benveniste expanded Frege's concept from the level of word to that of sentences. He held that reference is established through its use in the sentence, which gives separate words semantic value and thereby their referents. Ricoeur builds on Benveniste's linguistic observations in his consideration of textual reference. In The Rule of Metaphor (1977), Ricoeur argues that 'the meaning of a metaphorical statement rises up from the blockage of any literal interpretation of the statement'; inasmuch as 'the primary reference founders' as a result of the semantic impertinence of the metaphor (230), literal reference of a direct description gives way to a sense, a metaphorical truth which does not describe an existing reality, but which 'discovers' new possible realities. (See ""metonymy/metaphor.) MARIO J. VALDES

Althusser, Louis. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

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Primary Sources Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1977. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-discipli-

Reification nary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Reification Reification is a term associated with the work of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher *Georg Lukacs, who presented it as part of his dialectical theory of society in History and Class Consciousness (1923). Lukacs employs reification (Verdinglichung) to describe the economic process whereby, under capitalism, human social relations or actions take on the appearance of relations or actions among objects or things that are then described in purely mathematical or scientific terms. Such a reification of social relations ultimately comes to produce, in Lukacs' view, certain effects on the subject of production. Reification bears conceptual similarities and owes debts of influence both to Karl Marx's theory of alienation and to Max Weber's theory of rationalization. In Capital, vol. I (1867), Marx examines how the products of man's creation, such as the products of his labour, come to appear and act as alien constraints upon him because of the nature of commodity production. Writing on the 'fetishism of commodities' under capitalism, he explains that the social character of man's labour appears to him only in an objective light, as a 'thinglike' relation between persons, and conversely, that the relations between commodities assume the appearance of social relations. Reification as understood by Lukacs is an amplification of this theory, which in the third volume of Capital is given the name Verdinglichung. Lukacs claims that in the commodity-structure characteristic of capitalism, the relations between people acquire a 'phantom objectivity' that conceals the fact and the history of social relations. Also an important influence on Lukacs is the thought of German sociologist Max Weber. Weber's theory of rationalization in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [History and Society 1922] describes the way in which, under a capitalist economy, reason and science prevail in a manner privileging quantification and calculability. Capitalism is defined for Weber by its rational organization of production and distribution; all

units of human action (such as labour) are broken down into measurable, mechanical, standardized processes. According to Weber, such rationalization ultimately results in extreme bureaucratization and standardization. Lukacs' theory of reification has all of these implications but is expanded beyond economic issues in order to explain the structural consequences of reification for the inner as well the outer life of society. He distinguishes two sides of the phenomenon of reification, which he names the 'objective' and the 'subjective.' If the former aspect is the centrepiece of Marx and Weber's discussions, Lukacs' important contribution comes with his examination of the effect of reification upon the consciousness of the worker or, more broadly, upon the consciousness of man. With the reification of consciousness, the production process appears to the worker - or the world appears to man - as fragmented and incoherent. Reification results in man's inability to perceive the historicity or the totality of social relations and in his subsequent passivity in the face of what appears to be a fundamentally ungraspable and unchangeable world. But, according to Lukacs, the worker will be able to grasp society as a historical totality because he, unlike the bourgeoisie, possesses through his class consciousness a minimal understanding of his alienation and reification. Lukacs' theory of reification holds implications for his literary criticism. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963) he argues against the aesthetics of literary modernism, such as that he perceives in James Joyce's Ulysses; such a work is understood to be the product of a reified consciousness incapable of perceiving the historical nature of its own disintegration. He favours instead realism and the historical novel, both of which he believes attempt to provide the reader with a perspective on and an understanding of the historical totality that modernism can only describe in fragments. The theory of reification has emerged more recently in the work of the American Marxist literary critic *Fredric Jameson who accepts, in The Political Unconscious (1981), Lukacs' association of modernism with reification but who argues that the newly reified consciousness always brings with it a Utopian impulse resulting in a formal experimentation (for example, with language) that attempts to give aesthetic intensity to the reified

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Self/other world of capitalism. (See *Marxist criticism, ""materialist criticism.) ROSS K I N G

Primary Sources Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin P, 1971. - The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin P, 1963. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 3 vols. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Friedrich Engels. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1887. Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 3 vols. Ed. Giinther Roth and Claus Wittich. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. New York: Bedminster P, 1968.

Self/other The Self/Other opposition posits that at the centre of personal experience is a subjective self which constructs everything alien to it as 'other.' The opposition, sometimes phrased in different terms such as centre/margin or dominant/muted, has played an important role in *feminist criticism since *Simone de Beauvoir employed it to explain the power imbalance between men and women. It has also been used in psychoanalytic ""discourse to suggest a fundamental division within the individual consciousness. (See *centre/decentre, *margin, "•psychoanalytic theory.) In The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir argued that man is the subject, woman is the Other. (See ""subject/object.) Whereas man's experience is central and absolute, woman's is perceived as inessential, alien, negative. Thus, in patriarchal society, woman is denied full selfhood, alienated from her own subjectivity. (See ""patriarchy.) De Beauvoir believed the Other to be a fundamental category of human thought. The human mind bears an innate hostility to other consciousnesses. Although this holds for everyone, in the case of the sexes there is an imbalance because women, instead of reciprocally classifying men as alien, submit to men's view of them as Other. They do this even though they constitute neither a minority nor a class which has

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been subjugated by a specific historical event. They submit for several reasons. First, alienated in patriarchal culture, they are estranged from each other and lack the resources to form a consolidated body; women, de Beauvoir says, 'do not say "We"' (xix). Second, they perceive the imbalance of power between men and women to be an unchangeable absolute. Third, they submit because, in many cases, assuming the role men have scripted for them is easier than attempting to divorce themselves from a structure which has traditionally provided them with direction and value. De Beauvoir's argument derives in part from Hegel who, in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), had argued that the self characterizes anything which is not identical with itself as 'an unessential, negatively characterized object' (113). Her argument also shares close similarities with the philosophy of the existentialists, with whom she was closely connected. Their account of the relationship between the self and others as the relationship which crucially defines the self was central to their philosophy. De Beauvoir's concept of the Otherness of women has greatly influenced Anglo-American feminist criticism. (See ""feminist criticism, Anglo-American.) Examinations of ""literature produced in the patriarchal tradition, such as Kate Millett's pioneering work Sexual Politics (1969), seek to show how the male norm is constructed and how women are consistently characterized as Other. The more recent focus on literature written by women, demonstrated in works like ""Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), has concentrated on the problems women encounter when they attempt to inscribe themselves as central. Anglo-American feminist criticism has thus frequently accepted de Beauvoir's category of Otherness as the primary condition of women's existence. French feminists such as *Luce Irigaray, ""Julia Kristeva and ""Helene Cixous have also taken up the idea of the construction of the feminine as lack, negativity and absence but have employed it to different effect. (See ""feminist criticism, French; *desire/lack.) They argue that it is precisely from this Otherness, this unexplored 'dark continent,' that the liberating ecriture feminine, the discourse of marginality, is generated. Kristeva, for example, argues that the semiotic is a language which emerges from women's marginal position as Other. (See ""semiotics.) It diverges sharply

Seme from the traditional structures of patriarchal language (the symbolic) and moves in a fluid realm of word-play, association and nonsense. Kristeva firmly resists an essentialist link between women and the semiotic, but she does suggest that it is akin to the language shared between mother and child and predates the symbolic language which the child must ultimately enter. (See *imaginary/symbolic/real, *essentialism.) Unlike the Anglo-American feminists, French feminists generally employ the concept of Otherness as a liberating concept and use it to celebrate women's difference rather than to stress women's limitations. The Self/Other opposition has also entered critical theory through *]acques Lacan whose notion of Other is a polysemic concept at the heart of his work. Like de Beauvoir's, Lacan's concept of the Other derives from both Hegel (especially his account of the master-slave dialectic) and the existentialist philosophers. Whereas de Beauvoir assumed that men could possess full subjectivity, Lacan finds even the male subject essentially and irrevocably fragmented and incapable of the full occupation of self. During the formative *mirror stage, the child learns to perceive itself as a stable form but it does so only by means of an image which is not truly identical with itself but other and alien. Its self-image is thus structured by a misidentification. During the Oedipal crisis, the symbolic Father (see *Name-ofthe-Father), who for Lacan is the primal Other, legislates the separation of the child from its mother and thus introduces a permanent gap between desire and its object as the child enters the realm of the symbolic. The desire which drives individuals often appears to be the desire for an object (what Lacan calls the objet a or small-other object) but in fact it is really for the unattainable original presence. Although Lacan uses the term Other in many different senses, the Other is thus basically a locus of forces which enables the emergence of the subject but, at the same time, leaves the subject permanently fragmented and in perpetual slavery to desire. Lacan differs from de Beauvoir in that he argues that otherness is not an external category but an internal and unchangeable condition of man's existence. In Lacan's terms, when woman becomes man's Other, she becomes a correlative for man's lack and helps affirm him in his selfhood.

Primary Sources Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1977. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1966. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Equinox, 1971.

Seme A seme is a semantic dictinctive feature (see *Roman Jakobson) by which it is possible to differentiate one element of the signified of a term from another one in a given context of communication. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) The seme is thought to be 'a minimal unit of signification/ comparable at the semantic level to what the phoneme is at the phonological level. Semic analysis allows *A.J. Greimas to see any lexeme (that is, objectterm) as a collection of semes which constitute its properties and by which it differs from another one. The lexemes 'broad' and 'narrow' have in common with 'high' and 'low' the semes spatiality and dimensionality, but they differ from the latter terms by the absence of the seme verticality and the presence of the semes horizontality and laterality. These semes have no reality other than in their mutual relationships and should not be compared to atomic elements. Considering a given seme (for example, spatiality) as a semic axis, one can see that it forms a complex semic system. First, this system consists of antonymic relationships, the semic oppositions represented by the absence or the presence of the seme dimensionality being necessary to make clear the differences between concurring terms, like 'high' and 'vast.' Also, between the semes of the same category, one can observe a hierarchy of relationships, since each semic axis may be divided into many other axes. While these characteristics apply to the nu-

ML-I. AN IE SEXTON

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Semiosis clear seme, there is another type of seme, called contextual seme or *classeme. According to Greimas, this latter seme appears only in a discursive context, where its presence allows a uniform reading of a sentence (see *isotopy). In order to obtain a minimal sense effect, or a sememe, it is necessary to combine at least one nuclear seme and one classeme. Conceived by Bernard Pettier for his studies in componential semantics (dating back to his doctoral thesis in 1955), this concept was introduced into *semiotics by Greimas. Unlike Pettier, however, Greimas does not see semic analysis as a mere paraphrase in natural language but as a metalinguistic construction which would, ideally, be composed of minimal units in a coherent organization. (See *metalanguage.) The study of the fundamental relationships which may coexist between the semes of a given semic axis led to the elaboration of the semiotic square. This figure is presented by Greimas as 'the logical development of a binary semic category, like white vs black, whose terms are mutually in a relationship of contrariety, each of them being susceptible at the same moment to project a new term which would be its contradictory, and contradictory terms being able, in turn, to contract a relationship of implication toward the opposite contrary term' (Du sens 1970, 160). CHRISTIAN VANDENDORPE

Primary Sources Greimas, A.J. Semantique structural. Paris: Larousse, 1966; repub. PUF, 1986. Structural Semantics. Trans. D. McDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P, 1983. — Du sens. Paris: Seuil, 1970. - and ]. Courtes. Semiotique: Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie du langage. Paris, 1979. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Trans. L. Crist, D. Patte et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

Secondary Sources Pettier, B. Linguistique generale. Paris: Klincksieck, 1974.

Semiosis Semiosis is the term commonly used to refer to the innate capacity of human beings to produce and understand signs of all kinds (from

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those belonging to simple physiological signalling systems to highly complex symbolic structures). (See *sign.) The etymology of the term is traceable to the Greek word sema, 'mark, sign,' which is also the root of the related terms 'semiotics and semiology or 'the science of signs' and semantics, 'the study of meaning.' In the theoretical semiotic "literature the term semiosis is consistently used as well in the broader sense of signification or sign process. In its oldest usage (Noth 12-14), the term refers to the observable pattern of physiological symptoms induced by specific diseases. Hippocrates (46o?~377? BC) - the founder of medical science - viewed the semiosic characteristics associated with a disease as the basis for an appropriate diagnosis and a suitable prognosis. As Fisch (41) points out, it was soon after Hippocrates' utilization of the term semiosis to refer to symptomatic signs that it came to mean - by the time of Aristotle (384-322 BC) - the 'action' of a sign itself, or the correlative act of sign interpretation. In all the main conceptualizations of semiosis, from Aristotle to *C.S. Peirce and Thomas Sebeok, the primary components of this mental process are the sign (a representative image or "icon, a word), the object referred to (which can be either concrete or abstract), and the meaning that results when the sign and the object are linked by association. It would appear that the human cognitive system operates on the basis of this triadic nexus. Indeed, many semioticians now claim that it underlies the very structure of the mind. Thus, for instance, the word cat is a verbal sign that relates the animal (its object) to the meaning 'cat' (the domesticated carnivorous mammal with retractable claws, which kills mice and rats). Similarly, the use of the index finger to point to an object in a room creates a concrete existential meaning relation between the socalled indexical sign (the pointing finger) and the object. (See "index.) Following Charles Sanders Peirce, most semioticians now add the notion of interpretant to the process of semiosic competence. This is Peirce's term for the individual's particular interpretation of the triadic relationship that inheres in semiosis: 'A sign addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign' (2: -228).

Sign Peirce and Charles Morris are two of the most authoritative theorists on semiosis. Morris' account adds a behavioural dimension to the theory of signs by emphasizing the physical as well as the mental responses that a sign elicits in the human organism. Morris' account is considered a development of the Peircean idea that all thought 'is in itself essentially of the nature of a sign' (5: 294). More recently, Thomas Sebeok has argued persuasively that semiosis should constitute the cornerstone for a behavioural science of communication. He defines semiosis as 'the capacity for containing, replicating and extracting messages, and of extracting their significance' (Pandora's Box 452). (See *communication theory.) In the view of most theorists semiosis is intrinsically related to communicative behaviour. Whereas unilateral semiosis involves any organism in isolation as the receiver and processor of physiologically detectable signals in the immediate environment (Meyer-Eppler), bilateral semiosis involves the reception and processing of signals by participating organisms in the surrounding environment. The systematic interaction and pattern of responses in which these organisms participate through bilateral semiosis defines the communication system for the species to which they belong. Only in the human species, however, is highly abstract and symbolic bilateral semiosis possible (as, for instance, in verbal communication). The common factor in all biological organisms is the fact that semiosis and communication allow for the instantaneous interpretation of signals present in the immediate environment. As Ruesch has appropriately pointed out, communication is the 'organizing principle of nature' (83). For *Umberto Eco, semiosis is synonymous with the organization of communication systems (3 16). There are various theories on the phylogenesis of the semiosic capacity, but perhaps the most plausible one traces it to the mind's capacity to transform sense impressions into memorable experiences through the formation of images. Although all species participate by instinct in the experiential universe, only humans are endowed with the capacity to model their sense impressions in the form of mental images. It is when these iconic transformations of our bodily experiences are codified into signs and sign systems that they become permanently transportable in the form of cognitive units, phenomenologically free from their

physiological units of occurrence. Indeed, the work on semiosis has made it possible to relate the world of sensorial experience to the world of abstraction and thought, by showing the latter to be a kind of 'outgrowth' of the former. MARCEL DANESI

Primary Sources Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Fisch, Max H. 'Peirce's General Theory of Signs.' In Sight, Sound, and Sense. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978, 31-70. Meyer-Eppler, Werner. Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1959-

Morris, Charles W. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1938. Moth, Winfred. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. Vols. 1-6. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1931-58. Ruesch, Jurgen. Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. Sebeok, Thomas A. Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. Lanham, Md.: UP of America, 1976. - 'Pandora's Box: How and Why to Communicate 10,000 Years into the Future.' In On Signs. Ed. M. Blonsky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985, 448-66. - The Sign and Its Masters. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979.

