From Text to Literature: New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches

From Text to Literature New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches

Edited by

Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson

From Text to Literature

Also by Stein Haugom Olsen THE STRUCTURE OF LITERARY UNDERSTANDING THE END OF LITERARY THEORY TRUTH, FICTION, AND LITERATURE: A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE (with Peter Lamarque) AESTHETICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART: THE ANALYTIC TRADITION (co-editor with Peter Lamarque) SELF-FASHIONING AND METAMORPHOSIS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE (co-editor with Olav Lausund )

Also by Anders Pettersson REALISM SOM TERMINOLOGISKT PROBLEM. NÅGRA DEFINITIONER I MODERN LITTERATURVETENSKAP OCH DERAS GILTIGHET VERKBEGREPPET. EN LITTERATURTEORETISK UNDERSÖKNING A THEORY OF LITERARY DISCOURSE VERBAL ART. A PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE AND LITERARY EXPERIENCE LITTERATUR OCH VERKLIGHETSFÖRSTÅELSE. IDÉMÄSSIGA ASPEKTER AV 1900-TALETS LITTERATUR (co-editor with Torsten Pettersson and Anders Tyrberg) TYPES OF INTERPRETATION IN THE AESTHETIC DISCIPLINES (co-editor with Staffan Carlshamre)

From Text to Literature New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches Edited by

Stein Haugom Olsen and

Anders Pettersson

Editorial matter, selection, Introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 © Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson 2005 All remaining chapters © Palgrave Macmillan 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9332–8 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–9332–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Text and experience : new analytic and pragmatic approaches to the study of literature / edited by Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9332–7 (hard.) 1. Literature – Philosophy. I. Olsen, Stein Haugom, 1946– II. Pettersson, Anders, 1946– PN49.T4435 2005 801 – dc22 2005042909 10 9 8 7 14 13 12 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Notes on the Contributors

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson

1

1 The Concept of Literature: an Institutional Account Stein Haugom Olsen I. Literature as a social institution: the sociological perspective II. The institution theory of art III. An institutional account of literature IV. Objections to the institutional account of literature V. The theory of multiple interpretative communities VI. Conclusion 2 Aesthetic Experience and a Belletristic Definition of Literature Paisley Livingston I. Introduction II. Conceptual priorities: art and the aesthetic III. Concepts aesthetic IV. Aesthetic value and the definition of literature 3 Art, Literature and Value Lars-Olof Åhlberg I. Introduction II. The concept of art III. The concept of literature

11

11 14 19 21 27 31

36 36 36 37 45 52 52 53 62

4 Components of Literariness: Readings of Capote’s In Cold Blood Torsten Pettersson I. Introduction II. Literariness and fictionality III. Truman Capote’s account of a multiple murder IV. Components of literariness 1: expressiveness v

82 82 84 88 90

vi

Contents

V. VI. VII. VIII.

Components of literariness 2: representativity Components of literariness 3: form The role of fictionality Towards a more comprehensive understanding

5 The Concept of Literature: a Description and an Evaluation Anders Pettersson I. Introduction II. The everyday concept of literature III. Specialized concepts of literature IV. Attempts at defining ‘literature’ V. The concept’s critics VI. An evaluation of the concept of literature

92 96 98 100 106 106 108 110 113 118 121

6 Literature as a Textualist Notion Bo Pettersson I. Some terminological considerations II. From oral to digital texts: on textualization and textual scholarship III. The rise and fall of textualism in the humanities, especially literary studies IV. The textual aspect of literary studies today

128

7 The Literary Work as Pragmatist Experience Erik Bjerck Hagen I. Introduction II. Experience in Dewey and James III. The structure of a literary experience IV. Experiencing The Portrait of a Lady

146

8 The Poem as Perfect Sensate Discourse: Literature and Cognition According to Baumgarten Søren Kjørup I. Introduction II. Poetry, truth – and a little bit more III. The enlightenment of concepts IV. The aesthetic paradox and the concept of taste V. Geometric poetics VI. Sensate cognition VII. The rules for attaining perfect sensate discourse VIII. Aesthetics as epistemology

128 129 133 140

146 147 153 154 165 165 167 168 170 171 173 174 176

Contents vii

IX. Sensuousness, aesthetic analysis, and things in themselves X. Kant and Baumgarten XI. Emotive and cognitive language XII. A belletristic concept of literature

178 179 180 182

Bibliography

187

Index

203

Notes on the Contributors Lars-Olof Åhlberg is Professor of Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, and editor of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. He is currently Researcher in Comparative Aesthetics with the Swedish Research Council. His publications include articles in philosophical aesthetics, the aesthetics of music, cultural theory and analysis, in particular on postmodernism in philosophy and aesthetics, as well as contributions to the philosophy of the humanities. His work has been published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. Erik Bjerck Hagen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. His books include Allegories of Action: Truth and Ethics in Melville, Dickens, Henry James and Paul de Man (1997), as well as several books in Norwegian about literary theory, literary interpretation, and literary evaluation. Søren Kjørup is Professor of Theory and History of the Humanities at Roskilde University, Denmark. Most of Professor Kjørup’s scholarly production is in Danish, and he has published articles on aesthetics, pictorial speech acts, and semiotics of the cinema in English. His book on the nature of the humanities has been published in German: Humanities, Geisteswissenschaften, Sciences humaines (2001). Paisley Livingston is Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (1982), Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (1988), Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis (1992), Literature and Rationality (1991), and Art and Intention: a Philosophical Study (2005). With Berys Gaut he has edited The Creation of Art (2003). He has published papers on a range of topics in philosophy and literature, aesthetics, and cinema studies. Stein Haugom Olsen is Chair Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include The Structure of Literary Understanding (1978), The End of Literary viii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Theory (1987), and (with Peter Lamarque) Truth, Fiction, and Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (1994). He has edited, with Olav Lausund, SelfFashioning and Metamorphosis in English Renaissance Literature (2003), and, with Peter Lamarque, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: the Analytic Tradition: an Anthology (2004). He has published papers on a range of topics in aesthetics, philosophy of literature, and literary criticism. He is an elected fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Anders Pettersson is Professor of Swedish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Comparative Literature, Umeå University, Sweden, and a member of the executive board of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM). His most recent book is Verbal Art: a Philosophy of Literature and Literary Experience (2000). With Staffan Carlshamre he has edited Types of Interpretation in the Aesthetic Disciplines (2003). Bo Pettersson is Professor of the Literature of the United States at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Director of the Finnish Graduate School of Literary Studies. His publications are mostly on literary interpretation and aesthetics, including The World According to Kurt Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form (1994) and the co-edited volume Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice (in press). Torsten Pettersson is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published books on Joseph Conrad (1982) and Eyvind Johnson (1986); Literary Interpretation: Current Models and a New Departure (1988); Gåtans namn (The Name of the Enigma, 2001), a study of the oeuvres of nine pioneers of Scandinavian literary modernism; and Dolda principer (Hidden Principles, 2002), a collection of studies in cultural and literary theory. For his work in literary history, he was awarded the Schück Prize for the year 2000 by the Swedish Academy. He has also published a collection of short stories and seven collections of poetry.

Acknowledgements Assistance from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Nordic Cultural Fund, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters made it possible for the contributors to this volume to meet twice, in Uppsala and in Oslo, during the process of preparing their contributions. The Swedish Research Council, the Nordic Cultural Fund and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation also supported the publication of this collection with a grant. The editors and contributors gratefully acknowledge this support.

x

Introduction Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson

In the course of the nineteenth century the study of literature was professionalized. There was a concerted attempt to make the study of literature an academic pursuit, ‘a particular branch of learning or science’, to turn it into ‘literary studies’ or, as it was called in German, Literaturwissenschaft.1 This attempt was ultimately successful in the sense that literary studies became a recognized and established discipline within the new Humboldtian kind of university. However, this success brought troubles of its own. Among other things, the arrival of the academic discipline of literary studies not only required a method of study but also a determinate field of study. In order to delimit such a field, a clear and well-defined concept of literature was needed. This meant that academic literary studies would have to transform, for its own specific purposes, such concepts as ‘literary work’ and ‘literary text’ as well as the concept of ‘literature’, from broad, vague, non-theoretical, everyday notions into something like well-designed theoretical tools. Though it has not always been recognized, this transformation has presented a major theoretical problem for literary studies, and it is arguable that to this day no satisfactory solution has been found. A number of different concepts of literature – well described in modern literary and aesthetic encyclopaedias2 – emerged in literary studies in the course of the twentieth century. Very roughly one can identify six different types of concepts that exist, uneasily, side by side. There is, first, the concept of literature founded on the notion of ‘foregrounding’ – as discourse drawing attention to its own markedly unusual phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures – launched by the Russian Formalists back in the 1910s and culminating in Roman Jakobson’s famous essay of 1960.3 A second notion, gaining wide acceptance from the 1940s onwards, makes fictionality a central element in 1

2

From Text to Literature

the concept of literature.4 The third major group of positive analyses of the phenomenon of literature is focused in the concept of ‘practice’: literature has no definite formal characteristics but is language employed in a certain determinable fashion (the characterization of which varies a good deal between different theorists).5 Two other, related, concepts of literature also gained prominence in the 1970s. For different reasons post-structuralism, deconstruction, the New Historicism, and the empirical sociology of literature made the notion of text logically prior to the concept of literature and consequently removed any principled distinction between literary works and other genres of texts. In essence the notion of ‘literary text’ replaced the notion of ‘literary work’.6 On this conception literary texts were regarded as ‘just texts’ without any inherent artistic or aesthetic value that gave them a special status as ‘works of art’. A different version of this conception arose out of a combination of post-structuralist and deconstructionist theory with certain versions of Marxism and feminism, both of which saw the concept of ‘literature’ as an ideological tool for imposing certain political and social values on a reading public. However, so the argument went, the concept of literature had only a political function and no real substance, and, consequently it could and, indeed, should be abandoned.7 A sixth conception of literature can be found among those who were impressed by the post-structuralist and Marxist/feminist ‘critique’ of the concept of literature but nevertheless wanted to find a minimally binding reference for the concepts of ‘literary work’, ‘literary text’, and ‘literature’. This line of reasoning manifests itself in the attempt to make the notion adjectival rather than substantival – not the denotation of a genre or a type of discourse, but rather of a mood, ‘the literary’, a spirit that may hover more or less perceptibly over a text.8 It is not the aim of the present collection to present new conclusions or views about the art of literature or new interpretative approaches. The purpose is rather to focus attention on the concept of literature, on the relationship between this concept and the concepts of a literary work and a literary text, and on the usefulness/fruitfulness of these concepts as theoretical instruments for the discipline of literary studies. The articles appearing here fall into three main groups. Five of the contributions are mainly concerned with the concept of literature, two with the concept of text, and one with an eighteenth-century thinker about literature and the arts: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. The last topic may seem surprising. However, both ‘literature’ and ‘text’ are specifically western notions, and notions with a complex history. They should

Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson 3

not be taken as representing the only way in which the corresponding realities could be conceptualized. We did not find it feasible to go deeply into the cultural and historical variability of the concepts in this collection of essays, though the issue is broached in some of them. The Baumgarten article, besides its other merits, serves as our most concrete illustration of the existence of historically and culturally different perspectives on literary discourse.9

To a certain extent all the contributors share a pragmatic or practiceoriented perspective. This partly accounts for the word ‘pragmatic’ in the subtitle – as will become clear, some participants also embrace varieties of pragmatism. At the same time, most of the essays are characterized by a strong preoccupation with the aesthetic substance of literature. Both features are prominent in Stein Haugom Olsen’s contribution, ‘The Concept of Literature: an Institutional Account’. Olsen has long been one of the main proponents of viewing literature as a practice or, with the term which he uses here, as an institution. In this essay, he develops his view and its implications while at the same time commenting on a number of alternative approaches within literary theory and aesthetics. At the heart of Olsen’s account lies the idea that the writing and reading of literature rest on a system of roles and expectations to which empirical authors and readers are supposed to conform. To understand the institution of literature is thus to master ‘the rules and concepts that create the possibility of and regulate the expectations to and performances of the artist and audience roles’. When attempting to specify these rules and concepts we are dealing not with matters extrinsic to literature, but with such key factors in literary transactions as ‘the experience of the literary work’ and ‘the particular value of a work for a reader’. Olsen contrasts this ‘analytic’ conception of literature as an institution with what he calls ‘sociological’ conceptions, like those of Roland Barthes or Tony Bennett, and with such notions as Arthur Danto’s notion of ‘the artworld’ and the notion developed by George Dickie in his institutional theory of art. While sociological conceptions of literature can be justified on their own terms, Olsen argues that they do not capture the point of the literary activity. They tend to focus, instead, on the role of the literary institution in social power-relations. Olsen also defends his views against the sceptical objections that he is

4

From Text to Literature

overextending the concept of an institution and that no unified practice or institution of literature can be said to exist. The aesthetic substance of literature, ‘the aesthetic nature of literary works’, is repeatedly invoked by Olsen. In fact, his analysis comes close to being an ‘aesthetic’ definition of literature, a definition according to which literature is a type of linguistic utterance created for artistic contemplation. Such a definition of the concept is unequivocally advocated in Paisley Livingston’s ‘Aesthetic Experience and a Belletristic Definition of Literature’. By a ‘belletristic’ definition of literature Livingston means ‘one in which literature is defined in terms of some notion of fine art’, and he offers a straightforward definition of ‘literature’ in that vein. Taking as his basic premise that ‘all literary works must be utterances in a verbal medium’, he specifies the characteristics of literature in the following way: ‘The literary utterances are those intended primarily by their authors to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character.’ Aesthetic definitions of ‘art’ and ‘literature’ are nothing new, and the definition just quoted is, on the surface, simply a standard example of the kind. However, the demanding tasks in connection with an aesthetic definition of ‘literature’ are to provide the necessary demarcation of the aesthetic and to demonstrate that the definition does sufficient justice to elements that are widely considered central to the concept of literature. Livingston produces an original and provocative analysis of the aesthetic, defining ‘aesthetic response’ as ‘a direct, active contemplative attention to the qualities of some item issuing in an intrinsically valued experience’. The definition is given precision by his distinctions between aesthetic response and aesthetic attitude, and between inherent and intrinsic value. Livingston admits that the definition is stipulative – ‘it cannot simply mirror a unique, pre-established ordinary or technical usage’ – but argues that his distinctions trace philosophically important dividing-lines and are ‘distinctions worth drawing’. In ‘Art, Literature and Value’ Lars-Olof Åhlberg gives a survey of central modern definitions and analyses of both ‘art’ and ‘literature’ as they have been formulated in philosophical aesthetics and literary studies. Åhlberg gives congenial and extremely knowledgeable, but far from uncritical, reviews of some of the best-known positions, giving special attention to Morris Weitz’s analysis of ‘art’ as an open concept, George Dickie’s views of art as an institution, and Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s account of ‘literature’ as an institutional concept. He also discusses the history of the term and the concept of literature

Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson 5

and the relevance of such historical information for our present understanding of the notion. Unlike Livingston, Åhlberg refrains from putting forward a strong general thesis of his own about how the concept of literature should be defined or perceived. He argues, however, that the concept of literature does have a definitive, though limited, core content, which any theory about the notion and the texts which fall under it must take as its point of departure, and that this ‘minimal concept of literature’ is ‘the concept provided by the literary tradition and its institutions’. As the reference to institutions suggests, his main sympathies, where the understanding of ‘literature’ is concerned, are with an institutional definition like that of Lamarque and Olsen, which is centred on aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic value. Åhlberg also explicitly defends the idea that the concept of literature is essentially associated with considerations of value, intensely critical, on this point, of the ‘deep-seated mistrust of values and value-judgments’ within post-structuralist literary theory. Torsten Pettersson, in his ‘Components of Literariness: Readings of Capote’s In Cold Blood’, criticizes most definitions of ‘literature’ – aesthetic definitions included – for being too simplistic, and he advocates the view that ‘literature’ cannot be defined in terms of any single property. When we identify a text as being literary, we base this judgement, he argues, on a complex interplay between several perceived qualities. Without attempting to construct an all-embracing analysis of literariness, Torsten Pettersson explains and substantiates his view by describing three such components and aspects of their interrelatedness. One is the literary work’s expressiveness, which he regards as the reflection of a literary persona created by the author. Another is representativity, that is, the wider significance acquired by a work through the relationships, partly produced by the reader, between its characters and events and real people and phenomena. The last component is form, the pleasing structures and patterns exhibited by the work. Torsten Pettersson contends that expressiveness, representativity, and form are pivotal in literary experience. Although they do not together define literariness, they are values which readers of literature are trained to look for and which authors of literary works seek to afford. He illustrates this with a careful discussion of concrete critical statements, all drawn from the critical reception of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). According to Torsten Pettersson, fictionality, which critics have often taken to be central to the concept of ‘literature’, is intrinsically related to the three qualities he discusses: fictionality opens the way for the

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From Text to Literature

author to make a text fully expressive, representative, and pleasantly formed. The example of In Cold Blood, a work apparently intended to give an account of real events, highlights how deeply embedded the notion of fictionality is in the concept of literature. Critics taking seriously the claim that In Cold Blood is a novel tend to ignore the claim that it is an accurate account of real events, while critics who take seriously the claim that this is an account of real events, tend to see its ‘truth to facts’ as at best interfering with and at worst destroying its literary qualities of expressiveness, representativity, and form. Livingston, Åhlberg, Olsen, and Torsten Pettersson all envisage the possibility of a closely connected, non-disjunctive analysis of the concept of literature, though Åhlberg’s and Torsten Pettersson’s discussions do not, like those of Livingston and Olsen, put forward a definition of the concept. Anders Pettersson’s contribution, ‘The Concept of Literature: a Description and an Evaluation’, adopts a very different perspective. Anders Pettersson contends that ‘literature’ cannot be understood as a coherent notion. He regards ‘literature’ as an umbrella concept under which we find several notions that are not even of the same logical type. There is, on the one hand, the ordinary concept of literature, the one described in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. This is, according to Anders Pettersson, a useful but vague everyday notion which, like other such concepts, marks a rough but useful everyday distinction in the world of objects. The usefulness of this concept is due to its very vagueness and there is no need to make it precise. On the other hand, there are several specialized uses of the term ‘literature’, each associated with one or several more specialized concepts of literature, and these concepts demand clarity and precision. Unlike the everyday concept, they are intellectual tools with a more or less specific purpose, with reference to which proposals for their detailed design can be motivated. By way of examples, Anders Pettersson points to a variety of different concepts of literature used in library classification, in connection with the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in literary studies. He also discusses several well-known analyses or definitions of ‘literature’ (by Wellek, Lamarque and Olsen, Eagleton, and Widdowson) in order to demonstrate that they all, in their various ways, exemplify what he calls ‘the unified-concept mistake’: the idea that there is a concept of literature that is at once shared by all (like the everyday concept of literature) and in need of deeper theoretical clarification (like many specialized concepts of literature). If one does not presuppose the existence of such a unified concept, one will recognize that productive concepts

Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson 7

of literature can certainly be created, though no single concept and no single analysis can adequately cover the ground. Bo Pettersson’s ‘Literature as a Textualist Notion’, is first and foremost a discussion of the concept of ‘literary text’ and a critical account of what he calls ‘textualism’ – the view that largely disregards the roles of authors, readers, and other components of the social and historical context of a literary text. Bo Pettersson ties the notion of a text to the idea of written/printed/digital usage, concisely reviewing main standpoints in contemporary textual scholarship in order to bring home the fact that it is far from obvious exactly how an individual text should be circumscribed and specified. He also briefly discusses the history of the term ‘text’ from its first occurrence with reference to written usage in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and up to the twentieth century. His main concern, however, is to give an account of the concept of a text, and to trace the reasons and causes why it assumed such an important role in literary studies in the course of the twentieth century, a development which culminated in the full-blown textualism exemplified by many structuralists and post-structuralists. Bo Pettersson does not argue extensively against this textualism, which he tends to see as a historically more or less inevitable episode. His position is that the need to take authors and readers into account, and thus the fundamental inadequacy of the textualist perspective on literary writing, should be all too obvious today. Ultimately, he urges us to move forward towards a more inclusive and interdisciplinary perspective. Research within the humanities needs to be situated within a ‘considerably broader and more empirical view of man and his surroundings’. That would also open new and better possibilities for the understanding of texts and of literary communication, since ‘literary studies must include an awareness of so much more than before – of, at the very least, historical, cognitive and cultural aspects – in order to reach a deeper understanding of literary texts, their creation, mediation and interpretation’. In ‘The Literary Work as Pragmatist Experience’, Erik Bjerck Hagen’s theoretical starting-point is classic American pragmatism. He conceives of the literary work as an ‘experience’, taking his cue from John Dewey’s Art as Experience but drawing mainly on William James for the idea of what constitutes an experience. Hagen regards James’s analysis of pure experience, experience neither subjective nor objective, as being especially fruitful when one tries to reach an adequate understanding of the status of the literary work of art. He presents ‘the immediate experience as the most objective part of our commerce with the text’, while

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From Text to Literature

interpretation, creating rather than registering the facts of which it is speaking, ‘may take us as far into the idiosyncratic as our sense of truth, propriety, and originality will allow’. According to Hagen, when the work/experience emerges for a reader it will do so within a wider field of perceived realities to which it is related in certain complex ways. Hagen emphasizes in particular five kinds of such relational ties – five kinds of ‘intention’ in the phenomenological sense of the word, that is, five kinds of aboutness. Thus he distinguishes between the relation to the readers (pragmatic intention), to the author (authorial intention), to historical events (historical intention), to other works (intertextual intention) and to the literary work itself (coherence intention). The intentions form a web, as it were, and readers may differ in the way in which they allocate their attention within this complex field. Hagen makes his understanding of the literary work concrete in an extensive discussion of the opening of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In ‘The Poem as Perfect Sensate Discourse: Literature and Cognition According to Baumgarten’, Søren Kjørup takes us back in time to the German eighteenth-century philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62), who invented the word ‘aesthetics’ and introduced it into philosophical discourse. Kjørup focuses on the young Baumgarten’s Latin dissertation from 1735 on the nature of a poem, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, known in English as Reflections on Poetry. Kjørup lets us follow the path from Descartes’ distinction between clear and distinct ideas via Leibniz’ additions to the scheme to Baumgarten’s introduction, in his dissertation, of the idea of two different kinds of cognition: intellectual and sensate cognition. Baumgarten associates poetry with sensate cognition, and he defines a poem as a perfect sensate discourse, a view the implications of which Kjørup develops. Kjørup points out that Baumgarten anticipates the modern idea of the specificity of literary discourse while upholding the idea of the cognitive basis of poetry. There are thus clear similarities as well as differences between Baumgarten’s views and the well-known twentieth-century view that poetry makes use of emotive rather than cognitive language. ‘What I find so brilliant in Baumgarten’, says Kjørup, ‘is that he on the one hand recognizes that sensate cognition and intellectual cognition each has its own kind of value, yet that he maintains that they are connected through a common basis; they are not opposed to one another, they do not belong to different realms.’

Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson 9

We earlier referred to Kjørup’s contribution as illustrating the existence of other perspectives on literary discourse than the present ones. Yet in its foregrounding of aesthetic experience, Kjørup’s paper also has a clear connection with the opening articles in the anthology and with Bjerck Hagen’s contribution.

We emphasized above that the purpose of the present collection is to focus attention on the concept of literature, on the relationship between this concept and the concepts of a literary work and a literary text, and on the usefulness/fruitfulness of these concepts as theoretical instruments for the discipline of literary studies. The eight authors contribute to this goal in different ways. Olsen, Livingston, Torsten Pettersson, and Hagen make positive proposals for how a fruitful concept of literature should be designed. Åhlberg, Bo Pettersson, and Kjørup present and discuss critically various concepts of literature from past and recent theory, and Anders Pettersson focuses on the logic of the concept of literature as it is actually employed in a number of different contexts. This collection of articles does not presume to provide any final clarification of the concepts of ‘literature’, ‘literary work’, and ‘literary text’. Yet, going against the fashionable prejudice in literary theory against analytic analysis as a method of providing clarification of important critical questions, it contains a series of serious attempts to reach a theoretical understanding of these key concepts while relating them to their history, their usage, and their functions within literary studies.

Notes 1. The development took place earlier on the Continent than in the Englishspeaking world. In Britain, the pressure for making the study of literature into ‘literary studies’, a ‘particular branch of learning or science’, did not gain momentum until the 1880s. 2. See e.g. Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 Vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Karlheinz Barck and Martin Fontius et al., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, 7 Vols (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000–05); Harald Fricke et al. (eds), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 3 Vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000); Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London: Routledge,

10 From Text to Literature

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

2001); Jerrold Levinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350–77. See, e.g., René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd revised edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 25. See, e.g., Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 10. Roland Barthes’s ‘De l’oeuvre au texte’, Revue d’esthétique, 24 (1971), was a key contribution to this view. This, e.g., is essentially Terry Eagleton’s position in the first chapter of his Literary Theory: an Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). See Peter Widdowson, Literature (London: Routledge, 1999), esp. ch. 4. An attempt to integrate the broader historical and cultural context is made in SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft, Vol. 11 (1992), fasc. 2. This special issue on the theme ‘But What Is Literature? Literary Studies and the Question of Definition’ was edited by Willie van Peer. Anders Pettersson is currently preparing a collection of specialist essays, Notions of Literature across Times and Cultures, dealing with the notion of literature and its cognates in a wide range of cultures. The collection is to be published as one of four volumes in the series Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, produced within the framework of the Swedish project ‘Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts’.

1 The Concept of Literature: an Institutional Account Stein Haugom Olsen

I. Literature as a social institution: the sociological perspective ‘Literature presents itself to us’, says Roland Barthes, as an institution and as a work. As an institution, it collects all usages and all practices which govern the circuit of the thing written in a given society, the writer’s social status and ideology, modes of circulation, conditions of consumption, sanctions of criticism. As a work, it is essentially constituted by a verbal, written message of a certain type. It is the work-as-object that I wish to deal with, suggesting that we concern ourselves with a still little-explored field (though the word is very old), that of rhetoric.1 Barthes here employs what one may call a sociological concept of ‘institution’. He distinguishes sharply between the study of the ‘workas-object’, which is the province of rhetoric, and the study of the institution of literature which is the province of literary sociology. For literary history ‘is possible only if it becomes sociological, if it is concerned with activities and institutions, not with individuals’.2 Literature displays a number of features that makes it natural to see it as an institution in this sociological sense. It involves a number of people in a series of co-operative practices such as writing and publishing books, both literary works and critical works; editing and publishing journals of criticism; establishing and filling certain sections of newspapers with comments on, and presentations and criticism of, literature; teaching literature as a subject in institutions of secondary and tertiary education; judging and selecting works of literature for literary prizes, etc. 11

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A narrower and more technical concept of institution is applied by literary and intellectual historians to the academic discipline of literary studies that developed at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century and found a home with other new academic disciplines in the university. Thus, in the following passage Stefan Collini distinguishes explicitly between ‘literary culture’ and the ‘institutionalization of “English Literature” ’ even though he insists on the connection between the two: The institutionalization of ‘English Literature’ exhibited special peculiarities of its own, not least in the resulting discipline’s continued engagement in, and overlap with, lay literary culture.3 And it is this notion of institution that Chris Baldick uses in his Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present when he says that: This preliminary survey of the salient features [of criticism] can be arranged under three heads: the dominant ideas in this century of critical discussion; the fundamental shift in criticism’s institutional location and centre of gravity; and the question of criticism’s social and cultural functions.4 The institutional context and bias of literary criticism and theory in the period after 1890 is characterized above all by the spectacular development of professional academic criticism.5 Institutionalized literature in this sense exists within a formal administrative framework of professional roles, syllabi that specifies what to teach, a system of authorization in the form of a degree structure with rules for examination and graduation, venues of publication for research, a protocol for what is research and what is good research, etc. Because of their sociological orientation both the broader, more nebulous and the narrower and precise concept of the ‘institution’ of literature impose certain constraints on the ways in which literature can be described. Employing this kind of concept involves adopting a position outside literature. It does not require or even open up for an analysis or discussion of the concept of literature itself, nor can a description of the institution of literature in the sociological sense say anything about the experience of the literary work, nor about the value that the work has in virtue of the fact that it is a literary work. In this perspective the concept of literature is dissolved and, in Tony Bennett’s words,

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Its place is occupied by a series of dispersed and historically variable functions which exceed the compass of any and all conceptions of literature as an eternity imbued with an unchanging being of its own. From the point of view of these concerns, the study of literature becomes ‘the study of techniques, rules, rites and collective mentalities’.6 To adopt such an external view of literature is neither objectionable nor particularly problematic, but it may permit a far more limited study of the external relations of literature than Barthes seems to assume to be possible. It is of course possible to study the social position of authors, the reading habits in various groups at various times, the techniques of book-production, the structure of publishing and marketing, etc. without making reference to the nature of literary works. However, it is more problematic how one can study ‘techniques, rules, rites and collective mentalities’ without making assumptions about what a literary work is. It seems that one must then make assumptions about how the literary work is constituted through techniques and rules and how it in turn constitutes ‘collective mentalities’. And such assumptions cannot be grounded within the sociological perspective but must be defended in other terms. It is also a feature of these sociological concepts of the ‘institution’ of literature that they facilitate certain inferences about literary tradition and about the nature of the discipline of literary studies. The sociological concept of institution opens up for and even invites the assumption that it is a function of the institution of literature to define power-relations and make possible and effective the exercise of authority. If one adds in these assumptions, an institution may, though it need not, be seen as a means of conserving the power of certain groups over others. Literature thus comes to be seen a means for perpetuating the values of the ‘hegemonic’ class, and the works that constitute the tradition, that is, the works that are identified within the institution of literature as valuable and therefore as worth continued attention, are chosen as the tradition for that reason. This is the implication carried by the concept of institution when Frank Kermode poses the following question in a call for papers to the journal Common Knowledge: In the teeth of the objection that value is attributed to certain works (painting and music as well as books) only by institutional (and oppressive) fiat, are there ways of acceptably restating the value and importance of such works of art?7

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Like the broader concept, the narrower one is also frequently used as a stepping-stone for an ideological ‘critique’ of literature as defining power-relations and making possible and effective the exercise of ‘hegemonic’ authority: The ‘institution’ of literature, according to most predominantly synchronic accounts, gradually evolved into a recognizably hegemonic phenomenon that by the end of the nineteenth century combined, in its capacity as a cultural and political determining force, not only the controlling ideologies but also, as Louis Althusser suggests, the formal state apparatuses which made possible the transmission through time of those ideologies.8 Though this ideological critique is not built into the sociological concept of an institution of literature, adopting such a concept is in some analyses a preliminary rhetorical move the purpose of which is to set up literature as an object of attack on the grounds that it serves an objectionable political function. It would seem to follow from these observations that the analytical value of the concept of ‘institution’ in its application to literature is limited to an external (sociological) perspective that fails to give us insight into the nature of literature. At the same time the application of this concept in descriptions and analyses of literature invites users to make certain unargued assumptions about the literary tradition and about the discipline of literary studies that one would do well to avoid without providing further argument.

II. The institution theory of art However, the concept of institution in its application to literature does introduce an important theoretical perspective. It brings into focus the fact that literature exists in a network of relations that is ‘thicker’ than that assumed by traditional and current theories of literature. ‘Traditional theories of art’, says George Dickie in the most recent exposition of his institutional theory of art, place works of art within simple and narrowly focused networks of relations. The imitation theory, for example, suspends the work of art in a three-place network between artist and subject matter, and the expression theory places the work of art in a two-place network

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of artist and work. Both versions of the institutional theory attempt to place the work of art within a multi-placed network of greater complexity than anything envisaged by the various traditional theories. The networks or contexts of the traditional theories are too ‘thin’ to be sufficient. Both versions of the institutional theory attempt to provide a context that is ‘thick’ enough to do the job.9 Dickie argues that at the very minimum an adequate theory of art has to add in another element, that of a public: Whenever an artist creates art, it is always created for a public. Consequently, the framework must include a role for a public to whom art is presented. . . . The artist and public roles are the minimum requirement for the creation of art, and the two roles in relation may be called ‘the presentation group’.10 This is an important point but there are two problems with the way in which Dickie presents it. The problem with traditional and current theories of literature and art is not that they lack reference to an audience. Such theories are replete with references to readers or spectators. The problem lies in the way in which the audience is conceived. And Dickie’s introduction of the notion of a public adds nothing new to the conception of an audience employed by traditional theories. However, one can change the emphasis in the passage from Dickie quoted above. Dickie emphasizes the notion of a public. What needs to be emphasized, however, is the notion of an artist and an audience role. Traditional and current theories of literature are atomistic in their approach to the relationship between author, work, and reader. Their descriptions of this relationship have always been in terms of the single author, the single reader, and the single work. This framework is enriched not by the introduction of the notion of a public, but by changing the focus of the description through the introduction of the concept of roles. In order to give an account of the roles of artist, audience, and work a notion of institution is needed that is different from the sociological one. What is needed is not an account of actual author behaviour, reader-behaviour, and the ‘nature’ of literary works, but an account of the rules and concepts that create the possibility of and regulate the expectations to and performances of the artist and audience roles. Such an account requires what one may call an analytic notion of institution.