Sign 'The role of the sign is to represent, to stand as a substitute for something else' (*Emile Benveniste, Problems 51). For example, a red light may signify 'stop,' a siren or smoke that there is a fire. Signs are an essential feature of communication at every level through any sense or combination of senses. Virtually anything, animate or inanimate, real or imaginary, natural or created, may be used or interpreted as a sign, and for any one sign there may be several interpretations. Nor need these interpretations be mutually exclusive. For example, a drawn, written or other representation of the sun may be a sign of light, heat, life, star type, fine weather, or a combination of some or all of these. (See *communication theory.) A sign signifies within a system of signs which is by definition semiotic. (See *semiot-

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Sign ics, *semiosis.) According to Benveniste, the characteristics of such a system are (i) its mode of operation (how a sign is perceived); (2) its context of validity; (3) the nature and number of its signs; and (4) the way the signs relate to each other within a given system. He illustrates this by using a simple system of traffic lights: one red and one green light. The traffic lights (i) operate visually (2) in the context of road traffic; (3) the two lights are colour differentiated; and (4) they alternate. Within this binary system (or *code), red signifies 'stop/ green 'go.' (See ""binary opposition.) A given language is another sort of system, though much more complex. Within any language a genre, group of texts, particular *text or part of it may also constitute a system. For example, we might choose to reduce Hamlet's To be or not to be' speech to a simple binary system of signs: its mode of operation would be chiefly auditory, but gestures might add a secondary visual mode; its context would be (a) the particular scene and (b) the rest of the play, since the signs derive their meaning from the scene and the play as a whole; the two signs (to be/not to be) are contrastive (one affirmative, the other negative); they alternate (since one state or its contemplation precludes the other). A sign implies not only a system, however simple, within which a sign can signify, but also a sender and receiver. In the case of the traffic lights, the obvious sender is the light itself; behind it are other senders: switches, electronic circuits, and the operator or person who programmed the light switching. Similarly, the receiver is not only the vehicle driver (his eye and brain and vehicle) for whom the lights are intended as a signal, but anyone else seeing them as a sign. So, in ""literature, the sender may be an author, a *narrator, a character, or a character within a character's embedded story; conversely, a similar proliferation of levels of receiver will be implied. (See *embedding.) Types of sign According to *Charles Sanders Peirce there are three classes of sign. Since the work of Luis Prieto, the signal is also considered important. Thus there are four types of sign: *icon, ""index, symbol, signal. They are usually considered according to criteria of intention to communicate, their relationship to what they

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represent, and whether they are natural, conventional or arbitrary (to use Saussure's terminology). (See ""Ferdinand de Saussure.) Though, as John Lyons has pointed out, conventional and arbitrary are not synonymous. The index is usually a natural (rather than conventional) phenomenon, indicating another phenomenon not immediately perceptible but having some factual or causal connection with it: thus fever is an index of illness. Generally speaking, an index reveals no intention to communicate, though in literary texts indices may be intentionally set up for the reader. In this case they could be said to act both as indices and signals. In literary ""discourse, style is often an index. The signal, like the index, indicates a phenomenon which is not itself immediately perceptible. The sender of the signal, unlike that of the index, intends to communicate. Furthermore, the person being sent the signal must recognize it as a signal of something. For example, a white flag is a signal of truce in time of war. The truce is not a visible phenomenon but the flag is, and the person displaying the flag does so with the intention of communicating a message to the enemy, who recognizes this as a conventional, unambiguous signal. Signals, then, are usually conventional signs, and the relationship between signifier and signified is unambiguous and arbitrary. (See *signified/signifer/signification.) The difference between a signal and an index may be seen by comparing two interpretations of the same sign, variously called a 'wink,' if perceived as an intended conventional sign (a signal) or a 'blink' if perceived as an involuntary and natural sign of someone having something in her eye causing the blinking (that is, an index). The icon resembles, in some recognizable way, what it represents. Thus a stage play's painted decor or a prose description of Venice are icons of Venice; a stage prop, such as a chair, is an iconic representation of a 'real' chair in the imagined 'real' context. Onomatopoeic expressions, stage sounds offstage, stage costumes, make-up and lighting, Tristam Shandy's dark page representing the dark (technopagnia), Rabelais' panegyric printed in the shape of a bottle, and mise-en-abyme are all iconic. As John Lyons observes, the resemblance may be natural or conventional (cultural), depending upon the extent to which perception may be culturally defined. The intention to communicate is not a necessary

Sign criterion for icons, indices or symbols as it is with signals. But it should be remembered that literary signs tend to be overdetermined with the express intention of being recognized as signs - of whatever sort. The symbol differs from the icon and index in that the relationship between the sign and its signification is virtually always arbitrary and conventional. This relationship is established because of some implied 'rule' of conventional or habitual association between the symbol and its object or concept. Thus black is a symbol of evil. Words, both spoken and written, are symbols too, conventionally standing for what they signify. The components of the linguistic sign Ferdinand de Saussure defined the linguistic sign as a binary entity: it combines the signifier (or acoustic image) and the signified (or concept). (See *structuralism.) Thus the spoken words or their written equivalent, such as, for example, horse, equus, cheval, cavallo, a drawing of a horse, or some other representation, are all signifiers denoting the same signified: 'a solid-hoofed quadruped with flowing mane and tail, used for riding on.' Since meanings derive from a particular instance, or instances, and are always related to and coloured by their previous context(s) of reference in our mind's eye, a signified is said to be composed of two parts: its denotation (the concept) and its connotation (associations evoked by a particular sign in a given context). The linguistic sign has several distinguishing features. The signifier is linear: since it is primarily auditive, it is spread along a temporal axis; rather than hearing all its constituent sounds in a simultaneous jumble, we hear a sequence of differentiated sounds. The same is thus true of the written signifier, be it simple (a single expression) or complex (a whole text). The link between the signifier and signified is arbitrary. There is no logical reason why the sounds 'arbre' or 'tree' should be used to signify a tree, or 're-,' as in 'rewrite,' should signify 'again'; the link is purely conventional. This is why linguistic signs are classed as symbols. (Onomatopoeic expressions are an exception, since the link between, say, the sound 'boom' and the sound signified is not arbitrary.) Transmitted from generation to generation this link between signifier and signified is fixed within the linguistic system: the signifier

tree cannot signify 'cat' or anything we choose, but conventionally always signifies 'tree.' Likewise, in art and literature, many symbols or situations become conventionally associated with particular meanings. For example, a bucolic scene typically signifies innocence, cornmedia dell'arte characters their stock roles and attributes. However, since the link between a signifier and a signified can alter over time, it is also flexible; albus, meaning 'white' in Latin, has become album in modern English. In literary texts the same phenomenon may occur. A cliche may be intentionally destabilized so as to restore meaning, or a *parody may twist a well-worn message. Saussure held that linguistic signs signify because of their differences: we distinguish sounds and meanings because they are different from one another. But signs are also related to each other. The syntagmatic relationship links elements within a particular utterance according to certain established rules. Their role and meaning derive from this particular relationship. Each of these elements has been selected from a paradigm of other possible but different elements. Thus 'the grey mare' has three paradigms which might be (i) the, a, (2) black, grey, white, brown, pied, (3) stallion, horse, rnare, pony, colt, and so forth. *Roland Barthes illustrates the difference by using a menu. A simple menu might use three paradigms: hors d'oeuvre, main dish, dessert. Each paradigm might comprise four possible choices. Three items, one from each paradigm, are chosen for their mutual compatibility and are combined in a meal - comparable to a syntagmatic chain. Although in literary analysis the syntagmatic relation tends to be more useful in determining the meaning of a given sign (always defined in its relationship to others within a shared context), the paradigmatic relation is helpful in analysing poetry, since in poetry elements from the same paradigm are often used to construct a system of equivalent signs all pointing to the matrix or *hypogram. The ternary (or triadic) sign Saussure (and in his wake many French theorists) described the sign as a binary entity, as indeed it was for him, since he saw the referent as an extralinguistic phenomenon. However, most theorists consider the sign as having three parts: signifier, signified, referent.

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Sign (See ""reference/referent.) The referent is determined by its context and is the actual object, person or state of affairs to which the sign refers. It is an essential element of semantics. Without it there is no precise meaning: for example, 'she/ 'it' or other shifters are empty expressions without a referent. The American C.S. Peirce was the first to develop a theory of the 'triadic' sign, as he called it. This he did within a most sophisticated all-embracing, but unfinished, theory of signs or semiotics propounded in various writings. Peirce's impact has not long been evident in part because of the unavailability of his works, and in part because of their complexity. Some years later, in Germany in 1892, Gottlob Frege proposed the following ternary sign (as translated into English by Feigl): sign, sense, nominatum (the object to which the sign refers). Despite the terminology, it is clear that here 'sign' actually has the meaning of signifier. In England in 1923 C.K. Ogden and *I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning suggested the triad, symbol, thought or reference, referent. Here again 'symbol' may be interpreted as signifier, and 'thought' as signified. Ogden and Richards define the referent as an object or state of affairs in the external world. A somewhat similar sign, despite its different terminology, was presented by the American Charles Morris in 1938: sign vehicle (signifying vehicle), 'designatum' or 'significatum,' 'denotatum' (that is, an object which actually exists), sign vehicle (signifying vehicle). In 1934 the Czech linguist *Jan Mukafovsky elaborated a ternary sign of particular interest to those applying sign-theory to the arts. Like *Roman Jakobson, Mukafovsky was interested in the predominantly aesthetic or 'poetic' function of a work of art. For Mukafovsky, a work of art (the signifier) derives its meaning (the signified) from a given historical, social and cultural context, known generally as its ideological context. For Mukafovsky, each interpreter (spectator, reader) construes the artistic referent as a specific ideological expression of a particular context (a *concretization). Since the *ideology which this referent or concretization depends upon is likely to vary from age to age and culture to culture, so too will the referent and the signified. As *Mikhail Bakhtin has shown, ideologically construed signs imply dialogical relationships operating between sender and receiver, author and reader. (See *dialogical criticism.) Interpretation of aesthetic

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signs is particularly constrained by the receiver's awareness of the encoded ideological message, and this interpretation is often further coloured by the receiver's idiosyncratic ideological bent. *Louis Althusser, *Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes were all interested in the aesthetic signification of the 'ideological' sign. For them, the signified is as protean as its referent, and may ultimately be seen as an empty form constantly being refilled by a new ideological meaning or 'reality.' Years before, Peirce had already developed a multi-tiered theory of signs far more complex than any of the above. His vast scheme is based on his three categories of 'firstness' (i), 'secondness' (n), and 'thirdness' (in). Firstness is the possibility of some abstractable quality in what is perceived. Secondness is the 'beingthereness,' existence or occurrence of something. Thirdness is a linking of the two others by some mediating law or process. Peirce's terms in the following triad reflect these three aspects: qualisign (i), sinsign (n), legisign (m). This triadic sign is contained in, and becomes a single element of a more encompassing triadic sign, where the representamen or sign belongs to the first category, the object it represents to the second, and the interpretant, which interprets it meaningfully, to the third: representamen or sign (i), object (n), interpretant (HI). Peirce's sophisticated system is proving an extremely rich source of inspiration for practical applications of sign theory to literary texts. A more recent interpretation of the sign, and having little in common with any of the above, is that proposed by *Jacques Derrida. He does not believe in the sign per se, and refutes the concepts of system and context generally deemed essential for defining the sign. (He does, however, rely, at least in part, on Saussure, whose concepts of oppositional differences he develops.) Rather, his *deconstruction (or deconstruction theory) exploits *aporia by seeking out the break in a given system. He interprets this aporia as an 'anti-sign' of the subversive difference. This difference, now known as '*differance' (Derrida's spelling) is, in itself, significant. Defined by Derrida as both differing and deferring, no sign is ever ultimately definable, since meaning is for ever deferred. This view reveals *Nietzsche's strong influence on Derrida. Derrida's signs are not so much signs as traces of them. (See *trace.) The gaps between these traces are a free space

Signified/signifier/signification for the reader to construe as she or he will: a space/trace forever protean and incomplete, both absent and imminently (immanently) present. The Derridean sign is a mirror structure which never allows any possibility of distinguishing the authentic originating sign since, for him, these signs have no origin. ANNA WHITESIDE-ST LKCGR l.UCAS Primary Sources Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. M.E. Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971. Mukafovsky, Jan. The Word and Verbal Art. Trans. and ed. J. Burbank and P. Steincr. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1977. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1931-58. Prieto, Luis. Messages et signaux. Paris: PUF, 1966. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1986.

ity to the signified: 'in language there are only differences without positive terms' (120). The controversial feature of Saussure's theory is clearly his notion of the signified. For Tzvetan Todorov, 'whoever speaks of a sign must accept the existence of a radical difference between signifier and signified, between perceptible and imperceptible, between presence and absence' (100). (See *metaphysics of presence.) Signification thus occurs within a generalized principle of difference: an absence or lack that is marked. Saussure himself seems to have a slightly less radical notion that signs 'express' ideas that can be located in a human mind, but his emphasis on the systematic proliferation of signs needed for signification suggests that the immanent logic of signifiers is of greater importance for language than any necessary logic of the signified. We could not think without differentiated signs: 'There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language' (Saussure 112).

Secondary Sources Dubois, Jean, et al. Dictionnaire de liiiguistique. Paris: Larousse, 1973. Lyons, John. Semantics 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.

Signified/signifier/ signification *Ferdinand de Saussure posited the signifier/ signified distinction in his Course in General Linguistics. For Saussure, 'the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image' (66). (See *sign.) The signifier, whether audible as speech or visible as writing, is an object of perception: the signified is absent and ontologically indistinct - 'half way between a mental image, a concept and a psychological reality' (Eco 14-15). Signification is the relationship that holds together the signifier and the signified. To emphasize the nonreferential (or non-realist) quality of signification, Saussure argued that 'the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary' (67) in contrast to the symbol which is never arbitrary (68). In a revolutionary move beyond traditional philosophical thinking on the problem of language, Saussure did not grant any prior-

*Emile Benveniste has challenged Saussure concerning the arbitrary relation of the signifier and signified, arguing that 'the signifier and the signified, the mental representation and the sound image, are ... in reality the two aspects of a single notion' (45). By welding the two aspects of signification together, Benveniste actually strengthens their opposition: 'The absolute character of the linguistic sign ... commands in its turn the dialectical necessity of values of constant opposition, and forms the structural principle of language' (48). For structuralist and poststructuralist thinking as a whole, however, the arbitrary nature of signification has been very important. "Julia Kristeva, for example, speaks of the gap between signifier and signified as opening 'the heretofore unrecognized possibility of envisioning language as a free play, forever without closure' (128). (See *stmcturalism, *poststructuralism, theories of *play/freeplay, *closure/disclosure.) GREGOR CAMPBELL Primary Sources Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Ap-

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Signifying practice proach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice jardine and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Todorov, Tzvetan, and Oswald Ducrot. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Trans. Catherine Porter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Signifying practice *Julia Kristeva employs the term signifying practice in reference to language as socially communicable *discourse. For Kristeva, all such language is generated by a process which includes two signifying modalities, which she terms the 'semiotic' (psychic and libidinal drives) and the 'symbolic' (nomination, *sign, syntax; the realm of positions and judgment). Kristeva contends that these two modalities can be combined in different ways to constitute different types of social discourse or signifying practice. As well, she argues that a particular type of signifying practice corresponds to a particular articulation of subject identity. In her view, only certain types of signifying practice explore the revolutionary possibilities of the semiotic for breaking the closure of political structures by destabilizing unified subject identity. (See *semiotics, *semiosis, *closure/dis-closure.) Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) suggests a typology of signifying practice which she likens to the typology of discourse presented by *Jacques Lacan at his 1969 and 1970 seminars. Kristeva's classification includes four types of signifying practice: narrative, ""metalanguage, contemplation, and textpractice. For her, the first three types represent a subordination of the semiotic in favour of the authoritative position of a *narrator, a philosopher or a theoretician. What she calls text-practice, however, does not close off the semiotic modality of language but instead explores the infinity of its processes for transforming society and self. (See *self/other.) Kristeva associates the literary works of Stephane Mallarme and James Joyce with this revolutionary practice of the *text. DAWNE MCCANCE

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Primary Sources Kristeva, Julia. La Revolution du langage poetique: L'avant-garde a la fin du XIXe siecle. 1974. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Social formation Socialist literary theorists have used French Marxist philosopher *Louis Althusser's concept of the social formation to develop a more sophisticated model for the relationship of *literature and society than the reflection theory of *Georg Lukacs. Althusser proposes his concept of the social formation as a replacement for what he sees as the idealist notion of society which does not allow for the differentiation and structural complexity of social reality. He divides the social formation into economic, political, ideological, and theoretical levels or instances, each with its own practices. (A practice is any process by which raw material is transformed by labour into a finished product.) Each level enjoys relative autonomy from the others. Althusser avoids the Marxist heresy of pluralism, which deprives the economic base of its primacy in determining the rest of society, by describing the social formation as a 'structure in dominance' governed by *structural causality. The various levels exist within a hierarchical structure, with the economic level determinant in the last instance. For example, in medieval Europe the feudal economy determined that the Catholic church (part of the ideological level) was dominant over the social formation; in contemporary democracies capitalist economics determine that the political is dominant. By allowing relative autonomy for all levels, Althusser frees theoretical practice from pragmatic or dogmatic considerations arising within the other levels. Hence Marxist literary criticism is freed, as the socialist realism criticism of the early years of the Soviet Union had not been, to pursue its own ends regardless of the needs of the state or the Party. Writers do not have to be judged by how realistically they reflect society, but may be seen to stand in a more complex, partly autonomous, relationship to their society, attached to it by the way they produce "'ideology. Marxist theoretical practice requires autonomy if it is to avoid the simple and unproductive mimicry of official party policy and

Spatial form instead serve as a guide to political practice in the 'analysis of the structure of a conjuncture' or the alignment of the various levels and practices at a specific time (179). JOHN THURSTON

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. 'On the Materialist Dialectic.' In For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1977, 219-47. Jameson, Fredric. 'On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act.' In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981, 17-102.

Spatial form The notion of 'spatial form' gained currency with the publication, in 1945, of Joseph Frank's 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature.' Frank was particularly concerned with making a connection between literary High Modernism (*Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Pound) and a tendency within it to prefer simultaneity over sequentiality. While Frank's elaboration of the notion of spatial form remains contentious, spatialization has come, increasingly, to be an important category of debate within contemporary literary theory. Frank begins his essay by going back to the major post-classical articulation of the space/ time distinction, G.E. Lessing's Laocoon (1766). Lessing saw a fundamental distinction between painting (and the plastic arts in general) and poetry (the literary arts): painting developed its meaning simultaneously through space, whereas poetry developed its meaning sequentially, through time. While Lessing's purpose in writing the Laocoon was to argue against the mixing of genres (as defined by the space/time distinction), the distinction he makes has a wider application when seen as identifying modes of signification. (See *genre criticism.) As Frank puts it, 'what Lessing offered was not a new set of norms but a new approach to aesthetic form' (45). Thus, based on the space/ time distinction, Frank seeks to argue that modernist writers 'ideally intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence' (46). Frank sees the Imagist movement in poetry as a major turning-point in the direction of spatial form. One of the major theorists of Im-

agism was T.E. Hulme, who was profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson's notions of time and space (see Gross), and by his sojourn in the Canadian prairies, where he was confronted by an immense spatiality which, he felt, traditional poetry could not capture (cf. Jones). The Imagism that derived from the speculations of Hulme and others described a poetry that was meant to be apprehended 'in an instant of time/ as Pound wrote in Make It New (1934). For Eliot, spatial form in poetry, with its juxtapositioning of lines (as in 'Prufrock'), was a sign of the fragmentation of modern urban existence (cf. Lefebvre). Frank argues that the fragmented nature of these poems makes them impossible to understand on a purely sequential basis: 'modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity' (49), which was, paradigmatically, the case of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Frank's major example of this technique is Joyce's Ulysses, in which the work's many cross-references gain coherence only when one has a sense of the work as a whole - thus Frank's paradoxical assertion that 'Joyce cannot be read - he can only be reread' (52). (See *paradox.) Frank sees Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1946; his prime example in this essay) as taking this technique as far as it can go (such that its prose merges with poetry), in that 'the unit of meaning in Nightwood is usually a phrase or sequence of phrases - at most a long paragraph' (70), rather than an extended narrative. Criticism of Frank has centred on the exclusion of the temporal from his theory (cf. *hermeneutics) and on his diminution of the importance of the historical element in *literature (a logical extension of his purely formal argument; see *Kermode). The notion that spatialization has as its concomitant the 'end of history' is pursued by Sharon Willis in her critique of *Jean Baudrillard's notion of hyperspace. WJ.T. Mitchell argues at the other extreme that the space/time distinction is a false one, in that the modes of literary apprehension - including the temporal - are fundamentally spatial. Frank's insistence on the 'ahistorical' implications of spatial form has been related, by some of his critics, to the fascist ideologies with which such writers as Pound were associated (cf. Libby). It is noteworthy, however,

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Spatial form that contemporary Marxist theorists (whose precursor in this is the *Walter Benjamin of the Arcades project; cf. Buck-Morss), such as *Fredric Jameson, *Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre, have no difficulty in insisting at once on a historical dimension to their critical positions and on the importance of spatial notions within it (cf. Ross). (See *Marxist criticism, "Ideology.) But the very presence of notions of spatiality within contemporary Marxist thought indicates the extent to which spatial form has come to be a central concept around which contemporary theory (and not just literary theory) has ranged itself. How this came to be is worth examining. Coeval with the high modernists of whom Frank speaks was the Swiss linguist *Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure's insistence that linguistic systems were to be understood synchronically - that is, as self-contained and selfreferring - and not diachronically (historically) was both directly and indirectly influential on subsequent literary theories, from notions of 'structure' (*Frye) to concepts of the grapheme (*Derrida). Given that the synchronic aspect of a linguistic system was one in which all aspects of that system were available simultaneously, then the system itself was able to be conceptualized spatially, its meanings being produced by a network of static interrelationships, and not through succession over time. (Saussure's insistence on the synchronic and simultaneous as the major category of linguistic inquiry has an analogy in M.E. Chevreul's De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs 1838; Chevreul's theory influenced the paintings of Seurat [whose work was subsequently to figure as a major example in ""Marshall McLuhan's theories of media] and poets such as Apollinaire [precursor of the concrete poets, for whom poetic meaning was predicated on the spatial deployment of text on the page]. See Perloff and Ashton.) The structuralists developed the notion of synchronicity in iconographical terms, whereby structure became the immutable and ahistorical repository of timeless form. Frye combined this concept of structure with Eliot's notion of literary 'monuments' ('Tradition and the Individual Talent') in Anatomy of Criticism, where the fundamental metaphor is architectural (architectus being the term Frye employs), as established by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. (See *metonymy/metaphor.) Poststructuralist thought sought to proble-

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matize structuralist ahistoricity by going back to Saussure and noting the paradox that Saussure was able to posit the synchronic only as a function of the diachronic - it was precisely the fluctuation of language in time which had forced Saussure to posit the synchronic realm as a necessary fiction to enable analysis. (See ""structuralism, *poststructuralism.) But in reasserting history within the theoretical matrix, poststructuralism did not abandon the category of space. Rather (taking the work of ""Blanchot and *Bachelard as its point of departure), it reconstructed the concept of space, not as a product but as the process of the 'gaze' (cf. Mulvey) so that questions of context ('Who sees?') become of prime importance, as in *Foucault's notion of the panopticon, and Herrmann's concept of women's space. In its extreme form, representational space merges with the cyberspace of pure information. *Deconstruction sought to examine the notion of structure (including its implications for the practice of architecture; cf. Benedikt) not only by historicizing it (as poststructuralism had done) but by materializing it as well - that is, by taking the metaphor of space literally and problematizing figure and ground (a dynamic whose importance was established by McLuhan in his references to Seurat in Through the Vanishing Point and more broadly in The Gutenberg Galaxy), whereby the medium of production - the material book (as in Derrida's Glas; cf. D.F. McKenzie) or the graphic signs on the page (as in concrete poetry) - is put into play with the message. Derrida's concept of *differance is thus materialized in a neologism that can only be written, the change from 'e' to 'a' being unvocalized. The transparency which structuralist thought accorded to space gives way to opacity, such that the text must be read through, rather than unproblematically read (or reread rather than read, to go back to Frank's terms, though in that process one complicates reading with seeing - one sees that the first word of Ulysses, 'stately,' contains the last, 'yes,' spelt according to another logic). What deconstructivist space no longer allows is the ""totalization inherent in structuralist thought, where a structure was thought to contain all possibilities of that form. The imperialist implications of the structuralist mode have been decolonized within postcolonialist thought: 'This kind of history, which reduces space to a stage, that pays attention to events

Story/plot unfolding in time alone, might be called imperial history,' writes Paul Carter in The Road to Botany Bay (xvi). What he proposes instead (in his rewriting of the 'history' of Australia) is a 'spatial history' of 'horizons, possible tracks, bounding spaces' (xxi). Carter's 'postmodern geography' (Soja) has its literary analogue in Ashcroft/Griffiths/Tiffin's contention that postcolonialist texts 'run European history aground in a new and overwhelming space which annihilates time and imperial purpose' (34). This is to return to the debate over history initiated by Frank's essay, and to recontextualize it. (See *materialist criticism, *postmodernism, 'post-colonial theory.) RICHARD CAVEI.I.

Primary Sources Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Frank, Joseph. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. l.efebvre, Henri. Che. Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, J Q h 2 . - Through the Vanishing Point. \ew York: Harper and Row, 1968. Mulvey, Laura. 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.' Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Secondary Sources Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Ashton, Dore. A Fable of Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon P, 1969. Benedikt, Michael, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. - Deconstructing the Kimbell: An Essay on Meaning and Architecture. New York: Sites, 1991. Blanchot. Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. A. Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989 [195?]. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP 1984. Buck-Morss, Susan tin' Dialectics of Seeing: Waller

Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989. Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. New York: Knopf, 1988. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Gross, David. 'Time, Space and Modern Culture.' Telos s (Winter 1981-2): 59-78. Gusevich, Miriam. 'The Architecture of Criticism.' In Drawing Building Text. Ed. Andrea Kahn. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1991, 8-24. Herrmann, Claudine. The Tongue Snatchers. Trans. N. Kline. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. 'Cognitive Mapping.' In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988: 347-57- Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Jones, Alun. Life and Opinions of T.E. Hultne. Boston: Beacon P, 1960. Kermode, Frank. 'A Reply to Joseph Frank.' Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 579-88. - The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Libby, Anthony. 'Conceptual Space, The Politics of Modernism.' Chicago Review 34:2 (1984): 11-26. McKenzie, D.F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library, 1986. Mitchell, VVJ.T. 'Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory.' In The Language of Images. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980, 271-99. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Sallis, John. Spacings - of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany, eds. Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. Willis, Sharon. 'Spectacular Topographies: Amerique's Post Modern Spaces.' In Restructuring Architectural Theory. Ed. M. Diani and C. Ingraham. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1989, 60-6.

Story/plot The concepts of fabula [story] and siuzhet [plot] were employed by Russian formalists to distinguish between the raw material of "literature and the aesthetic rearrangement of that material in narrative fiction. (See Russian *formalism.) The basic difference between the two

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Structural causality stems from a different treatment of chronology and causality. In the 'story' the events are linked together according to their temporal sequence and causality. In the 'plot' they are rearranged, disrupting the chronological order and causal connections. In the precise definition by *Boris Tomashevskii in his Teoriia liter atury [Theory of Literature 1925], 'the story consists of a series of narrative motifs in their chronological sequence, moving from individual cause to effect; whereas the plot represents the same motifs, but in the specific order of occurrence to which they are assigned in the text.' Another fundamental difference between the story and the plot, according to "Viktor Shklovskii, results from the introduction into the narrative of authorial digressions, comments and observations. In many works, these digressions are motivated realistically but in some they are 'laid bare/ drawing the attention of the reader to their presence rather than their function. For Shklovskii, the best example of the plot technique 'laid bare' was Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy with its continuous disruptions of the action, authorial digressions, displacement of chronology, transposition of chapters, and retardations. In the opinion of Shklovskii, Tristram Shandy was the most typical novel in world literature for it revealed the aesthetic laws of plot construction without any realistic justification. The concept of plot was further developed by "Vladimir Propp in his study of the structural laws of the folk-tale, Morfologiia skazki [Morphology of the Folktale 1928]. Focusing on the elements of the composition rather than on characters, Propp distinguished 31 elements that appear in the structure of the folk-tale. He perceived these elements as 'functions' and defined them in terms of their significance for the course of the action. He formulated some important rules about the sequence of functions which, he maintained, would appear in the same order even if some of them were absent. (See also *narratology.) NINA KOLESNIKOFF

Primary Sources Propp, Vladimir. Morfologiia skazki. 1928. Morphology of the Folktale. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958. Tomashevskii, Boris. Teoriia literatury. Poctika. 1925. In part trans, as 'Thematics.' In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. L. Lemon and M. Reis.