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Proponents of the institution theory of art tend to equivocate in their use of the notion of ‘institution’. Ever since Arthur Danto introduced into currency that unfortunate term the ‘artworld’,11 proponents of the institution theory have been unable to decide whether the artworld should be characterized in terms of social organization or in terms of principles and conventions. Thus Danto himself in the article entitled ‘The Artworld’ says that ‘To see something as art requires something the art cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.’12 This sounds as if an individual becomes a member of the artworld by mastering ‘artistic theory’ and acquiring knowledge of art history.13 If this is the case, it opens up for a characterization of the artworld in what one might call analytic terms. At other times, however, Danto writes as if the artworld is to be characterized in terms of social positions: ‘Fashions, as it happens, favors certain rows of the style matrix: museums, connoisseurs, and others are makeweights in the Artworld.’14 In the same way, George Dickie, when he tries to describe the institution of art, sometimes talks about social organization and sometimes about a framework of knowledge about art, the conventions of art, and the history of art: In almost every actual society that has an institution of art-making, in addition to the roles of artist and public, there will be a number of supplementary artworld roles such as those of critic, art teacher, director, curator, conductor, and many more.15 Earlier in this chapter in opposing the notion of a Romantic artist, I made a suggestion about the framework within which art is created. I suggested that it is a framework which is typically acquired by a person’s having previously experienced examples of art knowing that they are art, of having had training in artistic techniques, of having a background knowledge of art, or the like.16 However, neither in the writings of Dickie nor in those of Danto is there any further exploration of the principles governing this framework of knowledge of art that has to be in place for an artist to create a work of art. On the other hand, the social structures and social roles that constitute the ‘artworld’ or the institution of art are repeatedly invoked to explain how ‘something’ becomes a work of art. To illustrate what is at stake in choosing between a sociological and an analytic concept of institution, a brief example is useful. If one chooses to describe the role of the judge in a modern legal system in

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sociological terms one would focus on how judges are recruited, which social class or classes they tend to come from, what contact they have with and what insight they have into the life of the class of people they most frequently sit in judgement on, how they are paid, how much they are paid, what their social status is, to what extent there is evidence that they can be influenced improperly, and so on. However, none of this tells us what a judge is, what his duties are, or who he is responsible to. To get at this information, we have to consult the statute book. This equivocation at the heart of the institution theory of art prevents it from exploring the constitutive logic of the institution of art and thus, apart from its initial idea of approaching art as an institution, it becomes uninformative and uninteresting. ‘It is assumed’, says Colin Lyas, that people who ask ‘Why is that in the gallery?’ are asking ‘Is it art?’ whereas they are asking ‘Why is it art?’ People don’t put things in galleries just so they can call them ‘art’, but because they see some point in doing so. To know the point is to know what value the object is thought to have. That is what the puzzled want to know about all art, and since the institution account is silent about that it tells us nothing about art.17 According to Dickie ‘the leanest possible description of the institution of art and thus the leanest possible account of the institutional theory of art’ is provided by the following five definitions: A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. This definition explicitly contains the terms ‘artworld’ and ‘public’ and it also involves the notions of artist and artworld system. I now define these four as follows: An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art. A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them. The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.18

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However, this description of the institution of art is too lean to provide the answer to the question posed by Lyas: why is something art? It is too lean because it does not provide for a way of describing the audience-role and the work-role in such a way as to distinguish the role of the work as a work of art and the role of the audience as an artconsuming audience from other roles the two may play. One possible avenue leading into an exploration of the conventions and concepts constituting the institutional practice of literature, would be a discussion and clarification of the concept of artistic appreciation. Dickie does introduce the concept of appreciation into his explanatory framework, but it is a ‘thin’ concept of appreciation: A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of aspects of which has had conferred on it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or person acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).19 The concept of appreciation employed by Dickie in this definition does not involve reference to a distinctive set of aesthetic qualities or aspects of art-works, which defines them as art-works. Though it is possible to identify such aesthetic qualities in a work of art (the example used by Dickie and his critics being the much overworked Fountain), they are not what make it a work of art: In Art and the Aesthetic I defined ‘appreciation’ as follows: ‘All that is meant by “appreciation” . . . is . . . in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable’. Defining ‘appreciation’ with reference to qualities caused me to respond to Cohen by saying that Fountain has qualities which one can appreciate (shiny surface and the like), virtually ignoring its gesture significance. I should have defined ‘appreciation’ as meaning ‘in experiencing a characteristic or the characteristics of a thing one finds it or them worthy or valuable’. This definition, which does not limit features one can appreciate to qualities, allows the protest characteristic of Fountain to be appreciated.20 Neither Dickie’s early concept of appreciation (as defined in Art and the Aesthetic) nor his later one (as defined in the passage quoted above) make any reference to artistic or aesthetic features. And for good reason: the theoretical framework developed by Dickie is simply too lean to provide an account of aesthetic or artistic appreciation.

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III. An institutional account of literature The analytic concept of an institution is not defined through the specification of a set of independently identifiable social roles and functions, but through a formulation of the conventions and concepts that govern the institutional practice.21 That is, it is the concept of a practice which is not only a habit, a way of doing things, but a practice defined through and governed by certain concepts and conventions which those who participate in that institutional practice can be seen as following. These conventions and concepts create the possibility of taking up certain roles and they determine how these roles must be played. This notion of institution thus opens the way for an account of aesthetic appreciation and artistic value. It is a notion that permits an ‘internal’ perspective that takes us straight to the heart of the problems of poetics: how literature is apprehended and responded to in virtue of the fact that it is literature. A number of methodological consequences follow from adopting this notion of institution in the analysis of literature and the literary work. First, the practice has to be described from the ‘inside’, by someone who masters the concepts and conventions of the practice. Someone who looks at the practice from the outside has no way of interpreting or even identifying the acts and objects that make up the practice. Thus, by redirecting analytical attention to the rules and concepts governing a practice rather than to the objects entering into and the groups of people participating in this practice, the analysis of the concept of literature becomes a non-empirical inquiry. Second, the membership of the institution of literature, that is, the members of the group that participate in the practice, cannot be delimited or defined through a set of social criteria such as age, ethnic background, gender, class background, etc. The only criterion for identifying someone as a member of the institution is that he or she masters the concepts and conventions governing the practice. The participants in the practice that constitutes the institution of literature have belonged and belong to many different kinds of social groups and it is an empirical question if any one social group has been dominant among these. Third, the institutional approach to the concept of literature locates literary value within the practice of literature itself. Literary value is not social or political value. The institutional approach to literature can allow for the fact that a literary work can be put to social or political uses identified independently of the practice of literature, but it does not license a view of literary practice as inherently promoting any kind of social or political ideology or set of social and political values.

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In a discussion like this of the concept of literature, one point should be given special emphasis: the institutional concept of literature also makes it easy to distinguish the analysis of the concept of literature from the analysis of the uses of the term ‘literature’ and the term ‘literary work’. It is of course trivial in philosophical inquiry that conceptual content is not fixed by vocabulary. And this is so even when a concept is socially constructed. Yet there has been a tendency in the fields of study relating to literature, art, and culture to adopt the Foucauldian prejudice that a change in vocabulary necessarily reflects a conceptual change. In a recent introductory book with the title Literature Peter Widdowson has two chapters with the subtitle ‘A History of the Concept’ but offers only a history of the use of the term ‘literature’. Widdowson is not unaware of the problem ‘It is’, he says ‘of course, important to avoid a slippage between a merely lexical and a conceptual history.’22 However, in his argument he ignores this and simply asserts an identity between concept and word, labelling ‘Literature’ a ‘concept-word’.23 On the basis of how the word ‘literature’ was used from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards (and ignoring problems concerning how to interpret the sources from which his examples are taken) he maintains that a new, restricted concept of literature came into existence in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.24 However, to establish that a new, restricted concept of literature came into existence in the late eighteenth century would take much more than a brief look at the use of the word literature. At the very least one would need to study the discourse on literature from the time of Chaucer onwards which employs such words as ‘poesy’ and ‘poem’ as well as every form of critical statement about what we today recognize as literary works from all periods. What one would have to look for would be whether the kind of judgements through which the understanding and appreciation of literary works are constituted could be found also prior to the introduction of the term ‘literature’ to refer to a category of works of art. The institutional theory of literature also permits a nuanced and rich account of literary convention. It provides for a fundamental distinction (to use Searle’s well-known terminology) between the constitutive conventions of the practice, the norms that are necessary for the practice to exist, and its regulative conventions, the conventions that can be dispensed without dissolving the practice. Constitutive conventions define literature and the literary work. A change in constitutive conventions necessarily brings a change in the type of practice involved: the practice is then changed into another kind of practice. However, an institution like literature has an indefinite number of regulative con-

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ventions that change over time without their change affecting the nature of literature. The institutional theory of literature permits literary history to be written not merely as a record and summary of literary events but as a continuous change in the regulative conventions of literature. At the same time, it secures the identity over time of the phenomenon described in this history through the recognitions it affords and the description it makes possible of the constitutive conventions of the practice.25

IV. Objections to the institutional account of literature There are two main objections to construing the concepts of literature and a literary work as institutional concepts in the analytic sense. The first is that while there is no problem with seeing literature as an institution in a sociological sense, it is implausible to construe it as an institution in the analytic sense. The paradigmatic cases of institutions in the analytic sense, competitive games like chess, football, cricket, and baseball have rulebooks specifying the constitutive rules of the game and defining institutional concepts and consequently also institutional objects and roles. This paradigm can fairly easily be transferred to other social institutions like the legal system and the monetary system which also have written rules as well as clear definitions of institutional concepts creating institutional objects and roles sanctioned by specified authorities. However, in the case of literature there are no such written rules, nor is it clear what these rules should be, and it is certainly the case that sensitive, intelligent, and well-informed readers of literature cannot specify any such rules. Literature consequently appears much more like a set of practices, of ways of doing things that have their basis not in a framework of rules and concepts but originate in individual reader responses to the work of literature. Addressing the problem that many social institutions apparently do not have explicit rules and that what appears to be institutional behaviour cannot therefore be said to be rule-governed, Searle gives an account of the role of rules in social institutions in terms of the acquisition of a set of background habits, a set of dispositions that develop the way they do because they are structured by the rules of the institution.26 An individual is socialized into the institution by being tutored in how to behave correctly in a range of different situation, dealing with a range of different objects and roles. The notion of ‘correctness’ is central in the tutoring process: there is a correct way of acting and other ways of acting in the same or similar situations are incorrect. One may

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say, though this is not Searle’s term, that an individual is initiated into the institution. The individual is simply told or shown how to behave in certain types of situation by someone who already knows how to behave and who also introduces him to the concepts needed to deal with that situation. This individual then adopts this behaviour. The dispositions and background habits that he acquires are thus structured by the rules of the institution though he himself does not know the rules, does not internalize these rules, nor does he follow them unconsciously: Instead of saying, the person behaves the way he does because he is following the rules of the institution, we should just say, First (the causal level), the person behaves the way he does, because he has a structure that disposes him to behave that way; and second (the functional level), he has come to be disposed to behave that way, because that’s the way that conforms to the rules of the institution. In other words, he doesn’t need to know the rules of the institution and to follow them in order to conform to the rules; rather, he is just disposed to behave in a certain way, but he has acquired those unconscious dispositions and capacities in a way that is sensitive to the rule structure of the institution. To tie this down to a concrete case, we should not say that the experienced baseball player runs to first base because he wants to follow the rules of baseball, but we should say that because the rules require that he run to first base, he acquires a set of Background habits, skills, dispositions that are such that when he hits the ball, he runs to first base.27 If this description of the role of rules in social institutions is correct, then it becomes much more plausible to see literature as an institution in the analytic sense. Reading literature is not an innocent activity and learning to read literary works involves a process of initiation into what to expect and not to expect, what to look for and what to ignore, etc. and it is part of this process to provide the innocent reader with a set of concepts that will shape his perceptions and help him to formulate expectations. This process is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the sort of literate and literary-conscious family in which Jane Austen grew up: ‘In the study their father kept his rows and rows of books; one of his bookcases covered sixty-four square feet of wall, and he was always collecting more, not just the classics but new ones, from which he read aloud.’28 When she was eight, Jane

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was able to read anything in English on her father’s shelves that took her fancy. She could also read some French, probably taught her at Mrs Cawley’s, for she owned a volume of Fables choisies with her name inscribed in December 1783 . . . Mrs Lefroy could also encourage her in her choice of books, supplementing her father’s and mother’s suggestions. The death of Dr Johnson occurred in 1784, which may have inspired her to start reading his essays from the Rambler, with their fine rolling prose and their short, dramatic life studies: the fortune-hunter, the flighty Miss of fifteen impatient of control, the adopted niece who is betrayed and abandoned and becomes a prostitute, and many more stories . . .29 When at Oxford, her brother James started publishing a periodical, The Loiterer, written mainly in the style of Addison and Steele, to which another of her brothers at Oxford, Henry, also contributed. Her brothers staged plays at the rectory when they were home on holidays, and wrote prologues to existing novels. But the family not only initiated her into reading. They also acted as a critical audience and taught her what to provide as an author: A writer is as good as the people he or she tries to please. Jane Austen at fourteen may have noticed that James and Henry at that time were ahead of her as writers: as she dabbled in the funny or absurd, they wrote ironic tales concerning major issues with comedy and moral points. For the rest of her life, she saw her first audience of readers as her capable brothers, and though Frank had a special place in her esteem she was especially stimulated by James and Henry. She never wrote at her best simply to please the Lloyd girls (who lacked a formal education) or other young friends. Her family gave her the incentive to polish, repolish, experiment, dare and attain to the finest results.30 The process that took place in the Austen family home is plausibly analysed in the way that Searle suggests: it was an initiation into correct literary behaviour that made no reference to rules but that could nevertheless be seen as structured by a framework of institutional concepts and rules. And the Austen family was not in any way unique in this respect. They adhered closely to the social mores of their class and of the superior classes to which they aspired to belong. However, from the late nineteenth century onwards when, on the one hand, the advent of universal literacy led to cultural democracy with no respect for or interest in aesthetic standards, and, on the other hand,

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professionalization and specialization led to the disintegration of a generally informed and trained reading public, readers of literature have to a great extent been created in the classroom rather than in the family circle, though one must still allow ‘beside reading’ considerable role in this process. This means that the important parts of the process of initiation for the vast majority of readers takes place under the guidance of the professional teacher of literature. It may be a poor substitute for the sort of initiation that Jane Austen went through, but it is recognizable as the same type of process. The second possible objection against construing the concepts of literature and a literary work as institutional concepts in the analytic sense is that these concepts, at least as they have been presented here, are empirically inadequate because they fail to reflect the diversity of approaches to literature that in actual fact exist. The sort of common reader that was created in households like that of the Revd George Austen has ceased to exist and in the classroom which has taken over from the literate and cultured environment provided by such family circles, there can be found a bewildering variety of approaches which constitute different institutional practices. At the level of tertiary education, when the study of literature becomes literary studies, there are even different ‘schools’ of teachers with different interests and goals, committed to different theories which determine how they will ‘read’ a literary work. If the institutional theory of literature is going to work it would have to be modified and recognize that there is not one but a number of different institutions of literature. To deal with this objection it is necessary again to remind the reader of the distinction between the sociological and the analytic concept of institution as well as to introduce a distinction between apprehending something as a literary work and as the literary work it is, and the further step of approaching that work in some way. The analytic notion of institution employed by the institutional theory of literature is meant to provide a framework for analysing how the mind grasps or apprehends something as a literary work, a framework setting out the conditions that have to be present for something to be identified and appreciated as literature. The implicit claim made in this account is that all those who employ the concept of literature share a framework of concepts and rules, a framework that has to be in place for them to communicate intelligibly. However, no claim is made that it is possible to identify a single, correct way of reading a literary work. It is quite possible that the constitutive rules of the institution should permit a range of readings. That question is left open, though the constitutive rules of the

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institution will have to provide a framework for deciding between more or less adequate ways of apprehending the work. The institutional account also allows for the fact that it may be possible to identify groups of people with shared interests and aims that will incline them to approach literary works in ways different from groups with other interests and aims. In fact, it allows as many approaches to a literary work as one could think up. More specifically, the institutional theory of literature permits an account of what Arthur Danto has called ‘deep interpretations’ of literary works. Danto distinguishes ‘deep interpretation’ from ‘surface interpretation’,31 and his ‘surface interpretation’ comes close to what the present institutional theory of literature describes: the act of the mind through which something is identified as a work of art and recognized as the work of art it is, that is, the act through which the aesthetic/artistic properties of the work are identified: ‘The interpretation is not something outside the work: work and interpretation arise together in aesthetic consciousness.’32 Surface interpretations are indispensable for the existence of works of art: ‘Without surface interpretation, the artworld lapses into so much ruined canvas, and so many stained walls.’33 ‘Deep interpretation’, on the other hand, ‘supposes surface interpretation to have done its work, so that we know what has been done and why.’34 ‘Surface interpretation, when successfully achieved, gives us the interpretanda for deep interpretation, the interpretantia for which are to be sought in the depths.’35 Deep interpretation addresses ‘the work in the spirit of science’ and it ‘requires the interpreter to be master of one or another kind of code: psychoanalytical, culturographic, semiotical, or whatever’.36 It reveals the hidden meanings of a work, hidden, that is, from everyone including the producer of the work, except from the interpreter who is in possession of the right key to unlocking its hidden depths. In this kind of interpretation an authority, the ‘humanscientist’37 in possession of the necessary theory, interposes himself between the work and the reader. The institutional theory of literature permits as many different deep interpretations of a literary work as one can conceive of. The institutional account thus has the resources to explain what one may call the problem of multiple interpretations as well as the fact that there are standards for adequacy/inadequacy in appreciation of literary works. It can also explain why there is apparently no competition between different kinds of deep interpretation. In Danto’s words, ‘deep interpretation leaves the world as it finds it. Nor does knowledge of it enter into response, except to the degree that response itself is given

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deep interpretation.’38 The institutional theory describes the logic of what Danto calls surface interpretation and permits one to see why the truth/falsity of such theories or codes as are applied in deep interpretation is irrelevant to the recognition of something as a work or art and the work of art that it is, and therefore to the appreciation of that work of art. One further point has to be made about the empirical adequacy/inadequacy of the institutional account of literature in relation to the problem of multiple interpretative approaches. In disciplines like literary studies, art history, architectural history, cultural studies, anthropology, etc. there has been a tendency among certain practitioners to adopt what one may call a parochial view of culture and an epochal view of history. These views have as common ground that that they divide up the world into artificially isolated communities which are then held to be defined culturally by their Weltanschauung and historically by their Zeitgeist, the Weltanschauung of a community C at a time t constituting the Zeitgeist for that community. This kind of view has the methodological consequence that it directs attention to discontinuities between different historical periods and to the cultural differences between communities rather than to similarities between them. At the same time the view discourages the identification of differences and discontinuities within a period and within a community. This view is particularly prominent in the Geisteswissenschaften and its provenance can be traced back to Giambattista Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova.39 In the present argument the importance of this view is that it has led theorists like Widdowson to emphasize the discontinuities rather than the continuity in the history of the concept of literature, and it has led other theorists to a distorting emphasis on the disagreements rather than the underlying agreement between the multiple ‘interpretative communities’ that practice different ‘approaches’ to literature. Adopting the analytic notion of institution in the description of literature encourages the theorist to emphasize and look for agreement rather than disagreements between what appear to be different ‘approaches’ to literature. Once this perspective is introduced, the objection that there are literary practices of ‘surface interpretation’ that are fundamentally different, becomes difficult to substantiate. This is not to deny that different literature departments or groups of teachers practise different approaches to literature. However, the kind of fundamental disagreements that would make the institutional account of literature with its flexibility in dealing with the fact of multiple surface interpretations as well as deep interpretation empirically inadequate would seem to be difficult to find.

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V. The theory of multiple interpretative communities The view that the existence of multiple interpretative approaches to literature may suggest that there is not one but a multiplicity of institutions of literature, can also be given a more principled form as what one may call the Theory of Multiple Interpretative Communities, a theory that is in the spirit of the parochial view of culture popular in the Geisteswissenschaften. In this theory no distinction is made between the analytic and the sociological notion of institution and between surface and deep interpretation. The theory agrees with the institutional account of literature that the features of a literary work can only be identified in appreciation (proponents of the view of multiple interpretative communities talk about ‘interpretation’) by those who share a set of concepts and conventions both defining what literature is and creating the possibilities for identifying its properties (proponents of the view of multiple interpretative communities talk about ‘interpretative strategies’): Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties. In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.40 However, while the institutional account of literature implicitly makes the claim that all those who employ the concept of literature have to share a framework of concepts and rules to communicate intelligibly, proponents of the theory of multiple interpretative communities hold that there are a number of different interpretative communities with different interests and goals determining different interpretative strategies. These different interpretative strategies also determine what texts members of an interpretative community identify as literary works and how they ‘read’ these texts. Interpretative agreement and disagreement is then explained in this theory as the result of shared/different goals and interests: . . . given the notion of interpretive communities, agreement more or less explained itself: members of the same community will necessarily agree because they will see (and by seeing, make) everything in relation to that community’s assumed purposes and goals; and conversely, members of different communities will disagree because from each of their respective positions the other ‘simply’ cannot see what is obviously and inescapably there: . . .41

28 From Text to Literature

The view has consequences for the ‘business of criticism’: The business of criticism, in other words, was not to decide between interpretations by subjecting them to the test of disinterested evidence but to establish by political and persuasive means (they are the same thing) the set of interpretive assumptions from the vantage of which the evidence (and the facts and the intentions and everything else) will hereafter be specifiable.42 There are various problems with this theory. The first is with the notion of ‘interpretative community’ itself. The theory offers no principle for distinguishing one interpretative community from another. The notions of ‘interpretative strategies’ and a ‘community’s assumed purposes and goals’ (or ‘interests’) are too vague to do this job. In order to distinguish one interpretative community from another one would have to be given some idea of when interpretative strategies are relevantly different and when they are relevantly similar. Furthermore, one must have a principle for deciding what purposes and goals are relevant in the determination of interpretative strategies for literary texts (would the shared purposes and goals of the Humberside and Goole Riverwideners’ Association be relevant, and if not, why not?), and what are the relevant differences between purposes and goals that can be used to distinguish different interpretative communities. It would be viciously circular to say that different interpretations indicate that different interpretative strategies are being applied and/or that relevant differences in purposes and goals would have to be inferred from interpretative disagreements. The notions of ‘interpretative strategies’ and ‘communal interests, purposes, and goals’ would then serve no explanatory function in the theory and one might as well say that an interpretative community has its identity determined by the interpretations its members agree on. Secondly, the notion of ‘different’ interpretations only has meaning within a framework that somehow guarantees the identity of the work of art from one interpretation to another. However, on this theory the work is created in interpretation and different interpretations produce different works. Work identity between different interpretative communities is consequently lost. This would be true even if one secured the identity of the text of the work by tying it to its origin.43 For the work is created in ‘reading’.44 Given this, it is difficult to see how one can meaningfully formulate disagreements about interpretation of literary works between interpretative communities. There is no way in this

Stein Haugom Olsen 29

theory of conceiving of communication between interpretative communities about the single work of art. Thirdly, if one accepts that there are many different interpretative communities with different interpretative strategies constituting different perspectives, then not only does it become meaningless to talk about communication between different interpretative communities about the same work or art or the same text. Since the concept of literature is constituted by what any one of these interpretative communities ‘decide[s] to put into it’,45 there can be no meaningful communication between different interpretative communities about what are and what are not literary works. Again, in this theory there is no way of conceiving of any common notion of literature that might make such communication possible. Fourthly, it is arguable that the theory of multiple interpretative communities simply fails to deal with the problem of multiple interpretations. It makes the same false assumption that all theories adopting the parochial view of culture or the epochal view of history make: that it is possible to delimit communities all the members of which share a set of ideas and aims that make them think alike at the same time as they make them think differently from other communities sharing a different set of ideas and different aims. However, the idea of a community defined by a shared Weltanschauung that makes everyone agree in outlook, interests and aims, has always been one of the weak spots of the parochial view of culture. Whenever one delimits such a community sharing a Weltanschauung, or a historical period sharing a Zeitgeist, it is always possible to find multiple and striking examples of individuals and sub-communities that did not agree with others in outlook, interests, and aims. In the case of interpretative communities, it is unlikely that ‘members of the same community will necessarily agree’ on an interpretation of a literary work if one did not make interpretative agreement (rather than shared interpretative strategies determined by shared interests and aims) a criterion for identifying an interpretative community. There is no guarantee that the problem of the multiplicity of interpretations would not resurface within the interpretative community. We are here back with the problem of identifying an interpretative community. If one looks at some celebrated interpretative debates in the history of criticism, for example why does Hamlet wait for five acts before he kills Claudius, the conversion of Moll Flanders, the evaluation of the Houyhnhnms, the significance of the strange passenger in the fifth act of Peer Gynt, etc. one would be hard put to identify the

30 From Text to Literature

interpretative communities which would account for the disagreements and the debates. The critics contributing to these debates may sometimes have different underlying interests and aims that influence what they look for and identify in the works in question, but sometimes they do not. Even when they do have different underlying aims and interests there seems to be plenty of scope to engage in rational argument with them both about their interpretations and the underlying assumptions. A good example is R.S. Crane’s argument against interpreting the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels as a contribution to Christian apologetics: I find it hard, I must admit, to accept this theory. There is no doubt that Swift could have conceived the fourth Voyage, had he wished, as a theological allegory: the materials for a satirical defence of religion were certainly in his possession. I cannot, however, find any decisive evidence, internal or external, that he actually did so conceive it.46 Crane’s argument is particularly interesting because it is directed against a group of interpretations produced by critics that share the concepts and vocabulary of Christian humanism. However, his argument is not an attempt to ‘establish by political and persuasive means’ a new ‘set of interpretive assumptions from the vantage of which the evidence (and the facts and the intentions and everything else) will hereafter be specifiable’. His argument proceeds by citing evidence, ‘internal and external’, that the group of Christian humanist critics as well as the reader would find difficult to reject. The evidence that he marshals is telling and carries weight with the reader and it is difficult to see that it should not carry weight with the group of critics against whom he is arguing. Indeed, that is why his argument is worth reading. Explaining this interpretative disagreement as being due to the fact that the critics belong to different interpretative communities is simply unhelpful. Even had this view offered some sort of explanation of the problem of the multiplicity of interpretations, it would have done so at a very high price. There does seem to be communication between teachers in schools and university departments locally and globally, as well as between single readers, be they ‘just’ readers or in some way professionally involved with literature as journalists, publishers, etc., both about how to conceive of, how to ‘read’, a literary work as well as about which texts are and which texts are not literary works. To assume that

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all these people can be grouped into interpretative communities between which there is no ‘real’ communication, is to pay a high price for explaining interpretative disagreements.

VI. Conclusion ‘We cannot’, says Michael Dummett, in general suppose that we give a proper account of a concept by describing those circumstances in which we do, and those in which we do not, make use of the relevant word, by describing the usage of that word; we must also give an account of the point of the concept, explain what we use the word for. Classifications do not exist in the void, but are connected always with some interest which we have, so that to assign something to one class or another will have consequences connected with this interest.47 It is arguable that the need for a clarification of the concept of literature arises with the development of literary studies as an academic discipline at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. A clear and well-defined concept of literature was then needed in order to delimit an object of study for the discipline. The present article is an effort to provide a conceptual framework within which such delimitation can be made. It is not an attempt to give an account of the actual use of the term ‘literature’ but to provide tools for fashioning an analytic instrument for the discipline. Anders Pettersson is therefore partly right when in this volume he says about previous versions of the institutional theory of literature that it would probably be best if it were taken as delineating a historical academic-literary-studies concept covering certain important aspects of the modern western understanding of literature (thus defusing African counterexamples and suchlike, and also the troublesome question of how general its descriptive validity for present-day western literary culture actually is).48 Two points need to be made. In present-day western culture there are many uses of the word ‘literature’, but most of these are of no interest for the concept of literature necessary for making a useful delimitation of the object of study for the academic discipline of literary studies. However, if the concept of literature is to be fruitful as an instrument

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in literary studies, it has to be applicable in the description of practices of reading and writing that are centred on the development and recognition of the aesthetic nature of literary works, practices that necessarily have their roots outside the confines of the discipline and that had to be in existence before a discipline of literary studies could be conceived of. The argument here has been that the institutional concept of literature is indeed applicable in a description of such practices of reading and criticizing as those exemplified by the Austen household and in the twentieth and this century by the classroom situation. And, to add a further example, it is also applicable in the description of and useful for making sense of the kind of intense efforts made by authors like Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf49 to get the novel fully recognized as an art form, that is, to get the novel full recognition as literature. The institutional concept of literature, then, aims to be sufficiently well defined to delimit a fruitful field of study for the discipline; its fruitfulness as a disciplinary concept being due to the fact that it has roots in artistic practices and reading practices outside the academic discipline of literary studies.

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorical Analysis’, in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 83, translated from the French by Richard Howard. Originally published as ‘L’analyse rhétorique’, in Littérature et Société: problèmes de méthodologie en sociologie de la littérature; [actes d’un] colloque organisé conjointement par l’Institut de Sociologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles et l’École Pratique des Hautes Études de Paris du 21 au 23 mai 1964 (Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1967), pp. 31–45; reprinted in Roland Barthes, Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 133–40. 2. Roland Barthes, On Racine (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), p. 161. 3. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 361–2. 4. Chris Baldick, Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (London: Longman, 1996), p. 10. 5. Ibid., p. 13. 6. Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 4. The quote is from Roland Barthes, On Racine, p. 172. 7. Frank Kermode, ‘Call for Papers’, Common Knowledge, 1 (1992), pp. 5–6. 8. Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature. The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 4. 9. George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: an Analytic Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 82.

Stein Haugom Olsen 33 10. 11. 12. 13.

Ibid., p. 89. Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), pp. 571–84. Ibid., p. 580. Danto uses the concept of ‘theory’ in a slightly awkward sense. The ‘atmosphere of artistic theory’ in which one has to breathe in order to recognize something as a work of art, manifests itself in the ability to interpret the work of art, in one’s ability to undertake the ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’: To see something as art at all demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories; without theories of art, black paint is just black paint and nothing more. Perhaps one can speak of what the world is like independently of any theories we may have regarding the world, though I am not sure that it is even meaningful to raise such a question, since our divisions and articulations of things into orbits and constellations presupposes a theory of some sort. But it is plain that there could not be an artworld without theory, for the artworld is logically dependant upon theory. So it is essential to our study that we understand the nature of an art theory, which is so powerful a thing as to detach objects from the real world and make them part of a different world, an art world, a world of interpreted things. (Arthur C. Danto, ‘Interpretation and Identification’, in Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 135)

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

The awkwardness arises because Danto seems to be saying that one needs a theory of art to recognize an artwork. However, what is needed to see something as a work of art is a mastery of the practice of art interpretation. One does not need a theory of art to do this just as one does not need a theory of language to recognize something as a word or a sentence in a language. What one does need is linguistic competence. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, p. 584. Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 90. George Dickie, The Art Circle: a Theory of Art (New York: Haven Publications, 1984), p. 65. Colin Lyas, Aesthetics (London: UCL Press, 1997), p. 93. Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 92. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic. An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 74. George Dickie, The Art Circle, p. 93. See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1995), chs. 1 to 6; the ideas developed in this book were introduced in John R. Searle, Speech Acts: an Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 33–42 which in its turn developed ideas put forward by H.L.A. Hart in ch. 5 of The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), and John Rawls in ‘Two Concepts of Rules,’ Philosophical Review, 64 (1955), pp. 3–32. For an early attempt to formulate the conventions defining and structuring literary appreciation, see Stein Haugom Olsen, The Structure of Literary Understanding (Cambridge:

34

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Cambridge University Press, 1978), chs. 4 and 5. More recently the idea of literature as an institutional practice in the analytic sense has been developed by Peter Lamarque and myself in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 10. 22. Peter Widdowson, Literature (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 34. 23. Ibid. 24. Widdowson uses the language of obscurantism: What we can now further deduce from this ‘very recent’ usage is that the concept-word ‘Literature’ is fundamentally inscribed with notions of period and, more importantly, of nation (the conception of it as a world species will resurface later in the status that Matthew Arnold and his disciples award it). (Widdowson, Literature, p. 34)

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

One is not sure what a ‘concept-word’ is, nor what it is for such a word to be ‘fundamentally inscribed with notions of period and . . . of nation’. For a detailed treatment of this aspect of literature see my ‘Conventions and Rules in Literature’, in Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (eds), The Philosophy of Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 25–42. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, ch. 6: ‘Background Abilities and the Explanation of Social Phenomena’, pp. 127–48. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 144. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen. A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 28. Ibid., p. 38. Park Honan, Jane Austen. Her Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 62. See Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), ch. II. ‘The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art’, pp. 23–46, and ch. III. ‘Deep Interpretation’, pp. 47–67. Danto, ‘The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art’, p. 45. Danto, ‘Deep Interpretation’, p. 67. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 52. Danto, ‘The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art’, p. 45. Danto, ‘Deep Interpretation’, p. 51. Says Danto: ‘[The] concept of [deep] interpretation belongs less to humane studies than to the Geisteswissenschaften, or to the humansciences, as I shall term them in an effort to preserve the German agglutinative,’ (Danto, ‘Deep Interpretation’, p. 49). Ibid., p. 66. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Unabridged translation of the 3rd edn (1744) with the addition of ‘Practice of the new science’. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. In Fish’s strong version of this view even text identity is lost between interpretative communities:

Stein Haugom Olsen 35 Indeed, the text as an entity independent of interpretation and (ideally) responsible for its career drops out and is replaced by the texts that emerge as the consequence of our interpretive activities. There are still formal patterns, but they do not lie innocently in the world; rather, they are themselves constituted by an interpretive act. (Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 13) 44. For the standard criticisms of this view, see Robert Stecker, ‘The Constructivist’s Dilemma’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1997), pp. 43–51; reprinted in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (eds), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: the Analytic Tradition: an Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 223–32. 45. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 11. 46. R.S. Crane, ‘The Rationale of the Fourth Voyage’, in Robert A. Greenberg (ed.) The Norton Critical Edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970), p. 332. The argument is fully developed in R.S. Crane, ‘The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos and the History of Ideas’, in Joseph Anthony Mazzeo (ed.) Reason and the Imagination: Essays in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 231–53. 47. Michael Dummett, ‘Truth’ in Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), p. 3. Originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., LIX (1959), pp. 141–62. 48. P. 118 of this volume. 49. See Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883), ed. David Skilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996), ch. 12: ‘On Novels and the Art of Writing Them’; Henry James ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Henry James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948); and Virginia Woolf in her writings on fiction collected in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. II (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966).

2 Aesthetic Experience and a Belletristic Definition of Literature Paisley Livingston

I. Introduction A belletristic conception of literature is, quite generally, one in which literature is defined in terms of some notion of fine art. There are rival belletristic conceptions, as well as rivals to all such conceptions. My primary goal in this paper is to consider how a belletristic definition may best be delineated. My assumption is not that the word ‘literature’, its cognates, and related terms in other languages designate either a natural kind or a Platonic Idea or essence; instead, the term has a variety of appropriate uses in diverse contexts and has been associated with significantly different classifications – as is ably documented by Anders Pettersson and Lars-Olof Åhlberg in their contributions to this volume.1 My attempt to set forth a cogent, belletristic conception is motivated by the idea that although artistic values and achievements do not exhaust the multiple facets of things aptly called ‘literature’, they do provide one important way of distinguishing between some different types and qualities of discourse. I begin by setting forth a way of distinguishing between aesthetic and other sorts of experiences. With that distinction in mind, I turn to the question of how a belletristic concept of literature, based on that notion, may be elucidated and motivated.

II. Conceptual priorities: art and the aesthetic A first question has to do with whether one’s notion of the art of literature depends conceptually upon a logically prior notion of the aesthetic. Some of the proponents of procedural definitions of art have contended that the art/non-art distinction can be delineated independently of any aesthetic concepts; it is sometimes further stipulated that a work’s 36

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aesthetic features are all and only those it has qua work of art, a move which makes aesthetic notions logically dependent on artistic ones. One problem with this line of thought is its reliance upon the ‘qua work of art’ locution, which is thought to do the job of singling out the aesthetic subset of a work of art’s properties. The key idea seems to be that some particular item can be evaluated in relation to two or more kinds of items with an eye to its possession of qualities associated with them. So to evaluate a particular painting qua investment is to assess it in terms of the sorts of qualities one looks for in a good investment – security, profitability, etc., while to evaluate the same painting qua work of art is to assess it in rather different terms, namely, those in virtue of which it is an artwork. Yet this use of the qua locution is only informative given a prior understanding of the kinds in question and of the sorts of normatively weighted properties one associates with them. The qua locution provides a label for some relevant comparing and contrasting, it being assumed that the problem of establishing the relevance of various possible comparisons and contrasts has already been solved. If it is to be in any way instructive to say that to appreciate a work of art qua work of art is to contemplate its artistic or aesthetic qualities, then we must say something informative about what we mean by the latter. Another, more substantive objection to the subordination of the aesthetic to the artistic is that works of art are not the only objects of aesthetic experience: landscapes, caverns, and other natural scenes have aesthetic qualities and can occasion valued aesthetic experiences, and the same is true of some utterances and artefacts which should not be classified as works of art. Nor is it obvious that our aesthetic experience of such items is somehow derivative – either logically, historically, or developmentally – of a prior experience of works of art.2 One may plausibly hold, on the contrary, that it is the concept of art which depends on an independent conception of the aesthetic: aesthetic experience is the more general category, and the aesthetic appreciation of art is a subset thereof. Such is the approach to be developed in what follows.

III. Concepts aesthetic Consider the following remarks made by Frank Sibley in a paper in which he asks whether tastes and smells can have aesthetic interest or value: There is no notion of the aesthetic; there are many criss-crossing ones, some very puritanical, some very catholic, some merely

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stipulative, some mere prejudice, some hand-me-downs, many for which intelligible reasons are available but with which one need not sympathise. So the question what really constitutes the domain of aesthetics has no answer, unless there is one laid up in heaven. I am not just suggesting that it has merely a vague boundary, or that it involves family resemblance. Reasons for including or excluding this or that run along very diverse dimensions and are diversely motivated.3 Sibley is right insofar as people have used ‘aesthetic’ as a label for some incompatible notions, several of which have been supported by sophisticated philosophical reasonings.4 It follows that a scholarly or theoretical definition of ‘aesthetic’ must be stipulative in the sense that it cannot simply mirror a unique, pre-established ordinary or technical usage.5 Yet such a proposal need not also be stipulative in the sense of being arbitrary or insufficiently motivated by evidence, intuitions, and arguments: it can, on the contrary, trace distinctions worth drawing, and in so doing, carry forward at least some of the reasons motivating the competing philosophical formulations. And what is more, Sibley may have overstated his point in writing of ‘many’ well-grounded definitions of the aesthetic: once the inaccuracies and exaggerations have been stripped away, there may not be so very many plausible options left. Consider a contrast between two kinds of reading experiences. In the first, I read a newspaper in a worried and impatient attempt to find out whether interest rates have risen. I quickly shuffle through the pages to locate the relevant section, scan the text, find the desired information, and then think about its various practical consequences. Imagine now a case where I read a poem by Charles Baudelaire so as to recognize the imaginative attitudes expressed there, as well as the special qualities of the language in which they are articulated. I get a special kind of intellectual and emotional stimulation from a careful reading of this work, dwelling on its remarkable features and thinking about it in relation to other poems I have read. Baudelaire’s poetic inventiveness and skilful articulation of his themes impresses and moves me, even though I am at times disturbed by the morbid and twisted thoughts his speakers seem to espouse. I think it incontrovertible that these two very different episodes of reading exemplify the contrast between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences (and also a corresponding contrast between readings attuned to artistic qualities and those that are not). Yet with Sibley’s

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remarks in mind, we may want to put the point more cautiously, saying that at least one of the intelligent and well-motivated concepts of the aesthetic – one with which I think we have good reason to sympathize – classifies these cases of reading quite differently. And why ought we to sympathize with such a notion? Although there is perhaps little or no point in announcing to a hurried newspaper reader that he or she is not having an aesthetic experience – which, we hope, would come as no news – there could, on the contrary, be good reason to say that if someone were to read poetry in the same sort of way, no specifically aesthetic experience would be had. The point is not that such experiences ought always come first whenever we read poetry, for such a claim would require a rather different sort of argument; the idea, rather is that the specific nature of aesthetic experience should be recognized so that it can, on occasion, be appreciated and promoted. And that, I contend, is the main point of a belletristic definition of literature. If it is granted that the two cases do exemplify the relevant contrast, we may then go on to ask what principles underwrite such a verdict, and whether there are problematic cases which thwart the distinction. And here we must sift through the hand-me-down notions and crisscrossing reasons Sibley evokes. Perhaps the first of these to come to mind is that the reading of the poetry is ‘disinterested’, while the raid upon the newspaper was too tendentious to be aesthetic. Yet the idea that an aesthetic experience must be disinterested sets the stage for a sceptical condemnation of the entire notion, for it is hard to see how such teleological creatures as ourselves could ever satisfy such a condition. Is the reader of poetry ever really disinterested? One’s interest in reading a Baudelaire poem may, for example, include various motives, such as trying to improve one’s knowledge of literature or looking for an example to use in a philosophical essay, aims which may in turn be instrumentally useful in various ways. Few, if any, of the things we do are wholly disconnected from the frameworks of plans and purposes within which we try to organize our lives. As George Dickie pointed out in his early critiques of certain prominent theories of the aesthetic experience, being strongly motivated to attend carefully to a work of art’s features is hardly incompatible with doing a good job of understanding and appreciating it, and it may even be that strong motivation is a prerequisite for attentive appreciation of works of art.6 Even so, the thought remains that at least part of what disqualifies a reader’s hasty raid on the newspaper from being classified as an aesthetic experience is its purely or predominantly instrumental nature. The

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newspaper prose had no inherent interest for me: it was just a means to another end, and I would have foregone the experience had the information been made more readily available in some other way. For example, had a reliable informant been in the room, I might simply have asked that person. Or again, a quick consultation of a website might have done the trick equally well. Here we may note a sharp contrast with the aesthetic experience of the poem, which was not entirely a matter of gaining access to something, such as information, which might have been acquired independently of the experience of reading the poem. As one of the few apparent truisms in aesthetics would have it, no description of the poem, no matter how accurate, efficient, and informative, could substitute for my encounter with the words of the text if what is wanted is an aesthetic experience of the work of art, as opposed, say, to instrumentally useful knowledge of it.7 A first conclusion that may be drawn, then, is that one trait of aesthetic experience is that it is distinct from an exclusively or predominantly instrumental stance, and is at least in part a matter of an intrinsically valued experience, that is, one prized, not only in order to realize some other end or value, but in itself or ‘for its own sake’. This is, of course, a received idea in aesthetics, but it is often misconstrued. What is overlooked is that an aesthetic experience need not involve an exclusive form of intrinsic valuing, since it is possible to value something both intrinsically and instrumentally at the same time.8 Aesthetic appreciation may, then, be accompanied by the pursuit of various practical or instrumental goals, so it is not a question here of defending the ideal of a purely detached or disinterested attitude. Nor is the claim about intrinsic value a matter of laying down that aesthetic experience must be wholly pleasurable or a matter of some unbroken and perfect delight. Various kinds of pleasure may be contingent symptoms, but not criteria of, our intrinsically valuing some experience. One may, for example, value intrinsically an arduous or even distressing experience, or one based on the appreciation of a work of art that is in some ways evaluated negatively. To say that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically valued experience may be correct, but hardly suffices to limn the concept. Glaring counterexamples come readily to mind. People can attribute intrinsic value to the existence of creatures they will never perceive directly: what is held to be valuable is not the enjoyment that can be had through acquaintance with these beings, but the very fact of their existence. The moral value of persons, it is sometimes contended, is also a matter of intrinsic value or ends in themselves, and should be distinguished from aesthetic merit more generally.

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Such counterexamples may be dealt with by working with a notion proposed by C.I. Lewis and subsequently advocated by William K. Frankena and various others, namely, the idea of inherent value.9 Things that have inherent value, Frankena proposes, are good because the experience of contemplating them is good or rewarding in itself. A thing’s inherent value, then, resides in its capacity or propensity to serve instrumentally as a means to a form of intrinsic value.10 If an ecologist attributes intrinsic value to the very existence of some creatures, and not to anyone’s perceptual experience of them, the creatures would be said to have intrinsic but not inherent value; if an aesthete, on the other hand, finds it intrinsically rewarding to contemplate the features of a hornbill, then the bird would be said to have inherent value.11 To sum up, a work of art or some other item is inherently valued just in case its contemplation yields an experience that is valued intrinsically or for its own sake. And what is required here is that the intrinsic value of the experience arise in and through the contemplation of the item’s features or qualities. Such contemplation is what is lacking in the stock analyst’s experience of the newspaper, for even though he may find some intrinsic value in his hurried encounter with the financial section, this value does not find its basis in an attentive and thorough attention to the features of the text. Such a condition is met by the reader who becomes absorbed in Baudelaire’s poetry, valuing the engrossing, contemplative experience for its own sake as well as for whatever other purposes may be targeted. Although some may find the word ‘contemplation’ misleading insofar as it can carry connotations of passivity, an emphasis on the active quality of aesthetic contemplation has been articulated at many different points in the history of aesthetics. This point is made quite clearly in D.W. Prall’s 1929 book, Aesthetic Judgement, where he writes of the ‘intense activity of full contemplation’, and the theme has been developed more recently by Francis Sparshott and others.12 In agreeing with this traditional emphasis on the role of active cognition, perception, and imagination in aesthetic experience, I do not mean to rule out various other factors, such as emotional and bodily involvement. Drawing these lines of thought together, we can sketch the needed condition as follows: aesthetic response, which embraces thought and imagination as well as perception and sensation, must be a direct, active contemplative attention to the qualities of some item issuing in an intrinsically valued experience. The word ‘item’ here is meant to serve as a highly neutral way of referring to the many different sorts of things that can be the object of aesthetic experience, and I see no good reason to place any restrictions on the scope of this term. We do not, in any

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case, want to say that we have aesthetic experiences only of works of fine art, nor of the arts more generally, or of some restricted category of properties or qualities. It will not do, for example, to stipulate that aesthetic experience is entirely a sensuous or perceptual affair. One way to put this claim would be to say that aesthetic properties, such as gracefulness and awkwardness, emerge from lower-level perceptual qualities, such as line, physical texture, and colour, and we experience the former just in case we attend to the latter. Such a claim harmonizes with the truism that someone who has not actually seen a picture can hardly have had an aesthetic experience of it, but that correct observation does not entail stronger theses as to the necessity or sufficiency of perceptual uptake in any literal sense. It is the reader’s eye that tracks down the wanted information in the newspaper in the case of non-aesthetic reading, while in the case of the aesthetic experience of poetry, an interpretation of propositional content, and not just seeing the letters or hearing the phonemes, is what is required. A literary work’s aesthetic qualities supervene in part on the perceptual features of its language, but it is uncontroversial to observe that the ‘base’ from which aesthetic qualities emerge is much broader than the phenomenal qualities of the text alone.13 Consider, for example, the case of a deaf composer who thinks of a new melody and as a result of entertaining it in his mind enjoys an aesthetic experience: perception is not literally the mode of access to the item, but it is still directly contemplated (as opposed to being learned about through descriptions). In speaking of aesthetic experience as requiring a special mode of attention, we come close to another vein of hand-me-down proposals which involve stipulations that one should not, in fact, be in a hurry to accept. I have in mind the various ‘aesthetic attitude’ theories, the debunking of which has led to no small measure of scepticism about philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience. A key issue here is whether the latter involves a special mode of attention which is generated by a decision, or which results from conscious deliberation or the voluntary adoption of the so-called aesthetic attitude. Here I agree with David Fenner, who in his book-length survey of aesthetic attitude theories, concludes that an aesthetic attitude is not necessary to aesthetic experience: we can rather spontaneously begin to attend to something, such as a bit of music that suddenly makes itself heard on the radio, and end up enjoying an aesthetic experience of it.14 Unlike Fenner, however, I also doubt that the adoption of an aesthetic attitude is sufficient, since one cannot simply will, of a given stretch of one’s experience, that it have some kind of aesthetic status or quality. One can, it is true, some-

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times intentionally engage in a process of active contemplation, but such an action, even if successfully carried off, does not suffice. And why not? The answer is to be found in the requirement that aesthetic experience be valued intrinsically, the thought being that it is the latter that cannot simply be willed by the agent, as such an action can fail to yield an experience of any significant intrinsic value or disvalue. Much more needs to be said, of course, about this proposal’s relation to other ideas about aesthetic experience in the philosophical literature. For example, I have not taken on board the sorts of holistic and organicist formal requirements that characterize John Dewey’s and Monroe C. Beardsley’s work on the subject. Although it could be the case that some of the things that are inherently valuable have the sort of complexity organicists mention, it is not obvious that our experience of such items must, to be of intrinsic value, formally reflect and exemplify these same structures. It is one thing to experience something which has the attributes of being unified, intense, and complex, but it is something else to have a unified and complex state of mind or psychological process. One’s stepwise exploration of the unity and complexity of a long film, novel, or operatic work, or of a large and complicated architectural structure, need not itself possess formal closure and unity, and in fact such experiences are likely to take place on different occasions and involve a process of intermittent and ongoing reflection.15 I have said nothing about the difficult problem of individuating experiences, then, partly because it can be side-stepped once we drop the emphasis on the idea that aesthetic experiences must exemplify the formal virtues classically associated with beauty. Another point of clarification concerns the idea that aesthetic value must involve a second-order reaction to one’s own judgements about the qualities of some item, a proposal that has been advanced by Kendall Walton.16 To say that one deems something inherently valuable is not to say that one must be engaged in appreciating one’s appreciation, and though the latter is a feature of some instances of aesthetic value, it does not seem plausible to say that it is necessary. A judgement of inherent value need not even take the form of a separate judgement to the effect that ‘this experience is valuable for its own sake’. Such valuing can remain immanent in the experience and need not be linked to any prior motivational fact. Nor would such evaluations constitute exceptions to the plausible assumption that agents can be self-deceived, or at least irresponsibly uninformed, about their own attitudes. One might think one’s motives purely instrumental, yet in fact attach great intrinsic worth to some activity, and vice versa.

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Are there some patently non-aesthetic experiences involving intrinsic value achieved through apt attention and contemplation? Suppose someone finds intrinsic value in the acquisition of various objects, it being stipulated that these objects are not desired as means to any other ends. The person is not, however, like the aesthete in Virginia Woolf’s story, ‘Solid Objects’, whose gaze lingers with pleasure over the phenomenal properties of the various lumps of glass and stone that he enjoys collecting.17 Instead, what the person intrinsically values is contemplating the event of acquisition itself. More specifically, the object of his intrinsically delightful contemplation is the coming into being of that relational property which he can designate as ‘now newly owned by me’. Should such an experience count as an aesthetic one? Kindred counterexamples can be based on experiences involving other seemingly non-aesthetic, relational properties of objects, such as sentimental ones (e.g. ‘it’s our song’), or ones related to the social distinctions some sociologists tell us are the sordid reality behind the aesthetic ideology. Cannot someone actively contemplate, and inherently value, the fact that his wine, furnishings, music, and paintings stand high in some cultural hierarchy? Yet isn’t this just part of a struggle for social distinction, and not an aesthetic experience? We have two basic options in dealing with such cases. One is to find some clause that will rule them out, and the other is to show that their acceptance is not in fact damaging to the analysis. I shall briefly discuss the former and embrace the latter. It will not do, I think, to try to handle such challenges by stipulating that properly aesthetic experiences focus exclusively on some object’s intrinsic qualities or features. As C.I. Lewis pointed out in the context of his delineation of the notion of inherent value, ‘good in itself’ is ambiguous between ‘good as an end in itself’, and ‘carrying its value in itself, and not in relation to anything else’.18 Attempts to analyse the former in terms of the latter regularly fail. It is not plausible to deny that aesthetic experience involves attention to a range of relational qualities, such as those involved in a picture’s or text’s semantic and referential properties.19 Here I think we need to break quite sharply with some of the handme-down proposals about aesthetic concepts. The way to handle such counterexamples is to point out that the concept of aesthetic experience being proposed here is in the first instance a descriptive one which is not designed to characterize only excellent or good aesthetic experiences, or those that correctly track the highest aesthetic and artistic values.20 My own clause involving inherent value is considerably weaker

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than that, since it has to do with what people effectively value and not what they ought to value, or value for good reason. So I am willing to allow that not all experiences which are aesthetic ones effectively possess the virtue of being grounded in, and instantiating, the object’s actual aesthetic value – or the value it would have for a model or idealized observer. A move characteristic of the philosophical literature on intrinsic value and disvalue is to define the latter in terms of what people are required, or ought, to admire, love, hate, or prefer, as opposed to whatever they happen to value intrinsically either for good or bad reasons, or for no reasons at all.21 This sort of strong, normative move has its purposes, but should not be made at the first stage of an analysis of aesthetic experience, especially if our aim is to develop a concept that can be employed in a classificatory, non-honorific conception of literature, that is, one which can accommodate the widespread recognition that there is such a thing as bad or indifferent works of literature. A concept of justified, correct, and positive aesthetic experience is well worth having and promoting, but it is, I contend, distinct from a concept of aesthetic experience tout court, and we need to have the latter in place before we attempt to discern the former. Thus we can grant that the consumers, sentimentalists, and cynics described in the examples have aesthetic experiences. One is free to add that these are very meagre and inferior aesthetic experiences because the items upon which they focus, such as the event of acquisition, hardly allow for any complex or deeply rewarding process of contemplation. Nostalgic feelings focused on the relation in which some item stands to oneself can, then, be aesthetic, but one can, if one wishes, go on to make the additional claim to the effect that the more rewarding and complex aesthetic experiences are those in which attention ranges away from one’s own personal role in the matter in order to explore various other qualities that it can be far more rewarding to contemplate.22 I shall not attempt any such argument here, and wish only to point out that the account of aesthetic experience on offer does not make such claims, yet is compatible with the ambitions which might motivate such proposals.

IV. Aesthetic value and the definition of literature Given the understanding of aesthetic experience sketched above, how might one go on to use this concept in reconstructing a definition of art, and by extension, of the fine art of literature? Various options are open.23 My own inclination would be to begin by enlisting a broad,

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Grice-inspired idea of utterances in a verbal medium. Utterances are intentional expressive acts and their products, and to be literary the primary vehicle of the utterance must be at least one natural language. Not all verbal utterances are literary, but all literary works must be utterances in a verbal medium.24 The literary utterances are those intended primarily by their authors to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character, in the very broad sense sketched above, which means that in writing a work of literature, the author or authors aim to create a work the contemplation of which can be intrinsically valued.25 This is an intentionalist definition of literary art, but it should be noted that the intention in question is not meant to exclude other, nonaesthetic instrumental aims.26 The writer can intend to promote the revolution, convey metaphysical truths, make himself rich and famous, and so on, while also intending to write something the reading of which will yield the kind of contemplative rewards the tradition has long associated with aesthetic experience. Note that the adverb ‘primarily’ introduces an important element of vagueness into the definition, yet also does the important job of sorting out genuine, art-making aesthetic intentions from cases where one has a subsidiary goal of writing in an intrinsically valuable way. A philosopher’s intention to realize valued stylistic qualities in an essay does not convert this prose into literature unless that intention functions as the predominant one in the actual writing of the works. The relevant intentions, by the way, are not only those involved in plans or projects, but the effective, action-orienting intentions which actually guide the compositional process. Whenever a writer’s primary intention relative to some work is that of creating something that it will be intrinsically valuable to contemplate – as opposed, say, to something accurate, reliable, and instructive – then the resultant work is literary on this belletristic account. Those who want to classify various great instances of argumentative prose and cosmological poetry as works of literature are invited to use an alternative definition of the term. Are there any decisive counterexamples to this proposal – that is, cases which would show the stipulation to be too narrow to be of any classificatory value? Robert Stecker thinks that letters and other documents written by a great author should be classified as literature simply because they belong to the writer’s overall corpus, and even if they have no literary or artistic merit.27 I disagree. We prize the diaries of Virginia Woolf for what they reveal about the author of The Waves and the many fascinating characters with whom she had tea, but this does not make

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these diaries works of literature. Woolf’s own explicit comments about the point of her diary-writing, by the way, characterize them as means to her other, properly artistic goals as a writer, and not as literary works. Significant parts of Franz Kafka’s diaries, on the other hand, may very well have been written with the kinds of aesthetic intentions constitutive of literary works of art. Another objection, raised by Torsten Pettersson, runs as follows: biographies are often written and read for the intrinsic value of the experience, in which case they would satisfy the definition and have to be counted as works of literature. As Pettersson’s instructive paper in this volume shows, the aim of telling the truth is hardly incompatible with having a primarily literary or artistic ambition. It would, then, be unwise to deny the possibility of a genre of writing which could be designated as literary biography, and which might be contrasted to scientific or scholarly biographical works. Whether a particular biographical work belongs to the literary variety hinges on the respective roles of the writer’s various intentions, such as the intention to devise and convey justified and substantiated claims about the life of some actual person. Whenever the latter aim is the primary one, the biography is not aptly classified as ‘literary’, at least along belletristic lines. How a work is actually read by particular readers is not the key issue, as there is in general no systematic relation between the various uses to which artefacts happen to be put and their categorial identities. Another challenge to the belletristic conception sketched here is the contention that an exclusively practical mode of valuing some utterance could be aptly recognized as an appreciation of its artistic or aesthetic merits. Certain forms of cognitive and interpretation-centred values are sometimes set forth as instances of this sort of thing, and it is plain that contemporary critics and scholars do often engage in highly instrumental readings of literary texts. Yet such interpretations are usually not meant to refer to the specifically literary features of the literary texts under discussion; nor are they plausibly produced or understood as reports on an aesthetic experience of the works, and so do not constitute a challenge to my analysis. That analysis would only be contradicted by a second kind of case, namely one in which the critic actually claims to be referring to a work’s specifically literary qualities or values, but contends either that the text’s literariness is realized uniquely in non-aesthetic functions or features, or that the text’s literariness is a matter of some artistic or aesthetic function incompatible with my broad, classificatory account of aesthetic experience. It remains to be seen whether significant cases in this vein can be found.

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In conclusion, my contention is that the essential or primary artistic goal – and there are of course, many subsidiary artistic goals – is the occasioning of intrinsically rewarding aesthetic experiences – first of all, that of the artist who creates the work, and secondly those enjoyed when we actively contemplate and explore the artist’s accomplishment. To be oriented towards what is specifically artistic in these accomplishments is to engage in the sort of appreciation which realizes aesthetic experience. Scholarly and critical writing about literature need not contribute to that goal, but it can advance it indirectly and attempt to explain the conditions under which it is realized. Many different things can provide an occasion for a process of contemplation that is intrinsically rewarding for someone in some context, which means that the artistic goal, as delineated here, is an extremely broad one. As a result, the proposed concepts of art and literature have the virtue of embracing a diversity of artistic efforts. Yet, as I have tried to show above, these concepts are not all embracing. Some of the more restrictive and difficult norms characteristic of the world’s various literary cultures find their rationales when we consider that intrinsically valuing one’s contemplative experience of something is not an event over which we exercise direct control. Inherent value does not arise automatically simply because one adopts the so-called aesthetic attitude. Many texts, for example, when read attentively under anything like normal or ordinary conditions, simply do not yield an intrinsically valuable experience, unless, that is, all of one’s experience has somehow magically won this quality. Intrinsically valued experience is instead an event that comes to us in different degrees and qualities. Whenever artists seek to enhance the likelihood that their accomplishments will occasion highly valuable aesthetic experiences, additional constraints come into play, some of them relative to our psychologies and the nature of artistic media, others relative to the historical context within which the artist is working. The description and analysis of such constraints on artistic creation and aesthetic experience are worthwhile tasks for literary scholars who wish to focus their research on those specifically artistic values located at the heart of a literary culture.

Notes 1. I also survey some of this ground in my ‘Literature’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 536–54.

Paisley Livingston 49 2. Such a view is advocated, for example, by Richard Wollheim in Art and its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 91–104. Wollheim concedes that the experience of art has neither historical nor developmental priority, and his argument for its logical priority over aesthetic concepts involves claims about the foibles of attitude theories and the unfair supposition that his opponent must hold that ‘the institution of art contributes nothing to human experience’ (p. 101). For a more convincing treatment of the issue, see Frank Sibley, ‘Arts or the Aesthetic – Which Comes First?’, in Frank Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 207–55. 3. Frank N. Sibley, ‘Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics’, Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 207–55 (pp. 254–5). Sibley was, of course, much more bullish about the concept of the aesthetic in his earlier papers. 4. Publications on the issue include Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘What is an Aesthetic Quality?’, Theoria, 39 (1973), pp. 50–70; Ted Cohen, ‘Aesthetic/NonAesthetic and the Concept of Taste’, Theoria, 39 (1973), pp. 113–52; T.J. Diffey, ‘A Note on Some Meanings of the Term “Aesthetic” ’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 35 (1995), pp. 61–6; Bohdan Dziemidok, ‘On the Need to Distinguish Between Aesthetic and Artistic Evaluations of Art’, in Robert J. Yanal (ed.), Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s Philosophy (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 73–86; Alan Goldman, ‘Aesthetic Qualities and Aesthetic Value’, Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), pp. 23–37; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: an Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988); Göran Hermerén, The Nature of Aesthetic Qualities (Lund: Lund University Press, 1988); Peter Kivy, ‘What Makes “Aesthetic” Terms Aesthetic?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 35 (1975), pp. 197–211; Ruby Meager, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 10 (1970), pp. 303–22; Michael H. Mitias, What Makes An Experience Aesthetic? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988); Michael H. Mitias (ed.), Possibility of the Aesthetic Experience (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); David Novitz, ‘The Integrity of Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (1990), pp. 9–20; J.O. Urmson and David Pole, ‘What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society, suppl. vol. 31 (1957), pp. 75–106; Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), pp. 421–50 (reprinted in Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 1–23); and ‘Aesthetic and NonAesthetic’, Philosophical Review, 74 (1965), pp. 135–59 (reprinted in Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 33–51); Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 467–86; Noël Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited,’ British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (2002), pp. 145–68. 5. For amplification of this point, see Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition Meaning Value (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 35–8. 6. George Dickie, ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), pp. 55–65; and ‘Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of Philosophy, 62 (1965), pp. 129–36. 7. For background, see my ‘On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003), pp. 260–78.

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8. That this point was already clearly made by Plato is usefully reiterated by Robert Stecker in his ‘Only Jerome: A Reply to Noël Carroll’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 41 (2001), pp. 76–80. Another philosopher who usefully emphasizes the link between intrinsic value and aesthetic appreciation is Gary Iseminger, ‘Aesthetic Appreciation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 39 (1981), pp. 389–99. 9. C.I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle: Open Court, 1946), pp. 388–92; William K. Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1963), pp. 65–6. An aesthetician who applies Frankena’s distinction in thinking about artistic value is Robert Stecker, but he is sceptical about its extension to the concept of aesthetic experience and value. See Stecker’s Artworks: Definition Meaning Value, pp. 251–58. For a critical reconstruction of Lewis’s proposal, see my ‘C.I. Lewis and the outlines of aesthetic experience’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (2004), pp. 378–92. 10. Similar distinctions were expressed by W.D. Ross in The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930). Ross notes that the value of beautiful things is ‘solely instrumental to the production of aesthetic enjoyment’, which enjoyment is ‘good in itself’ (p. 130). 11. One can doubt, along with C.I. Lewis, whether any sort of intrinsic value can cogently be said to be fully independent of all possible experience, but the issue need not be argued here. See Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 255–6. 12. See D.W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1929), p. 13. See also Francis Sparshott, Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 149–50, pp. 202–05. 13. As Roger Scruton puts it, ‘any attempt to define aesthetic appreciation in sensuous terms will fail to explain the arts of poetry and narrative’, Art and Imagination: a Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 154. For a more recent recognition of this point, see Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 44–5. 14. David E.W. Fenner, The Aesthetic Attitude (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996). 15. On this theme, see Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 16. Kendall Walton, ‘How Marvelous: Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993), pp. 499–510. 17. Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, Athenaeum, 22 October 1920, pp. 543–5; reprinted in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (London: Hogarth, 1943), and in Susan Dick (ed.) The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1985). 18. C.I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, p. 386; see also Christine M. Korsgaard, ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’, Philosophical Review, 92 (1983), pp. 169–95, and Shally Kagan, ‘Rethinking Intrinsic Value’, Journal of Ethics, 2 (1998), pp. 277–97. 19. Gregory Currie, ‘Supervenience, Essentialism and Aesthetic Properties’, Philosophical Studies, 58 (1990): pp. 243–57. 20. Such was C.I. Lewis’s manner of characterizing the specificity of aesthetic values, for in addition to requiring them to involve intrinsically valenced contemplative experience, he further required them to be a non-

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21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

competitive, positive experiences of some item’s enduring excellence; he also required the valued aesthetic experience to issue from the adoption of a special, aesthetic attitude. For background see Roderick M. Chisholm, Brentano and Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); more recent contributions include Noam H. Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Cf. Michael J. Zimmerman, The Nature of Intrinsic Value (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), who contends that a state’s intrinsic goodness consists in it being such that the moral contemplation of it requires that one favour it for its own sake (p. 9). Zimmerman employs ‘moral’ here in a very broad sense. For an example of a sophisticated, normative account of excellent aesthetic experience, see Miller, ‘Three Kinds of Objectivity’, in Levinson (ed.) Aesthetics and Ethics, pp. 26–58. See, for example, James C. Anderson, ‘Aesthetic Concepts of Art’, in Noël Carroll (ed.) Theories of Art Today (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. 65–92, and Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Anders Pettersson protests here that there are counterexamples. On my revisionary proposal, however, wordless works are not classified as literary ones, the assumption being that the medium in which artistic structures are created is essential to distinctions between art forms. I do not believe that a work of art is reducible to an artistic structure – the latter being only a necessary part of a work, and so agree with Bo Pettersson’s more general critique of ‘textualism’ in this volume. This need not entail that the authors consciously think in terms of the concept of aesthetic experience as delineated in this paper; instead, the requirement concerns their effective motivational states and their implicit and explicit targets. For background on my partial intentionalism, see Art and Intention: a Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Robert Stecker, ‘What is Literature?’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 4 (1996), pp. 681–94.