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Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965, 61-98. 'Literary Genres.' Russian Poetics in Translation 5 (1978): 52-93-

Structural causality The concept of structural causality, derived from the work of French Marxist philosopher "Louis Althusser, has been most rigorously used by *Fredric Jameson to explain how social forces manifest themselves in literary texts. (See *text.) Althusser endeavours in Reading Capital (1965) to establish the centrality of structural causality to Marxist philosophy. Traditional historiography, according to Althusser, has available to it 'only two systems of concepts with which to think effectivity' (186). One, 'a transitive mechanical causality,' is linear and works only within a 'homogenous planar space' (182). This type of causality, which Althusser attributes to political economy, cannot 'think the effectivity of a whole on its elements' (186). The other option, 'expressive causality' (187), reduces the social totality to an 'inner essence' and sees the elements of the totality as 'no more than the phenomenal forms of [its] expression' (186). This type of causality, which Althusser attributes to Hegel, only works 'on the absolute condition that the whole [is] not a structure' (187). Marx, conceiving of the "social formation as a 'complex and deep space' (182) and a 'structure in dominance/ needed a new type of historical causality which would allow for the relative independence of the various levels and their different temporalities, and which would yet bind them together in a totality. According to Althusser, this third type of causality and the only one adequate to its object is 'a structural causality' (186). Althusser begins Reading Capital with the claim that a "symptomatic reading of Marx uncovers one 'important answer to a question that is nowhere posed.' Marx answers the question 'of the effectivity of a structure on its elements' without having posed it 'because the age Marx lived in did not provide him ... an adequate concept with which to think what he produced.' He answered the question through a proliferation of images and metaphors around the image of Darstellung (representation, exhibition, presentation) (29). (See "metonymy/metaphor.) Althusser claims that this image is the keystone of Marx's work and at-

Subject/object tempts to provide it with its adequate concept. Althusser's argument culminates with the production of the concept of 'structural causality' (186). The social structure is present only in its effects; it has no empirical existence nor is it 'an essence outside the economic phenomena' (188). It is 'a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects' (189). Jameson interprets structural causality as Althusser's attempt to retain the Marxist commitment to a model of the social formation as a totality in which all levels are related, in contrast with the capitalist 'fragmentation and ... compartmentalization ... of the various regions of social life' (40). Although AHhusser explicitly rejects the concept of mediation, Jameson argues that 'Althusserian structural causality is ... just as fundamentally a practice of mediation as is the "expressive causality" to which it is opposed.' The distinctiveness of structural causality is that, while it 'necessarily insists on the interrelatedness of all elements in a social formation},] ... it relates them by way of their structural difference and distance from one another, rather than by their ultimate identity' (41). The relations of the economic, the political and the ideological to the cultural may only be perceived by way of the 'detour of a theory of language through ... structure, as an ultimate cause only visible in its effects or structural elements' (46). Structural causality can also be related to other poststructuralist concerns, initiated largely by the work of "Jacques Derrida, with effective features of textual reality which are present only in their absence. (See *poststructuralism.) JOHN THURSTON

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brevvster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Jameson, Fredric. 'On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act.' In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 11)81, 17-102.

Subject/object The relationship between subject and object is the crucial issue for *Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and for those philosophical schools, like existentialism, which spring from it. (See *phenomenological criticism.) Husserl states frequently in his works that the aim of phenomenology is the examination of the necessary conditions for the possibility of absolutely certain knowledge concerning human experience. He writes that philosophy should be 'a science of true beginnings, or origins' and that, in the pursuit of radicalism, it 'must not rest until it has attained its own absolutely clear beginnings, i.e., its absolutely clear problems, the methods preindicated in the proper sense of these problems, and the most basic field of work wherein things are given with absolute clarity' ('Philosophy as Rigorous Science' 196). In his search for this absolutely true and selfvalidating foundation for human knowledge, Husserl consequently rejects both metaphysics and any empirical investigation of the sensegiven world (Sinha 8, 14-15, 22-3). In other words, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of reality are abandoned in favour of an examination of how we come to a knowledge about the world as it appears to us in consciousness (Sinha 24). To us, these two alternatives - metaphysics and empiricism - may appear to exhaust the possibilities for the absolutely sure grounding of philosophy and the natural sciences, respectively. Husserl, however, states that there is a way of avoiding the taking of the vague, probable and variable 'laws' of empirically founded disciplines for the clearly defined, absolute and invariable laws of essential structures. Through the practice of transcendental phenomenology, Husserl believed that he could indeed arrive at an absolutely true, a priori and self-validating foundation for human knowledge which reverted neither to the assumptions of metaphysics nor to those of empiricism, and upon which (subsequently) all sciences could be grounded (Kockelmans 271-80). As the final and most advanced stage of his philosophy, transcendental phenomenology clearly builds upon the more descriptive orientation of Husserl's earlier works. As phenomenology aims at an absolute certainty which it feels that neither metaphysics nor empiri-

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Subject/object cism has been able to provide, we obviously cannot conceive of transcendental-phenomenological subjectivity in either of these two contexts. It is in some ways, then, easier to describe what this concept of subjectivity does not entail. Husserl, having fought his entire life against charges that phenomenology was nothing more than a branch of empirical psychology, takes great pains to distinguish between the 'psychological I' (the self-evident subject as defined in the science of psychology, made up of all the natural, mental events of an individual's particular psychic life) and the 'transcendental I' (that subjectivity which intuits and reflects upon the essential, invariable and universal structures of consciousness and their contents). Clearly, the construction and goal of these two subjectivities are radically different - the former concerned with and affected by concrete individuals' particular psychic lives and psychological quirks; the latter aimed at intuiting the universal structures of consciousness as consciousness. Through transcendental, non-psychological subjectivity alone can the structures of both this intentional world and of this subjectivity itself be understood (Kockelmans 252-3, 278-9, 301-14). Consequently, unlike those sciences which posit an empirical-psychological subjectivity, transcendental phenomenology suggests that consciousness and subjectivity are characterized first and foremost by intentionality. (See *intention/intentionality.) Intentionality translates the problem of the subject/object relationship and its influence upon the grounding of human knowledge into one of constitution and referentiality. (See *reference/referent.) In the thesis of intentionality, this relationship is conceived of as inherently relational - the objects of the intentional acts of consciousness (the world as bracketed) give themselves to this consciousness which, in turn, confers upon them their meaning ('Phenomenology' 122-4). (See "bracketing.) In this way, Husserl's conception of transcendental subjectivity tries to avoid the pitfalls of objectivism and subjectivism as they are traditionally understood. The crucial notion of intentionality involves a rejection of the former as an uncritical return to empirical data based on sense-perception as the criteria for an absolutely certain theory of knowledge; it involves a rejection of the latter as a reduction of knowledge itself to a purely individual and self-enclosed mental

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realm. Subjectivity is only constituted in phenomenological terms in the interrelationship between subject and object, where neither element in this equation has a prime facie status. Transcendental subjectivity, then, is that subjectivity, characterized by intentionality, which governs, orders and gives meaning to the *Lebenswelt, the world of our immediately lived experience, in its existence as the essential content of consciousness (Kockelmans 252-3, 278-9). *Martin Heidegger and *Maurice MerleauPonty, while sharing many of Husserl's assumptions, have very different conceptions concerning the nature of subjectivity and of the relationship between subject and object. Heidegger, while accepting the crucial importance of the thesis of intentionality in any discussion of the subject-object relation, takes Husserl and other phenomenologists to task for their misconceptions concerning this thesis and the resultant misrepresentation of the roles of subject and object in intentional experience. While acknowledging the care taken by other philosophers to maintain the mutually constituted relationship between subject and object, Heidegger points out that, even in suggesting that subject and object are mutually constituted in intentional experience, such philosophers still employ a traditional, inner-outer spatial model, a model which leads to an 'erroneous subjectivizing of intentionality' (64). Heidegger's solution to this problem of constructing subject-object relations as one of inner and outer, where the ego or subject 'is something within a sphere in which its intentional experiences are, as it were, encapsulated' and the object is something outside this self-enclosed intentional realm, is to refuse a definition of intentionality framed in these terms. Instead, he states that 'the subject is first of all determined only on the basis of an unbiased view of intentionality and transcendence' (64). For Heidegger, the achievement of this unbiased view of intentionality and transcendence depends on this rejection and eradication of what he saw as the latent mind/ body, subject/object dualism of Husserl's philosophy: 'we shall in future no longer speak of a subject, or a subjective sphere but shall understand the being to whom intentional comportments belong as Dasein' (64). Consequently, Heidegger concentrates upon an elucidation of the Dasein (being-in-the-world) as a continuous field of intentional experience,

Subject/object where the Dasein's mode of being is Existenz, 'the specific mode of being that belongs to a transcending, intentionalistic being which projects the world' (Hofstadter xix). The intentionality characteristic of the subject-object relation in Husserl becomes for Heidegger that which characterizes the Dasein and human Existenz, that which differentiates the being of humans from the being of stones or trees. But while the concept of the Dasein emphasizes the uniqueness of human existence, since only a human can be said to exist whereas all other objects (books, cats, etc.) are merely 'extant,' Heidegger avoids reproducing traditional dualisms by asserting that 'the mode of being of our own self ... is always dwelling with the extant' (64), with that towards which intentional experience is directed. While it is true that Husserl himself in his final experience begins to consider the existential status of transcendental-phenomenological subjectivity when he notes that no phenomenological reduction can affect this transcendental ego, he nevertheless fails to develop this insight in any systematic way. Heidegger himself as a result of this radical redefinition of subject-object relations necessarily rejects Husserl's emphasis upon transcendental-phenomenological subjectivity and the reduction which opens it up to phenomenological investigation. For Heidegger, the Dasein and its mode of being (Existenz) are not amenable to phenomenological bracketing precisely on account of their unique ontological status. Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger and 'JeanPaul Sartre, also rejects Husserl's concept of transcendental subjectivity, while supporting and expanding upon the thesis of intentionality. His expansion of the concept is part of an attempt to resolve the rift between body and mind which, as Heidegger noted, threatens Husserl's conception of this relationship as mutually constituted. Merleau-Ponty, while he largely agrees with Husserl that the main concern of philosophy should be the search for meaning in the world, disagrees with Husserl's concentration upon essences and their intuition through the transcendental phenomenological consciousness as constituting this meaning. For Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger, there can never be 'pure ... consciousness' such as that characteristic of transcendental subjectivity (Husserl, 'Phenomenology' 126), since the perception of the world occurs through a consciousness which is always, in an appropria-

tion and expansion of some of Heidegger's ideas about Existenz, both physical as well as mental. Merleau-Ponty claims that '"the true subject" which emerges from phenomenolgical description is not "the thinking Ego", but a body-subject which is "always already in-theworld"' (in Hammond et al. 161-2). The *Geneva School, that early and influential group of phenomenological literary critics whose ranks include *Georges Poulet, Marcel Raymond and Jean-Pierre Richard, is most closely tied to the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Husserl's conception of consciousness as fundamentally intentional and Merleau-Ponty's expansion of the intentional field to include language are both of crucial importance for their literary criticism, as well as for that of their American colleagues *J. Hillis Miller and Paul Brodtkorb. For the Geneva School, then, the meaning of a "text arises from the arrangement of reader/critic and text as part of a 'continuous field of experience' (Con Davis 345), where the activities of reading and critiquing contribute to this meaning. This attempt to deal with a text phenomenologically, however, has often been charged (as by *W.K. Wimsatt, M.C. Beardsley and *E.D. Hirsch) with destroying any objective grounds for the evaluation of a literary work. The Geneva School, however, while urging the critic to adopt a stance of 'passive receptivity' in relation to the text, also indicates that the degree to which the critic 'surrenders' to the text's phenomenological ego 'can and should be controlled' (Magliola 15). The author's task, then, is 'to enverbalize the spontaneous mutual implications of his Lebensuielt, without scientific regard for subjectivity and objectivity as such.' Consequently, the difference between the author's epistemological stance and the critic's is that the 'author's ... is naive [but] the critic's must be relatively objective' (Magliola i 5; emphasis mine); that is, the critic must be aware of and make his or her reader aware of his or her particular epistemological stance with regard to the text. As a result, there are two distinct stages in the criticism practised by the Geneva School: (i) an imaginative identification with and 'a vicarious experience of the author's phenomenological ego (that is, the ego enverbalized in the literary text)'; and (2) 'a description of this experience (so the description becomes the "interpretation" proper)' (Magliola 16). The project of phenomenological literary interpretation as taken up by later

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Subversion critics such as *Wolfgang Iser also focuses upon the 'mutual implication' of author and text, of reader/critic and text. Accordingly, Iser emphasizes 'not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text' (376). MARIE H. LOUCHLIN

Primary Sources Con Davis, Robert. 'The Affective Response.' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Post-Structuralism. New York: Longman, 1986, 345-9Hammond, Michael, Jane Howarth and Russell Keat. Understanding Phenomenology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans., intro. and lexicon, Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Hofstadter, Albert. 'Translator's Introduction.' The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. By Martin Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982, xv-xxxi. Husserl, Edmund. 'Phenomenology.' In Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986, 121-40. - 'Philosophy as Rigorous Science.' In Husserl; Shorter Works. Ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1981, 166-97. Iser, Wolfgang. 'The Reading Process: A Phenomenological View.' In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Post-Structuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986, 376-91. Kockelmans, Joseph J. A First Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1967. Magliola, Robert. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 1977. Sinha, Debabrata. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1974-

Subversion Subversion is best understood over against the concept of *ideology, where ideology is defined as the repertoire of images, themes, and ideas disseminated throughout society by and for a dominant culture. (See "theme.) In this context subversion would represent the articulation or 'becoming visible' of any repressed, forbidden or oppositional interpretations of the social order. In "literature, subversive content may be openly manifested as the thematic

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content of entire works. Alternatively, it might be voiced as an active opposition by one or more characters in a fiction to ideological norms inscribed in a text's structure. (See *text.) Under conditions of persecution and censorship, subversion must perforce become covert. Here the oppositional or dissident message may be encoded in a work's formal organization, often by means of allegorical displacement. (See *code.) Under conditions of extreme persecution such as those described in Leo Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing, the subversive content of a work may exist only as an esoteric meaning accessible to a limited group of initiates or conspirators. The writings of "Mikhail Bakhtin provide a very full account of the process of subversion as popular festive form, which embodies the social world-consciousness of marginal or subordinated groups. (See "margin.) Bakhtin's theories of "carnival and the carnivalesque argue for the existence of a complex and very fully worked-out alternative philosophy disseminated throughout popular culture and oriented towards officially sanctioned subversion and cultural dissidence. The social practices of carnival create a 'second life of the people' with its own characteristic interpretations of the social order. These practices are sedimented in literature as the carnivalesque, which uses laughter, the grotesque, and various types of structural inversion or topsy-turvydom to 'uncrown' and demystify the dominant ideology, but always within the context of being allowed and authorized to do so by dominant institutions. (See "demythologizing, theories of the "grotesque.) In ordinary usage the idea of subversion seems to be that of an actively empowered, conscious protest or insurgency against the "authority of a dominant or ruling elite. Such a view would imply that there is at least a relatively and provisionally 'rational' character to subversion, in the sense that the subversives want to displace a dominant social and cultural order with a structure that more fully represents their own interests. In the work of *New Historicism, however, subversion is understood not as a resistance to "power, but rather as an instrument and also a "sign of power itself. Subversion cannot achieve an active cultural dissidence, since it works in complicity with the authority of official culture. The idea that subversion is a deliberate strat-

Supplementarity egy of the dominant culture and that it serves the interests of privileged groups rather than of marginal elements seems at first completely counter-intuitive. New Historicism, however, bases its interpretation of ideology on the ideas of *Michel Foucault and *Louis Althusser, both of whom suggest, though in different ways, that subversion is 'always already' contained by dominant institutions. For Althusser, subversion is contained by ideology, which operates outside the conscious knowledge or 'behind the backs' of social agents so that any subversive agenda is in principle self-defeating. For Foucault, subversion is contained by the insidious and all-but-omniscient activity of 'power.' In Foucault's writing, power seems to be almost a metaphysical entity of some kind rather than simply the aggregate will of those who hold power. In any case, the movement of this abstract power makes meaningful and purposeful resistance impossible. It is not immediately obvious why a legitimated power structure would find it useful to generate subversiveness where none actually existed. The followers of New Historicism usually argue that the production of subversive elements within a power structure is due to the paradoxical nature of power itself. (See *paradox.) The powerful individuals in whom social power is invested - Queen Elizabeth I is an example often cited - feel a deep and chronic anxiety about their situation. This anxiety is mastered by the elaborate 'staging' of subversion and its containment, not only in literary texts, but also in a wide range of spectacles ranging from court masques and civic processions to elaborate public trials and executions. M I C H A E L D. BRISTOL

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.' In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1968. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. Creenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, lyso.