3 Art, Literature and Value Lars-Olof Åhlberg

I. Introduction I shall begin by considering some contemporary analyses of the concept of art, since one’s attitude to the generic concept of art is likely to influence one’s view of the nature and function of the concept of literature. The discussion of the generic concept of art is introduced (II.i) followed by an analysis of art as an open concept and its relationship to the subconcepts of art such as literature, music, architecture (II.ii). The next section (II.iii) is devoted to the institutional theory of art, and in particular the notion of appreciation in that theory, followed by a discussion of the problem of identifying art, in contrast to defining art (II.iv). The logical importance of a minimal concept of art as the precondition for theorizing about art and of defining art is frequently overlooked. Part III is devoted to the concept of literature, beginning with a survey of the history of the concept of literature, since the conceptual history of literature is relevant for our endeavour to understand contemporary conceptions and concepts of literature (III.i). Some of the problems involved in defining literature are discussed in the following section (III.ii), followed by an analysis of an institutional approach to literature (III.iii). In the final section (III.iv) questions concerning the evaluation of works of literature are analysed by means of examples drawn from three different literary genres. I argue that the concept of literature is not an evaluative concept in any straightforward sense, but that there is an ineliminable evaluative dimension to the concept, which has been neglected in much recent literary theory.

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II. The concept of art II.i. The generic concept of art When philosophers discuss the concept of art and propose definitions of art and of a work of art they usually have the generic concept of art in mind. It has been felt that developments in the arts, particularly in the visual arts, during the past hundred years have strained our concept, or should I say, our concepts and conceptions of art almost beyond breaking point. Aestheticians have concentrated primarily on the visual arts and the examples and counterexamples discussed are drawn mostly from the visual arts. Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades in particular have played an extraordinary role in the discussions of analytic aestheticians. As Richard Wollheim noted, the advocates of the institutional theory of art ‘have been deeply impressed by the phenomenon of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades’, adding that it ‘would be a total misunderstanding of Duchamp’s intentions . . . to think that the existence of readymades requires aesthetic theory to be reformulated in such a way as to represent an object like Fontaine as a central case of a work of art’.1 Of course there have been provocations – conceptual as well as nonconceptual – in other art forms as well. But the offence that literary works such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterleys Lover have given is not conceptual. There are purported literary works that raise questions about their conceptual status, as does Finnegans Wake, and Hugo Ball’s ‘phonetic’ poems, but by and large literature is a more conservative art form than the visual arts. There are far fewer ‘anxious objects’ in literature than in the visual arts.2 It is unlikely that the institutional theory of art, as a definition of art, would have been put forward had Dickie and his followers focused on literature or architecture. As Dickie declares, ‘[b]oth versions of the institutional theory of art have quite consciously been worked out with the practices of the artworld in mind – especially developments of the last hundred years or so, such as dadaism, pop art, found art, and happenings’.3 It does, of course, make sense to regard literature or architecture as cultural practices involving institutions, but the notion of appreciation plays an entirely different role in these art forms than in those that so intrigued Dickie. II.ii. Art as an open concept Most philosophers have assumed that the analysis they offer of the generic concept of art is a fortiori also valid for sub-concepts such as literature, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture.4 If the generic concept of art is an institutional concept, that is, if it can be analysed

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and defined in institutional terms, the concepts of literature, painting, sculpture, music, architecture as well as of other art forms such as opera, theatre, dance, and film are also assumed to be institutional concepts, and to those who have argued that the concept of art is an indefinable ‘open’ concept based on family resemblances between their members, it has seemed that the sub-concepts are also open. In ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, Morris Weitz illustrates what he takes to be ‘the open character’ of the concept of art by offering ‘examples drawn from its sub-concepts’,5 but the only examples he considers are drawn from literature, moreover only from one genre, the novel. Weitz argues, or, rather assumes that what is true of the novel, is ‘true of every subconcept of art: “tragedy”, “comedy”, “painting”, “opera”, etc., of “art” itself’,6 that is, they are open concepts which cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient properties. Thus Weitz seems to argue that if the generic concept of art is open, so are the sub-concepts of art, if they were not, the definition of art and its sub-concepts would ‘foreclose . . . on the very conditions of creativity in the arts’.7 What Weitz probably had in mind, though he does not say so explicitly, is that art and art forms have a history, and that art forms consequently develop and change. Weitz’s argument is somewhat reminiscent of Nietzsche’s conviction ‘that only that which has no history . . . can be defined’.8 Nevertheless Weitz recognizes that ‘there are legitimate and serviceable closed concepts in art’,9 such as Greek tragedy, which is a closed concept in contrast to the concept of tragedy, presumably because art forms and genres which are not ‘alive’ any more are ‘closed’. A theory or a real definition, which for Weitz amounts to the same,10 of Greek tragedy is therefore possible. If Weitz is correct in thinking that art forms and genres of the past, that is, art forms and genres in which no new works can appear, are definable, it should be possible to provide definitions in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient properties of, for instance, Shakespearean tragedy, the Victorian novel, Imagism, the Second Viennese School or of British pop-art, since no new works can be created in these styles and genres. Nevertheless it is extremely unlikely that any generally acceptable definition of these styles and genres will be forthcoming. Weitz later realized this and attempted to show why this is so. Weitz, then, argues that the concept of art as well as the sub-concepts of art, such as tragedy and painting are open concepts. But even if the sub-concepts that Weitz considers (tragedy, comedy, painting, and opera) really are sub-concepts of art, there are categorial differences between them: they are not on the same level of generality. Whereas painting and opera relate to the generic concept of art as species to a

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genus, tragedy and comedy are sub-concepts of the generic concept of literature, and relate to that concept as species to a genus. Discussing Weitz’s view of definitions in aesthetics, George Dickie, while admitting that ‘all or some of the sub-concepts of art, such as novel, tragedy, sculpture, and painting, may lack necessary and sufficient conditions’,11 insists that it still could be the case that ‘ “work of art,” which is the genus of the all sub-concepts, can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions’.12 According to Weitz the generic concept of art is an open concept, and so are the sub-concepts of literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music – with the exceptions mentioned,13 whereas for Dickie the generic concept of art is a closed one, and the sub-concepts may be open.14 In The Opening Mind Weitz distinguishes between various kinds of open concepts, that is, concepts which cannot be defined in terms of ‘definitive sets of rules or criteria . . . for their use’.15 ‘The perennially debatable’ concepts such as realism, romanticism, and modernism are ‘governed by criteria’, but ‘none of these criteria is necessary or sufficient and each is intelligibly rejectable’,16 whereas the perennially flexible concepts are open in the sense that they ‘must allow for and accommodate the ever present possibility of the new and unforeseen’.17 The valid point Weitz is making here is that there are several kinds of open concepts with important logical differences. All open concepts have, however, one feature in common, namely, the feature that there is ‘no definitive set of criteria’ for the application of the concept in question.18 Art is a perennially flexible concept because it must ‘allow for the possibility of new [criteria] that render definitive sets of them violations of the concept . . . they convey’.19 Weitz’s main argument against the possibility of defining the concept of art, and many of its sub-concepts such as literature, sculpture and music, is the same as before: the creativity of art demands that these concepts be open. Now, this argument has been severely criticized by many philosophers of art. Noël Carroll, for example, claims that the supposition ‘[t]hat artworks might possess defining properties does not logically preclude the invention of new works that instantiate the relevant conditions in innovative, unexpected, and unforeseeable ways’.20 This may be so, but the relevant conditions have to be spelt out, and even if they could be specified exhaustively, doesn’t it happen sometimes – as with avant-garde works in the visual arts – that the relevant conditions change, or, rather that new criteria are added to the concept of art? Carroll goes on to invoke

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the analogy between science and art. However, I find this unconvincing. Carroll claims that ‘[a] definition of science would not preclude innovative, unexpected, and unforeseeable research’.21 This is true, but then defining science is not one of the occupational obsessions of philosophers of science, nor of scientists. Of course, questions concerning the legitimacy of new methods and procedures arise, but there is no such thing as the scientific method which remains the same through history and which could be invoked as a defining feature of scientific knowledge and research. There is one important distinction to keep in mind when discussing creativity and novelty in the arts: the distinction between ‘nonradical creativity’ and ‘radical creativity’.22 Nonradical creativity is compatible with real definitions. Radical creativity, on the other hand, poses a problem for the search for real definitions of art and its sub-concepts. A definition of the realist novel in terms of narrative technique and subject-matter did not prevent Jane Austen and George Eliot from writing innovative novels. The problem arises when something radically new is created and presented as a work of art. This happens rarely in the art of literature, but has happened often in the visual arts in the twentieth century although ‘novelty’ has a tendency to wear off.23 Weitz’s family-resemblance argument has been criticized for not being able to show what it purports to show, namely, how radical innovation is possible in the arts, how new art forms and genres emerge and are accepted as art since everything can be seen to resemble everything else in some respect. The family resemblance model can, however, handle these cases because the metaphor of a family implies a genealogy and therefore a history and a tradition. Radically new or challenging works, and radically innovative art forms and genres can then be seen to share one or several properties or functions of previous art forms and genres or to perform similar or analogous functions. Even critics of the family resemblance approach seem to recognize this. ‘[T]he fact that we call new things “art” ’, says Colin Lyas, ‘shows that they share something with their predecessors’.24 Otherwise it would be difficult to understand why they are called ‘art’. And as Carroll points out, ‘the relevant changes and expansions must be related to what precedes them, or they would not be changes and expansions of the practice [of art]’.25 As Cynthia Freeland says in her recent book, ‘[m]any modern artworks challenge us to figure out why, on any theory, they would count as art’.26 She attempts to show how challenging and shocking works of visual art such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) can be art by emphasizing similarities in purpose and function between them and some of Goya’s

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works.27 When the first non-figurative paintings were created in the 1910s the concept of painting changed, or, rather the concept of painting was expanded in order to cover these unforeseen innovations in the art of painting. When Rimbaud and Verlaine began writing vers libre around 1880 the concept of poetry changed since it was no longer deemed necessary for poets to follow prescribed metrical patterns, and when the second Viennese School abandoned tonality as the organizing principle of composing music the concept of music underwent a transformation. Some concepts, such as the generic concept of literature, on the other hand, have not expanded; on the contrary, it has acquired a more restricted sense since the eighteenth century, a matter I return to in the first section of part III of this essay. II.iii. Art as an institutional concept The institutional theory of art, originally proposed by George Dickie in 1969, and modified several times, has been at the forefront of the discussion for a long time, and is still debated.28 In spite of weighty criticisms, which in particular concern Dickie’s contention that art is a purely descriptive concept implying that artefacts are classified as works of art according to descriptive criteria, the institutional theory still has many defenders. Stephen Davies, while critical of the ‘ahistoricism’ of Dickie’s institutionalism, sides with the institutional, or, as he prefers to say, ‘procedural’ definitions of art,29 and Robert Yanal is able to say that ‘[n]o one has in any way refuted the institutional theory’.30 Even those who oppose the institutional theory of art admit that there is a core of truth in the theory, although it is unacceptable as a definition of art.31 Dickie nowadays distinguishes between two rather different versions of his institutional theory of art, the early version codified in his Art and the Aesthetic, the later version presented in The Art Circle32 and commented upon and modified in other writings.33 Common to both versions is the attempt to isolate a descriptive sense of ‘art’ and to define it in institutional terms, that is, in terms of an artworld a representative of which confers the status of being a candidate for appreciation on certain artefacts (the early version) or in terms of an artist who creates an artefact to be presented to an artworld public (the later version). In the early version there is more emphasis on the institutional setting; the artworld is seen as an informal institution which has the power to confer a certain status (of being a candidate for appreciation) analogously to the conferment of legal status to a couple in marriage or to the conferment of the non-legal status of a Ph.D. degree (Dickie’s examples). In both cases an institutional framework and institutionally

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defined roles are presupposed for the successful conferment of a new social status. The analogy between a social institution such as the legal system and the artworld is, however, as Dickie now recognizes, weak, since ‘[t]he counterparts in the artworld to specified procedures and lines of authority are nowhere codified, and the artworld carries on its business at the level of customary practice’.34 To say that ‘customary practices’ constitute the artworld and the various artworld systems (painting, literature, etc.) which make up the total artworld comes close to saying that the artworld is not really an institution, so ‘the institutional theory’ may be a misnomer with regard to Dickie’s later theory. Both versions of the institutional theory exemplify, however, the procedural approach to the definition of art. The notion of appreciation in Dickie’s early theory and the notion of presentation in the later version are obscure. It is unclear what he considers the nature of appreciation to be, and what role the possibility of appreciation and actual appreciation respectively play in his definition of art. Being a candidate for appreciation seems to imply that the object in question is appreciable, even if it is not actually appreciated (in an art-relevant sense) by members of the artworld. In a perceptive criticism of Dickie’s first statement of the institutional theory of art in ‘Defining Art’35 Ted Cohen raises the question whether there are any limits to what can be appreciated and claims ‘that possibilities concerning what can be appreciated have some bearing on what can be made a candidate for appreciation’.36 Dickie speaks of appreciation in general terms though what his theory needs is an account of the kind of appreciation that works of art invite or are intended to invite.37 It is certainly not enough to say as does Dickie, that ‘[t]he kind of appreciation I have in mind is simply the kind characteristic of our experiences of paintings, novels, and the like’.38 Responding to Cohen’s criticism to the effect that in order for something to be a candidate for appreciation ‘it must be possible for that thing to be appreciated’,39 Dickie claims that Duchamp’s Fountain in fact can be appreciated, because of ‘its gleaming white surface, the depth revealed when it reflects images of surrounding objects, its pleasing oval shape’,40 adding for good measure that Fountain has qualities similar to those possessed by Brancusi’s or Moore’s sculptures. Perhaps someone might approach Duchamp’s Fountain in the way Dickie envisages, but that would betray a total misunderstanding of Duchamp’s intentions. His work was certainly not meant to be appreciated for its ‘gleaming white surface’.41 Any perceptual object, however insignificant, can be viewed and appreciated for its perceptual surface qualities without making it into a work of art. This kind of appre-

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ciation is totally different from the kind of appreciative response relevant to works of art. In his Introduction to Aesthetics, published almost thirty years after his first article on the definition of art, Dickie claims that ‘[t]he earlier version of the institutional theory does not involve a special kind of aesthetic appreciation’, and he furthermore denies that ‘there is a special kind of aesthetic appreciation’.42 For him appreciation simply means ‘something like “in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable” ’.43 The question nevertheless remains which qualities are relevant to experiencing something as a work of art, and which values are the relevant ones. Aesthetic appreciation is constituted through paying attention to and experiencing the art-relevant qualities of a visual work and the literature-relevant qualities of a literary work and of finding these particular artistic qualities of a work valuable. We have seen that Dickie claims that Fountain was exhibited as a candidate for appreciation and that it can, in fact, be appreciated, that it is appreciable. In his response to Cohen’s criticisms Dickie agrees ‘that every work of art must have some minimal potential value or worthiness’, a contention that in his view ‘does not collapse the distinction between the evaluative sense and the classificatory sense of “work of art” ’.44 We know that an object has potential (artistic) value if, in fact, it has been so valued, and in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain we know that it has been ‘appreciated’ by other artists and members of the artworld as an artistic gesture of defiance, or as a work of meta-art. Whether we ourselves ‘appreciate’ it, or any other work for that matter, is beside the point. What matters is that it has been recognized as a work of art by a majority of art historians and critics, who for a variety of reasons that were accepted as legitimate reasons in the artworld, accepted Fountain as a work of art. In his Introduction to Aesthetics, where Dickie rehearses the later version of the institutional theory of art claiming that it is important ‘not to build into the definition of the classificatory sense of “work of art” value properties such as actual appreciation’ since in his view that would debar us from speaking of unappreciated works of art and of bad works of art.45 Dickie is not alone in thinking that evaluative definitions of art, or the view that art (and its sub-concepts) are fundamentally evaluative concepts have this consequence. Also Robert Yanal thinks that if we define art in evaluative terms, bad art becomes ‘a definitional impossibility’.46 I fail, however, to see that this follows, nor do I think that ‘actual appreciation’ is a value property or that using value criteria in determining or deciding that something is a work of art prevents us from speaking of unappreciated or bad works of art.

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A bad work of art is in my view a work that fulfils some minimal requirements for arthood, or, rather is deemed to possess valuable properties to a small degree: a work is recognized as a work of art because it passes a certain minimal test.47 The main weakness of both Weitz’s and Dickie’s theories of art is that they regard the concept of art as a purely descriptive and classificatory concept, whereas it, in fact, is an evaluative concept. Weitz, in contrast to Dickie, however, realizes that the ‘ “criteria of recognition” of works of art’ are mostly evaluative in nature.48 II.iv. Identifying art Morris Weitz has been criticized by Peter Kivy among others for failing to distinguish between defining art, and offering criteria for arthood. Kivy differentiates between an epistemic thesis and an ontological one. It is one thing to claim, he argues, that ‘we tell whether something is a work of art by noting family resemblances (the epistemic claim) even though, in fact, what makes it a work of art is some (unknown) property common to all artworks (the ontological claim)’.49 According to Kivy ‘all works of art [might well] have a common (unknown) defining property . . . even though we perforce tell which are and which are not works of art by noticing “strands of similarities” ’.50 There is in his view an analogy with natural kinds like ‘water’: we tell whether something is water from its resemblance to other samples of the same stuff, but what makes something water is a common (invisible) property, namely, the molecular structure that defines water. This is an intriguing but limping analogy. The fact that over two thousand years of theorizing about art has not resulted in the discovery of this purported ‘unknown defining property’ analogous to the molecular structure of water might well induce us to believe that the failure to discover the ‘deep structure’ of arthood is due to the fact that art does not have a common essence.51 The same distinction is made by James C. Anderson; the distinction between what he calls the metaphysical project of defining art and the epistemological project of identifying art, or, rather of finding criteria for identifying art.52 In discussing these related but different projects, Anderson refers to Collingwood, who in the introduction to The Principles of Art claimed that there is an important difference between having a clear idea about something and ‘construct[ing] a definition or (what is the same thing) a “theory” of something’.53 Having a clear idea about something enables us to identify the thing in question and to recognize it for what it is, and to apply the corresponding term correctly, whereas defining something is more like explaining the thing by placing it in relation to other phenomena, since defining ‘necessarily means

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defining one thing in terms of something else’, Collingwood says.54 Collingwood’s purpose is, as he declares in the first sentence, ‘to answer the question: What is art?’.55 In order to provide a theory or a definition of art, which for Collingwood amounts to the same thing, we must have some kind of pre-definitional and pre-theoretical knowledge that enables us to identify certain artefacts as works of art. We could perhaps say, using traditional terminology, that we must be aware of the normal extension of the term ‘art’, although we do not know its intension. The purpose of a definition or a theory of art is to give us insight into the essence of art, into that which makes something art, to ‘make explicit the content of our concept of art’, as Anderson puts it.56 Now, it seems natural to suppose that the identification and recognition of something as a work of art or as a work of literature must precede the project of defining art or literature, that is, we cannot theorize about the essence or the function of art or literature unless we possess what could be called an ‘identificatory conception of art’ and literature respectively. A minimal definition, or, rather, a minimal conception of literature, is a precondition for a full-fledged definition of literature and, also for literary theory, for a theory about literature.57 This minimal conception of literature is implicit in the practices of literary institutions, and gives us a set of exemplary or paradigmatic works of literature, which serves as the logical starting point for theorizing about the nature and function of literature whether a theory of literature issues in an explicit definition of literature or not. This, however, does not mean that the exemplary works that constitute the core of the minimal and pretheoretical conception of literature necessarily retain their status as exemplary and paradigmatic works at the end of the day. As the theoretical work progresses and the theorist’s grasp of the complexities and the heterogeneity of the literary field deepens, his or her understanding of the nature and functions of literature also deepens. This may lead the theorist to question the paradigmatic status of certain works, works that were regarded as paradigmatic literary works at the beginning of the investigation, without, however, losing their status as literary works. They are still literary works, but in the light of an elaborated theory of literature they are perhaps no longer regarded as exemplary. Even those who question the legitimacy of the category of art or of literature aiming at exploding it and replacing literary criticism and the scholarly study of literature with discourse analysis, ideological analysis, or a cultural studies approach to literature (!) must start from a minimal conception and concept of art and literature; otherwise the project could not get off the ground. Tony Bennett, for example, believes that the term

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‘literature’ which ‘cannot designate an ontologically distinct realm of writing’ can be used to ‘refer to a particular socially organised space of representation whose specificity consists in the institutionally and discursively regulated forms of use and deployment to which selected texts are put’.58 This enables us, according to Bennett, ‘to rethink the ontological status of literature such that it is taken to refer to an observable set of social processes rather than to an (as it has proved so far) unfathomable essence’.59 Literature and literary works can certainly be analysed ‘from the outside’ as a ‘socially organised space of representation’, in which ‘selected texts’ are put to certain uses and deployments. But in order to achieve this, we must be able to identify certain texts as literary texts, otherwise we wouldn’t know what we were analysing and how the (literary?) texts relate to a social and cultural context. Literature may be regarded as ‘an observable set of social processes’, and, according to Bennett literature probably is just that, but the term ‘literature’ certainly does not refer to ‘a socially organised space of representation’. It does so only in his theory. Bennett seems to regard the statement I have quoted as a definition of literature, but, in fact, his statement presupposes a conception of literature, a minimal concept of literature, which can be no other than the concept provided by the literary tradition and its institutions. To repudiate that tradition is to repudiate literature and to reject the concept of literature. It is, of course, quite possible to do that, and it is being done by many literary theorists for a variety of motives and reasons, but then they are treating literary texts as springboards for theorizing not about literature but about something else.

III. The concept of literature III.i. The meanings of ‘literature’ The history of the term ‘literature’ is a fascinating subject in its own right and is, I believe, relevant to the analysis of the concept, or, rather, the concepts of literature current today. Some theorists believe that literature can only be defined in historical terms, whereas others while not subscribing explicitly to an historicist approach to the definition of literature think that the history of ‘literature’ must be taken into account if we wish to understand our present concept and conceptions of literature. The ‘historical definition’ of art proposed by Jerrold Levinson and the ‘historical functionalism’ advocated by Robert Stecker has received much attention in recent years.60 The role of history in

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these theories is, however, rather Pickwickian. For although, according to Levinson, it is a necessary condition for something being a work of art that it has been intended to be regarded ‘in any way (or ways) in which prior artworks are or were correctly (standardly) regarded’,61 he has nothing to say about how works of art were regarded in the past and what were the correct ways of regarding them. In other words, the actual history of the concept of art plays no role in his theory in spite of the fact that he believes that ‘the essence of art . . . lies in art’s relation to its contingent history’.62 History seems to have a purely logical role in Levinson’s and Stecker’s theories of art, although their approach seems to demand investigations into the actual history of the ideas surrounding the creation of art. Robert Stecker, for example, maintains that ‘earlier concepts are linked to ours both causally and by similarities of content’.63 These links and similarities are of great interest, and an investigation of them will certainly enhance our understanding of the arts both from a historical and a conceptual point of view.64 As René Wellek has said, the definition of literature ‘should be approached through a study of the history of the word “literature” and its cognates’,65 an investigation very different from the logical approach taken by Levinson and Stecker. The very term ‘literature’ is derived from the Latin ‘litteratura’, which had three distinct senses: ‘A writing formed of letters’, ‘the science of language, grammar, philology’ and general learning or erudition.66 In the major European languages the word ‘literature’ was associated with general learning and erudition up till the end of the eighteenth century. In English ‘literature’ referred to ‘[a]cquaintance with “letters” or books’ as well as to ‘polite or humane learning’, a sense that is now rare and obsolete.67 This sense was the only one recognized by Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. In French the word ‘littérature’ had similar connotations before the end of the eighteenth century. A person could be ‘de grande littérature’ or have ‘une littérature immense’.68 In England one could be a person ‘of infinite literature’ or ‘of very small literature’ as the case might be.69 In German the same linguistic development took place as in English and French: ‘Literatur’ first meant simply science (‘Wissenschaft’) or scientific knowledge and erudition; around the turn of the eighteenth century new and differentiated uses gradually emerged.70 The second sense of ‘literature’ listed by The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘[l]iterary work or production’ from 1779, has a distinctly modern flavour, the third sense is ‘[l]iterary productions as a whole’ from 1812 referring to the body of writings in a particular country or in a particular period, while today, the OED says, the word is ‘applied

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to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’.71 This definition has a definitely oldfashioned ring, but it pinpoints the evaluative nature of ‘literature’. As in English, the word ‘Literatur’ in German refers to writings on a particular subject as well as to writings with artistic value, for which at the beginning of the nineteenth century the expression ‘schöne Literatur’ was coined, an expression that has no equivalent in English but exists in Swedish (‘skönlitteratur’) and is a literal translation of the older French expression ‘belles-lettres’, which in its turn was replaced by ‘littérature’ at the end of the seventeenth century.72 ‘[H]istorically’, says Wellek, ‘literature has been used to define writings of some significance’ regardless of subject-matter, therefore ‘[s]ome criterion of quality or value (intellectual, moral, aesthetic, political, national) is implied’.73 This captures, I think, to a certain extent most contemporary uses of ‘literature’, that is, ‘literature’ is used explicitly or implicitly as a value-term. Wellek also rightly emphasizes that a text can be regarded as a work of literature because it exemplifies values belonging to different categories. There is, however, an ambiguity in Wellek’s formulation. It is unclear whether he thinks that the works (or, at least most of the works) labelled ‘literature’ are actually valuable (‘writings of significance’), or whether he holds that those works are regarded as valuable? There is an important difference between something actually being valuable and something being regarded as valuable. ‘This novel is great literature because . . .’ is a value judgement, whereas the statement ‘This novel is regarded as valuable because . . .’ is not. There is a fundamental difference between the view that nothing can be a work of literature unless it actually possesses artistic value (at least to some extent), and the view that nothing can be a work of literature unless it is deemed to possess artistic value at some point of time in the history of the artworld. According to both views the concept of literature is in a sense an evaluative concept – I believe it is evaluative in the latter sense. Wellek further notes that the uses of ‘literature’ before the end of the eighteenth century were very inclusive; works of history, of philosophy and even natural science were considered to be literature. The ‘modern’ conception, which refers to ‘imaginative literature’ and includes ‘the poem, the tale, the play in particular’ developed slowly and is, according to Wellek, intimately connected with the rise of aesthetics, of the whole system of arts’.74 New institutions were created, such as the ‘Académie des Beaux Arts’, the result of a merger of several older

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academies in 1795,75 and thus the modern system of the arts was consolidated.76 There is widespread agreement that the term ‘literature’ has existed in its current uses for about two hundred years. In addition to ‘literature’ in the sense of literacy and in the sense of general erudition Bruce Robbins lists in his article ‘What is Literature?’ two ‘modern’ senses: ‘literature’ as ‘a valued body of secular writings until the early eighteenth century’ and a ‘still more . . . specialized sense of creative or imaginative writing, as distinguished from the moral, the true, and the useful’.77 From the fact that literature in the modern sense of ‘imaginative writing of some distinction’ is about two hundred years old, it follows, Robbins believes, that there ‘is no . . . reason to believe that Sophocles, Dante, William Shakespeare, or even Voltaire was self-consciously trying to produce literature in the modern imaginative/creative sense’.78 This means, according to Robbins, that we cannot regard literature ‘to be both imaginative/creative and a canon extending back to classical antiquity’.79 Since there is a canon, the western canon extending back to Greek antiquity, this presumably means that there were writers before the advent of the modern conception of literature as imaginative and creative writing nevertheless composing imaginative literature; or it means, as Robbins claims, that there is ‘a retroactive imposition of the modern sense upon works that recognized no such criterion’.80 I shall return to this problem when discussing the institutional approach to literature. But first I wish to contrast Robbins’s view with Wellek’s view that if we accept fictionality, invention, or imagination ‘as the distinguishing trait of literature, we think thus of literature in terms of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Keats rather than of Cicero or Montaigne, Bossuet, or Emerson’.81 Presumably the works of the former qualify as literature because they fulfil Wellek’s criteria of literature in the contemporary sense: ‘organization, personal expression, realization and exploitation of the medium, lack of practical purpose, and, of course, fictionality’.82 In the following section I will focus on analyses of the modern sense of literature and definitions of the modern concept of literature, that is, of imaginative fictional literature or, to quote Wellek, ‘imaginative literature in which the aesthetic function dominates’.83 Wellek’s characterization of the contemporary use of ‘literature’ comes close to what I have called a ‘minimal concept of literature’, a conception that logically precedes any theories of literature and any ‘theoretical’ definitions of literature and sociological analyses of the literary field.

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III.ii. Defining literature Various institutional analyses of the concept of literature have been offered in the past twenty or thirty years and they have to a large extent been prompted by the failure to find a definition of literature identifying the necessary and sufficient properties of literature. As a preliminary to a discussion of an institutional approach to literature it is instructive to look at W.W. Robson’s article, ‘The Definition of Literature’. According to Robson definitions of literature ‘may be divided, without remainder, into the descriptive and the honorific’, apparently assuming that the descriptive/evaluative dichotomy is absolute and that definitions of literature can be neatly classified as either descriptive or evaluative.84 To say that a definition of literature is purely descriptive means, I suppose, that literature is defined in purely descriptive terms, that is, that the criteria that a verbal artefact must fulfil in order to fall under the concept of literature are descriptive. Robson does not consider the possibility of ‘mixed’ criteria, that is, a set of criteria containing both descriptive and evaluative terms. In fact, most definitions of literature as an evaluative concept seem to be of this kind; they employ both descriptive and evaluative criteria.85 Robson considers two kinds of descriptive definitions, the first defining literature in terms of a special use of language and the second defining literature in terms of fiction, or, fictionality. Theories defining literature in terms of a specific literary use of language, distinguish as Wellek and Warren do, between ordinary everyday language, scientific language, and literary language. Theorists in search of the ‘literariness’ of literary language have often taken poetry as paradigmatic of literary language as such. But, as Robson notes, ‘there is a great deal of poetry which does not differ in diction and syntax from everyday uses, or from prose uses’.86 ‘Literary’ tropes occur in almost all kinds of language uses, although it is prevalent in certain kinds of poetry and literary prose. The second descriptive definition he discusses is the definition of literature in terms of fiction, a definition, that according to him, ‘most of us, for practical purposes, unreflectively accept’.87 Fictionality, I think, is often employed as a criterion for recognizing or identifying something as literature. It is, however, a defeasible criterion since fiction, as Robson realizes, ‘includes a lot of writing which no one, neither author nor reader, would dream of calling literature’.88 Fairytales, cartoons, and the various genres comprising sub-literature, as well as mythological narratives and even Ptolemy’s Almagest are fictions but hardly literature. Then there are border-line cases such as philosophical prose and historical works, which – rightly or wrongly – are included in canons of national literatures,89 not to mention historical and autobio-

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graphical novels that contain fictional elements but are not wholly fictitious. It seems that only fiction which has, or, is considered to have artistic value and which is consequently incorporated into a literary tradition is literature. Fiction may still be, as Robson believes, ‘in some way exceptionally distinctive of [literature]’, but since it cannot be defined as fiction, ‘the last plausible candidate for a descriptive definition of literature disappears’ he thinks.90 We are, in his view, left with honorific definitions. Robson does not, however, offer any definition of his own, instead he proposes several criteria for literature, which are not meant to make up a definition; genuine survival, or, the test of time being his main criterion. ‘[A] central characteristic of literature’, says Robson, is the ‘transcendence of originating contexts’, which is secured, he suggests by ‘linguistic adequacy, propriety, and excellence’.91 Robson realizes that his conception, which he regards as ‘a recommendation’ can be ‘criticised on the ground that it is too formalistic’ in leaving out subject-matter.92 And subject-matter certainly matters. There are, moreover, many texts which transcend their originating context without being literary. If it were a necessary criterion, contemporary novels, for example, could not be regarded as literature, since the test of time cannot be applied to them. Nor does it distinguish literary texts from philosophical texts or any other texts transcending their original context. III.iii. Literature as an institutional concept Because of the difficulties of offering an essentialist analysis of literature and a definition of literature in terms of necessary and sufficient properties many theorists have favoured an institutional approach to literature, which does not mean that literary theorists simply have taken over Dickie’s analysis of the generic concept of art and applied it to literature.93 In fact, Dickie’s theory has not been a major influence for the literary institutionalists.94 Theorists who wish to explicate the concept of literature in terms of an institution and a practice seem to share Stein Haugom Olsen’s view that an analysis of this type offers us ‘some insight into the “essence” of a literary work’.95 One major difference between Dickie’s and Olsen’s view is that whereas Dickie is convinced that the concept of art is a descriptive concept and that there consequently is a classificatory, descriptive concept of literature as well, Olsen and most theorists who favour an institutional and conventionalist analysis of literature claim that the concept of literature is an evaluative concept. In Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s view there are no intrinsic properties of a text that marks it off as a literary text; literature

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is ‘an institutional concept, a concept that is defined within a practice involving authors (as producers), texts, and readers’.96 Literature cannot be defined in terms of fictionality, specific language uses, or aesthetic effects since many non-literary texts possess the same characteristics as literary texts without being literary works. A text is a literary work, according to Lamarque and Olsen, if it is intended ‘to be read within the framework of conventions defining the practice (constituting the institution) of literature’.97 Literature cannot be defined in terms of formal features as there are ‘no inherent formal features that constitute [literary works] as literary works’.98 ‘Certain kind of texts’ Lamarque and Olsen claim, ‘become literary works only by fulfilling a role in, and being subject to the conventions of, an institution’.99 Theorists searching for inherent properties of literary works have suggested that there are specific syntactic and semantic features defining literature and literary works, their ‘literariness’, but these attempts at defining literature are rejected by Lamarque and Olsen as they are by most theorists today. Nor can literature be defined in terms of fictionality or fictional discourse, since ‘ “[f]iction”, in the relevant sense, covers a large subclass of all invented stories, which can be realized in a number of media’.100 Fiction, moreover, is, ‘a descriptive concept while “literature” is an evaluative concept’.101 Literature is ‘[a]n institutional practice’, which is ‘constituted by a set of conventions and concepts which regulate and define the actions and products involved in the practice’.102 An institution is in this context a rule-governed practice which makes certain actions possible: ‘the actions and objects so defined are characterized by (institutional) concepts which again are given meaning only in terms of the rules governing the practice’.103 According to their theory there are two fundamental dimensions of a literary work, the imaginative dimension and the mimetic dimension. It is part of the concept of literature that a work of literature is recognized as resulting from ‘a creative-imaginative effort’.104 There is also ‘the mimetic aspect [which] is both a central and an ineliminable facet of the concept of literature’.105 Lamarque and Olsen’s analysis seems to capture some fundamental aspects of the modern concept of literature, that is, the concept that gradually evolved in the western tradition and which was consolidated during the last decades of the eighteenth century. In particular it seems correct to regard the ‘creative-imaginative’ aspect as fundamental to our contemporary concept of literature. Their claim that a text is identified as a literary work ‘by recognizing the author’s intention that the text is produced and meant to be read within the framework of conventions defining the practice (constituting the institution)

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of literature’,106 is, however, more problematic since there can apparently be literary works that were not produced with that intention. If the relevant intention is, as Lamarque and Olsen say, ‘the intention to invoke the literary response’,107 the Homeric epic is hardly literature, nor are the Greek tragedies since they were written and produced in a very different cultural and social context; they were embedded in institutions and practices different from the literary institution and the literary practices we know. Of course, we can say that there is a certain continuity between Greek literature and modern literature, they both exemplify story-telling, and they can be seen to have thematic properties, but if this is so, is it not because Greek literature has been incorporated into the western canon? These oral traditions and works were not literature in the modern sense but have been ‘adopted’ and are now regarded as literature, but they hardly fall under the modern concept of literature without qualifications.108 III.iv. Literature and value The ‘attack on literature’ in post-structuralist literary theory is accompanied by a deep-seated mistrust of values and value-judgements.109 Stuart Sim’s remark to the effect that ‘[t]he rejection, or at least suspicion, of value judgement is a common theme running through structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism’ though perhaps too sweeping, is not an entirely unfair assessment.110 The concept of literature itself, as well as assessments of literary merit, are regarded as part and parcel of an ideologically pernicious ‘humanist’ conception of culture. Nevertheless value-judgements about literary works and of works of art in general are unavoidable. Similarly unavoidable are valuejudgements about theoretical works in and outside of aesthetics. Deconstructionist, feminist and psychoanalytic literary theorists cannot avoid believing that their particular theoretical approaches are superior to rival approaches, in particular to humanist conceptions of art and literature. In order to illustrate these points I shall discuss a few critical appraisals of three very different works, Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608), Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Elizabeth George’s detective novel In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (1999). Shakespeare’s King Lear ‘has come to be regarded not only as its author’s finest literary achievement, but also as one of the most profound and challenging examinations ever undertaken of what it means to be human’, says Stanley Wells.111 The literary value of the play is presumably due, at least partly, to the ‘earnestness of the play’s concern with fundamental human issues’.112 But it is not only the theme of the

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play and the way the theme is handled that contributes to its value, according to Wells. He also praises King Lear for its language, which ‘can rise to incomparable heights of calculated eloquence in both verse and prose’.113 The linguistic artifice of the play, Wells argues, is, moreover ‘not entirely unselfconscious . . . at times he causes the characters to express awareness of the manipulative and affective powers of what they say and of the way they say it’.114 Older critics such as A.C Bradley and Wilson Knight have valued the play for its ‘immense scope’, for ‘the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains’,115 for ‘the abundance and richness of human delineation’ and for ‘the purposeful working out of a purgatorial philosophy’.116 In spite of differences of emphasis and interpretation these critics apparently use similar criteria in their evaluation of the play: the use of language, the structure of the plot, the subject-matter of the play and the way in which the play develops its theme. Radical ‘anti-humanist’ critics have approached the play from a different perspective and with different value commitments, but have, nevertheless, regarded King Lear as in some sense exemplary. Terry Eagleton, for example, in his William Shakespeare, ‘an exercise in political semiotics’,117 claims that there ‘would seem a contradiction at the very core of the linguistic animal which makes it “natural” for signs to come adrift from things, consciousness to overstep physical bonds, values to get out of hand and norms to be destructively overridden’.118 These contradictions, which Eagleton somewhat surprisingly (and inconsistently) calls ‘opposites’ cannot simply be reconciled. ‘It is a matter’, he says, ‘of regulating what would seem an ineradicable contradiction in the material structure of the human creature’, and he concludes that ‘King Lear is a tragedy because it stares this contradiction full in the face, aware that no poetic symbolism is adequate to resolve it’.119 It could perhaps be said that Eagleton in his own way discovered a ‘perennial theme’ in King Lear, because the purported fact that ‘it is structural to human nature to surpass itself’,120 is in his view exemplified and illustrated in Shakespeare’s play. Kathleen McLuskie offers a feminist reading of King Lear, claiming that ‘the text contains possibilities for subverting [the misogynist] meanings and the potential for reconstructing them in feminist terms’.121 This, however, does not mean that ‘[f]eminist criticism should restrict itself to privileging the woman’s part or to special pleading on behalf of female characters’.122 Feminist criticism can, she continues, ‘be equally well served by making a text reveal the conditions in which a particular ideology of femininity functions and by both revealing and subverting the hold which such an

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ideology has for readers both female and male’.123 The value of King Lear resides for her, at least in part, in ‘[t]the potential for subversive contradiction in the text’, a potential that is ‘restricted to the first part’.124 Presumably Shakespeare’s play would be less interesting, less worthy of study if it did not contain ‘a subversive potential’. No doubt many texts both literary and non-literary can be read from a feminist perspective and be made ‘to reveal the conditions in which a particular ideology of femininity functions’. There is nothing particularly literary about such a project, and nothing Eagleton or McLuskie say can serve to define literature as an art, nor to legitimate specific value-judgements about works of literature. Their approach presupposes a minimal concept of literature, and their choice of no less a canonical author than Shakespeare as the object of analysis would seem to presuppose traditional evaluations of literature as well. For it is arguable that other texts, such as sermons, political pamphlets, philosophical and legal treatises ‘reveal the conditions in which a particular ideology of femininity functions’ much more clearly than Shakespeare’s complex and ambiguous plays. The fact that King Lear has been approached from a great variety of perspectives and interpreted in accordance with formalist, structuralist, deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist critical canons, bears according to Wells witness ‘to the richness and density of Shakespeare’s text, and to the force and impact over the centuries, not only on those who regard it as one of the landmarks of Western civilization, but even on those who have found it technically faulty and ideologically distasteful’.125 In other words, critics of various persuasions have treated the play not only as literature, but as great or at least as important literature. My second example is a postmodern novel, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. In this novel, Brian McHale claims, Pynchon achieves a breakthrough ‘to a mode of fiction beyond modernism and its epistemological premises’; Pynchon ‘is no longer constrained by the limits of modernism’, here he ‘freely exploit[s] the artistic possibilities of the plurality of worlds’ as well as ‘the transgression of boundaries between worlds’.126 In a later work, McHale praises Pynchon’s novel for its effect to radically ‘destabilize novelistic ontology’; it has the ‘salutary [effect] of disrupting the conditioned responses of the modernist reader’.127 In a similar vein Linda Hutcheon claims that the values of postmodernist meta-fiction are mainly cognitive in nature, ‘self-conscious metafiction today is a most didactic form. As such it can teach us much about both the ontological status of fiction (all fiction) and also the complex nature

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of reading (all reading)’.128 Exploiting artistic possibilities, exhibiting the structure of the ontology of fiction, creating new imaginary worlds are apparently values found in meta-fictional novels and in particular in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. McHale’s and Hutcheon’s interpretations are not at issue here; Pynchon’s novel can be interpreted differently and the challenge of postmodernist fiction can be understood differently; the point is rather that according to these critics a work of literature is valuable if it conveys insights into the nature of writing, the nature of reading, and the nature of fiction. My third example is Elizabeth George’s detective novel, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner. It has been praised as ‘an excellent drama of life and death in an enclosed society’.129 The relationship between Nicola Maiden and her parents is an important ingredient in the plot of the novel as is the troubled co-operation between Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. There is a wealth of descriptive detail of various social environments ranging from the seedy atmosphere of escort agencies to the quiet and not so quiet life of respectable middle-class professionals in the countryside. This novel covers, as her previous one, Deception on His Mind (1998), ‘[a]ll the important contemporary themes’ as the Guardian’s reviewer puts it. They are, moreover, ‘handled with . . . skill and sureness of touch’.130 It could be said that both ‘topical themes’ and ‘perennial themes’ in Olsen’s and Lamarque’s sense131 interact in George’s In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner: it is not for nothing that the epigraph of the novel, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child!’ is taken from King Lear.132 George’s detective story certainly deals with matters of abiding human interest; it has a perennial theme ‘realized’ or instantiated in a contemporary setting, and the theme as well as the plot is skilfully handled. It would therefore seem that this detective story is a work of literature, but is it also a work of Literature, and if not, why not? It certainly has no claim to enter the canon of English literature let alone that of western literature. It might be said that her novel is not ‘serious’ enough to count as ‘real’ literature, although it might be among the best novels of its kind, that is, excellent as a detective story. If the status of literature tout court is denied to Elizabeth George’s works it is because the thriller or the detective story is regarded as a minor genre not comparable in literary value to the drama or the novel from Fielding to Margaret Drabble. The literary artworld does not only criticize and evaluate single works of literature; various literary genres are the object of explicit, and more often, implicit evaluations according to a hierarchical scale.

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Every analysis of a literary work that is not purely linguistic or technical is explicitly or implicitly evaluative. But if literary criticism cannot avoid making value-judgements nor can literary theory. The current rhetoric against values and value judgement cannot change the fact that theories are evaluated in terms of their consistency, explanatory value, fruitfulness, originality, elegance, or, radical potential as the case may be. The theoretical orthodoxy claims, according to Murray Krieger, that ‘the quest for value . . . is now at an end’. Our most influential theorists, he continues, urge us to look ‘into the sociological, psychological, and political processes that prompt the strange action we undertake when we evaluate’. Theories claiming to show that ‘evaluation merely reflects an imperialistic attempt to impose one’s own prejudices’133 deny any rationality to evaluations and value-judgements. But, of course, not only literature, but also theories of literature are themselves subject to critical assessment, and thus to evaluation.

Notes 1. Richard Wollheim, ‘The Institutional Theory of Art’, in Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects, 2nd edn, with Six Supplementary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 165. Cf. Dickie’s response to Wollheim’s criticisms in George Dickie, Art and Value: Themes in the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 53–6; pp. 63–73. 2. At least since the 1910s the visual arts have produced an abundance of what the American critic Harold Rosenberg called ‘anxious objects’. He coined that phrase, as Suzi Gablik puts it in her indictment of modernist art, ‘to describe the kind of modern art that makes us uneasy because of uncertainty as to whether we are in the presence of a genuine work of art or not’ (Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984) p. 36). Whatever we may think of these ‘anxious objects’ and their claim to be art, it must be admitted, I think, that the majority of modern and postmodern works of visual art are not ‘anxious objects’, whose arthood is open to doubt. We may add that from a historical perspective ‘anxious objects’ constitute a small minority – because the art status of most works of visual art from, say, Giotto to Francis Bacon is beyond doubt. 3. George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: an Analytic Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 84. 4. These sub-concepts make up ‘The Modern System of the Arts’ as analysed by Kristeller (Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 163–227). Originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), pp. 496–527, and Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1952), pp. 17–46. I have modernized Kristeller’s system somewhat by substituting literature for poetry.

74 From Text to Literature 5. Morris Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, in Joseph Margolis (ed.) Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, 3rd edn (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p. 148. Page references to this reprint. Originally publ. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1956), pp. 27–35. 6. Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, p. 149. 7. Ibid. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic, Second Essay, § 13, trans. Horace B. Samuel, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1913), p. 94. German original, Zur Genealogie der Moral, published in 1887. Nietzsche’s dictum has inspired Terry Diffey’s subtle and historically minded institutional theory of art, see T.J. Diffey, The Republic of Art and Other Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 5, and his essay ‘Essentialism and the Definition of “Art” ’ (Diffey, The Republic of Art, pp. 35–7). Originally published in British Journal of Aesthetics, 13 (1973), pp. 103–20. 9. Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, p. 149. 10. Weitz uses these expressions synonymously. This conflation is unfortunate since there are many kinds of theories in aesthetics and not all of them issue in definitions of art or in definitions of its sub-concepts. In fact, very few literary theories offer formal definitions of literature in terms of necessary and sufficient properties, although they may presuppose as well as imply such definitions. 11. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: an Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 22. 12. Dickie speaks of the concept of a work of art here, not of art, whereas Weitz is concerned with the definition of art, not of a work of art. Dickie’s aim is to define the concept of a work of art, although he sometimes speaks of defining art as well as of defining ‘art’ (Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 21, 27). Now ‘art’ and ‘work of art’ do not necessarily mean the same, for one thing ‘art’ can mean ‘the practice, the activity of art’ or ‘the work of art’, an ambiguity that does not arise in the case of ‘work of art’. There is an analogous difference between ‘literature’ and ‘literary work’. Nor is ‘art’ the same as art. 13. At least in ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’. In The Opening Mind: a Philosophical Study of Humanistic Concepts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) Weitz offers a more differentiated analysis of open concepts, distinguishing between different kinds of open concepts. 14. Cf. Hans-Johann Glock’s claim that Wittgenstein suggested that ‘at least some of the branches of a family-resemblance concept are united by necessary and sufficient condition’ (Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 123). Art and romanticism are, he suggests, resemblance concepts. 15. Weitz, The Opening Mind, p. 31. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 34. This implies that the concept of an open concept is itself a closed concept, since to be an open concept it is necessary and sufficient that it cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient criteria or properties or conditions. Weitz distinguishes between three kinds of open

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

concepts: those ‘with no necessary, no sufficient, and no disjunctive set of sufficient criteria’; those ‘with a necessary criterion but no necessary and sufficient set of criteria’; and those with ‘no definitive set as well as no undebatable necessary criteria’. Ibid., p. 51. Noël Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Noël Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 9 Cf. Lüdeking’s instructive analysis of Weitz in Karlheinz Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst: Eine Einführung (1988) (Munich: Fink, 1998), pp. 70–81. Lüdeking’s work, which is unfortunately not available in English, is one of the most thorough and best discussions of the endeavours of analytical aestheticians to define art. Noël Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, p. 9. These are Peter Kivy’s terms (Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Art: an Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 37). Peter Kivy believes that Weitz has not shown that radical creativity cannot be accommodated by ‘the traditional, common-property necessary-and-sufficient-condition model’ arguing that also Arthur Danto’s analysis of radical creativity ‘is based on that very model’ (Kivy, Philosophies of Art, p. 38). But Danto’s theory, which is almost exclusively concerned with the visual arts, is far from traditional. It is indeed difficult to gather what, according to him, are the necessary and sufficient properties of art. It is far from clear that Carroll’s view that Dickie’s and Danto’s ‘theories are real definitions of art’ is correct (Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Carroll (ed.) Theories of Art Today, p. 10). Carroll has also expressed doubts ‘whether the new institutional theory is really a theory of art’ (Noël Carroll, ‘Identifying Art’, in Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 81). Originally published in Robert J. Yanal (ed.) Institutions of Art (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 3–38. Colin Lyas, Aesthetics (London: UCL Press, 1997), p. 86. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Noël Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, p. 10. Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xvii. Freeland, But Is It Art?, p. 18ff. See, for example, Derek Matravers, ‘The Institutional Theory: a Protean Creature’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2000), pp. 242–50; Lauren Tillinghast, ‘The Classificatory Sense of “Art” ’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61 (2003), pp. 133–48. Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 3. Robert J. Yanal, ‘Institutional Theory of Art’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, p. 511. See Ben Tilghman, But Is It Art? The Value of Art and the Temptation of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 70; Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 223; Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 85; Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford:

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32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

Blackwell, 1992), p. 43. It is noteworthy that Jacques Derrida, a philosopher of a very different ilk than those discussed in this paper, has expressed institutionalist intuitions regarding the concept of art: ‘it [a work of art] cannot be countersigned, that is to say, attested to as signature, unless there is an institutional space in which it can be received, legitimized, and so on. There needs to be a social “community” that says this thing has been done – we don’t even know by whom, we don’t know what it means – however, we are going to put it in a museum or in some archive; we are going to consider it as a work of art’ (‘The Spatial Arts: an Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Peter Brunette and David Wills (eds), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 18). George Dickie, The Art Circle: a Theory of Art (New York: Haven Publications, 1984). Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics; ‘Wollheim’s Dilemma’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 38 (1998), pp. 127–35; ‘Art and Value’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2000), pp. 228–41; ‘The Institutional Theory of Art’, in Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, pp. 93–108 and Art and Value. Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 84. George Dickie, ‘Defining Art’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969), pp. 253–6. Ted Cohen, ‘The Possibility of Art: Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie’, in Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts, p. 189. Page references to this reprint. Originally published in Philosophical Review, 82 (1973), pp. 69–82. See, for example, Christopher New, Philosophy of Literature (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 32–3. Dickie, ‘Defining Art’, p. 255. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Cf. Colin Lyas’s intriguing interpretation of Fountain as a symbol of a bankrupt culture, a culture that produced the fountains of Versaille and ended in World War I (Lyas, Aesthetics, p. 106f.) and Lüdeking’s criticisms of Dickie’s analysis of Fountain (Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 171–3). Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 84. Ibid. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 43. Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 84. Yanal, ‘Institutional Theory of Art’, p. 511. Cf. Cyril Barrett, ‘Are Bad Works of Art “Works of Art?” ’, in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Philosophy and the Arts, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 1971–72 (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 182–93. See also Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Art, p. 100ff. Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, pp. 150–2. Kivy, Philosophies of Art, p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Cf. Richard Kamber’s perceptive article ‘Weitz Reconsidered: A Clearer View of Why Theories of Art Fail’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 38 (1998), pp.

Lars-Olof Åhlberg 77

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

33–46. Kamber argues convincingly, to my mind, that art does not have ‘a deep structure’, therefore the concept of art does not have a common essence to be captured in a definition, nor does literature. James C. Anderson, ‘Aesthetic Concepts of Art’, in Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, p. 65. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 2. Ibid. Ibid., p. 1. Anderson, ‘Aesthetic Concepts of Art’, in Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, p. 68. The minimal conception I have in mind is akin to Gadamerian Vorurteil (pre-conception, prejudice) and Vorverständnis (pre-understanding). See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Part II, sec. II:I, 2nd edn (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1965). Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 140–1. Ibid., p. 141. For ‘historical’ definitions of art see, Jerrold Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 19 (1979) pp. 232–50; ‘Re-fining Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47 (1989), pp. 21–33; and ‘Extending Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993), pp. 411–23. The first two articles reprinted in Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 3–25 and 37–59, the third in Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 150–71. Page references to Music, Art and Metaphysics. See also Stecker, Artworks, chs. 3 and 5. Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, p. 9. Cf. p. 12 and 15. Ibid., p. 25. Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value, p. 17. The philosopher Larry Shiner offers an interesting and penetrating historical account of the emergence of the concept of art in western culture (Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: a Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)). René Wellek, ‘Literature, Fiction, and Literariness’, in René Wellek, The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 20. ‘litteratura’, A Latin Dictionary, founded on Andrew’s edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, rev., enl., and in great part rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), entry 1. under ‘literature’. ‘Littérature’, Dictionnaire des littératures françaises et étrangères, ed. Jacques Demougin (Paris: Larousse, 1985). According to Furetière’s dictionary from 1690 ‘littérature’ is ‘la connaissance profonde des lettres’, and writers such as Scaliger, Grotius and Bayle are said to have been ‘des gens de grande littérature’. The Oxford English Dictionary, see the examples given under ‘literature’, entry 1.

78 From Text to Literature 70. Hermann Paul, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 9th edn, ed. Helmut Henne and Georg Objartel, Niemeyer, CD-ROM. 71. The Oxford English Dictionary, entry 3a under ‘literature’. Two more senses of ‘literature’ are recorded in the OED, viz. writings that treat of a particular subject as in ‘the literature on a particular subject’ (3b) and printed matter of any kind (3c). 72. ‘Belletristik’ is still used in contemporary German, meaning ‘unterhaltende, schöngeistige Literatur’ (‘Belletristik’, ‘belletristisch’, Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch, 2nd edn, Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1989), that is, entertaining, aesthetic literature. ‘Schöngeistig’ means pertaining to a ‘Schöngeist’, which is derived from the French ‘bel esprit’ and has a somewhat ridiculous ring in contemporary German. The Oxford English Dictionary lists ‘Belletrism’ (‘the study or composition of belles-lettres’) as well as ‘belletristic’ (‘pertaining to belles-lettres’). Coleridge wrote in 1821 that he wished he ‘could find a more familiar word than aesthetic, for works of taste and citicism [sic]. It is, however, in all respects better, and of more reputable origin, than belletristic’ (The Oxford English Dictionary; example under entry for ‘belletristic’). 73. René Wellek, ‘What Is Literature?’, in Paul Hernadi (ed.), What Is Literature? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 16–17. 74. Ibid., p. 19. Abbé Batteux’s treatise Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (Paris: Durand, 1746) is the first systematic exposition of what has been called the modern system of the arts (Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’). Batteux distinguished between the fine arts, which had pleasure as their end, and the useful mechanical arts. He also recognized a third group of arts combining pleasure with usefulness. The imitation of beautiful nature is the principle common to the fine arts of music, poetry, painting, sculpture and dance, whereas architecture and rhetoric belonged to the ‘mixed’ group since they combine pleasure with usefulness. The final form of the modern system of the arts, which included painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music was, according to Kristeller, set forth by D’Alembert in his preface, ‘Discours préliminaire’, to the Encyclopédie (1751). It is noteworthy that prose literature is not yet regarded as an art form in spite of the fact that Fénelon’s Télémaque was hailed as a ‘poëme en prose’ as early as 1721 (Timothy J. Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 232). 75. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 203. 76. Literature in the modern sense is an ‘invented tradition’ dating from late seventeenth-century France and England, Timothy Reiss claims; it had, however, ‘as yet no clear name’ ( Reiss, The Meaning of Literature, p. 229). According to Reiss ‘[T]he modern concept of literature was born simultaneously with a professional and semiprofessional criticism’ of authors such as Boileau, Dryden, and Addison (p. 229). 77. Bruce Robbins, ‘What Is Literature?’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, p. 155. 78. Ibid., p. 156. 79. Ibid. Cf. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: the Books and Schools of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1995), where Blooms asserts that ‘[t]he secular canon . . . does not actually begin until the middle of the eighteenth century’ (p.

Lars-Olof Åhlberg 79

80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95.

96. 97.

20), meaning that the idea of a canon was forged in that period. The ‘most’ canonical writers for Bloom are Dante, and, above all Shakespeare, who of course created their works before the canon was forged. Bruce Robbins, ‘What Is Literature?’, p. 156. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942), 3rd rev. edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 26. I have attributed this view to Wellek since he is ‘primarily responsible’ (p. 8) for the chapter from which I have quoted. Ibid., p. 27. Wellek, ‘Literature, Fiction, and Literariness’, p. 32. W.W. Robson, ‘The Definition of Literature’, in W.W. Robson, The Definition of Literature and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 1. See, for example, Hugh Bredin and Liberato Santoro-Brienza, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Introducing Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), ch. 7. W.W. Robson, ‘The Definition of Literature’ p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Descartes’ treatise Discours de la méthode (1637) springs to mind. W.W. Robson, ‘The Definition of Literature’, p. 12. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid. For an illuminating criticism of Dickie’s theory in regard to literature, see Tommie Zaine, ‘Dickie’s Institutional Analysis of Art: a Critique from the Perspective of Literary Art’, in Lars-Olof Åhlberg and Tommie Zaine (eds), Aesthetic Matters: Essays Presented to Göran Sörbom on His 60th Birthday (Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 1994), pp. 164–71. Stein Haugom Olsen, who offered an institutionalist account of literature in several essays from the 1970s onwards nowhere discusses Dickie’s institutional theory of art. See Stein Haugom Olsen, ‘Defining a Literary Work’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35 (1976), pp. 133–42; Interpretation and Intention’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 17 (1977), pp. 210–18; and ‘Literary Aesthetics and Literary Practice’, Mind, 90 (1981), pp. 521–41. All reprinted in Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 73–87; pp. 20–8; pp. 1–19. Page references to The End of Literary Theory. Olsen, ‘Defining a Literary Work’, p. 87. Cf. Stanley Fish’s view that communal decisions decide what is to be counted as literature (Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980)). Some contributors to Paul Hernadi’s anthology What Is Literature? offer proceduralist and institutionalist-like analyses of literature. See Charles Altieri, ‘A Procedural Definition of Literature’ (pp. 62–78), Richard Ohmann, ‘The Social Definition of Literature’ (pp. 89–101), and George McFadden, ‘ “Literature”: A Many-Sided Process’ (pp. 49–61). Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 255. Ibid., pp. 255–6.

80 From Text to Literature 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., pp. 256–7. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., pp. 255–6. Ibid., p. 256, italics omitted. The cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira present a somewhat similar problem for the history of art, as does Egyptian art. Peter Lamarque discusses this problem in his article ‘The Aesthetic and the Universal’ and argues that these objects ‘can be appropriated by other cultural traditions and assimilated into contexts far removed from the origins of their creation’ (Peter Lamarque, ‘The Aesthetic and the Universal’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 33 (1999), p. 2). There is no reason why similar considerations should not apply to works of literature. Avoiding the question of quality, ‘the distinction between art and nonart’, is, according to Wellek, one form the attack on literature takes (Wellek, ‘The Attack on Literature’, p. 12). Stuart Sim, ‘Structuralism and Post-Structuralism’, in Oswald Hanfling (ed.), Philosophical Aesthetics: an Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 436. Stanley Wells, ‘Introduction’, King Lear, in Stanley Wells (ed.), The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 1. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 49. A.C. Bradley, ‘King Lear’, in A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 202. G. Wilson Knight, ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’, in G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: an Interpretation of Shakespearian Tragedy, 4th enl. and rev. edn (London: Methuen, 1949), pp. 160–1. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), ‘Preface’, p. ix. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid. Ibid. Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and King Lear’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 103. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid. Ibid., p. 105. Wells, ‘Introduction’, King Lear, p. 58. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 24–5. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 81.

Lars-Olof Åhlberg 81 128. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: the Metafictional Paradox (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. xi–xii. 129. http://www.co.uk/authors/elizabethgeorge.htm (quoted 15 November 2002). 130. http://www.hha.com.au/newbooks_inpuruit.htm (quoted 15 November 2002). 131. Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, pp. 417–26 and 405–11. 132. King Lear, act 1, sc. 4. 133. Murray Krieger, The Institution of Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 15.

4 Components of Literariness: Readings of Capote’s In Cold Blood Torsten Pettersson

I. Introduction The question ‘What is literature?’ must be pivotal in literary theory: serious scholarly interest in literature, one may reasonably assert, presupposes a correct delimitation of this phenomenon as well as an account of its central characteristics. In the first respect the task is a relatively simple one. We all know that for instance novels, poems, and plays are literature, and border-line cases such as essays and memoirs need pose no serious problem. On the contrary, they indicate that there is a border line – otherwise certain texts would not be able to straddle it. In the second respect, however, the question shows its teeth. If we take it to mean ‘What are the key properties requisite for literary status’,1 our confidence evaporates. It is so difficult to specify such properties that all traditional definitions can easily be undermined: ‘Literary texts foreground their linguistic make-up’ – no, so do many adverts without achieving literary status, and many realistic novels fail to do so without jeopardizing that status. ‘Literary texts have a carefully considered and effective structure’ – no, the same is true of brilliant, yet not literary speeches such as the one in which Martin Luther King repeats the phrase ‘I have a dream’. ‘Literary texts evoke an aesthetic, that is, a contemplative and non-utilitarian attitude’ – no, so do many non-literary texts such as a historian’s account of the death of Seneca or an astronomer’s description of the vastness of the universe.2 Problems of this kind have put the whole question on a back burner in the literary theory of the last few decades. The last collection of articles focused on it, Paul Hernadi’s What Is Literature?, was published in 1978,3 and two recent surveys of alternative answers understandably 82

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have occasion to refer to even older standpoints.4 For all this, the question remains both central and topical – it is just that a fruitful approach to it must differ from earlier accounts in three respects. In outlining these differences, and throughout this essay, I shall use terms such as ‘literature’ and ‘literary texts’ in a sense that is both a belletristic one denoting ‘imaginative literature’ and a wide one which comprises popular literature. Firstly, the consistent failure of attempts to define literature in terms of one key property indicates that texts are not literary by virtue of one quality alone. Instead, literariness (the status and constitution of certain texts as literature) consists of various qualities of texts linked to conventions of reading. They are heterogeneous in the sense that some may be purely formal, whereas others are for instance mimetically or partly psychologically orientated. None of these qualities is in itself a necessary and sufficient condition for literary status; instead, that status is conferred by a combination of qualities, in different proportions in different types of works. Consequently, a full exploration of literariness must take many different properties into account, whereas most treatments of the subject have viewed it from only one perspective.5 Furthermore, these properties should be regarded as a network which is loosely organized, perhaps partly discontinuous and not entirely hierarchical (to conceive of it in the latter fashion would send us once more on a futile quest for the one defining feature from which all others emanate). Secondly, one must concede that no component of the network of literariness is unique to literature. This point emerges clearly from the history of attempts at definition: the perpetual possibility of finding a nonliterary counterexample of a supposedly unique literary quality. More precisely, the counterexamples make it clear that no such quality can be found on an abstract level of definition along the lines of ‘foregrounding of linguistic traits’ or ‘contemplative stance’. It follows, thirdly, that a discussion in abstract terms in which examples are reduced to brief illustrations is not a fruitful approach. It cannot unveil the qualities and combinations of qualities which we are nevertheless attuned to since we recognize literary texts with such relative ease. Instead, I submit, these qualities can be detected by studying the practices in which readers rely on them in their efforts to define literariness in a given material. These three negative points about previous accounts of literariness can be complemented by a more positive observation: such accounts may offer considerable insights, provided that their exclusivist

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pretensions and the excessive abstraction of their arguments are discounted. The literary qualities detected by them will not wash when presented as necessary and sufficient conditions, but they are not entirely without foundation. On the contrary, they may offer good starting points for more concrete descriptions of one particular area in the network of literariness. The area I shall focus on is related to fictionality and exhibits three components of literariness. As I have suggested, described in the abstract they are not unique to literature. However, in literature they can be combined, focused, and made concrete in such a way as to distinguish it for instance from journalism. This point will emerge from detailed examples drawn from the reception of a well-known nonfiction novel.

II. Literariness and fictionality Definitions of literature have often relied on the notion of fictionality. For example, Wellek and Warren refer to ‘ “fictionality”, “invention,” or “imagination” ’ as ‘the distinguishing trait of literature’,6 and Barbara Herrnstein Smith states that ‘the fictive presentation of discourse is precisely what defines . . . “imaginative literature” ’.7 This may be explicated as the idea that a literary text does not offer a direct referential description of reality and that this is clear to both the writer and the reader. The latter proviso distinguishes fictionality from lies, which are fraudulently offered as true descriptions of reality, and from accounts that genuinely aspire to referential status but fail to attain it because of some kind of mistake.8 In some cases this is indeed the heart of the matter. The story about Anna Karenina may not differ from a story about Czar Alexander II in its treatment of time and causality or in its operative assumptions about human nature in general and nineteenth-century Russia in particular. It is literary, whereas its counterpart is not, primarily because Anna Karenina, unlike Czar Alexander, has never existed in the real world. This in turn generates significant differences in the kind of knowledge available to the narrators and the kind of questions that may reasonably be asked about the two protagonists. But this criterion is not generally valid. On the one hand, there is nonfictional literature: entire genres like aphorisms and the nonfiction novel; on the other, there are fictional, yet nonliterary texts such as philosophers’ examples of moral dilemmas, books of party jokes, or the narratives constructed by copywriters to promote a product.