Supplementarity Supplementarity is a term coined by "Jacques Derrida to describe the peculiar logic of all discursive signifying structures. Derrida focuses on the contradiction in the concept of the 'supplement.' The word itself is potentially paradoxical for it can mean either something added to complete a thing or something added to a thing already complete in itself. (See *paradox.) In 'La Structure, le signe, et le jeu' (L'Ecriture et la differance - Writing and Difference 1967), Derrida shows how *Claude LeviStrauss posits in a signifying structure a *floating signifier which, having an excess symbolic value, fills a lack on the part of the signified, but which can do so only because it exceeds the total signification of the structure; thus it represents the overabundance of the signifier in relation to the signified. (See "signified/signifier/signification.) These two senses of supplement coexist in a sort of a-logic, for which Derrida uses the analogy of play and games. (See theories of *play/freeplay, *game theory.) The centre - the end or goal of the game - is paradoxically both outside the game and part of it. The movement of Supplementarity is evidence of the de-centred 'play' of signification upon which any *discourse depends. (See *centre/decentre.) This play is paradoxically both the necessary condition of logocentric discourse (see *deconstruction), that which makes such discourse possible, and also that which is marginalized as purely chance activity. (See "margin, *logocentrism.) In De la Grammatologie [Of Grammatology 1967], Derrida examines the writings of LeviStrauss and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and finds Supplementarity at work in profound nostalgia for a lost presence. (See * gramma tology.) In different ways both writers conceive of a supplementary chain of vicarious substitutions that takes the place of a lost origin or 'presence' (see "metaphysics of presence). At the same time, however, the supplement represents paradoxically both a violent usurpation and a compensatory substitution. Moreover, the fact that Supplementarity always seems to predate the disrupted origin implicitly belies the existence of plenitude, the tragic loss of which is cause for pathos and nostalgia. The implications of this effect of Supplementarity go beyond Levi-Strauss and Rousseau and extend to the entire metaphysical tradition

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Symptomatic reading and its underlying conception of the *sign. Within the metaphysical tradition the sign is supplementary in a substitutional sense. The order of the sign is a secondary and compensatory one, a 'fallen' order, and is always indicative of absence, loss, emptiness, and ultimately death. At its best, the sign is a necessary evil consequent on a loss of presence. In metaphysical thinking, the order of language and of structure in general takes the form of a substitutional chain that compensates for the loss of and is impelled towards the eventual restoration of a lost centre. In Derrida's view, rather than a secondary and vicarious process tragically originating with the loss of presence, the supplementarity that belongs to the chain of substitutions writing - is always already there. Writing as supplementarity does not compensate for the loss of presence and voice; it is, rather, the origin of presence and voice; it is that which • gives birth to the desire of presence in the first place. JOSEPH ADAMSON

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. De. la Grammatologie. 1967. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - L'Ecriture et la difference. 1967. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Symptomatic reading Symptomatic reading is used in literary criticism as a means of analysing the presence of *ideology in literary texts. French Marxist philosopher *Louis Althusser develops the technique of symptomatic reading in Reading Capital, finding the theoretical rationale for the technique in work by *Sigmund Freud and *Jacques Lacan. *Pierre Macherey transfers the technique to literary theory, where it becomes the reading of a scientific criticism for the ideological unconscious of the literary *text. Symptomatic reading has been diffused in English literary theory through the early work of Terry Eagleton. A symptomatic reading uncovers the buried *problematic of a text. According to Althusser, Marx's symptomatic reading of the classical economists found that they were answering

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unposed questions dictated to them by the ideology within which they worked. In Capital Marx posed the questions behind the work of the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and thus broke with its ideological problematic. Since any new problematic must be formulated in terms carried over from the discarded problematic, Althusser reads Capital symptomatically in order to clarify in terms adequate to them the principles of its new problematic. JOHN THURSTON

Primary Sources Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: New Left Books, 1976. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Synecdoche A term of classical rhetoric from the Greek meaning 'understanding one thing with another,' synecdoche is a "trope whose range of definitions overlaps considerably with that of metonymy, of which it is sometimes considered a kind. (See "metonymy/metaphor.) The term most often refers to the substitution of a part for a whole, or vice versa, as in saying 'sail' to refer to the ship of which it is part. Yet synecdoche also includes, as defined by Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 8.6.19-21) and others, the following relations of substitution: container for contained, cause for effect, effect for cause, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing made, species for genus, and genus for species. (See *signified/signifier/signification.) In these last instances, synecdoche overlaps with the Aristotelian definition of metaphor. Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, renders the Greek synecdoche as the 'figure of quick conceite' because it requires the listener or reader to translate from one order to another. Peacham in his Garden of Eloquence warns against the use of synecdoche (or the Latin, intellectio) with 'ignorant' hearers because its success depends on both knowledge and understanding.

Text The most significant rethinking of the character and function of synecdoche occurs in the work of *Kenneth Burke who considers synecdoche one of the four master tropes, along with metaphor, metonymy and *irony, and who thinks of metonymy as a 'special classification of synecdoche.' Burke notes that all synecdochal conversions imply 'an integral relationship, a relationship of convertibility, between the two terms' (506). He links the trope of synecdoche with nothing less than the notion of representation in general. (See also "mimesis.) Many thinkers rely heavily on synecdoche as a trope for thinking the specific possibilities of language, as Coleridge does in defining the symbol, in contrast to allegory, as a part the whole of which it represents and renders intelligible. In this instance and many others, synecdoche operates as a particularly seductive trope, enlisted to represent totalities not available to thought other than through a mode of rhetorical ""totalization. IAN BALFOUR

Primary Sources Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1945. Lausberg, Heinrirh L. Handbuch dcr literarischen Rhetorik. 2 vols. Munich: Verlag Max Hueber, '973' Quinlilian. Institutio Oratorio. Trans. H.E. Butler. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP and London: Heinemann, 1429. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. Trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto: L" of Toronto P, 1977.

Text A text is a structure composed of elements of signification by which the greater or lesser unity of those elements makes itself manifest. A text comprises, consequently, elements of signification, the unity of these elements and the manifestation of this unity. In narrower usages 'text' is restricted to linguistic unities, in wider usages any group of phenomena, and even being itself, may be understood as 'text.' (See *signified/signifier/signification.) Inasmuch as the totality of being is grasped as text, it is understood as a 'language'; this concept derives from a Graeco-Christian ontotheology of the incarnation of the Logos in the

world. *Jacques Derrida's philosophy, following *Martin Heidegger, arises as a reflection on the history of that ontotheology and proposes to deconstruct the so-called *logocentrism of Western thinking by way of a functionalization of its fundamental concepts. (See *deconstruction.) To say that 'truth/ for example, is a 'function' of a system, means, for Derrida, that there is nothing, as such, which corresponds to this ideal entity: what we call 'truth' arises out of the interlocking relations of the textual! y conceived system as their effect, producing, in turn, effects of behaviour, emotion, power, within the signifying terms of the system. And yet Derrida's interpretation of text as I'ecriture (writing, *textuality) presupposes an understanding of being-in-its-totality as a functional system of inscriptions which, in principle, comprehends the entire scale of being. Hence genetic inscription, linguistic and computorbased inscriptions, for example, are equally aspects of the all-encompassing text of 'inscription in general.' For any attempt to understand 'text,' the question arises as to how, according to what mode of being, the elements of the structured whole are to be defined, for this wrill determine what we understand by 'language.' Structuralist conceptions dominate the contemporary debate. (See *structuralism.) Founded on phonetics, the linguistics of *Ferdinand de Saussure proposes that language is composed of signs which are determined by their material and non-material differences. (See *sign.) The system of signs, moreover, is conceived as a conventional institution. Unlike the "index, the symbol, the "icon, or the emblem (composed of iconic and signifying elements), then, the sign has neither existential nor analogical relation to what is represented. The interpretation of the text of the world as system of signs (or of signifiers, in poststructuralist thought) limits the mode of manifestation of the things themselves to the purely functional structures which can be captured in the abstract calculus of a formal system. Aspects of a work of art, a social practice, an experience, which cannot be captured, for example, in the formalism of binary analysis, cannot manifest themselves; and what can manifest itself has no ontological 'presence,' only a 'simulacrum' of being. Because a function is always a conditioned and conditioning element of a preconceived system, it is never originary: the function combines with other functions to repeat the

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Text elements of a system in variations. Any given event is therefore conceived as a re-iteration of the already written. (See *poststructuralism, "metaphysics of presence, "binary opposition, "variation.) Thus it is that the structuralist characterization of language - and, by extension, of "literature - abstracts utterances or cultural 'products' from their existential and historical situatedness. Inasmuch as language, according to structuralist theory, is conceived as imposing form on the formlessness of Nature (*Friedrich Nietzsche, *Roland Barthes), language prefigures Nature, and makes it manifest as the given of a certain structure. The forms of the already given order themselves into the cultural codes of language (Barthes); and these codes, in a further development of structuralist-inspired thought, make up the repertoire of a *discourse (*Miche! Foucault). The sign, the codes which order the signs into the already said of a culture, and the discourses to which sets of codes belong are the three basic determinants of the structuralist text. (See *code.) In Roland Barthes' 'From Work to Text,' 'code' refers to all the forms imposed by language on reality to prefigure our perception of it, and of ourselves. Hence we may refer, for example, to syntactic codes of the grammatical form of the sentence, to narrative codes which prescribe a certain logic of cause and effect, and to semantic codes, which govern the culturally determined meanings we perceive. (See also "narrative code.) All of these codes are, in the French sense of the word, 'cliches' - they impose a prefiguring frame on reality. Now, the procedure of literary analysis consists in identifying the governing codes (those above, and others) which constitute the 'methodological field' out of which the literary text is produced. This field composes a set of discourses that includes the entire regime of research from the bibliographical establishment of the text, through the conditions of its technical, psychological and sociological production, to its criticism and consumption. If, for example, a research project focuses primarily on the sociological conditions of the production of the text, then the identification of semantic codes will dominate the analysis. The text which consequently emerges will be a product of a methodological perspective based on the assumed priority of sociological conditions and the assumption that the historical past and our own being is a code-ordered signifying system

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(see *New Historicism). Because the literary text is a function of the methodological field which produces it, the being it has consists in its operation as a quantum of power (and, in this sense as a cultural 'value') within the system of the methodological field. Insofar as the methodology of "Marxist criticism, for example, draws on the regime of research to constitute the text, the text is integrated into the Marxist program and functions as an ideological weapon in the class struggle; the literary text of Marxism consequently emerges as the re-iterative interlacing of the semantic codes which constitute (class) consciousness. (See also "ideology, "materialist criticism.) As opposed to the traditionally conceived 'work/ which is still an object rather than a function, the literary 'text' is not allowed any autonomy, any substantial or monumental quality which would justify our judging it, like the work, on the criterion of formal unity. While the classical work integrates literary 'sources/ generic 'influences/ historical and sociological 'conditions' into the unity of a new thing (supposedly much like a plant transforms the determinants of its existence into its own tissue), the literary text derives its coherence from the codes which integrate it into the whole of signification. Whereas the 'stability/ or self-sameness of the work derives, for instance, from the imitation of a generic form such as the sonnet, the stability of a text depends upon an analysis which takes the work apart to discover the interaction of the codes: the codes remain stable in the flux of textuality which dissolves generic and historical distinctions into one unified field of signification of varying levels of complexity (complexity itself - not to be confused with 'quality' - emerges as a cultural 'value/ and hence the attraction of the literary text). Moreover, the selfhood of the reader, like selfhood as such, is also conceived of as a structure of code-ordered signs; and consequently selfhood consists in the re-iteration of the Already Written of textuality. To be, at least in this account, is to be the more or less complex interface of a set of cliches. Basic to the prevailing contemporary understanding of text is the assumption that phenomena, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, are to be understood as purely conventional elements of a system of signification. And it follows from such an understanding that whatever is not functional for the economy of a

Textuality system cannot manifest itself. Because it is the 'function' of a "myth, according to the structuralism of Malinowski, for example, to help maintain the 'efficiency' of a social system, the existential and revealed truth of the 'myth' for example, of Christianity - is not and cannot be manifested or even conceived within the terms of the anthropological 'text.' This means that a poem, for example, must also be inscribed as the 'function of linguistic, psychological, ideological discourse, in order to enter the purview of the human sciences. As such, the poem becomes calculable and can be integrated into a system of causes and effects. The contemporary understanding of 'text' therefore implicates the concept of a coherent system of cause/effect relations from which the things themselves derive as elements of an instituted economy of the already known (the consumable). As such, the unique, the incalculable, the not-already-known, is in principle excluded. In this sense, the understanding of 'text' which is pre-eminent today is appropriate to the technological reduction of all entities and their re-inscription into a postmodern economy of production and consumption. (See *postmodernism.) BERNHARD RADLOFF

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Boston: Beacon P, 1970. — 'From Work to Text.' In Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge, 1975. Derrida, Jacques. 'Difference.' In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. - 'Freud and the Scene of Writing.' Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. - Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. - 'Structure. Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.' In The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford, 1989. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM P, 1962. Malinowski, Bronislaw. A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Preface by Huntington Cairns. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1973.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 'On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.' In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. and trans. Sander L. Oilman et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. - The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Textuality In its most limited sense, textuality describes the written condition of the literary object. The term suggests that "literature is a material entity constructed from words rather than an abstract concept. However, as part of structuralist and poststructuralist linguistic theory, particularly in relation to the work of *Jacques Derrida and *Roland Barthes, the term marks both a breakdown of the boundaries between literature and other verbal and non-verbal signifying practices, and a *subversion of the principle that any *text can function as an object whose meaning is coherent and self-contained. (See *structuralism, *poststructuralism, *signifying practice.) Textuality in this context describes the tendency of language to produce not a simple "reference to the world 'outside' language but a multiplicity of potentially contradictory signifying effects that are activated in the reading process. Therefore, the term implies the suspension of interpretive "closure that this multiplicity makes necessary. It thus represents a rejection of *New Criticism's conception of the text as autonomous and autotelic. A number of what might broadly be called 'worldly' theorists of textuality, among them "Michel Foucault and "Edward Said, have responded to what they perceive as more linguistically inward-looking versions of the concept by making their own theories responsible to political, historical and social frames of reference. As these approaches demonstrate, textuality takes in what might more traditionally be seen as the purview of the social sciences. Objects of study such as historical events, institutional practices, or cross-cultural relationships may therefore be seen as systems of signs to be deciphered and interpreted, rather than as realities to be recorded. (See "sign.) Any simple opposition between 'text' and 'world' is thus refused. Texts, including literary

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Theme texts, are read in terms of their specific situations in the world, and 'the world' itself is constituted within signifying processes that must be taken into account. Instead of being considered in terms of the boundless potential of significance, therefore, the textuality of such objects is grounded in their various contexts. Attention to context may extend to the gathering and interpretation of data itself. It, too, is 'textualized' if the analyst is herself perceived as a reader whose reading is contingent on her own 'inscription' within historical, social and political situations. Textuality thus absorbs both the subject and object of study, effacing the distinction between the two. (See *subject/ object.) As a general term, textuality incorporates the sense of radical relationship between texts that "Julia Kristeva denotes more specifically as *intertextuality. It also functions as an extension and elaboration of Roland Barthes' use of the word text. MAN1N A JONES

Primary Sources Balibar, Etienne, and Pierre Macherey. 'On Literature as an Ideological Form.' In Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge, 1981, 79-99. Barthes, Roland. 'From Work to Text.' In Image Music — Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 155—64. - 'Theory of the Text.' In Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge, 1981, 31-47. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Fraser, Nancy. 'On the Political and the Symbolic: Against the Metaphysics of Textuality.' boundary 2 14.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1985-86): 195-209. Glogowski, James. 'The Psychoanalytic Textuality of Jacques Lacan.' Prose Studies 11.3 (1988): 13-20. Harari, Josue, ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. Jameson, Fredric. 'The Ideology of the Text.' Salmagundi 31-32 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976): 204-46. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. LaCapra, Dominic. Rethinking Intellectual History:

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Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Temporality of Textuality.' Modern Language Notes 100.5 (Dec. 1985): 968-88 Margolis, Joseph. 'What Is a Literary Text?' In At the Boundaries. Ed. Herbert L. Sussman. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1984, 47-73. Ray, William. Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Said, Edward W. 'The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions.' Critical Inquiry 4.4 (1978): 673-714. - The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983. Spanos, William V., Paul Bove and Daniel O'Hara. The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Sprinkler, Michael. 'Textual Politics: Foucault and Derrida.' boundary 2 8.3 (1980): 75-98.