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This, however, should not induce us to eject the proverbial baby with the fluid of ablution. Even though fictionality, like any other single feature, falls short of providing a viable comprehensive definition of literature, it nevertheless plays a central part in the majority of all literary works.9 In accordance with a convention of which writers and readers are fully cognizant, the lion’s share of novels, short stories, and plays presents characters that have never existed enacting events that have never occurred in a certain location at a given time. Some poetry – particularly reflective poetry such as Pope’s An Essay on Man – is comparable to aphorisms as comments on reality which do not conjure up a fictional world. Still, like narrative fiction and drama, a considerable portion of all poetry relies on fictionality since a (minimal) fictional world is generated as soon as a nonreferentially presented locus or focus of reflection is given any spatiotemporal concretion: ‘I am looking at an oak tree’; ‘He remembered the shape of his grandmother’s hands.’ Many other aspects of both literature and reading are related to the predominance of fictionality in western literature. Literary evaluation often presupposes fictionality, for instance when it focuses on the credibility and aptness of the plot.10 There is also a special technique based on fictionality: that of the omniscient narrator, whose invisible presence and telepathic powers cannot credibly be applied to persons in real life.11 The three components of literariness which I wish to highlight in this essay are more loosely connected with fictionality but at the same time more widespread and pervasive. They do not presuppose fictionality as omniscience does, but they are facilitated by fictionality in ways that I shall go on to expound, adducing examples from the central area of narratives in prose. The three components of literariness are expressiveness, representativity, and form. Even considered together, they do not fully constitute the concept of literature. However, they are markedly characteristic of literature in present-day western culture and hence pivotal in the expectations with which literature is approached by experienced readers within that culture. Firstly, a literary work is seen as the result of a creative process which reflects the artistic persona and aspirations of the author. His or her expressiveness has considerable latitude precisely because of fictionality: rather than being conditioned by a predetermined subject matter, the author is free to decide what will take place in the fictional world and what the characters will be like. For instance, Dostoyevsky could have

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had Raskolnikov commit suicide, in which case Crime and Punishment would tend to emphasize the hopeless despair following from this character’s nihilistic and criminal leanings. But Dostoyevsky decided that Raskolnikov should not die but be sent to Siberia, accompanied by a devout woman with whose support he may at some point in his future amend his pernicious attitude to life. This emphasis on the possibility of redemption emerges as an expression of Dostoyevsky’s philosophy of life precisely because we know that he could have provided a different ending. In formulaic literature – such as many forms of popular literature – the latitude for expressiveness is reduced. But even here writers achieve a certain personal profile because they must necessarily choose one path among many alternatives towards a generically prescribed ending, be it the revelation of the murderer’s identity or the heroine’s eventual union with the right partner. As the above comments suggest, I believe expressiveness is best construed as authors’ creation of literary personas displayed in their works. Whether these personas are consonant with their private, ‘nonliterary’ personalities is often indeterminable and, from a literary point of view, perhaps ultimately irrelevant. However, I recognize the fact that many competent readers think of expressiveness in partly or wholly psychological terms, that is, what is in the work is seen, at least to some degree, as an expression of the author’s ‘true’ personality. In the following attempt to describe – rather than reform – components of literariness, I therefore take into account all references to authorial expressiveness, regardless of their position on a scale from ‘artistic persona’ to ‘authentic personality’. Secondly, literary characters and events are expected to exhibit some form of representativity. Since they are fictional and devoid of immediate real-life reference points such as Alexander II, they have no value as purveyors of information. Why then should people write and read about them? Partly, no doubt, because they make for good entertainment. But generally we also look for some point, some insight into aspects of reality. Because we know that the narrative of a fictional work evinces no one-to-one correspondence with real-life phenomena, we instead consider it representative of a group of people or a type of events as described by the work. In so doing we must – if we are to produce a plausible interpretation – find our point of departure in observable qualities of the fiction in question, but given that we are free to relate it to many different groups (or, to be more precise, to our conception of these groups). The choice we make in this respect is often intimately connected with our reading of the work as a whole: Raskolnikov repre-

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sents the Russian intelligentsia whose secular Western European rationalism is condemned by Dostoyevsky (a historical reading); people who in a time of personal crisis are torn between conflicting emotions (a psychological reading); people who have committed an iniquity at odds with their deep-seated ethical convictions (a reading from the standpoint of moral philosophy); or fallen man who nevertheless has a chance of redemption (a religious reading). One might think that in popular literature representativity is set aside and fictionality motivated exclusively by its qualities of escapism and entertainment. However, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén’s account of plot and character delineation in fifty-six Harlequin romances12 suggests that the heroine can easily, in my terms, be seen to represent various groups: for example, young people trying to find the right partner or people of any age who must decide whom to trust on the basis of insufficient or conflicting indications. Hemmungs Wirtén also quotes a comment by Leslie Rabine: ‘the Harlequin heroines seek an end to the division between the domestic world of love and sentiment and the public world of work and business’.13 Again, in my terms, this clearly elicits representativity related to a question of contemporary social psychology: the heroine represents all those who wish to find new combinations of the private and the public sphere. Thirdly, literature is expected to display form at least to some degree. Form consists in structures and patterns which are pleasing in themselves (parallels, contrasts, expectations that are first established and then satisfied), but which may also support expressiveness and/or representativity (parallels and contrasts that bring out the author’s artistic stance and/or the relevant connection between the fictional characters and a group of people in real life).14 Again, fictionality provides ample opportunity for this: since authors are free to mould the stories of their own invention, they can be expected to produce a well-proportioned and illuminating ensemble of constituent parts and interrelations. This is also true of popular literature even though it is sometimes wrongly described as formless. In a very obvious manner it establishes and satisfies (generic) expectations and it can introduce formal patterns such as symbolic leitmotifs: the heroine may, for instance, receive an engagement ring from her partner, throw it away during a crisis in their relationship, but only to recover it at a later stage and display it to him as a sign of reconciliation. My contention, then, is that these three components are central to a conception of literature shared by authors and readers. In other words, they play a part in literariness as well as in literary competence (the

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ability to read and interpret literature in accordance with current conventions). Neither perspective can be neglected; as Jonathan Culler has aptly observed, ‘qualities of literature can’t be reduced either to objective properties or to consequences of ways of framing language’.15 Furthermore, I contend that the three components of literariness are connected with fictionality in the ways that I have outlined. An interesting test case for these claims presents itself when fictionality is removed. How do literary critics – readers possessed of a high degree of literary competence – react to a nonfiction novel whose basic premise of reporting unadulterated reality would seem to make it difficult for the author to fulfil the literary expectations of expressiveness, representativity, and form? I propose to examine this question using the critical response to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as a case in point. At the end of this essay I shall briefly return to the role played by fictionality and suggest some guidelines for further explorations of literariness.

III. Truman Capote’s account of a multiple murder In November 1959 the four members of the Clutter family were found murdered on their ranch in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. After some initial bewilderment, the police received a tip that enabled them to identify the killers as Richard (‘Dick’) Hickock and Perry Smith. Having been pursued and apprehended, they were tried and sentenced to death. After a few stays of execution they were put to death in April 1965. The book in which Truman Capote (1924–84) relates this story is entitled In Cold Blood: a True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (1965). The documentary aspirations enshrined in the subtitle are further underlined by an introductory note in which the author avers that the book is based entirely on his own observations, official records, and a great number of interviews.16 Also, in an interview printed in The New York Times Book Review at the time of publication Capote was once again concerned to uphold the factuality of his account. Asked point-blank if he really had not fictionalized anything he answered that he had not: ‘One doesn’t spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.’ In keeping with this stance he claimed to have created ‘a serious new art form: the “nonfiction novel” ’. It differs, he said, from the ‘impure genre’ of ‘the documentary novel’ precisely by keeping entirely to the facts and avoiding ‘the latitude of the fiction writer’.17

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When the journalist Phillip Tompkins checked these claims of veracity by interviewing some of Capote’s informants, it transpired that, for all his protestations, Capote had apparently departed from factual accuracy in a few cases: above all, Perry Smith in fact had not cried after being arrested or expressed remorse before his execution. Given Capote’s claims for his work, Tompkins considered these deviations a liability,18 but his assessment, published some six months after In Cold Blood appeared, did not carry much weight in the overall response. The first critics to review the book did not know it, and later critics apparently considered the departures from ascertainable facts unimportant; whether or not they referred to Tompkins (whose observations were never disputed as such), they found their point of departure in the purely factual pretensions of In Cold Blood. Concomitantly, most critics accepted Capote’s term ‘nonfiction novel’ as a designation of the book’s genre, even though they often adduced various historical examples to show that he had more precursors than he cared to admit.19 The reception of In Cold Blood thus provides an excellent opportunity of scrutinizing the critical response to nonfictional literature with a view to illuminating conceptions of literature. My answer to the above question concerning that response will be twofold. On the one hand, factuality does present a threat to the components of literariness by removing the fictionality that facilitates their emergence. On the other hand, readers orientated towards these elements may elicit them in such a manner that the book nevertheless conforms to their established notions of a literary work. In the latter case it should be noted that the point of interest in the present context is lodged in the make-up of the interpretations and what it tells us about the critics’ conceptions of literature. The question of whether in each case the interpretations are justified or not is of minor importance, but its relevance can be described as follows. If the interpretations seem justified, they can be seen to reflect a combination of authorial and critical efforts within the institution of literature: Capote wrote a book which, in addition to being ‘nonfiction’, was also a ‘novel’, thereby applying an internalized understanding of literariness similar to the one found among his critics; the result of their joint efforts – their successful symbiosis, one might say – is embodied in the interpretations articulated by the critics. If on the other hand some interpretations of markedly literary points in Capote’s novel seem laboured and implausible, this deficiency underlines the strong need felt by the critics to bring to bear their conception of literariness – even when the work in some of its aspects did not readily lend itself to such efforts.

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IV. Components of literariness 1: expressiveness As Capote’s account of the given sequence of events was generally considered to be historically accurate, the first question was one of expressiveness: to what extent was he able to bring out a personal artistic stance if he was merely reporting the facts? Diana Trilling put her finger on this. She underlined the unfortunate consequences of ‘the impersonality of his approach’ for the book’s value as a work of literary art: ‘in his submission to actuality, or factuality, and his abrogation of the artist’s right to emphasize or even to suppress or distort reality for his own purposes, Mr. Capote prepared for himself an almost inevitable artistic defeat’. This is precisely the problem: that in the interests of unadulterated factuality the composition of the book is determined by reality, rather than by the author and his free expression of his artistic aspirations. The counterexample, for this critic, is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939), James Agee’s documentary novel about sharecroppers: ‘by licensing his consciousness to prevail over external fact, Agee was able to create an artistic reality, that of his own felt experience’. In Cold Blood, on the other hand, ‘is not a novel’.20 Another critic, Hilton Kramer, analogously considered this element of personal expressiveness to be essential, and its absence damning: ‘Capote has not written a novel’. The argument is that while his ‘prose rhythm’ may be characteristic of an excellent reporter, ‘it is not what the language of fiction, the medium of significant art, always is: the refraction of a serious moral imagination’.21 One could say that according to Trilling and Kramer, Capote has demoted himself to the position of a mere scribe whose impersonal reliability serves a documentary purpose but concomitantly produces an artistic failure severe enough for his work to be banished from the domain of the novel as an art form. Other critics solved the problem of expressiveness by demonstrating, along one of two main lines, that for all appearances to the contrary, In Cold Blood was in fact an expression of a creative artistic personality. Along the first line, the book was related to Capote’s earlier output, half a dozen volumes of fiction and journalism. The choice of subject itself was considered typical of the author. Tony Tanner observed that ‘behind the mask of the dispassionate reporter we can begin to make out the excited stare of the southern-gothic novelist with his febrile delight in weird settings and lurid details’ – Tanner is here referring to the Gothicism of Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).22 The narrative technique of Capote’s new book was similarly seen to display characteristics reminiscent of earlier works: a propensity to withhold

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crucial information over long stretches of narrative;23 a knack for evocative descriptions of the characters’ surroundings, for instance at the end of both In Cold Blood and The Grass Harp (1951);24 as well as a tendency to suggest states of mind by a depiction of external details.25 By making such observations the critics demonstrated the persistence, in this nonfiction novel, of traits that had long been peculiar to Capote as a writer of fiction. The underlying point was that, even though the genre conditions had changed, he had by no means stopped unfolding and developing his artistic persona. As one of the early critics put it: ‘Rather than displaying a new Capote, this book seems to us to bring to light an author who with newly found mastery integrates the elements of his talent.’26 The consequence of this for the question of artistic status was later articulated explicitly by John Hollowell: In Cold Blood is ‘a work of literature because it is clearly the product of an artist’s imagination. Capote shaped the “facts” and manipulated our responses to the characters and events he described.’27 Hollowell’s assessment thus differs from that of Trilling and Kramer. Their criterion is the same, however: they all agree that the phenomenon which I call expressiveness is an essential requirement for literary status. Hollowell finds that quality in Capote’s book, and for that reason regards it as a work of literature; Trilling and Kramer do not, and for that reason deny it literary status. Along the other line of interpretations bringing out the expressiveness of Capote’s work, there was an emphasis on his presumed identification with Perry Smith, one of the two murderers. This was partly attributed to the fact that both men were markedly short of stature and had had a miserable childhood,28 as well as to similarities in the inflection of their voices.29 Phillip Tompkins felt this identification was the reason for Capote’s conciliatory description of Smith as a sensitive person and a poète maudit endowed with considerable verbal and literary skills, when in fact Smith, according to Tompkins, was hardly able to form a grammatical sentence.30 Tompkins deemed this a weakness and deplored Capote’s misleading insistence that every word in the book is true. But on the other hand it was this personal strand in the book that prompted the evaluation: ‘Capote has, in short, achieved a work of art.’31 The very trait that according to Tompkins mars the book as documentary nonfiction is, from the point of view of expressiveness, an advantage which earns it the accolade of artistic status. At a later stage in the critical response the idea of identification was further elaborated. Jack de Bellis pointed out that if Kansas is seen as part of the American South and Smith as Capote’s double,

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In Cold Blood then becomes the author’s revenge upon the section which gave him the dual vision of his fiction, daylight and nocturnal, and which prompted the extreme tactic of the ‘nonfiction novel’ as a way of release from his psychological bondage to the South.32 In a somewhat convoluted interpretation de Bellis thus makes Capote’s choice of subject and genre appear as an expression of a deep-seated need to liberate himself from what the American South meant to him personally.

V. Components of literariness 2: representativity The second quality which a literary reading of nonfiction will be concerned to bring out is representativity. The concept, though not the term, was first discussed by Aristotle, who observed the phenomenon in question in the epics and plays with which he was familiar. In a famous passage in the ninth chapter of his Poetics he pointed out that while poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of particular facts. By universal truths are to be understood the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation; and this is the aim of poetry, although it gives individual names to its characters. This contrast is, however, attenuated by Aristotle’s realization that it is possible to create literature based on historical events. Even if the poet writes about things that have actually happened, that does not make him any the less a poet, for there is nothing to prevent some of the things that have happened from being in accordance with the laws of possibility and probability, and thus he will be a poet in writing about them.33 To the best of my knowledge the critics commenting on the representativity of In Cold Blood do not refer to these passages in Aristotle.34 It is nevertheless true to say that in bringing out one aspect of the literary qualities of Capote’s novel, they must highlight the possibility suggested by Aristotle. To put it differently, they must combat the danger of what may be called ‘idiomorphism’ (from the Greek idio’morphos, ‘having a form or shape of its own’). Its essence is that something is true but devoid of the representativity necessary for a literary presentation of

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characters and events. As Georges de Scudéry, in the era of French classicism, once put it in his strictures on Pierre Corneille’s play Le Cid: a woman’s decision to marry her father’s killer, though in this particular case true as a matter of recorded history, is not probable, and therefore unfit for literary treatment.35 All these terms mean roughly the same, but the two traditional ones are less felicitous. ‘[U]niversal truths’ is too wide since, as Aristotle goes on to suggest, the persons or events represented by the fiction may be limited to a certain type (such as – one may add – a ‘melancholy man’ or a clearly defined social group at a given time). ‘Probable’ is also an unfortunate term, since its criterion is occurrence in real life. For instance, it is not probable that anyone will actually tilt at windmills, but Don Quixote is nevertheless representative of man’s propensity for a subjective reconstitution of reality. Furthermore, from a logical point of view it seems somewhat laboured to say that a ‘true’ event is not ‘probable’ whereas it makes perfect sense to say what de Scudéry actually meant: that a true event may in some cases be idiomorphic and thus lack the ‘representativity’ necessary for a successful literary treatment of it.36 A certain kind of representativity also occurs outside literature.37 A newspaper report of torrential rains may include an interview with a family whose house has been flooded and looted to boot; a friend returning from a foreign country may tell us of a number of occasions on which the natives answered his questions affirmatively by shaking their heads. Rather than attracting attention as such, these individual cases are meant to clarify generally valid circumstances, the situation in the flooded region or the modes of behaviour in another culture. Such cases differ from literary representativity in two ways. Firstly, as I observed above, in reading literature we have considerable latitude in deciding what group of people is represented for instance by Raskolnikov: within certain limits a literary work is ‘pliable’.38 In the non-literary case, by contrast, there is a pre-established link to a given group: the family interviewed represents the population of the flooded region at a given time. A reader who overlooks or slights this point – and holds for instance that the interview illustrates the general precariousness of human existence – has misunderstood the report on its own terms. (It is a different matter that we may secondarily use the report as a departure point for philosophical reflections that go beyond its function as journalism.) Secondly, a sufficient number of nonliterary examples have evidentiary value. A tourist who has met a dozen people who shake their heads

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when it is clear in the context that their response is affirmative is well justified in presenting this as proof of behavioural patterns in this culture. Literary representativity, on the other hand, has no evidentiary value. Dostoyevsky may pile up umpteenth misguided nihilistic students and overwhelm us by his insights into their psyche. But a moment’s reflection persuades us that, from a logical point of view, we have had no proof that such students actually existed in nineteenthcentury Russia. Literary representativity, then, is pliable and non-evidentiary. The lack of such representativity has been deplored in the case of another nonfiction novel, John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident (1968): ‘the very rigor of its documentary method – its zeal to record the specific facts of a specific incident, together with all possible variants – precludes its achieving the larger metaphoric dimension of In Cold Blood’.39 But in the response to Capote’s novel I have seen no such explicit criticism of idiomorphic limitations. However, the larger question discussed by Diana Trilling (who as we have seen does not consider the book a work of art) was the problematic assessment of mental competence within the American system of justice.40 This should probably be seen as an indication that she found no literary representativity in the narrative, focusing as she did on its legal and sociological implications.41 Generally speaking, however, the critics emphasized literary representativity rather than nonliterary evidentiary value. Donald Pizer pointed out that Holcomb, the home town of the murdered family, is ‘an ironic representation of a large segment of American life. Holcomb and Garden City [a larger town nearby] are almost exactly in the middle of the United States.’42 From the viewpoint of reality this would be unimportant. If one were to argue that a certain act of violence is markedly typical, one would refer to the fact that it was committed in an area riddled with well-known phenomena conducive to crime such as a high rate of unemployment, a low level of education, and strong social contrasts. The symmetrically appealing location of that area would be of no consequence. But from the vantage point of literary representativity such a location may seem symbolically reverberant. Other critics viewed the Clutters, successful and respected in their community, as a variety of the American dream come true. Capote’s novel could then be regarded as a story of how that dream is destroyed.43 In the tension between the Clutters and their killers various aspects of American life were seen to be represented: the Clutters were linked to the ‘homestead’ and the ‘heart of community’, the killers to ‘the road

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and the automobile’;44 their confrontation appeared as ‘a “true” parable of the outlaw against the community’.45 In such interpretations Capote’s narrative was thus considered representative of a collision between the life styles of the resident and the rootless – a more mythically suggestive contrast than the most obvious socioeconomic one between haves and have-nots. This social orientation is strongly to the fore in the critical response, but the pliable nature of literary representativity allows other possibilities. Malcolm Bradbury also underlines the contrast that has just been exemplified but gives it a psychological slant: In Cold Blood is an ‘inside account of two distinct elements in the American national psyche, the orderly and the anarchic’.46 The two approaches are fused by Jack de Bellis: ‘Perhaps he [Capote] saw in Smith’s life and death a parable about the serious artist in America.’47 De Bellis thus combines expressiveness, in the form of Capote’s presumed identification with Perry Smith, with a special form of social and psychological representativity: Smith – described by Capote as a man of some literary talent – represents not only Capote but American artists in general, and his experiences represent their treatment at the hands of society. There were also some interpretations couched in terms of philosophy of life or philosophy of language. John Hollowell noted that the murders are not fully explained by any linguistic or conceptual system in the novel. He concluded that it was perhaps a ‘memory of the vertigo beyond language that he [Capote] hoped to reproduce for readers of In Cold Blood’.48 A more partial interpretation by Chris Anderson reached out in the same direction. During their search for the criminals the police at one point in the novel come to a Las Vegas motel where the first and last letters in the word ‘Rooms’ are missing on the signboard. The hollow reverberation of this ‘OOM’ is in Anderson’s view ‘a symbol of the disintegration of language and meaning in the face of violence’. He observed that such details are all presumably ‘true’, yet selected from their context they assume a symbolic, evocative value beyond their literal meaning. As in Capote’s fiction, concreteness does not mean what it says; it points beyond itself, evokes via association or metaphor something not stated.49 In a wider perspective, this is an excellent description of how critics may bring out forms of representativity which transcend the idiomorphism of specific details.

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Anderson regards symbolism of this kind as a deliberate means of communication. Three pages further on in his article he makes a particularly revealing statement of this: ‘What makes nonfiction fictive for both [Tom] Wolfe and [Joan] Didion, as for Capote, is the symbolic implications and patterns of meaning that emerge from the shaping and positioning of these concrete images.’ The slip of the pen which I have italicized is instructive. What Anderson means is obviously that ‘nonfiction’ can have literary qualities, evince characteristically literary representativity by engendering symbolic meanings that go beyond the individual case. The fact that he refers to this as ‘fictive’ – illogically, since all his examples are after all nonfiction – indicates that in his conception of literature such representativity is closely linked to the prevalent cases of fictional narrative.50 On the whole, the forms of representativity elicited by the critics from the unique historical events in question vary and are sometimes tentative, sometimes not entirely persuasive. What is essential in this context is that the critics clearly reached out for interpretations where idiomorphism is overcome by representativity. In two cases this aspiration was articulated even more clearly than by Chris Anderson. In his treatment of In Cold Blood, William Wiegand pointed out that what is important in a novel is not fictionality as such but ‘the suggesting and extending capacity all art forms share’,51 while Alfred Kazin stressed that Capote’s work ultimately aims to create ‘an emblematic human situation for our time that would relieve it of mere factuality’.52 In a literary context, then, mere idiomorphic factuality is a liability of which a novel such as this must be ‘relieved’ by being endowed with some form of representativity. By and large, as we have seen, this operation was successfully performed in the critical response.

VI. Components of literariness 3: form The third problem of nonfiction, from a literary point of view, is the requirement of form. Reality, in this context, is usually taken to be amorphous, inadequately organized into essentials and minutiae, full of irrelevancies and dead ends. Art, by contrast, should have a meaningful and elegantly functional structure: a form. This may partly be an end in itself, a balance, a symmetry of parts within a whole which makes a pleasurable impression. However, as I remarked above, form is also related to the other two components of literariness: the formal structure of the material may express the author’s artistic stance, his or her sense of what is essential enough to be underlined by strategic posi-

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tioning or by parallels and contrasts; and it may bring out the relevance of a certain mode of representativity. These three functions of form sometimes appear separately, sometimes together without clear distinctions in the critical response to Capote’s novel. This will necessarily be reflected in the following analysis. The departure point is of course the peculiar relation of nonfiction to reality. A novel which purports to record an actual train of events in great detail and as correctly as possible seems to have committed itself to amorphous reality so irrevocably that it cannot achieve the requisite artistic form. This criticism has been levelled at other representatives of nonfiction. For instance, Donald Pizer has claimed that The Death of a President (1967), William Manchester’s novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, ‘fails as successful art’ because its ‘form is incapable of producing significant theme’.53 With regard to In Cold Blood Hilton Kramer suggested similar strictures by pointing out that the book confirms Ivy Compton-Burnett’s remark that ‘[r]eal life seems to have no plots’.54 The general tendency, however, was for critics to comment appreciatively on various aspects of form in Capote’s novel. Most of them noted the crosscutting between the Clutters and the approaching murderers in the first part of the book. Pizer went on to observe that the same technique is used in the second and third parts to juxtapose the itinerant killers and the police who pursue them. According to him this creates an impression of an ‘inexorable coming together of two groups or units separated spatially but fated to converge’. This in turn ‘implies that a shaping destiny controls all life despite our unawareness of that destiny as it fulfills itself’.55 Thus for Pizer the narrative technique is ultimately linked to a general thematic point: the events are – in my nomenclature – representative of such human affairs that are subject to the workings of fate. As I have already suggested, some critics dwell on Capote’s tendency to withhold information. He is seen to compel the reader to draw conclusions from external details;56 because of his organization of the text it comes as a surprise that the murders are physically committed by Perry Smith, the seemingly nicer person of the two criminals;57 and Capote avoids overwhelming the reader when, in keeping with a literary tradition, he gives only an indirect account of the central outburst of homicidal frenzy, which ‘needs to be recounted second-hand, as violence was on the Greek stage’.58 Furthermore, by means of roughly equal attention the book strikes a balance between the official legal background of the death penalty and a psychological analysis which

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suggests that a long term in prison would have been more appropriate in view of the mental instability of the accused. Thereby the reader is placed in a field of tension between these two alternatives.59 A further obvious focus on form appears in Capote’s account of a beaten dog, a slaughtered pig, and birds caught in the grills of pick-up trucks. Together they function as a leitmotif which also includes the dead bodies of the Clutters.60 The last observation may seem more peripheral than the others but it can easily be developed into an example of the various roles played by literary form. Firstly, the recurrence of dead or mangled bodies as a leitmotif creates a regular pattern which affords some aesthetic gratification as such. Secondly, that pattern expresses the writer’s artistic persona since he has chosen to include details which could easily have been omitted without detriment to the central story. And thirdly, the technique suggests that Smith and Hickock are representative of mankind in its destructive aspects. Because of the link forged between animals that have been beaten or killed and people that have been killed, human beings are presented as creatures that now turn aggressively on animals, now on members of their own species – a pattern which in the end includes the two criminals put to death by society.

VII. The role of fictionality We have now in some detail seen the answer to the question of what happens when readers endowed with a high degree of literary competence encounter a novel which eschews the fictionality normally evinced by that genre. A minority of the critics found this departure from the norm bothersome. They felt that Capote’s nonfiction novel realized two of the dangers of factuality: it became a mere chronicle devoid of expressiveness, and it remained as amorphous as the reality which it set out to record faithfully. A majority of the critics were, however, able to produce a literary reading even in this special case. They stressed authorial expressiveness demonstrated by the choice of subject, the application of various forms of narrative technique, as well as by presumed personal identification; they highlighted aspects of literary form; and countering the risk of idiomorphism, they brought out the representativity of the events in question in terms of social structure, social psychology, philosophy of life, or philosophy of language. Thereby they also lent credence to my emphasis on three important components in our conception of literature. These components were strong enough to stamp the response to In Cold Blood even though the

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book seemed to evade their influence by giving up the fictionality to which they are normally linked. At this point it may be helpful to consider the formal relations between fictionality and the three components of literariness. In the first place, fictionality facilitates expressiveness because it opens up a sphere where writers are free to make choices that display their artistic aspirations. But it is not a necessary condition of expressiveness, which can also be achieved in a nonfiction novel without sacrificing factuality. This is because writers of nonfiction may express themselves by their choice of details and perspectives, their decision to divulge or suppress information at a certain stage in the narrative, and by arranging the narrative so as to bring out the parallels and contrasts that they wish to emphasize. Furthermore, in choosing a certain subject they have of course made the crucial initial decision that it has dimensions worth conveying, that is, conforms to their general artistic aspirations. Conversely, a degree of expressiveness always follows from fictionality. Any fictional text which is not entirely plagiarized embodies a great number of choices made by the author. These choices necessarily express an artistic stance – to some degree in formulaic fiction and to a high degree in nonformulaic fiction. In the second instance, fictionality facilitates representativity. The fact that fictional characters and events embody no information about reallife phenomena points us in the direction of a different kind of relevance (apart from pure entertainment). It can be secured by regarding the fiction as representative of a type of phenomena in human existence. But again fictionality is not a logical requirement; as we have seen, a nonfictional story can also evince literary (pliable and nonevidentiary) representativity. One may add, though, that such stories seem to require more of their readers than their fictional counterparts: an ability to take in and assess unique historical givens as well as their wider implications. Finally, fictionality facilitates form in much the same way as it facilitates expressiveness: since the material is not predetermined it allows itself to be moulded into patterns that are aesthetically satisfying as well as expressive and indicative of representativity. But here there is no logical condition in either direction. On the one hand, fictional stories – such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel – may be notoriously amorphous. On the other hand, historical givens can be moulded into patterns by means of techniques such as those that were highlighted in the critical response to In Cold Blood.

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VIII. Towards a more comprehensive understanding Having seen the three components of literariness in action, one may step back and realize with some consternation that they do not figure prominently in definitions of literature. Typically, such definitions have been based, respectively, on ideas about fictionality, special forms of linguistic and structural organization, the integration of form and content, deviation from norms, and specific collective or individual readerly practices.61 The emphasis on form is of course crucial to the third of these definitions, and it plays a part in the second. But the role of expressiveness and representativity clearly has not received due consideration. Apparently their links with fictionality, one of the favourite candidates in the search for a defining feature of literature, have gone unnoticed. In addition, expressiveness has probably been considered too much of an old-fashioned psychological category – despite the possibility of construing it as a set of characteristics of artistic personas displayed in literary works. Representativity, on the other hand, is free from such encumbrances and was adumbrated by Aristotle in what remains one of the most famous passages in all of literary theory. The obstacle here has perhaps been a feeling that this is a way of reading rather than a quality inherent in literature. As the response to In Cold Blood indicates, this is partly correct, but not to the exclusion of the other perspective. Even nonfiction displays qualities that encourage readings in terms of representativity, and this is true a fortiori of fictional works which, in the absence of documentary relevance, rely more heavily on representativity. A more general explanation of these puzzling omissions in literary theory is the one suggested at the outset of this essay: discussions of literariness have often been couched as attempts to find the one defining feature of literature. In each individual case this has led to the neglect of other important traits in the network of literariness. Admittedly, my description of that network has been far from complete. The three components of literariness, although their effects spread throughout the process of literary interaction, are basically located in one dimension each: expressiveness in the work’s relation to the author, representativity in the work’s relation to the world, and form in the internal makeup of the work. A fourth dimension, the relation to the reader, has appeared in the guise of the literary competence geared to the three components. However, that relationship has not been dealt with in its own right. One main question that remains is therefore: what are the specifics and the consequences of the ‘aesthetic’ or ‘ludic’ attitude which a literary text as a work of art encourages in the reader?

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In addition, there are no doubt further components of literariness to be defined and relations between them to be described in all four dimensions. In order to discover them one could continue the strategy that I have applied in this essay. One could start out from the partially valid insights of established definitions of literature and try to discern what other characteristics are related to the components of literariness which they specify. One could then try to define the relations between all these components, the newly discovered ones as well as the well-established bases of earlier definitions. To explore literariness in this more comprehensive way is also to continue exploring ourselves as creatures of culture: readers who competently and continually respond to literary texts without being fully aware of what they are doing.

Notes 1. In other words, the question ‘What is literature?’ harbours a structural ambiguity, but one that can be dissolved linguistically by rephrasing the question as a subordinate clause. In the first sense, it will be ‘I wonder what is literature’, and the relevant answer will specify novels, poems, etc. In the second sense the corresponding clause is ‘I wonder what literature is’, and the relevant answer should attempt a specification of central literary qualities. 2. For an elaboration of counterarguments of this kind, see Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 27–36, and Paisley Livingston, ‘Literature’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 3. Paul Hernadi (ed.), What Is Literature? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 4. Culler, Literary Theory, pp. 27–36, and Livingston, ‘Literature’, in Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. 5. Two attempts to combine different criteria are, however, Bennison Gray, The Phenomenon of Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) and Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 6. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942), 3rd rev. edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 26. The point is repeated, with minor qualifications, in René Wellek, ‘What Is Literature?’, in Hernadi (ed.), What Is Literature?, pp. 16–23. 7. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Poetry as Fiction’, New Literary History, 20 (1971), 259–81 (p. 268). A further example of this stance is Murray Krieger, ‘Literature as Illusion, as Metaphor, as Vision’, in What Is Literature?, pp. 178–89. 8. See Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 1, for further elaborations. 9. This assessment is in line with the explicit or implicit view of the relationship between fictionality and literariness held by Currie; Robert L. Brown, Jr., and Martin Steinmann, Jr., ‘Native Readers of Fiction: A Speech-Act and

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

Genre-Rule Approach to Defining Literature’, in Hernadi, What Is Literature?, pp. 141–60; Robert Scholes, ‘Toward a Semiotics of Literature’, in Hernadi, What Is Literature?, pp. 231–50; and Peter Lamarque, Fictional Points of View (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). They all study fictionality, particularly in literature, but without claiming there cannot be nonfictional literature. However, they do not discuss at any length the question of how fictionality and literary status are related. See Alan Collett, ‘Literature, Criticism, and Factual Reporting’, Philosophy and Literature, 13 (1989), 282–96. As the word ‘credibly’ suggests, omniscience presupposes fictionality in a sense that is not strictly logical but based on the culturally dominant assumption that we do not have access to other minds without some external clues such as words, nonverbal sounds, gestures and facial expression. If that assumption is rejected, one may, in nonfictional as well as in fictional texts, allow omniscience based on telepathy or divine revelation. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts. The Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden, Skrifter utgivna av Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen i Uppsala, Vol. 38 (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen i Uppsala, 1998), ch. 6. Hemmungs Wirtén, p. 180. I thus use the word ‘form’, not in the catholic neutral sense of ‘shape and proportions’, but in the sense of ‘good, functional form’. The latter, I take it, predominates in art criticism and aesthetics; for instance, it is only on this understanding of ‘form’ that the common criticism of a given artwork as ‘formless’ or ‘amorphous’ can make a point. Cf. also note 37. Culler, Literary Theory, p. 35. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: a True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966). George Plimpton, ‘The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel [Truman Capote interviewed]’, in Irving Malin (ed.), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: a Critical Handbook (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1968), pp. 25–43 (pp. 39, 25, and 28, respectively) (originally publ. in The New York Times Book Review, 16 January 1966, 2–3, 38–43). Capote’s term is by now well-established, and ‘nonfiction’ may also – with the requisite terminological substitutions – refer to films ‘based on a true story’. The term ‘faction’ refers to the same phenomenon, but it now seems to have fallen out of favour (though it is still found sporadically, as in Peter Craven, ‘W.G. Sebald: Anatomy of Faction’, Heat, 13 (1999), 212–24). From the 1970s onwards roughly the same meaning has been attached to the term ‘the new journalism’, which has been promoted by Tom Wolfe, for instance in The New Journalism: With an Anthology Edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Here the matter is viewed from the other side. While ‘the nonfiction novel’ emphasizes the expansion of literature into the realm of factuality, ‘the new journalism’ stresses that journalism based on factuality starts to apply varieties of narrative technique and character delineation which used to be restricted to fiction. Well-known early studies of the then new phenomenon include Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel

Torsten Pettersson 103

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); John Hollowell, Fact and Fiction: the New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Ronald Weber, The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980); and John Hellman, Fables of Fact: the New Journalism as New Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). For some later additions, see Barbara Lounsberry, The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction. Contributions to the Study of World Literature, Vol. 35 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), and Daniel W. Lehman, Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997). Phillip K. Tompkins, ‘In Cold Fact’, in Malin (ed.), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, pp. 44–58 (pp. 53–4 and 58) (originally publ. in Esquire, 65 (June 1966), 125, 127, 166–71). A particularly illuminating treatment of other forms of nonfiction is John Russell, ‘ “No Guides Need Apply”: Locating the Nonfiction Novel’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 59 (1990), pp. 413–32. Diana Trilling, ‘Capote’s Crime and Punishment’, in Joseph J. Waldmeir and John C. Waldmeir (eds), The Critical Response to Truman Capote (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999) pp. 121–7 (p. 122 and p. 121) (originally publ. in Partisan Review, 33 (1966), 252–9). Hilton Kramer, ‘Real Gardens with Real Toads’, in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: a Critical Handbook, pp. 65–8 (p. 67) (originally publ. in The New Leader, 31 January 1966, 18–19). Tony Tanner, ‘Death in Kansas’, in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: a Critical Handbook, pp. 98–102 (p. 101) (originally publ. in The Spectator, 208 (18 March 1966), 331–2). Chris Anderson, ‘Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Rhetoric of Silence: The Art of Truman Capote’, Midwest Quarterly, 28 (1987), pp. 340–53 (p. 346). Horst Tonn, ‘Making Sense of Contemporary Reality: The Construction of Meaning in the Nonfiction Novel’, in Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds), Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1994), pp. 197– 208 (p. 205). Richard Pini, ‘Fiction et Réalité chez Truman Capote’, Les Langues Modernes, 63 (1969), pp. 176–85 (pp. 177–9). My translation of an observation in Pini (Ibid.), p. 179: ‘Ce livre nous semble moins montrer un nouveau Capote que révéler un auteur intégrant avec une maîtrise nouvelle les éléments de son talent.’ Hollowell, Fact and Fiction, p. 85. Tompkins, ‘In Cold Fact’, p. 56. Kenneth Tynan, ‘The Kansas Farm Murders’, in The Critical Response to Truman Capote, pp. 129–34 (p. 134) (originally published in the Observer, 13 March 1966, 21). Tompkins, ‘In Cold Fact’, pp. 56–7. Ibid., p. 58. Jack de Bellis, ‘Visions and Revisions: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood’, Journal of Modern Literature, 7 (1979), pp. 519–36 (p. 535). Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, trans. T.S. Dorsch in T.S. Dorsch (ed.), Classical Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 29–75 (p. 44).

104 From Text to Literature 34. There is a reference to the first of these passages in Phyllis Frus McCord, ‘The Ideology of Form: The Nonfiction Novel’, Genre, 19 (1986), pp. 59–79 (p. 60). However, her aim is entirely different from mine as she sets out to describe the origin of a division into factuality and fiction which she feels should be dismantled in the interests of a post-structural emphasis on the element of rhetorical construction in all kinds of texts. 35. See C.J. Gossip, An Introduction to French Classical Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 138: ‘This, while true (vrai), claimed Scudéry, was improbable and hence of historical but not literary interest.’ 36. In addition, as is suggested by the Raskolnikov example above, representativity ties in with a more general search for wide significance in literature. Consequently, the former is sometimes covered implicitly by terminology designed for the latter. Good examples are ‘the symbolic code’ applied by Roland Barthes in S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970) passim, and Jonathan Culler’s description, with reference to Barthes, of ‘thematic extrapolation’ in Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 224–9. 37. It may therefore seem unfortunate that my term ‘representativity’ refers to a component of literariness. But in fact this kind of duality is characteristic of a considerable portion of the terms that occur in the study of the arts. In common parlance concepts like ‘expression’ and ‘form’ are by no means limited to aesthetic phenomena, but they are taken over and given a special meaning when applied to them. This is also true of the concept of ‘representativity’. 38. For elaboration of the concept of ‘pliability’, see my ‘The Literary Work as a Pliable Entity: Combining Realism and Pluralism’, in Michael Krausz (ed.), Is There a Single Right Interpretation? (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), pp. 211–30. 39. David Galloway, ‘Real Toads in Real Gardens: Reflections on the Art of Nonfiction Fiction and the Legacy of Truman Capote’, in The Critical Response to Truman Capote, pp. 143–54 (p. 146) (originally publ. in Raimund Borgmeier (ed.), Gattungsprobleme in der anglo-amerikanischen Literatur: Beiträge für Ulrich Suerbaum zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), pp. 217–29). 40. Trilling, ‘Capote’s Crime and Punishment’, pp. 123–5. 41. In addition, one should perhaps see a reference to non-literary representativity in the observation in Pini, ‘Fiction et Réalité chez Truman Capote’, pp. 180 and 183, that murder is a common phenomenon in the United States. 42. Donald Pizer, ‘Documentary Narrative as Art: William Manchester and Truman Capote’, Journal of Modern Literature, 2 (1971), pp. 105–18 (p. 117). 43. Peter Bruck, ‘Fictitious Nonfiction: Fiktionalisierungs- und Erzählstrategien in der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Dokumentarprosa’, Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 22:1 (1977), pp. 123–36 (pp. 126–8). 44. William Wiegand, ‘The “Nonfiction” Novel’, in The Critical Response to Truman Capote, pp. 135–41 (p. 139) (originally publ. in New Mexico Quarterly, 37 (Autumn 1967), 243–57). 45. Tanner, ‘Death in Kansas’, p. 99. 46. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Capote, Truman’, in Malcolm Bradbury, Jean Franco, and Eric Mottram (eds), The Penguin Companion to Literature, 4 Vols, Vol. 3: U.S.A. and Latin America (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 54.

Torsten Pettersson 105 47. de Bellis, ‘Visions and Revisions: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood’, p. 536. 48. John Hollowell, ‘Capote’s In Cold Blood: the Search for Meaningful Design’, Arizona Quarterly, 53 (1997), pp. 97–116 (p. 115). 49. Anderson, ‘Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Rhetoric of Silence: the Art of Truman Capote’, p. 348. 50. Cf., in note 43, the main title of Peter Bruck’s article: ‘Fictitious Nonfiction’. I should add, however, that this combination of concepts does not figure prominently in the text of the article. 51. Wiegand, ‘The “Nonfiction” Novel’, p. 135. 52. Quoted from Galloway, ‘Real Toads in Real Gardens: Reflections on the Art of Nonfiction Fiction and the Legacy of Truman Capote’, p. 146. 53. Pizer, ‘Documentary Narrative as Art: William Manchester and Truman Capote’, p. 111. 54. Kramer, ‘Real Gardens with Real Toads’, p. 68. 55. Pizer, ‘Documentary Narrative as Art: William Manchester and Truman Capote’, p. 113. 56. Anderson, ‘Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Rhetoric of Silence: the Art of Truman Capote’, p. 340. 57. Mariska Koopman-Thurlings, ‘Fictionalité et structure fermée: lois ou conventions du genre romanesque?: Réflexions à partir du nonfiction novel’, La Licorne, 22 (1992), pp. 77–88 (p. 81). 58. Wiegand, ‘The “Nonfiction” Novel’, p. 139. 59. Hollowell, ‘Capote’s In Cold Blood: the Search for Meaningful Design’, pp. 107–14. 60. Galloway, ‘Real Toads in Real Gardens: Reflections on the Art of Nonfiction Fiction and the Legacy of Truman Capote’, p. 147. 61. See the articles in Hernadi, What is Literature? as well as Culler, Literary Theory, pp. 27–36, and Livingston, ‘Literature’, in Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics.

5 The Concept of Literature: a Description and an Evaluation Anders Pettersson

I. Introduction There is a long-standing discussion about the concept of literature and its definition (or abolition, or revision) among students of literature and of literary aesthetics. Though I have profited much from following these debates over the years, I have also felt a growing dissatisfaction with the premises which underlie the arguments both of the concept’s advocates and of its critics. In this article, I endeavour to present a partly new view of the problems surrounding the concept and its use. First, I offer a short description of the everyday concept of literature and of special uses of the concept of literature (Sections II–III). Then I introduce and comment on a couple of well-known definitions or analyses of the concept of literature put forward by theorists of different theoretical persuasions (Sections IV–V). The article concludes with a summary of the methodological situation, as I see it, and with an attempt at assessing the usefulness and the limitations of the concept (Section VI). I shall argue that ‘literature’ is basically to be regarded as an (entirely respectable and useful) everyday concept, but that it is not in itself a theoretically important term. If we want to make good use of the concept in more demanding contexts than that of ordinary language, we will have to redefine it from case to case to make it suitable for the purpose at hand. A few terminological stipulations will be necessary to forestall confusion. When thinking about the concept of literature and discussing its problems, theorists do not normally distinguish between what I just called the ‘everyday’ concept on the one hand and its ‘special uses’ on the other. The importance of that distinction is one of the crucial points of my analysis. In the rest of this article, I shall use the expression ‘the 106

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concept of literature’ (without further specifications) to designate the concept as understood in the broad and undifferentiated manner. The ordinary-language concept described in dictionaries and encyclopaedias will be referred to as ‘the everyday concept of literature’, while this or that special, more or less technical concept related to a more specific use of the term will be called a ‘specialized concept of literature’. Figure 5.1 below gives a graphic presentation of the relationships between these terms. It is worth emphasizing that the figure should not be read ‘historically’ and taken to imply that an original, undifferentiated concept of literature later split up into an everyday concept and a number of specialized concepts of literature. What might have happened is that the (everyday) concept of literature over time came to be employed in some more or less specialized senses, giving rise to more or less specialized concepts of literature. The concept of literature now covers, as an umbrella concept, both the everyday concept and the specialized ones, and that is the relationship which Figure 5.1 is intended to capture. Regarded in this fashion, the concept of literature is certainly not a family concept in the Wittgensteinian sense. It could be called a family of concepts, though. It is a cluster of more or less differentiated but genetically closely related concepts that go by the same name. This article discusses many problems in a few pages: the present content and use of the concept of literature, the literary-theoretical and literary-aesthetic disagreements about the concept, and the nature of concepts and of conceptual relativity. Naturally, I cannot treat any of these topics thoroughly. My ambition is to sketch, and to argue for, a way of viewing the concept, and to do this in a manner that is concrete

The concept of literature

The everyday concept of literature

Specialized concepts of literature

Specialized concept of literature1

Specialized concept of literature2

Specialized concept of literaturen

Figure 5.1: The concept of literature, the everyday concept of literature, and specialized concepts of literature

108 From Text to Literature

enough, in its brevity, to make that perspective comprehensible and, to some extent at least, convincing.

II. The everyday concept of literature The word ‘literature’ comes from Latin ‘litteratura’ (derived from littera, ‘letter of the alphabet’), a translation of the Greek grammatike¯.1 It was adopted in many major European languages by the Middle Ages, either via French or directly from Latin, in the sense of ‘learning’, ‘erudition’, or the like.2 In these modern languages, the word over time came to be used as a designation of texts. This development did not, however, start until the eighteenth century, and the reference to texts did not become the main one until well into the nineteenth century. The history of these changes is reasonably well known, at least in broad outline,3 but the causes behind the developments are less clearly understood.4 My interest here is firmly focused on the contemporary situation and on the concept as related to verbal art. I will be looking mainly at the English word ‘literature’ and the corresponding concepts, but I believe that the notion exists, in basically identical form, in all major European languages. What I am going to say consequently applies to these language communities as well as to English and to Anglophone cultures. The Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter: OED) distinguishes between three principal meanings of the word ‘literature’. The first is the now obsolete one referring to learning or erudition, the second being ‘literature’ in the sense of a pursuit (for example, ‘the activity or profession of a man of letters’). In its third main meaning, ‘literature’ refers to texts. There are two varieties of this use that do not interest me here (‘The body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject’; ‘Printed matter of any kind’); the third one, however, is the sense that is relevant in my context: ‘Literary productions as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect.’5 The last two quoted sentences form a description of the concept which I call ‘the everyday concept of literature’. True, I am not entirely happy with the description: according to my intuitions, it would be more natural to regard the two senses referred to – all writing; beautiful or emotionally effective writing – as two different concepts, in which case I would see the latter rather than the former as the everyday concept of literature (as an art). My intuition is in fact shared by

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Webster, where we find a distinction between ‘literature’ in the sense of ‘writings in prose or verse; esp: writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest’ (more or less the everyday concept of literature, as I am inclined to see it) and ‘the body of written works produced in a particular language, country, or age’.6 I must also confess that my own linguistic intuitions would lead me to wish to define the everyday concept of literature more narrowly than OED and Webster. I would have thought that the idea of literature as a kind of art is central when the word ‘literature’ is used in the manner being discussed, and that fictional prose, poems, and dramas nowadays stand out as prime examples of that which is literature in the relevant sense. Maybe the dictionaries are being overly conservative, or maybe my professional training as an academic student of literature leads me to misjudge the everyday notion. I just note my doubts and pass on. In speaking of the everyday concept I am, of course, taking a broad view of the situation. The concept in question is no doubt understood somewhat differently by different persons, and most people probably only have a rather diffuse idea of what literature is.7 Yet it seems natural to say that the concept of which I am speaking is in fact one, distinguishable concept. We have, for instance, seen that it is singled out (under varying descriptions) as one specific meaning of the English word ‘literature’ by dictionaries like the OED and Webster, a meaning of the word that is implicitly supposed to be stored in the minds of those who know English. Much more could naturally be said about the concept than is comprised in the sentences in the OED and in Webster. Space does not however permit any really in-depth description of it, so I shall restrict myself to supplementing the characterizations in the encyclopaedias with three brief additional observations. First, it is worth pointing out that the everyday concept of literature has in fact been in constant change since its introduction and establishment around 1800. On the whole, it has over time been narrowed down: for example, such things as historical accounts and oratory used to fall under the concept earlier but do not really count as literature today.8 The development has undoubtedly not been uniform between periods and language communities, but it is impossible to enter into the finer details of these matters, which are insufficiently studied anyway, in this essay. The important thing here is to note that the concept could well be indexed temporally and geographically – we could speak of the everyday concept of literature Britain 1850 and so forth.

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Second: the evaluative component in the dictionary definitions needs glossing. According to the OED, for instance, literature is writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or (positive) emotional effect. Now, the idea of positive value is certainly associated with the everyday concept of literature – but perhaps not as robustly as this definition makes it seem. Bad literary works are no contradictions in terms. One would not be hard put to find examples of unsuccessful literary texts – poems, novels, short stories, and dramas which, regrettably, do not have any substantial claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect. Aesthetic or artistic merit is thus hardly a defining property of literature. Perhaps it would be apt to say that it is something which we expect from literature, and that the condition forms part of the everyday concept of literature in that capacity. Not all literary works possess the kind of merit in question, but paradigmatic literary works do. (The definition in Webster can in fact, if one wishes, be interpreted much in that vein.) Third and last: it is the case, I believe, that the core of literature, according to the everyday concept, is made up of such literature for adults that has ambitions to provide more than just entertainment, but that literature for children and young adults nowadays also falls under the concept, though less centrally, as does lighter literature for adults (‘popular literature’).

III. Specialized concepts of literature The everyday concept of literature is used in a variety of contexts to refer to an aggregate of texts. The divisions it effectuates in our picture of reality are, presumably, relatively vague. There also exist a number of more technical employments of the term ‘literature’. There are different practical or theoretical motivations behind them, and they vary somewhat in degree of technicality. I shall adduce a few examples of such more specialized concepts here without claiming to have covered the whole field or even to have singled out all the most important instances. Let us think, first, of the library classification concepts of literature. Major classification systems (Dewey Decimal Classification, Library of Congress Classification, Colon Classification) as well as more local ones (such as the Swedish SAB classification) use the term ‘literature’ or other terms designating the same concept to cover a class of texts which constitutes one of the major subdivisions in the system. This is clearly a

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more specialized use of the term than the one described initially. For instance, the four classification systems in question all specify what general types of text are comprised within the category of literature (as might be expected, they do not wholly agree in their delimitations),9 and thus create concepts with a higher degree of conformity and precision. The concept of literature used in connection with the Nobel Prize in Literature is related to another specialized employment. The Nobel Prize regulations say that ‘under the term “literature” shall be comprised, not only belles-lettres, but also other writings which, by virtue of their form and method of presentation, possess literary value’.10 Historically speaking, it is a mid nineteenth century everyday concept of literature – the concept of literature, rather old-fashioned already at the time, which Alfred Nobel obviously had in mind on formulating his will – that (at least formally) underlies the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Unlike the present-day everyday concept – and the ones related to library classifications – it may include in its scope also such writings as historical and philosophical texts, which helps explain the literature awards to Theodor Mommsen (1902), Henri Bergson (1927), Bertrand Russell (1950), and Winston Churchill (1953). If one thinks of ‘literature’ as a technical term, it is however undoubtedly first and foremost because of the concepts of literature used in academic literary studies. One might even imagine that those wishing to inform themselves about the content of the concept of literature should turn to academic students of literature, since these would seem to be the real experts in the area (as one would go to theoretical physicists for in-depth explanations of what quarks really are). This may or may not be a sound intuition – I will attempt to elucidate the situation in the latter part of my essay – but what is certain is that academic students of literature do not agree among themselves about the definition of ‘literature’. To some extent, this too will be illustrated later. For the moment, I just want to point out that concepts of literature figure in literary studies in at least two capacities. When writing about later periods – approximately the last two centuries, where western literature is concerned – the student of literature is dealing with an intellectual culture which possesses the concept of literature and does, itself, at least to some extent, think about its writings in the terms of literature and non-literature. As a consequence, historical academic-literary-studies concepts of literature seem unavoidable in literary studies. When describing and analysing modern ‘literary’ cultures, the literary historian will

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have to take into account, implicitly or explicitly, the concept(s) of literature of the culture in question, irrespective of how sceptical he or she may be of the concept of literature on other grounds.11 It is another matter whether or not researchers find the concept useful in their own description of individual texts, and of the world of texts, and of its developments over the centuries and millennia. That is a question of whether the individual researcher wishes to use a systematic academic-literary-studies concept of literature or not. By a ‘systematic’ concept I simply mean, in this connection, a concept which genuinely forms part of one’s own conceptual toolkit, a concept on which one builds in one’s academic work in literary studies (unlike the corresponding ‘historical’ concept, which forms part of somebody else’s conceptual apparatus and enters one’s own vocabulary only as a necessary element in one’s description and analysis of that other system). I do not necessarily expect a systematic academic-literarystudies concept to be particularly advanced in other respects, or even particularly systematic in the ordinary sense. For instance, behind a history of literature there is by necessity some conception of what is and is not literature – even if it is normally unclear – of what does and does not, in principle, belong to the subject of that history. Such concepts of literature underlying literary-history writing by professionals are systematic academic-literary-studies concepts (no matter how unsystematic they may appear). A researcher who decides to employ a systematic academic-literarystudies concept of literature will obviously have to fashion the concept in a way that forges it into a useful instrument for the purposes which it is to serve – and those purposes may be conceived differently, depending on how the researcher views the textual material, the overall task, and the required methodologies of academic literary studies. Because of this, the researcher’s concept of literature, as it is put to use in this or that specific investigative and expository context, may obviously have to be differently shaped from the everyday one, or the library classification one, or the Nobel Prize one. To return to the literary history example: the writing of literary histories cannot normally be described as being based on either of these concepts, and presumably literary historians have good reasons for choosing other alternatives.

I have spoken briefly of some different concepts of literature – the everyday one, the library classification ones, the Nobel Prize one, and

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Literature is a kind of the exemplars of which are

aggregate of verbal compositions, works of general cultural importance;

their typical characteristics being that they are

well-written, with important content,

and their value consisting in

the provision of emotional satisfation, knowledge, or aesthetic pleasure.

···

···

Figure 5.2: The (everyday) concept of literature, understood as a frame-like structure

the various academic-literary-studies ones. It is an important part of my thesis that lack of attention to the multiplicity of employments of the concept, and of concept-versions, has led both the concept’s advocates and its critics astray and seriously hampered the discussion about the concept of literature. Before taking up that thread, however, a few words about concepts generally are in place. There are several views of what concepts are: abstract entities, mental entities, eliminable fictions, and so on. For obvious reasons I cannot enter into a discussion of the nature of concepts here; I shall have to content myself with making it clear how I view them. I conceive of concepts as mental entities, a kind of complex prototypical representations stored in the mind – ‘frames, schemas, or scripts, . . . representations of typical entities or situations’, to quote Paul Thagard, whose view of concepts I fully accept.12 Just to illustrate the perspective – no great importance should be attached to the exact formulations – I sketch above, in Figure 5.2, how the everyday concept of literature could possibly be described when seen as ‘a frame-like structure’ and understood in the wide manner favoured by OED and Webster:13 Consideration of other concepts of literature – library classification/Nobel Prize/academic literary studies/and so on – would lead to different completions of the schema.

IV. Attempts at defining ‘literature’ Some scholars and critics defend the concept of literature; some attack it.14 In many cases, the controversies about the concept have wider cultural implications,15 but I will mainly ignore that aspect of the matter here.

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The concept’s advocates often wish to establish it more solidly by defining it carefully or by providing it with a thorough analysis. Before looking at two such proposals, a few general words about definitions are needed. One could usefully distinguish between three sorts of definition.16 One type is the lexical definition, the account of how the term in question is actually used. The definitions of ‘literature’ in OED and Webster are lexical ones, and in fact my two last sections can be seen as outlining, taken together, a relatively ambitious lexical definition of the concept. Lexical definitions are obviously important in that they help us understand what people mean by the words they use and make it easier for us to use words in ways that do not give rise to misunderstandings. As I see it, however, lexical definitions of ordinary non-technical concepts do not have much theoretical significance. When we let a concept taken from everyday language carry considerable theoretical weight in our argument or in our empirical investigations, we will normally have to sharpen or refashion it in order to make it useful in its new context. For that reason, I would not necessarily let ordinary language govern my use of the word ‘literature’ in a specific study. I would find it wrong to assume that normal usage provides a framework within which we have to move conceptually, that the conceptual apparatus which it entails cannot be improved upon. A very different kind of definition is the stipulative one, the introduction, by fiat, of a special way of using the term. (An invented example: ‘By “literature” I will mean, in this essay, novels, short stories, poems, and plays.’) Like the lexical definition, the stipulative one is important in its own way, and also faces specific problems of its own. When one speaks of the problem of defining this or that term, though, it is hardly ever the difficulties of defining it lexically or stipulatively that one has in mind. One is referring to the third type of definition, the analytical definition, and that is also the kind which will interest me here. An analytical definition accounts for the main characteristics of the concept in question, and thus provides an analysis of it. Depending on one’s ontological convictions, on one’s view of the nature of concepts, and on the character of the concept at hand, analytical definitions may assume quite a different character. For instance, if you believe that literature is a formation in reality itself and possesses a specific nature, then you will no doubt attempt to produce what could be called an essentialist analytical definition: a definition which delineates the essential nature of literature. If, on the other hand, you believe that litera-

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ture is, as the catchphrase goes, a construction, you will rather endeavour to formulate what could be called an explicative analytical definition (sometimes called a rational reconstruction): a definition which makes the concept of literature (or, one of them) more purposeful, typically by making it clearer and more precise. (More subtypes of the analytical definition could be mentioned, but it does not appear necessary to enter deeper into the subject here.) I would say that those who wish to define ‘literature’ almost invariably commit a certain fallacy which I will call the unified-concept mistake. They suppose that there is a common concept of literature, one that we all share, more or less, and that this concept is of theoretical importance and in need of analytical definition. Actually, however, there is no such concept, at least not as I see it. We certainly do share a concept of literature, more or less, but that is the everyday concept, which may be practically useful for our orientation in reality but lacks theoretical importance. It would be quite easy to make the everyday concept clearer and more precise – in fact, countless varieties of an explicative analytical definition could be proposed. But we could not very well judge one such definition superior to the others except with reference to some purpose that the concept has to fulfil – and there does not seem to be any specific task that the everyday concept of literature is obliged to carry out except effecting a certain rough division in the universe of texts. If we want to make that division exact instead of rough, we should have some more specific reason for that, and certainly we would need a solid practical or theoretical motivation for drawing the demarcation in exactly the way that we propose, otherwise we would land in arbitrariness. Analytical definitions of the everyday concept of literature may even be harmful in that they may remove its useful elasticity, typical of ordinary language notions. In short, defining the everyday concept of literature analytically would seem misguided to me. It would be a little like presenting an exact definition of baldness. The definition would inevitably be arbitrary to a large extent, and, worse, it would, at bottom, be counterproductive. I can see no parallel objections against analytical explicative definitions of some other kinds of concepts of literature. It appears, for instance, entirely reasonable to devise analytical explicative definitions of library-classification concepts of literature or of systematic academicliterary-studies concepts of literature. There is thus, as I see it, a commonly shared concept of literature (the everyday one), and there are also concepts of literature that are not commonly shared and where an analytical definition may be in its place (like the systematic academic-

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literary-studies ones). However, there is no commonly shared concept of literature which is also a fit object for analytical definition. Yet attempts at defining ‘literature’ typically seem to concern such a concept. I shall content myself with two examples. Let us first look at René Wellek’s definition or analysis in his and Austin Warren’s classic Theory of Literature (1942): The term ‘literature’ seems best if we limit it to the art of literature, that is, to imaginative literature. . . . The centre of literary art is obviously to be found in the traditional genres of the lyric, the epic, the drama. In all of them, the reference is to a world of fiction, of imagination. . . . If we recognize ‘fictionality’, ‘invention’, or ‘imagination’ as the distinguishing trait of literature, we think thus of literature in terms of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Keats rather than of Cicero or Montaigne, Bossuet, or Emerson.17 Wellek does not say what (variety of the) concept of literature he seeks to define. It appears natural to me to understand him as believing that there is, fundamentally, only one concept of literature, which is also a theoretically important notion, and as referring to that assumed concept. If one does not share Wellek’s underlying belief, his definition acquires a somewhat free-floating character: if we find the proposal interesting, we will have to devise, ourselves, some concrete use for it, applying it to one or other more specialized concept of literature. All this is quite characteristic of definitions of ‘literature’.18 Wellek contends that the term ‘seems best’ when limited in the fashion he prefers. In the context where the discussion occurs, it is perhaps most natural to understand him as presenting his version of the concept as the one best suited for literary study or literary scholarship. However this does not, of course, explain why it ‘seems best’ to draw the lines in the way Wellek suggests. There are other problems with the definition as well: for instance, whatever frequently used concept of literature one has in mind, definitions in terms of fictionality will, I am sure, prove difficult to uphold.19 I shall not pursue such questions, though: my main objective here is simply to point to the indeterminacy in Wellek’s analysis and to suggest that he commits the unified-concept mistake. Wellek devised his definition more than half a century ago, but modern state-of-the-art definitions of the term do not normally fare any better where that particular source of error is concerned. In their book Truth, Fiction and Literature (1994), Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom

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Olsen assert – with perfect justification, I believe – that literature as we know it depends for its existence on a social practice directed at the creation and apprehension of a special variety of verbal artefacts. According to their analysis, a verbal composition is a literary work if and only if the author intended it to be read with a specific stance, which they call ‘the literary stance’. Adopting the literary stance towards a text is to identify it as a literary work and apprehend it in accordance with the conventions of the literary practice. The mode of apprehension which the practice defines is one of appreciation. The literary stance is defined by the expectation of (and consequently the attempt to identify) a certain type of value, i.e. literary aesthetic value, in the text in question.20 Lamarque and Olsen’s analysis consists of two components. They describe a practice – the literary practice – and they offer an explanation of how the concept of literature, as they see it, is related to, and gets its meaning from, that practice. It is their analysis of the concept that is my concern here, but under the circumstances it is impossible not to begin with a few comments on what the authors have to say about the literary practice. Since we must understand Lamarque and Olsen as offering something more than a description of their own literary preferences, their account has to be compatible, by and large, with how actual readers behave when experiencing literature. However the authors do not put forward any real empirical data in support of their theses. They seem to expect us to assent on the strength of our general cultural competence, especially our intuitions about literature. One could thus characterize their highly interesting analysis of literary practice as being an as yet unverified hypothesis. Personally, I fully accept the idea of a literary practice, but I do not believe that it has the kind of precision ascribed to it by Lamarque and Olsen, nor that readers of literature normally seek the rather refined literary aesthetic value postulated by the authors. ‘All respondents agreed that writers are moral educators and nobody subscribed to a belief in experimental writing or “art for art’s sake” ’, says Stephanie Newell in her concrete and lively account of a questionnaire inquiry into views of the role of authors and the function of literature, carried out in 1998 among Ghanaian undergraduates and trainee teachers.21 My own knowledge of empirical investigations into western reading attitudes is scant, and I am not familiar with any such survey which includes

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aesthetic values among the optional answers. An ambitious empirical German survey from 1980 suggests that most readers seek hedonic, cognitive, and moral values in literature (in that order), but ‘literary aesthetic value’ was not among the alternatives investigated.22 My real point, however, is that Lamarque and Olsen’s analysis presents us with another instance of the unified-concept mistake. Their position differs from Wellek’s in many respects, yet they too seem to hold that there is, fundamentally, only one concept of literature, which is also a theoretically important notion, something which creates the same problems as I already commented on apropos of Wellek’s definition. Nor is it easy to find a concept of literature for which the analysis would be suitable. In reality, Lamarque and Olsen’s analysis would probably be best if it were taken as delineating a historical academicliterary-studies concept covering certain important aspects of the modern western understanding of literature (thus defusing African counterexamples and suchlike, and also the troublesome question of how general its descriptive validity for present-day western literary culture actually is). I have given but two examples of how the unified-concept mistake is haunting definitions of ‘literature’; if space had allowed, many more could have been adduced.23 The strength of definitions and analyses of ‘literature’ usually lies in their introduction of subtle and interesting complexes of properties or attitudes, in their pointing to features or interplays well worth dissecting and reflecting on. (Lamarque and Olsen’s proposal is a good example of this.) The methodological situation – the multiplicity of the concept of literature and of its uses, and the requirements on concepts of literature following from those uses – is mostly overlooked.