Theme History The term theme originally meant the subject around which an orator proposed to construct a speech. Tacitus speaks of themes as equivalent to topoi; Quintilian, in his treatment of forensic rhetoric, discusses theme under the rubric of 'invention' as the facts in the case. By the Middle Ages, 'theme' had come also to mean the scriptural text on which a sermon was founded. (Chaucer's Pardoner says, 'My theme is alwey oon, and evere was - / Radix malorum est Cupiditas.') The use of theme as the subject-matter, topic or idea on which a poet bases a poem, visible as early as Aristotle's Rhetoric, is common by the Renaissance. Theme is an authorcentred term, but from it follows the idea that readers can read theme out of a work and recognize a common theme in many different works. Theme as a critical term is not, however, much in evidence prior to the 20th century. Before that, didactic terms, such as 'moral,' or terms that emphasized ideational content were generally used instead. 'Theme' became a frequently employed term with the rise of 20th-century formalist schools, such as the American New Critics, that emphasized techniques of close interpretive reading. (See *New Criticism.) Formalist critics largely divorced theme from its previous associations

Theme with authorial intention and turned it into a text-centred term. Preferring 'theme' over words such as 'idea' because it suggested an element more grounded in the particulars of the literary work and over words such as 'moral' because it seemed more value-free, they reoriented literary analysis to thematic considerations as a way of opposing earlier plot- and character-based discussions. As well as responding to semantic aspects of the "text, formalist thematic statements acknowledged elements such as imagery, tone, style, and structure. (The fragmentary form of The Waste Land has often been treated as a thematic element.) Formalist interest in theme was reinforced by the use of theme as a principle in musical compositions (music borrowed the idea from rhetoric in the i6th century) and by the way theme as a musical term shaped the writing of some literary modernists (such as Thomas Mann). Influenced by the development of theme in music, some literary critics have preferred to speak of 'theme and variations' or of 'variations on a theme.' (See "variation.) Among the objections that have been made to the use of 'theme,' one is that the term is too vague to be truly useful. When applied to a single work, 'theme' may not distinguish between dominant content, central subject, unifying 'thought,' or authorial intention. In an introductory essay *Northrop Frye treated theme as indistinguishable from 'structure' ('We can see the whole design of the work as ... a simultaneous pattern radiating out from a center, not a narrative moving in time. The structure is what we call the theme.'), and some critics (such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith) have enlarged the concept so that it becomes equivalent to all the non- formal aspects of a work (including syntax). When drawing several works together for comparison, critics have often employed 'theme' not only for common topics but also for the recurrence of certain type figures and their associated stories (the Do« Juan theme), or have spoken of repeated images as themes. Theme has also often been associated with generic effects - as it is in The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation, where *Murray Krieger makes it interchangeable with vision as well. Indeed, not only does 'theme' have a range of meanings, but the concepts associated with theme have also been invoked by a number of other terms. One of these is *m\/th, when used

in phrases such as 'the myth of the frontier in American literature.' (See "literature.) The use of 'motif has further added to terminological difficulties: many literary critics use 'motif and 'theme' interchangeably; some, however, distinguish between these terms by defining motifs as theme-like units that are smaller than theme (subthemes, of less importance to the text as a whole); while some - chiefly those influenced by folklore studies - treat motif as an extratextual unit of meaning that is larger than theme. In contemporary theory 'theme' has often been reintroduced under new names: *Michael Riffaterre's "hypogram and *Claude Levi-Strauss' 'mytheme' are very close to the traditional meanings of theme. The use of theme as a critical tool and the value of a thematic statement as a goal of interpretation have been reassessed by the critical schools that have emerged in the last 20 years, as part of their larger critique of interpretation. Thematic statements have been objected to as insufficiently nuanced, as reductive and as unsatisfying replacements for complex literary artefacts. The use of 'theme' as a critical tool has been attacked as a totalizing approach that implies a view of a literary work as a vehicle for ideas and as having one presiding idea. (See 'totalization.) The term remains in common use, however - especially in the classroom and in anthologies designed for teaching, but also in critical "discourse, where it is employed not only by those who engage in interpretive readings of texts but by a large number of contemporary theorists. Definition and use Though its use has been imprecise, 'theme' is too valuable a critical concept to abandon. While definitions in handbooks and introductory guides to literary analysis continue to associate 'theme' with the making of brief statements that are the generalizable meaning of chief concern of a work of literature, it is not necessary to simplify its application to this degree. A better way of using 'theme' today would be to view it as the meeting place of the semantic levels of a literary work with formal structural qualities such as rhythm and repetition. Theme might thus be thought of as the semantic dimensions of a work dispersed by and through its formal elements. Defined in this way, theme can continue to be of considerable value.

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Theme Furthermore, as reception theory and *reader-reponse criticism imply, critics can make statements of theme without necessarily arguing for intrinsic meanings in literary works (though *Norman Holland is more extreme than most in viewing theme as a subjective projection onto the work, one that arises entirely from the reader). (See also ""Constance School of Reception Aesthetics [Reception Theory].) Not only can theme be conceived of as part of the reading experience; reading for theme can be viewed as a technique to which the reader has recourse as a way of organizing that experience. From this perspective, theme would be regarded as negotiated between reader and text, or between reader and implied author (because readers often conceive of themes as arising out of the author's 'vision' or preoccupations). The making of a thematic statement is thus a synthesizing act that follows from identifying a pattern of meaning (or a pattern that contains a range of related meanings). In addition, reading for theme might be thought of as allowing the formulation of statements that enable readers to connect the text with their experience of the world: theme has sometimes been described as mediating between word and world. Since part of the reader's world consists of other texts, thematic readings are intertextual. (See *intertextuality.) Indeed, themes gain saliency when they are recognized as being repeated in more than one work. (The importance of card-playing in a single Russian story takes on heightened meaning for readers who locate it in the context of gambling as a theme in Russian fiction.) Thus thematic readings can be the opposite of reductive: they can give resonance and significance to what might otherwise be overlooked as minor or trivial. Reading for theme may also be thought of as a coherence device. Features of a text that seem unrelated in any other way can usually be related through theme, which therefore provides the reader with a way of constructing unity (especially important in modern and postmodern works that avoid plot-based or character-based coherence). (See *postmodernism.) This is one of the reasons themes are often felt by readers to provide an enriched way of approaching a literary work: they offer a secondary understanding or response to the overall narrative at a level other than that of

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plot and an additional level of unity in lyric poetry besides that offered by the dramatization of the speaker. (See *story/plot.) Since literary works permit a number of thematic statements, different themes that are neither exclusive nor tautological can be perceived by different readers (or even by the same reader) within the same work. In fact, it is almost impossible to reduce a literary work to a single theme, since any expression of theme can usually be recast in terms of its opposite. ('Illusion and reality' is a familiar theme that is expressed in terms of thematic opposition.) There has been some debate about whether a theme can satisfactorily be given only as a brief - typically one-word statement (as in 'Death is a central theme in Hamlet') or must be expressed in the form of a thesis (as in The theme of Hamlet is that one must recognize the constraints of time and take action'). It is not necessary to give preference to either form, since brief statements can be transformed into thesis statements (and vice versa) by readers familiar with the work. Though critics today generally view theme as an area of investigation within a work rather than as the final goal of analysis, theme remains a valuable and flexible concept when employed in a way that remains sensitive to the complex nature of literary expression. Thematic statements can serve as metonymic or mnemonic aids to the critical dialogue, providing convenient starting points for discussion. (See ""metonymy/metaphor.) Though such statements may seem reductive in themselves, critics can locate them inside arguments that by qualifying and contextualizing themes within the particulars of a work - recognize and retain the nuances of individual texts. Critical approaches through theme Critical approaches based on reading for theme are often referred to as 'thematic criticism' or 'thematics' (a term first used by the Russian formalist *Boris Tomashevskii in an essay called 'Thematics'). However, 'thematics' has never been a unified school or a single way of approaching texts; and it is useful to distinguish between explicative thematics and comparative thematics. Explicative thematics seeks to articulate a theme (or several themes) within a single work. It develops its conclusions through con-

Theme sideration of internal textual relations and uses an inductive approach. Explicative thematics was often the goal of the techniques of critical reading ('close reading') associated with American New Criticism. It remains in extensive use, especially in classrooms. Comparative thematics, sometimes referred to as the study of 'universal themes,' has its origins in Stoffgeschichte, the igth-century German thematic practice that grew out of the study of comparative literature. Resembling archetypal approaches to criticism, it involves the finding of one theme in many texts - potentially as many as the reader has the time and energy to examine - and has quite often been associated with discussions of recurrent literary figures: Ulysses, Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust are among the most-often cited in Western literature. (See "universal, *archetypal criticism.) While some critics have objected that the name of such a figure is not a theme, it has been argued that these figures serve metonymically. ('Don Juan' can be understood as a figure that emblematically stands for the theme of unbridled desire.) Furthermore, the use of such type figures is one way of not reducing theme to statement. The procedure of comparative thematics is principally deductive and consists of collection. Comparative thematics is the kind of thematic practice that has most often been attacked, chiefly for remaining extrinsic to texts and for minimi/ing their distinctive particulars. But defences of the approach could now be made by employing structuralist theory and especially by understanding comparative thematics as a kind of intertextuality. (See "structuralism.) A third kind of thematics, which could be called corpus thematics, stands between explicative and comparative practice. Corpus thematics resembles the comparative approach in that it describes themes that exist in more than one text, but it is more limited in that it examines a specified and bounded body of texts. This body of work may be relatively small (such as the work of one author) or quite broad (the works of a literary period). At its broadest (as in certain kinds of genre thematics) it may be hard to discriminate between corpus and comparative thematics. However, corpus thematics maintains an inductive model and, unlike comparative thematics, is given to reading a body of work as if it were one large composite text.

The most important kind of corpus thematics today is cultural thematics - the reading of cultural themes out of national bodies of literature or out of the writing of ethnic or genderidentified groups. Because cultural thematics joins literary studies with other disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology, it has been common among critics interested in interdisciplinary approaches, and in fields such as American studies (where it has sometimes been referred to as the 'myth and symbol school'), Canadian studies (where it is known simply as 'thematic criticism'), and post-colonial studies. (See "post-colonial theory.) Structuralist criticism and the recent work done by anthropologists and sociologists influenced by structuralist methodologies may offer perspectives that permit a more sophisticated handling of comparative and corpus thematics than has sometimes occurred. Poetique 64 (1985) is a special issue on theme that may be seen as initiating this investigation. Elsewhere, "Alexander Zholkovskii (often in collaboration with lu. K. Shcheglov) has attempted an elaborate - though not always satisfying - structuralist approach to theme as part of a "poetics of expressiveness. Although it might seem that explicative thematics is a necessary first step for the practice of either comparative or corpus thematics, the relationship is not as close as one might anticipate. None of the themes suggested by a reading of specific works may turn out to be the theme(s) emphasized by critics seeing those literary works as part of a larger body of texts. For this reason, critics who emphasize individual texts have sometimes complained that comparative and corpus thematics produce results that are circular; they find what they go looking for. Despite such objections (the use of the hermeneutic model of reading with its emphasis on intuitive leaps provides one response to this objection), cultural criticism has valued thematics as a tool, especially for making comparisons between cultures, where analyses of contrasting themes or of contrasting ways of deploying the same theme may reveal a great deal about larger cultural patterns. All well, critics dealing with the writing of the previously 'silenced' (minorities, women, emerging nations) have not only found thematic approaches valuable in themselves but also since many of the writers in these groups have created works that deliberately invert, ironize

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Totalization or *parody the themes of a dominant culture see their own thematic discussions as a way of continuing a contestory project already begun by the writers. (See also "irony, "metacriticism, *hermeneutics.) RUSSELL BROWN

Primary Sources Beardsley, Monroe C. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1958. Chatman, Seymour. 'On the Notion of Theme in Narrative.' In Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, Ed. John C. Fisher. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1983, 161-79. Crane, R.S. The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1953. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Frye, Northrop. 'Literary Criticism.' In The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature. Ed. James Thorpe. New York: MLA, 1963, 57-69. Holland, Norman. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. - 'Unity Identity Text Self.' In Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980, 118-33. Krieger, Murray. The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. Levin, Harry. 'Thematics and Criticism.' In Grounds for Comparison. Ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972. Levin, Richard. New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Tomashevsky, Boris. 'Thematics.' 1925. Trans, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965, 61-95. Wetherill, P.M. The Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Zholkovskii, Alexander. Themes and Texts: Toward a Poetics of Expressiveness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

Totalization Totalization is the homogenizing process by which a dominant "ideology is imposed on any "text (musical, textual, architectural, philosophical), thereby eliding its diverse elements. A term largely employed by poststructuralists (*Michel Foucault, "Jacques Derrida, *Paul de

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Man, *J. Hillis Miller, "Edward Said), it refers to the methods of traditional criticism (*New Criticism) for assessing texts on the basis of inherent formal unity and universal appeal. The term draws attention to the assertion of control and the apparent will to "power evident in any unification process. (See "universal, "poststructuralism.) Most theorists contend that there are gaps within texts (see "Roman Ingarden, "Gerard Genette, "Pierre Macherey, "Wolfgang Iser). These gaps must be elided or disregarded in order to enforce unity but they also offer interesting insights into the text and its production. For example, when readers interpret the Sherlock Holmes stories as exemplifications of pure logic and deduction, they are totalizing the myth of positivism that underpins the stories. However, a reader may also focus on the gaps that exist within them that critique positivist logic. As Catherine Belsey has demonstrated, in Arthur Conan Doyle's writings feminine representation constitutes such a gap. (Critical Practice 109-17). Doyle depicts women as indefinable figures, figures who cannot be explained logically. These feminine portrayals thus emphasize the stories' inability to articulate what lies outside of their male-centred "discourse. "Deconstruction is one among many new theoretical approaches which resists totalizing tendencies. P R I S C I L L A L. W A L T O N

Primary Sources Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980.

Trace Trace is a theoretical term associated primarily with "Jacques Derrida, the leading proponent of "deconstruction. The problem with defining the term is that definition is itself a gesture which runs contrary to Derrida's overall view. Trace is, at best, an evasive term, one Derrida uses in a number of different ways and in a variety of different contexts. The term, in fact, undergoes in his texts a series of what he calls 'nonsynonymic substitutions,' appearing in various forms such as 'differance/ 'arche-writing' and 'spacing.' Although Derrida insists that these terms are 'nonsynonymic' and will

Trope argue that each of them is dictated by and used within a particular context, the degree of overlap between those terms makes defining them all the more slippery a task. In Of Gramniatology, Derrida writes, 'Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist' (167). If the trace 'does not exist/ how, then, can we begin to define it? (See "text, differance /difference, *grammatology.) An instructive, if tentative, starting-point might be Derrida's critique of the notion that the being of any entity is determined as presence. (See "metaphysics of presence.) Rejecting the privileged place in Western thought of being and presence, he introduces the term 'trace' in an attempt to show us that the truth about what is allegedly present in language at the moment of utterance is always conditioned by absences. Trace, in this sense, is an extension of *Ferdinand de Saussure's formulation of the *sign; it is the name Derrida gives to the absences, the relations of difference, that are involved in the production of the sign. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure argued that signs mean what they mean not through direct correspondence with external objects, but through their difference from other elements in the system. No element in language is present in and of itself, because, as Derrida puts it in Positions, 'no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each "element"... being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system' (26). Any element thus signifies only through "reference to other absent elements (similar to and/or different from it) which might have filled the same spot in any given linguistic chain. The linguistic sign receives its value only in relation (contrast and difference) to other signs and therefore, according to Derrida, all other signs which might have filled the same spot leave their traces on the sign in question. The French word la trace can also be rendered into English as track, mark, footprint, trail, or clue. Derrida's term resonates with implications of these various translations. For instance, as a mark of the absence of an anterior presence, the footprint too is a kind of trace and it helps us understand the curious double status which traces enjoy. A footprint serves as a physical reminder of something which is no

longer there: as a trace it mediates between presence and absence, between that which remains and that which is no longer present. Derrida shows no nostalgia for a lost presence and would deny that anything is ever fully present in language. But the example of the footprint is useful because it shows us just how difficult it is to fix a stable definition on Derrida's notion of the trace. The presence of the physical entity, the footprint itself - this despite Derrida's insistence that the trace does not exist - complicates our understanding of the trace by reminding us that, as a concept, it can serve only as a provisional analogy for the production of meaning in language. Trace is also a term which enjoys currency in the field of psychoanalysis, particularly in relation to the unconscious, which can only be apprehended by its effects. Throughout his writing, *Sigmund Freud saw the structure of human experience as being based on the trace rather than on a notion of presence. Writing about the human capacity for retaining or reviving the experience of things past, Freud uses the term 'memory-trace' to refer to the ways in which the perceptual apparatus of the mind is always already inhabited by incidents inscribed upon the memory. (See also "psychoanalytic theory.) AJAY HEBLE

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. 1967. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. - Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Trope A trope (Gr. 'turn') is a rhetorical figure in which words are used in a way different from their standard or literal usage. The distinction between the tropological and 'literal' aspects of language has, however, been attacked by postSaussurean thinkers. (See "Ferdinand de Saussure.) They recognize the rhetorical and metaphorical dimension of language as integral to all "discourse, not just poetic and literary language. Although there is some disagreement

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Trope about the precise definitions, in general, classical rhetoricians (such as Aristotle, Isocrates, Quintilian) distinguished between tropes and schemes, with trope referring to a change in the meaning of a word, and scheme designating a change in a pattern or series of words. (See *rhetorical criticism.) Sixteenth-century rhetoricians like Peter Ramus categorized the basic organizing principle for figures of speech as four major tropes: metaphor, metonymy, *synecdoche, and "irony. (See "metonymy/ metaphor.) Where classical and Renaissance theories of rhetoric saw tropes as linguistic ornaments that embellished language, Giambattista Vico inverted the distinction between rationalist and poetic theories of language, arguing rather that the tropological provides the foundation for abstract thought. In The New Science (1725) he employed the four major tropes as a way of organizing the development of human thought and culture, a history in which the originary mythic and tropological consciousness is eventually supplanted by the abstract language of science. Structuralist criticism, which assumes that linguistic elements provide keys for understanding not only complex structures in language but also patterns of culture and history, uses tropes to analyse structure. (See "structuralism.) "Gerard Genette and "Tzvetan Todorov are concerned with the figurality of language, the way certain tropes or figures operate as an organizing system at various levels within a *text. *Roman Jakobson, in his chapter on metaphoric and metonymic poles in Fundamentals of Language (1956), combines psychological linguistics and literary criticism to produce a binary system of explanation. (See "binary opposition.) Through his analysis of speech disturbances, he designates all aphasic disorders as belonging either to the metaphoric or the metonymic pole, the former relating to similarity disorders and the latter to contiguity disorders. Extrapolating from this study, Jakobson goes on to classify literary forms as belonging to one of the two poles: poetry, romanticism and symbolism are correlated with the metaphoric, whereas prose and realism are associated with metonymy. "Claude Levi-Strauss also uses the metaphor-metonymy dyad for his analysis of "myth, kinship patterns and culture; and "Jacques Lacan applies the distinction to "Sigmund Freud's writing, metaphor becoming associated with condensation, and metonymy with displace-

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ment. Following Vico, *Hayden White in Metahistory (1973) draws on the four-fold system of tropes to analyse the history of consciousness in 19th-century Europe, thus providing not only a history of thought, but also an argument for the poetic or tropological nature of historical writing in general. Hayden White's discussion of tropes illuminates the inescapably rhetorical nature of language. The recognition that all language is tropological is one of the features of poststructuralist thought. (See "poststructuralism.) Since, in this view, our access to the world is always mediated by language, a poststructuralist understanding of the world is fundamentally concerned with tropes. In contradistinction to the philosophical view of metaphor as merely ornamental and language as a transparent medium, "Jacques Derrida in 'White Mythology' demonstrates that metaphor is indispensable to the conceptual system that would seek to classify and contain it, for it is impossible to purify language of the tropological. (See "white mythology, *deconstruction.) But rather than seeing the trope as originary and ontologically secure - as Vico did - poststructuralist thinkers view it as both ubiquitous and unstable. The reliability of meaning is continually subverted by tropes, so that language is always 'turning,' revealing new meaning. Texts are thus read against themselves through their tropological structures, a deconstructive strategy employed by such critics as *J. Hillis Miller, "Harold Bloom and "Paul de Man. De Man's sustained work on tropes which focuses on a wide range of figures such as metaphor and metonymy, prosopopoeia, apostrophe, and catachresis - has profound implications not only for theories of narrative and the lyric, but also for our conception of discourse itself. His analysis of the relationship between rhetoric and grammar in Allegories of Reading challenges the semiological work of critics like Genette, Todorov, "Roland Barthes, and *AJ. Greimas, who, he argues, subsume rhetoric under the univocal logic of grammar. Redefining rhetoric not as persuasion, but as the figural potential of language itself, he claims that rhetoric suspends logic, producing a 'semiological enigma' in which it is impossible to decide whether the 'literal' or the figural meaning should prevail. (See "semiosis.) De Man, like Derrida, examines some of the very philosophical texts that seek to protect themselves from the 'dis-figuring' nature of meta-

Universal phorical language, disclosing the ultimate futility of the desire either to transcend the tropological or to reduce language to a mere *code. By showing how even the putatively pure and rigorous discourses of philosophy and science are ineluctably metaphorical, poststructuralist theory seeks to collapse the distinction between 'literary' and 'ordinary' discourse. (See also *discourse analysis theory, *semiotics, "narratology.) ELIZABETH HARVEY

Primary Sources de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. 'White Mythology.' 1972. In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Hall. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1956. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. 1725. Trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Frisch. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1948. White, Hayden. Metahistciry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Universal Brief definitions of the term universal - as, for example, 'the element in literature which appeals to readers regardless of period or condition' - have only a limited usefulness. The more abstract and open-ended the ideas behind a critical term, the less likely are its users to have the same ideas in mind. Indefiniteness is only one reason why the term universal, its derivatives (universality, universalize), and related terms (general, generality) have become the 'loose and baggy monsters' of critical terminology. But indefiniteness is not the only reason why the universal and the ideas it refers to are currently unfashionable, and typically if often dismissed as 'totalizations/ or the collective delusions of white males. (See "totalization.) Other difficulties with the term arise from its long history. In moving from philosophy to criticism the universals of Plato and Aristotle have suffered losses and accretions that blur new and original meanings as the term is applied in a variety of contexts. In Literary Criticism: A Short History, *Wimsatt and *Brooks' acute discussion of neo-classicism (330-3) lo-

cates nine distinct meanings of the term. There are others. The idea of universality seeds itself across the range of formal and thematic issues. It can refer to moral, behavioural and generic norms; to what is accepted as likely or only widely applicable. Such universals apply to the content or the form of literary works. (See also *genre criticism, "theme.) Recent criticism that emphasizes 'the reader's part' and sees the creation of meaning in the act of reading implies (however tacitly) that the process of reading is itself an act of universalizing. (See ""reader-response criticism.) In Structuralist Poetics (175-6), "Jonathan Culler points out that, in order to create a poem out of the note William Carlos Williams left asking his wife's forgiveness for having eaten some plums, 'we deprive the poem of the pragmatic and circumstantial functions of the note ... and we must therefore supply a new function to justify the poem.' The process of replacing pragmatic and circumstantial functions with others (the function of art), is essentially what Aristotle isolates when he distinguishes drama proper from lampoon in the Poetics. Interpreting a particular use of the term universal requires some sense of its philosophical origins and of the historical and critical contexts in which it figures. Philosophy distinguishes universals (abstract propositions and relations) from particulars (concrete objects that exemplify them); the universal 'whiteness/ for example, from the piece of chalk. For Plato and so-called Realists universals exist independently of thought and things; for Aristotle and Nominalists they are a mental artefact, existing only in particulars. (A midway position, Conceptualism, associated with Aquinas and Locke, is less relevant to literary criticism.) In literary criticism, as in philosophy, universals are inevitably connected with their nominal opposites. Thus a critic's use of 'universal' is often clarified by examining the accompanying use of the 'particular.' From Plato to *I.A. Richards critical discussion opposes 'minute particulars' to universals. Through a Hegelian sleight of hand of terminology the opposites were supposedly reconciled in the phrase 'concrete universal/ which embodied the idea that "literature achieves universality through the concrete depiction of the particular. This formulation, especially popular with mid-century critics, was rejected by poets like John Crowe Ransom, for whom its neatness seemed superficial, untrue to actual poetic

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Universal achievement, in which luck, irrelevance and other wayward elements played necessary parts. Typically, the universal and the particular are in a complex relation of opposition and complement. Yet there are also instructive confrontations. For Blake (the phrase 'minute particulars' is his), the authenticity and power of literature lay in particulars rather than in conformity to the abstract aesthetic norms set out by Joshua Reynolds. For Reynolds Theory [was] the Knowledge of what is truly Nature.' This man, Blake wrote in the margin of his copy of Reynolds' Discourses, would destroy 'character itself.' For Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, 'Nothing [could] please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.' It seems the case that cultural moments of conformity and consolidation like the neoclassical emphasize universals in discussions of both the form and aim of literature, and moments of scepticism and iconoclasm like the Romantic period or our own ignore them. Yet it is a mistake to expect no exceptions (there are simply too many kinds of universal), or to ignore differences among critics apparently of the same school. Romantics who rejected aesthetic universals held passionately to the idea of a universal 'human nature.' Samuel Johnson and the French critic Rapin, both neoclassicists, appeal to universality as the test of art, but while Rapin's universals were arrived at a priori, Johnson's appealed to experience and consensus. Until recently, almost no one would have disagreed with *Wayne Booth's assertion in The Rhetoric of Fiction that 'the deeper [the Author] sees into permanency the more likely he is to earn the discerning reader's concurrence' (70). But the 'permanency' of literary responses, or of standards of behaviour and values - all cited by Booth - seems increasingly arguable. On the eve of the Second World War Louis Macneice wrote in his Autumn Journal: 'Good-bye now, Plato and Hegel, / The shop is closing down, / They don't want any philosopher-kings in England. / There ain't no universals in this man's town': this, not many lines after the poet told us 'how much [I] liked the Concrete Universal.' In additon to the harrowing public events that led to scepticism about human faculties and responses, objections in recent criticism to 'essentialist' ideas of human nature, and to the class, gender and Eurocentric biases underlying

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literary judgment have challenged the validity of long-accepted moral and psychological universals, especially - as Macneice suggests those of a Neoplatonic cast. (See also *essentialism.) Nominalist or Aristotelian universals have been challenged more subtly. A good gloss on 'universal' as Aristotle uses it in the Poetics is provided in the translation and commentary by H.G. Apostle, Elizabeth Dobbs and Morris Parslow (153). There the universal is 'a thought or expression predicable of or applicable to an indefinite number of things.' *Deconstruction might well define 'particular' in the same words. In some contexts it is difficult to maintain an absolute distinction between the universal and the particular, a *binary opposition of the sort deconstruction delights in collapsing. Whatever the difficulties of interpreting particular use of the term universal, the effort can reveal distinctions of importance. For example, in the Phaedo Plato urges the poet to make particulars suggest the universal, while Johnson wants the universal in literature to recall the particulars. The terms 'universal' and 'particular' seem unavoidable. For Aristotle, drama - by extension all 'making,' literature as a whole - begins with a step toward the universal, with the departure from lampoon by the invention of thought and expression applicable to more than an identifiable contemporary target of satire. Whether the step toward universality is attributed to a poet or to an audience, for there to be literature it must be taken; and if the step is attributed to the audience, objections to the falsity of notional distinctions between the literary and non-literary must seem beside the point. More important, however, is the case for the familiar moral and behavioural universals associated with Plato. For modern critics as diverse as *Todorov, *Said and *Habermas, the confusions and biases that are part of the history of universals in criticism cannot outweigh the need for some idea of 'a shared humanity' which, as Todorov (74) says, it would be dangerous to abandon, even more dangerous than ethnocentric universalism. At this moment in critical debate, the idea of a shared humanity of human nature is open to attack from many quarters as sentimental and undemonstrable, even pernicious. For some modern critics the idea of 'human nature' or indeed any universal simply ignores the com-

Variation plexity of the historical and psychological evidence. Worse still, such ideas may reflect the efforts of those who speak for the dominant forces in a given culture to impose their vision on the culture as a whole and thus validate the status quo. Clearly, ideas of human nature and notions of universality can easily leave out of account the marginalization of the underclasses and the oppressed, among others who do not participate in the cultural consensus. The richness of recent *feminist criticism and of criticism that comes from outside of Eurocentricism suggests the strength of recent critiques of the idea of universals. SHELDON P. ZITNER

Primary Sources Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. H. Apostle, E. Dobbs, and M. Pavslow. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell, 1990. Aron, Richard Ithamar. The Theory of Universals. London: Clarendon P, 1967. Barthes, Roland. 'The Great Family of Man.' In Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Frogmore: Paladin, 1973, 100-2. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism. Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Derrida, Jacques. 'White Mythologies.' In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Gudas, Fabian. 'Concrete Universal' In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974, 149-51. Hagstrum, Jean. Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952. Todorov, Tzvetan. '"Race," Writing and Culture.' In 'Race.' Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986, 370-80. Wimsatt W.K., Jr., and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, i9lv.

Variation Variation is a compositional technique borrowed from music which aims at creating artistic order through the exploitation and development of a "theme or a motif. Variations became a preferred form of a musical composition at the beginning of the 18th century. They were later taken up by Beethoven who added the possibility of transforming the themes from

within (for example, Variations on a Theme by Diabelli, Sonata Opus 111). Indeed, before Beethoven, variation was only one of the external technical methods related to the sonata, which repeats unchanging material (*Adorno). With Beethoven, the variation takes on a new, dynamic dimension and the development process (the subjective reflection of the theme) acquires a central position in the global structure of the musical piece. Thus the variational development of the theme conserves its starting materials while transforming all of its elements. With this new type of variation, music began to entertain a new and paradoxical relationship with time. Finally, at the beginning of the 2oth century musical variations rested on series instead of on musical themes (Schonberg, Webern). Outside music, the variational principle has been used in philosophy (the 'imaginary variation' in *Edmund Husserl's phenomenology) and in the visual arts (particularly painting). However, "literature, and especially the 20thcentury novel, uses variations by treating them as differentiating repetitions which reveal the deeply phenomenological dimensions of a work (as one object is submitted to various modes of illumination). A recurring theme, therefore, cannot be confused with simple repetition, for the meaning of the theme itself varies at each stage of its development. The whole set of variations found within a work defines the identity of the chosen theme. (See "phenomenological criticism.) Proust, Broch, Faulkner, Mann, Hartling, Hrabal, and many other authors of 20th-century Western novels explicitly use variations. Milan Kundera goes even further and uses a variation-based aesthetics in a programmatic manner. Over and over again, he brings to light its manner of working within the *text while questioning its formal, aesthetic, as well as philosophical, and playful meanings. EVA LE G R A N D

Primary Sources Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophy of Modern Music. New York: Seabury, 1973. Aronson, Alex. Music and the Novel: A Study in 20thcentury Fiction. Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980. Brand, Glen. 'Kundera and the Dialectics of Repetition.' Cross Currents - A Yearbook of Central European Culture 6 (1987): 461-72.

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White mythology Deleuze, Gilles. Differance et repetition. Paris: PUF, 1968. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove P, 1988. - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1980. - 'Introduction a une variation.' In Jacques et son maitre. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Le Grand, Eva. 'L'Esthetique de la variation romanesque chez Kundera.' LTnfini 5 (1984): 56-64. Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Pernon, Gerard. 'Variation.' Dictionnaire de la musicjue. Rennes: Quest-France, 1984. 'Variations sur le theme.' Communications 47 (1988). Special issue.

White mythology The term 'white mythology' derives from "Jacques Derrida's essay of that name in Marges de la philosophic [Margins of Philosophy 1972]. It refers to the metaphysical value of metaphor as the movement of a loss and return of 'proper' - literal - meaning (sens propre). (See "metonymy/metaphor.) Derrida begins the essay by examining a series of philosophical 'metaphors' of the process by which metaphors are transformed into concepts through the loss of their original significance. He borrows the phrase 'white mythology' from Anatole France's Le Jardin d'Epicure, a dialogue on figurative language. Playing on the sense of propre in French as 'clean' and on sens propre, 'literal meaning/ Derrida uses the term 'white mythology' as a general rubric for the philosophical dream of a language cleansed of all figurative stain and made absolutely approximate to its "signified. One traditional metaphor of this effacement (usure) is that of a coin, the inscription of which is worn away by excessive use. The meaning of usure as an inexorable dwindling involves a play on the economic sense of the word: with the gradual disappearance of the original metaphoric meaning comes the usurious growth in time of a surplus conceptual meaning. For Derrida this process is essential

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to metaphysical thinking. At the end of the essay, Derrida focuses on a passage from Hegel in which the movement of the sun becomes a metaphor for the procession of the Spirit away from and back to itself in the course of history. The Spirit imitates the sun's circular westering away from an oriental origin and towards its recovery. This movement involves a detour through metaphor: with the expropriation of the primitive meaning given to things, we fall into a metaphoric mode of understanding; in the course of human history and through the process of usure or wearing away of the figurative, a new 'proper' meaning is restored; this new one is the old one effaced and carried to a higher conceptual power, now interiorized and spiritualized. The delayed return of the proper produces interest, a surplus of meaning which is collected at the end of time when the 'proper,' like Hegel's setting sun, returns to itself. Thus Derrida plays on the French word plus: plus de metaphor, no more metaphor (metaphor is destroyed as it becomes increasingly conceptual through the process of wearing away or usure) and the surplus of metaphor (the surplus of conceptual meaning produced by usure as a sort of accrued interest on an outstanding loan). Derrida thus exposes the link between the traditional philosophical understanding of something as apparently innocent as metaphor and the entire metaphysical epoch of Western culture. Derrida's critique of 'white mythology' is thus a part of his general exposition of the metaphysical suppression of what he calls 'writing' and of the way in which philosophy's restricted 'law of the proper' attempts but fails to contain the margins of its own "discourse. (See "deconstruction, *centre/decentre, "margin, "metaphysics of presence.) JOSEPH ADAMSON

Primary Sources Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophic. 1972. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

List of entries

Approaches Anglo-American feminist criticism: see Feminist criticism, Anglo-American Archetypal criticism, 3 Black criticism, 5 Chicago School: see NeoAristotelian or Chicago School Communication theory, 11 Constance School of Reception Aesthetics [Reception Theory], 14 Constructivism, 18 Constructivist theory of literature: see Empirical Science of Literature Creation Philological Society: see Hvratsko filolosko drustvo Cultural materialism, 21 Cultural poetics: see New Historicism Deconstruction. 25 Dialogical criticism, 31 Discourse analysis theory, 34 Empirical Science of Literature/Constructivist Theory of Literature, 36 Feminist criticism. AngloAmerican, 39 Feminist criticism, French, 44 Feminist criticism, Quebec. 50

Formalism: see Formalism, Russian; New Criticism; structuralism Formalism, Russian, 53 Frankfurt School, 60 French feminist criticism: see feminist criticism, French Game theory, 64 Genetic criticism, 70 Geneva School, 73 Genre criticism, 79 Grotesque, theories of the, 85 Hermeneutics, 90 Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo [Croatian Philological Society], 94 Marxist criticism, 95 Materialist criticism, 100 Metacriticism, 102 Narratology, 110 Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago School, 116 New Criticism, 120 New Historicism, 124 Nitra School, 130 Performance criticism, 133 Phenomenological criticism, 139 Play/freeplay, theories of, 145 Poetics of expressiveness, 149

Polish structuralism: see Structuralism, Polish Polysystem Theory, 151 Post-colonial theory, 155 Poststructuralism, 158 Prague School: see Semiotic Poetics of the Prague School Psychoanalytic theory, 163 Quebec feminist criticism: see Feminist criticism, Quebec Reader-response criticism, 170 Reception Theory: see Constance School of Reception Aesthetics Rhetorical criticism, 174 Russian formalism: see Formalism, Russian Semiotic poetics of the Prague School, 179 Semiotics, 183 Sociocriticism, 189 Speech act theory, 193 Structuralism, 199 Structuralism, Polish, 204 Tartu School, 208 Theory and Pedagogy, 218 Thematic criticism: see Theme (part 3) Translation, theories of, 211

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List of entries

Scholars Abrams, M.H., 225 Adorno, Theodor W., 226 Althusser, Louis, 230 Auerbach, Erich, 233 Austin, J(ohn) L(angshaw), 236 Bachelard, Gaston, 239 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 241 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 242 Barthes, Roland, 245 Baudrillard, Jean, 246 Benjamin, Walter, 249 Benveniste, Emile, 251 Blanchot, Maurice, 253 Bleich, David, 255 Bloom, Harold, 257 Bodkin, Maud, 258 Booth, Wayne C, 259 Bourdieu, Pierre Felix, 261 Bremond, Claude, 263 Brooks, Cleanth, 264 Burke, Kenneth Duva, 267 Cassirer, Ernst Alfred, 270 Chomsky, Noam Avram, 271

Cixous, Helene, 273 Crane, R(onald) S(almon), 279 Croce, Benedetto, 281 Culler, Jonathan Dwight, 283 Deleuze, Gilles, 288 della Volpe, Galvano, 291 de Man, Paul, 293 Derrida, Jacques, 296 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 297 Ducrot, Oswald, 299 Eagleton, Terry, 301 Eco, Umberto, 303 Eikhenbaum, Boris Mikhailovich, 305 Eliade, Mircea, 306 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns), 308 Empson, (Sir) William, 311 Fiedler, Leslie A., 313 Fish, Stanley, 314

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Forster, E(dward) M(organ), 316 Foucault, Michel, 318 Freud, Sigmund, 320 Frye, Northrop, 324 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 326 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 329 Geertz, Clifford, 331 Genette, Gerard, 333 Gilbert, Sandra Mortola, and Susan David Gubar, 336 Girard, Rene Noel, 338 Goldmann, Lucien, 340 Gombrich, (Sir) Ernst Hans Josef, 341 Gramsci, Antonio, 344 Greimas, A(lgirdas) J(ulien), 345 Grivel, Charles, 349 Guattari, (Pierre) Felix, 351 Gubar, Susan David: see Gilbert, Sandra Mortola, and Susan David Gubar Habermas, Jurgen, 352 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 354 Heidegger, Martin, 355 Hirsch, E(ric) D(onald), Jr., 360 Holland, Norman N., 362 Husserl, Edmund, 363 Ingarden, Roman, 365 Irigaray, Luce, 368 Iser, Wolfgang, 373 Jakobson, Roman Osipovich, 375 James, Henry, 378 Jameson, Fredric R., 380 Jauss, Hans Robert, 382 Jung, Carl Gustav, 383 Kermode, Frank, 386 Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye, 388 Koestler, Arthur, 390 Krieger, Murray, 392 Kristeva, Julia, 394 Lacan, Jacques-Marie Emile, 396

Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert), 399 Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond), 401 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 403 Lewis, C(live) S(taples), 405 Lodge, David John, 407 Lotman, lurii Mikhailovich, 407 Lubbock, Percy, 410 Lukacs, Georg (Gyorgy), 410 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 413 Macherey, Pierre, 414 Maritain, Jacques, 417 Mauron, Charles, 419 McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall, 421 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 423 Miller, J(oseph) Hillis, 425 Moi, Toril, 428 Mukafovsky, Jan, 430 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 432 Olson, Elder, 436 Ong, Walter Jackson, 437 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 439 Peirce, C(harles) S(anders), 441 Potebnia, Aleksander A., 443 Poulet, Georges, 445 Praz, Mario, 447 Prince, Gerald, 448 Propp, Vladimir lakovlevich, 449 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong), 451 Ricoeur, Paul, 453 Riffaterre, Michael, 456 Robertson, Durant Waite, Jr., 458 Rorty, Richard, 459 Rousset, Jean, 460 Said, Edward W., 461 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 464 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 466 Scholes, Robert, 468 Searle, John R., 470

List of entries Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich, 471 Showalter, Elaine, 473 Starobinski. Jean, 474 Steiner, George Francis, 475 Todorov, Tzvetan, 477 Tomashevskii, Boris Viktorovich, 479

Trilling, Lionel, 480 Tynianov, lurii Nikolaevich, 481 Uspenskii, Boris Andreevich, 482 Wellek, Rene, 484 White, Hayden, 486 Williams, Raymond, 486

Wilson, Edmund, 489 Wimsatt, William Kurtz, Jr., 491 Winters, (Arthur) Yvor, 494 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 495 Woolf, Virginia Stephen, 498 Zholkovskii, Aleksander K., 501

Terms Act ant, 505 Affective stylistics, 506 Anxiety of influence, 506 Aporia, 507 Archetype. 508 Arche-writing: see Differance/difference, trace Aura. 508 Authority, 509 Binary opposition, 511 Bracketing, 5 1 1 Canon. 514 Carnival. 516 Centre/decentre, 518 Character zones. 520 Chora. 521 Classeme, 522 Closure/dis-closurc, 522 Code, 525 Communicative action, 526 Competence/performance, 526 Concretization, 527 Critical theory, 527 Daseitr. see Heidegger, Martin; Geneva School; Bracketing; Intention/ Intentional!ty; Lebensicelt; Phenomenological criticism Defamiliarization, 528 Demythologizing, 529 Desire/lack, 531 Dialogism: sec Doublevoicing/dialogism; Poly phony /dialogism Diegesis, 533 D iffe ranee/di ffe re nee, 534 Discourse, 535

Disnarrated, 537 Double-voicing/dialogism, 537 Ecriture: see Derrida, Jacques; Deconstruction; Differance/ difference; Intertextuality; Logocentrism; Textuality Ecriture feminine: see Cixous, Helene; Irigaray, Luce; Kristeva, Julia; Feminist criticism, French, Quebec; Polyphony/dialogism Embedding, 539 Enonciation/enonce, 540 Episteme, 544 Essentialism, 544 Expressive devices, 545 Floating signifier, 546 Genotext/phenotext, 547 Grammatology, 548 Gynesis, 548 Hegemony, 549 Hermeneutic circle, 550 Heteroglossia, 551 Horizon of expectation, 552 Hypogram, 553 Icon/iconology, 555 Ideal reader, 556 Ideologeme, 556 Ideological horizon, 557 Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAS), 558 Ideology, 558 Imaginary/symbolic/real, 560 Implied reader, 562 Indeterminacy, 562 Index, 563

Intention/intentionality, 564 Interpellation, 566 Intersubjectivity, 568 Intertextuality, 568 Irony, 572 ISAS: see Ideological State Apparatuses Isotopy, 574 Jouissance: see Cixous, Helene; Irigaray, Luce; Feminist criticism, French; Pleasure/bliss Langue/parole, 575 Lebenswelt, 575 Leerstellen: see Ingarden, Roman; Iser, Wolfgang; Indeterminacy Liminality, 578 Literary institution, 580 Literature, 581 Logocentrism, 583 Margin, 585 Metalanguage, 587 Metaphysics of presence, 589 Metonymy/metaphor, 589 Mimesis, 591 Mirror stage, 593 Misprision, 595 Monologism, 596 Myth, 596 Name-of-the-Father, 597 Narratee, 598 Narrative code, 599 Narrator, 600 Overdetermination, 602 Paradox, 602 Parody, 603 Patriarchy, 605 655

List of entries Phallocentrism, 606 Phonocentrism: see Logocentrism Pleasure/bliss, 607 Plot: see Story Pluralism, 608 Polyphonic novel, 609 Polyphony/dialogism, 610 Postmodernism, 612 Power, 613 Praxis, 614 Presence: see Metaphysics of presence Problematic, 615 Readerly/writerly text, 616

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Recuperation, 617 Reference/referent, 618 Reification, 619 Self/other, 620 Seme, 621 Semiosis, 622 Sign, 623 Signified/signifier/ signification, 627 Signifying practice, 628 Social formation, 628 Spatial form, 629 Story/plot, 631 Structural causality, 632

Subject/object, 633 Subversion, 636 Supplementarity, 637 Symptomatic reading, 638 Synecdoche, 638 Text, 639 Textuality, 641 Theme, 642 Totalization, 646 Trace, 646 Trope, 647 Universal, 649 Variation, 651 White mythology, 652