V. The concept’s critics Especially among students of literature, the concept of literature has met with much scepticism over the last few decades.24 Terry Eagleton’s introductory chapter to his Literary Theory25 is a well-known and influential manifestation of such lack of belief in the concept’s usefulness. Eagleton first – quite justifiably – casts doubts on a number of ways of defining the concept, and then goes on to suggest that literature can in fact be understood as ‘ “fine writing”, . . . that by and large people term “literature” writing which they think is good’.26 He apparently understands this as a reasonable definition of literature – characterizing it as ‘the definition of literature as highly valued writing’27 – and draws

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the conclusion that literature cannot really be defined, since evaluations change over time. In addition, he argues that the values which determine what writings we are to consider good are social values associated with the classes that rule society at a given time. Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, welldefinable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. . . . When I use the words ‘literary’ and ‘literature’ from here on in this book, then, I place them under an invisible crossing-out mark, to indicate that these terms will not really do but that we have no better ones at the moment.28 What we have uncovered . . . is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.29 I find Eagleton’s radical doubts about the concept refreshing and, in their negative way, very helpful. At the same time, however, I think that much can be said against his actual argument. One of its flaws is easy to detect. It is true that calling something ‘literature’ often implies ascribing positive value to it, but that is not always the case. And even if it were, it would not follow that all valuable texts could be called literary. ‘If it is literature, then it is valuable’ says something quite different from ‘If it is valuable, then it is literature.’ The reservation with which Eagleton hedges his definition – it is said to concern types of text rather than individual texts – cannot change the fact that it rests on a non sequitur.30 A deeper and more interesting problem with Eagleton’s line of reasoning is that he, too, apparently commits the unified-concept mistake, or a negative version of that fallacy. For Eagleton certainly seems to suppose that there is only one concept of literature, that it is one which we all share, more or less, and that that concept ‘will not really do’. To my mind, such criticism is too sweeping. As I have attempted to demonstrate, the concept of literature comes in several varieties with somewhat different content and varying intended uses. Eagleton simply overlooks this. I find it most natural and productive to understand Eagleton’s criticism as being levelled, at bottom, at systematic academic-literary-studies concepts of literature. But then it is difficult to accept his claim that the

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concept is – with necessity, apparently – an evaluative one. No doubt the everyday concept of literature often implies, among other things, a positive evaluation. Yet there is no reason why systematic academicliterary-studies concepts of literature should mirror the everyday notion in this respect. When we (eventually) devise a systematic concept of literature fit to be used within academic literary studies, we could, and perhaps should, leave evaluative aspects aside. It is a provoking thought that we could do without the concept of literature. In a sense, the idea is self-evident, but it may still take one by surprise. If we decide to eliminate the concept (in its systematic academic-literary-studies uses, let us suppose), what have we got to put in its stead? Nothing, for the moment, was Eagleton’s answer, but Peter Widdowson has attempted to sketch a positive alternative. There are substantial, and by no means hidden, relationships between Eagleton’s analysis and some of the views in Peter Widdowson’s Literature (1999). He, too, regards the concept of literature as incorporating the idea of traditional elite values (‘the high cultural “Canon” ’). Through this, but also ‘through demystification and deconstruction by radical critical theory’, it ‘has become so problematical . . . that it approaches the unusable’. Perhaps it can only be represented ‘under erasure’.31 Widdowson, however, also wishes to offer a constructive alternative, or at least the outlines of one. Reluctant to make use of the concept of literature, he seeks to replace it with the concept of the literary. ‘The literary’ is found in ‘writing which presents itself as being “creative”, “imaginative” and “artificial” ’, in texts which ‘create a “poietic reality” ’ while they ‘simultaneously enable us to “see” the new “reality” being created’. It can be met with ‘in all historical periods and cultures’, though ‘the category in itself ’ should not be understood as ‘unchanging and transhistorical’.32 Widdowson’s description of the literary is perhaps in need of clarification (as his many scare quotes indicate). What I find worth stressing, however, is his idea that fresh intellectual categories can be manufactured for the solution of new or traditional tasks of literary history, theory, and criticism. There are textual and sociotextual realities to be understood and described, and perhaps we may devise other, more promising tools for their study. At the same time, however, it is not easy to see what new or traditional academic or other purposes Widdowson’s concept of the literary could serve, or why it could serve them better than conceivable alternatives. Just like the concept’s adherents, the adversaries of the concept

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of literature seem to me to pay insufficient attention to the concept’s current content and use, and to what is required from us if we want to sharpen, refashion, or replace it.

VI. An evaluation of the concept of literature What I have said in this article may have sounded unduly relativistic to some readers. Nowhere have I reckoned with the possibility that there is, so to speak, a truth of the matter: something which simply is literature, and whose specific nature has to be analysed. Before I go on to my evaluation of the concept(s) of literature, I would like to clarify how I view the situation. This necessitates a very brief excursion into ontology and epistemology. I do not doubt that there exists an outer world, a world independent of our minds, nor that it is, in itself, differentiated and not the same all over. In representing the world (thinking about it, describing it, and so on), however, we must make use of concepts and other means of representation. These are of course all man-made. ‘Systems of representation, such as vocabularies and conceptual schemes generally, are human creations, and to that extent arbitrary’, says John Searle. ‘It is possible to have any number of different systems of representations for representing the same reality.’ Searle calls this thesis – to which I wholeheartedly subscribe – the thesis of ‘conceptual relativity’.33 It would, in principle, be possible to believe that literature is a kind of subdivision of the outer world – part of its inherent structure, as it were – so that the division into literature and non-literature is an aspect of the material nature of things, and literature a natural given whose essential features the concept of literature should capture and reflect.34 Since it seems so obvious that literature is a purely cultural phenomenon, however, I find it hard to make sense of such a stance. If someone is, let us call it, a ‘material objectivist’ where literature is concerned, I feel that he or she has much to explain with respect to the ontological and factual basis of the standpoint. No, literature is hardly a material phenomenon, existing independently of human minds. Things like texts exist not as brute or material objects, but as what Searle calls ‘institutional facts’.35 Under certain circumstances, which can be specified, marks on paper (material facts) count as texts or linguistic compositions (institutional facts) for the members of a cultural community. The notion of literature, in its turn, is superimposed on concepts such as ‘text’ or ‘linguistic compositions’: certain texts (but not all) are literary works.

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Institutional facts are cultural constructs, and so are the concepts that describe and order them. It is possible to look at these constructs from a descriptive point of view: what are they like? They can however also be confronted with normative considerations: do they serve a purpose that is in fact worthwhile, and do they serve it well? Those are precisely the kinds of question that I am asking about ‘literature’ in this essay. I attempt to describe and evaluate the concept(s). Could one be a ‘cultural objectivist’ about ‘literature’; an inherentstructurist with regard to the cultural reality in which the concept and the designated phenomenon exist? I suppose that one can, in a sense. One could, in principle, argue that there are cultural purposes so essential, and concepts so necessary for their fulfilment, that the concepts are, in a way, culturally unavoidable and irreplaceable. Just like the material objectivists, however, such cultural objectivists about literature would have much to explain before their standpoint would seem tenable.

The stage has now been set for my evaluation of the concept – or, rather, concepts – of literature. How good are they? Are they worth having, or could we actually do without them? A serious evaluation of them would be an enormous undertaking and would also have to include the consideration of more or less viable alternatives. What I have to say here should be taken as preliminary observations. It must be remembered that my ambition in this essay only is to place the questions surrounding the concept of literature in a partly new, hopefully liberating perspective. On the one hand, I think that one has to say that the concept of literature, in its varying versions, is part of our language, and that it also serves us reasonably well, at least as long as we do not require very much from it. In any case, both the everyday notion, the library classification concepts, and the Nobel Prize concept seem to serve understandable and to some extent reasonable purposes. Perhaps they do this less than perfectly, but that hardly gives us cause to abolish them altogether. As I said earlier, I think that the concept’s critics are too prone to dismiss the concept, that they do not really take account of the humble but not indifferent purposes that many concepts of literature serve. On the other hand, the concept of literature could be made clearer and more useful in many contexts – or perhaps, indeed, replaced with better alternatives. The everyday concept of literature is, to my mind, a

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notion about which no theorist should bother, but the library classification concept could, I suppose, always be made clearer and more purposeful – or replaced, within the framework of some new classification system, better suited to the needs of the present age. The Nobel Prize concept could certainly also be clarified – and, perhaps, widened to include more kinds of what we now call literature, like books for children and young adults? The problems with our present concepts of literature probably make themselves felt most of all within literary studies. I referred, earlier, in passing, to the question of what concept of literature (if any) one should base one’s history of, say, world literature, on, if one were to write such a history. In answering such a question, many considerations have to be taken into account. It should be obvious that the design of one’s systematic academic-literary-studies concepts of literature (if one decides to adopt such concepts) must depend not only on our vague general notions about what literature is, but also on one’s literary-theoretical and literary-historical convictions, and on the specific operations that the concepts are meant to perform. Formulated in the unified-concept terms whose problematic nature I have endeavoured to expose in this essay: ‘literature’ is, at heart, an everyday notion rather than an indispensable intellectual instrument. There seems to be little doubt that the concept will continue to be used, both in ordinary language and in academic literary studies, for a long time yet. Where academic literary studies are concerned, the need to take account (‘historically’) of the idea of literature and of the practices associated with it will always be of fundamental and obvious importance. It is my firm personal belief, however, that the concept is of little systematic value in academic literary studies unless it is always remodelled to suit the purpose at hand, case by case.

Notes 1. Concerning the word’s employment in Latin, see esp. Eduard Wölfflin, ‘Litteratura’, in Eduard Wölfflin (ed.), Archiv für lateinische Lexikographie und Grammatik mit Einschluss des älteren Mittellateins [. . .] (Leipzig: Teubner), V (1888), pp. 49–55, and Thesaurus linguae latinae, 9 Vols to date (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900– ), VII, Sect. 2 (1970–79), col. 1531–32. 2. See, e.g., Alain Rey et al. (eds), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 2 Vols (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1992), I, 1137; ‘Literature’, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Carlo Battisti and Giovanni Alessio, Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 Vols (Florence: G.

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

Barbèra editore, 1968), III, 2212; Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch, started by Hans Schulz, continued by Otto Basler and by the Institut für deutsche Sprache, 7 Vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1913–88), II (1942), 34. Especially relevant in a literary context are Robert Escarpit, ‘La Définition du terme “littérature” ’, in Robert Escarpit, Charles Bouazis et al. (eds), Le Littéraire et le social: éléments pour une sociologie de la littérature, (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 259–72; Bo Bennich-Björkman, Termen litteratur i svenskan 1750–1850, Meddelanden utgivna av Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturhistoriska institutionen i Uppsala, 4 (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturhistoriska institutionen, 1970), pp. 40–57; Henryk Markiewicz, ‘The Limits of Literature’, in Ralph Cohen (ed.), New Directions in Literary History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); René Wellek, ‘What Is Literature?’, in Paul Hernadi (ed.), What Is Literature?, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 16–23; Peter Widdowson, Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), ch. 2. A particularly ambitious analysis of the underlying social, intellectual, and cultural transitions is found in Siegfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). The broader cultural and historical picture is painted, with an impressive diachronic span, in Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art: a Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). ‘Literature’, The Oxford English Dictionary. Frederick C. Mish et al. (eds), Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1989), pp. 697–98. This is certainly the impression that one gets when consulting the only ambitious empirical investigation of the matter that I know of, an inquiry into the West German understanding of what literature is that was carried out a couple of decades ago. See Dagmar Hintzenberg, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Reinhard Zobel, Zum Literaturbegriff in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Friedr. Vieweg und Sohn, 1980). See, e.g., Bennich-Björkman, Termen litteratur, ch. 3; Wellek, ‘What Is Literature?’, pp. 19–20; Shiner, The Invention of Art, p. 191. See, respectively: Melvil Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index: Devised by Melvil Dewey, 21st edn, ed. Joan S. Mitchell and others, 4 Vols (Albany: Forest Press, 1996), III, 737 and IV, 1184–5 (the term ‘belleslettres’ is still employed as an alternative to ‘literature’ in the Dewey Decimal Classification); John Philip Immroth, Immroth’s Guide to the Library of Congress Classification, 3rd edn, ed. Lois Mai Chan (Littleton: Libraries Unlimited, 1980), pp. 224–5; S.R. Ranganathan, Colon Classification, 6th edn (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, [1960] 1963), p. 2.94; Klassifikationssystem för svenska bibliotek, 7th revised edn, ed. Anders Noaksson in co-operation with Klassifikationsgruppen inom SAB:s kommitté för katalogisering och klassifikation (Lund: Bibliotekstjänst, 1997), p. 67; SAB uses the Swedish term ‘skönlitteratur’ (approximately: ‘imaginative literature’). Quoted from Lars Gyllensten, The Nobel Prize in Literature, trans. Alan Blair (Stockholm: The Swedish Academy, 1987), p. 15. By rights, these historical concepts should be time-and-space-indexed concepts of literature, mostly versions of the everyday concept. I do not believe, however, that scholarly practice is as sophisticated as that. As already said,

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12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

it is my impression that the inner multiplicity of the concept of literature is largely overlooked (unlike the fact that the content of the concept is contested, which is well known). Paul Thagard, Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 60. Thagard’s view of concepts is well described in his Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), ch. 2, esp. pp. 24–30 and, more briefly, in his Mind, esp. pp. 60–2. Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions, p. 29. Cf. Thagard’s schemas in the passages already referred to. Battle metaphors are common in this connection. Good examples are the title of René Wellek’s ‘The Attack on Literature’, in René Wellek, The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 3–18, and Richard Shusterman’s description of ‘literature’ as an essentially contested concept in The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi; Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1984), ch. 1. The idea of the concept’s essential contestedness has later been brought forward anew by Ole Martin Skilleås in his Philosophy and Literature: an Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), ch. 3. Recent accounts of the modern discussion about the concept from a more philosophical point of view include Christopher New’s Philosophy of Literature: an Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), ch. 2, and Skilleås, ch. 3. For perspectives from literary studies see, e.g., Trevor Ross, ‘Literature’, in Irena R. Makaryk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 581–3; Widdowson, Literature, chs. 1–3; Klaus Weimar, ‘Literatur’, in Harald Fricke, Klaus Grubmüller, Jan-Dirk Müller and Klaus Weimar (eds), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 3 Vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), II, 443–8; Rainer Rosenberg, “Literarisch/Literatur’, in Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius et al., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, 7 Vols (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000–01), III, 665–93. Three valuable modern surveys of the concept of literature are Stein Haugom Olsen, Bruce Robbins, and Bernard Harrison, ‘Literature’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 Vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), III, 147–60; Peter Lamarque, ‘Literature’, in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2001) pp. 449–61; Paisley Livingston, ‘Literature’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 536–54. This is well known and becomes quite obvious in, for instance, Wellek’s ‘The Attack on Literature’, in Skilleås, and in the critical contributions by Eagleton and Widdowson discussed in section V. There are different ways of classifying definitions. I follow Konrad MarcWogau’s taxonomy and terminology in his Filosofisk uppslagsbok (Stockholm: Liber, 1963), pp. 54–5, which fits my present, modest purposes perfectly. About the kinds of definition that I here call ‘lexical’, ‘stipulative’, and ‘explicative’, cf., e.g., Takashi Yagisawa, ‘Definition’, in Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 185–6 (‘definition in use’, ‘stipulative definition’), and G. Aldo

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Antonelli, ‘Definition’, in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 10 Vols, II, 845–9 (846) (‘rational reconstructions’, ‘explication’). René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942) 3rd rev. edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 22, 25, and 26 respectively. And of ‘art’, I might add. See my article ‘Definitions of “Art” and Their Intended Import’, Nordisk estetisk tidskrift, 23 (2001), pp. 25–43, where I analyse the discussion about the concept of art along similar lines (with an excursion about ‘literature’ now elaborated further in the present essay). John R. Searle’s essay ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’, in Searle’s Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 58–75, contains a succinct and to my mind excellent explanation of the distinctions between the fictional, the literary, and the figurative (pp. 58–60). Cf. also my own A Theory of Literary Discourse (Bromley: Chartwell-Bratt, 1990), pp. 200–04. Wellek expands and defends his analysis of literature in terms of fictionality in his essay ‘The Attack on Literature’. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 256. Stephanie Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction: ‘Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life’ and Other Tales (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), p. 51. See Hintzenberg, Schmidt, and Zobel, Zum Literaturbegriff, pp. 71–2 and 89–90. I would especially have liked to comment on Willie van Peer’s definition, consciously designed to be applicable to both older and modern literature, and on my own 1990 definition, consciously specialized on ‘literature’ as applied to literature after circa 1800 and defining it in terms of what I call ‘presentationality’. I see both (now!) as ambitious, empirically orientated undertakings which in the final instance both fail to avoid the unifiedconcept mistake. See my Theory of Literary Discourse, ch. 7, and Willie van Peer, ‘But What Is Literature? Toward a Descriptive Definition of Literature’, in Roger D. Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 127–41. It would also have been instructive to discuss, along the same lines, Jonathan Culler’s proposal in his Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 26: ‘We can think of literary works as language with particular properties or features, and we can think of literature as the product of conventions and a certain kind of attention. Neither perspective successfully incorporates the other, and one must shift back and forth between them.’ For the background, see esp. Widdowson, Literature, ch. 3. Cf. also the cited works by Ross and Weimar. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: an Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Ibid., p.16. Eagleton, Literary Theory, says that the text in itself does not have to be fine, ‘but that it has to be of the kind that is judged fine’. This does not remove the problem I am pointing to, which becomes obvious if one changes ‘is

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31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

valuable’ in my two ‘If . . . ’-sentences in the text to ‘is a text of a valuable kind’ (p. 10). Widdowson, Literature, p. 2; cf. also p. 13. Ibid., p. 96, p. 111, and p. 119 respectively. John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1995), p. 151. Personally, I do not adhere to such ‘inherent-structurism’ (as Ian Hacking calls it) with respect to any concepts at all. But in this context, only the concept of literature is concerned, and that, I presume, makes the matter less contentious. Cf. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 83–4. For a discussion of institutional facts, see Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, chs. 2, 4, and passim. What I offer in the text is only a very sketchy presentation of the general idea behind Searle’s analysis.

6 Literature as a Textualist Notion Bo Pettersson

I. Some terminological considerations My focus in this paper is not merely on the central notions of text (and the related notion of work) and textuality, but more pointedly on textualism, by which I understand a narrowing of the spectrum of literary communication to the study of literary artefacts denoted as texts. In other words, an approach is textualist if it largely disregards a text’s communicative poles, the author (intentional considerations) and the reader/s (interpretive considerations). Needless to say, perhaps, absolutely purist notions of textualism seldom occur, but as I shall attempt to show there are periods and movements in literary studies – as well as recently in historiographical, cultural, and social studies – which explicitly or implicitly are textualist in their approaches. In the last few decades the denotative range of text has been expanded to cover such a wide array of cultural artefacts and phenomena that I should think any contemporary discussion of the term should be aware of this expansion. Thus, I am more open to the actual usage of the term than, say, Manina Jones in her encyclopaedia entry on textuality as ‘the written condition of the literary object’ (even though she is aware that this is the term’s ‘most limited sense’).1 We may deplore the fact that text and its cognates are used beyond such a clear-cut and traditional sense, but should be aware of the considerable spread of its semantic field in recent years. From the presumably first usage of the original Latin textus in the sense of ‘woven string of language’ in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, text passed into humanistic usage in the Middle Ages, only to surface in the Modern Age as one of the terms for ‘written usage’ in European languages.2 It is important to notice that even in the mid-1960s, just before 128

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its semantic boom started, text was still simply regarded as ‘written usage’, or, more precisely, ‘language in written or printed form’. (Since my concern here is literature, I shall use text in this neutral sense, with the addition of the digital format). It was primarily post-structuralists like the later Barthes and Julia Kristeva, who spawned the usage of terms text and textuality in the sense of ‘any cultural phenomenon that can be studied as if it were a written document’. As we shall see, however, the widespread metaphor of ‘society as text’ in the humanities and the social sciences since the late nineteenth century paved the way for such a usage. Below I first discuss what texts are, then trace the history of textualism with a focus on literary studies, and finally briefly assess the status of textualism in contemporary literary studies.

II. From oral to digital texts: on textualization and textual scholarship In contemporary literary studies in general and literary theory and literary aesthetics in particular text is seldom discussed in conjunction with related notions, such as textualization (from oral to written/printed/digital forms) and textual scholarship. The two articles on text and textuality referred to above in the perhaps most extensive recent encyclopaedias of literary theory and aesthetics include no such discussion.3 What this oversight leads to is the facile taking for granted of the textual version of a literary work. Yet in many cases there are multiple versions or editions; and there may be editorial changes, omissions and additions, possibly owing to censorship, which form deviations from the author’s manuscript/s. To put it another way, the interpretation of any text (as a written document) starts before it reaches a large readership by the very textualization (if originating in oral performance), transmission, editing, printing and/or other changes in the spoken or sung words or the body of the manuscript. Such changes will affect the final interpretation by readers in many ways. In the discussion of texts we should be aware of the development and spectrum of what we today call text (in the narrow sense) from oral to written to printed and finally to digitally encoded forms. While being grateful to the Milman Parry–Albert Lord tradition of textualization of oral literature, we should be aware of its shortcomings – as indeed Lord was in his later writings.4 More particularly, John Miles Foley has noted how Parry’s and Lord’s conclusions have limited applicability, since their primary material – the Serbo-Croatian epic tradition – has features

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not necessarily shared by other oral cultures, such as the more literate environments of the Anglo-Saxon and the Greek traditions.5 After suggesting that the key concept for the development of the study of textualization should be ‘complication’, Foley goes on to suggest ‘a three-step approach that follows the trajectory from philology to aesthetics’: a holistic view of oral features in particular cultures at particular times; comparison with contemporary oral traditions; and a study of recurrence as a phenomenon in the specific poem and in the canon to which it belongs.6 Also, even though Walter J. Ong’s study on orality has reached the status of a modern classic, it is best counter-balanced by David R. Olson’s work on how literacy early on influenced oral literature.7 We should remember that the very notion of textuality (before its recent semantic expansion) ‘is not so much generally text-based as more narrowly printbased, since it assumes a fixity that cannot be found – because it would not have been sought – in manuscript culture’.8 But, in fact, in recent years the pendulum in textual studies has swung away from the fixity the printed word used to imply. If in the middle of the twentieth century there was an emphasis on eclectic, final, in a word, definitive, editions, epitomized by the influential textual scholars W.W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, and more recently by G. Thomas Tanselle,9 now copyediting theory has swung in the other direction. After Jerome McGann’s ground-breaking criticism of the Greg-Bowers tradition of eclectic definitive editions,10 New Historicism (more recently, Cultural Poetics) has made McGann one of its leading textual theorists. By emphasizing the impossibility of arriving at any final authorial intention and the importance of and differences between various editions, McGann pushed the pendulum to the extreme at which the theory of copyediting largely is today: the text – like any meaning its interpreters may find in it – is by definition supposedly ‘unstable’.11 I maintain this is the most current theoretical stance, if not the most widespread practice in textual scholarship, since many copy-editing projects are still firmly based on the Greg–Bowers ideal of a definitive edition. In fact, the stable–unstable divide is most likely the central division in copy-editing in general. Interestingly, the advocates of textual instability have received much help from rather unexpected quarters: classicists and medievalists. The point they tend to make is that often there is simply no original manuscript or there are multiple manuscripts transmitted through centuries – and this of course fits the post-modern copy-editing axiom of the instability of meaning or, in post-structuralist jargon, ‘the receding signified’ (a linguistically untenable notion fal-

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laciously attributed to Saussure).12 However, the point I would like to make on the basis of comparing two major editorial undertakings in Swedish literature is that the one policy does not necessarily exclude the other. In Sweden the complete works of two towering authors, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793–1866) and August Strindberg (1859–1912) are being re-edited, according to completely different copy-editing premises. In Almqvist’s case we have no recourse to manuscripts and the principle is quite McGannian: the editors strive to publish the original editions, even to the point of issuing all four versions of the radical novella Det går an, a plea for common-law relations, including the posthumous one in his Samlade skrifter (Collected Works) from the early twentieth century (for the copy-editing rationale of the project see Johan Svedjedal).13 Strindberg’s case is quite different: all these years we have been reading the publisher’s Strindberg, quite heavy-handedly edited and bowdlerized by the publishing house Bonnier. Understandably, the editors now feel that the public should finally have recourse to what is sometimes called Strindberg’s Strindberg. In other words, in attempting to recreate Strindberg’s final intentions on the basis of his manuscripts they largely conform to the Greg-Bowers editorial policy. The guiding principles of each editorial project – the one based on a real texts policy, the other on an ideal text one – I, for one, find acceptable. What is more, despite McGann’s argument against ‘the ideology of final intentions’,14 none of the editors have in fact totally disregarded authorial intentions: the Strindberg editors have made it their aim to reconstruct the author’s intentions; the Almqvist editors, in deciding to reissue all four editions of Det går an, in fact not only attempt to recreate its publishing history but also the successive and varying authorial and editorial intentions each edition harbours. In other words, the latter policy is not so much anti-intentional as poly-intentional. What currently increasingly affects editorial policies is digital publishing and the hypertextuality it makes possible. Here too Jerome McGann is at the forefront of the editorial discussion. In a recent study McGann writes of how digital publishing will lead to the fact that ‘[o]ur sense of language will never be the same’ and goes on to argue that quantum and topological models of analysis are applicable to imaginative writing tout court, that these models are more adequate, more comprehensive, and more enlightening than the traditional models we inherit from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Marx.15

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With a wry allusion to Greg’s classic paper, McGann simply speaks of ‘the new “rationale of the hypertext” ’.16 Apart from the exceedingly modish jargon (‘quantum and topological models’) and the rather questionable assertion that textual analysis is based on a tradition from Plato to Marx, in this recent work McGann throws to the winds the historical caution he so carefully exhibited in his early work on textual criticism: the plea for each text to be edited with an eye on its particular cultural and socio-pragmatic parameters. It is true that digital editors today can display all textual editions and variants on the Internet, in accordance with McGann’s vision.17 But shouldn’t one particular version (or in some cases, such as that of King Lear, two versions) be given priority? Is it not perhaps elitist to think that all readers of a website – including students and lay readers – have the time to peruse, say, all dozen versions of a particular Wordsworth poem? They might want to have recourse to all versions, but will most likely prefer one particular version as their basis. During or after reading this basic version they may or may not choose to take the forking hypertextual paths into the other versions. And however enlightening digital textuality may be, should it really become the one dominant mode of displaying all literature from all historical periods? In fact, McGann’s reservations against the printed Cornell Wordsworth volumes: Grotesque systems of notation are developed in order to facilitate negotiation through labyrinthine textual scenes. To say that such editions are difficult to use is to speak in vast understatement.18 could well be used mutatis mutandis about digital textuality. On the face of it, perhaps the surfing between versions facilitates reading, but I would not be surprised if a reader of a digital version of Wordsworth would find it at least as hard to reach an understanding of a particular Wordsworth poem, its genesis, and versions as the reader of the Cornell Wordsworth. Nor does McGann take into account the growing awareness of the considerable side-effects of using the web, best summarized and analysed by Hubert L. Dreyfus.19 To put it differently, I wonder if Foley’s point about seeing the complexity in each case of textualization is not equally applicable to all modes of textuality and if we should not be wary of letting the most recent vogue in textual criticism or publishing replace all others. In more general terms this implies that we should not let the rather strange bedfellows advocating textual instability carry the day in textual criti-

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cism but analyse each case separately. Against numerous instances of textual instability, one could show countless texts, especially in the Modern Age, in which the authorially approved first edition and later editions are not markedly different. In any case, all aspects of textualization from oral to digital – not least various hybrid forms – deserve more attention. A final point on a textual aspect, which should still be developed but which so far has mainly been discussed by literary sociologists and, recently, by post-structuralistically coloured textualist critics with an interest in the ‘surface’ features of texts and hypertexts, are the very different physical manifestations of particular texts and their interpretive repercussions. To be sure, a text is never simply a text, and much more and diverse work on the socio-cultural history of particular texts is needed for us better to understand the interpretive effects of the checkered history of textualization and copy-editing. Since textual scholars, like Tanselle and D.C. Greetham, have already shown their willingness to embrace interpretive and theoretical considerations in textual criticism,20 it is now up to literary scholars to meet them halfway. Having met, we might be able to adopt a broader view of cognitive, textual, and sociocultural aspects of literary communication that literary studies so sorely need.

III. The rise and fall of textualism in the humanities, especially literary studies Although I have decided to follow the most common contemporary literary-critical practice by employing the notion of text in the sense of ‘language in written/printed/digital form’, the previous section alone should suggest great caution when dealing with notions like text and textuality. As I now go on to discuss how the increasing emphasis on language in written and printed forms gave rise to textualism in the humanities, especially literary studies, I may touch on familiar turf for readers acquainted with the history of literary theory. However, I seek to question some received notions of it as well to present some novel perspectives. First, it is important to remember that text did not gain currency as a central notion for language in written or printed form until the early twentieth century and that it took another half-century before it became the central term in the western world. Second, as noted above, as text in the 1960s and 1970s had a veritable boost in usage its semantic range underwent a related expansion. Despite the fact that this made

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text the received notion for written, printed and (now) digitally encoded language usage, we should also be aware that its spread was based on a specific, tendentious, even ideological, view of the humanities as well as the social sciences, which quite blatantly advocated a textualist view of not only literature but culture in general. Text (at times, discourse) simply became the most prevalent metaphor for all forms of human interaction. But let us backtrack some. Since Quintilian, text has certainly been in use, not least in matters of biblical hermeneutics and copy-editing (and related, more general references to an author’s original work or wording). According to the OED (s.v. text), we find some of its earliest instances in English in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (1377), where it refers either to the Scriptures or to a particular original wording. But until the mid-twentieth century, in English and German scholarship at least, the most widespread term for a literary text was most likely work (Werk). I say ‘most likely’ since it would be quite an undertaking to go through centuries of scholarship to prove that work indeed was the received notion, especially before Romanticism. Of course, this should be done in a number of languages, since translations – even excellent ones – are seldom to be trusted. Let me take a case in point. What is usually (and understandably) translated as text and context or surroundings from German humanist works in the early nineteenth century seems, after a cursory look into especially Friedrich Schleiermacher’s writings, quite varied: Rede (perhaps best rendered by utterance or discourse, signifying both oral and written usage) and Schrift (writing) occur at times almost interchangeably with Werk; whereas context or surroundings is most prevalently signified by Zusammenhang (often, but not exclusively, in the sense of ‘co-text’ in contemporary linguistics) and by Umgebung or Kreis (surroundings; the latter also group).21 Not surprisingly, Schleiermacher emphatically held that a text can only be understood in context, a view that later was to influence the semantic spread of the term text. (Apparently the reasoning went something like this: if text and context are closely interrelated, then the boundary between them is blurred; see below.) Again, we should do quite considerable analytical work in order to learn in what sense and to what degree any particular scholar or period (or even a specific period in a scholar’s career) conforms or does not conform to what we today would term textualist. However, surely it is no exaggeration to claim that in the wake of Romanticism work – or the literary work of art – became the received term in belles-lettres. What work more or less explicitly signifies is that

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any literary text (in the neutral sense) is an artefact, created and crafted by one or more persons. In fact, I would claim that the continued use of work in the writings of British and American New Critics and so-called Russian Formalists well into the 1960s and in those of philosophical aestheticians to the present day suggests that the break with the Romanticist-intentionalist tradition was not as radical as is sometimes claimed. If indeed a poem, as suggested by Cleanth Brooks in a memorable metaphor, is a ‘well wrought urn’, then by implication the urn has been crafted by somebody working in a particular tradition (note the continued preoccupation with literary diachrony) – despite the fact that the critic’s preoccupation is supposed to be with the very urn itself. The enduring link in aesthetics to this tradition is probably why the most serious and fruitful discussion of the relation between intention and interpretation has been and still is conducted by theorists and critics writing in fora like Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics. Still, by the early twentieth century important moves towards stronger textualist positions were being made. What Anglo-American and Russian critics reacted against was the Romanticist modes of biographical-psychologist writing still very much in evidence at the start of the twentieth century in Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic.22 However, for all the critical sound and fury to promote anti-intentionalism, the author’s intention was not so much disregarded as textualized, that is, included in the text. Wayne C. Booth’s well-known notion of the implied author and Wolgang Iser’s analogical one of the implied reader (cf. Gerald Prince’s neologism narratee forming a symmetrical pole to the age-old notion of narrator) simply sought to textualize all of literary communication: all communication allegedly took place within the literary work. Certainly, real authors and real readers did exist but they were not to be the objects of study in the new literary-critical mode, which edged its way from the largely humanist Anglo-American rhetoric of fiction or narrative theory to the considerably more positivist and anti-humanist French structuralist narratology. This development was reinforced by that of semiotics – a field of study, which, like narratology, drew on structuralism – as Umberto Eco, one of its leading practitioners, persisted in textualizing authorial intention by his notion of intentio operis.23 It is crucial to be aware of such rather small moves within or between disciplines in order to understand that what in retrospect may seem like a sudden paradigm shift to fully-fledged textualism in fact was thoroughly grounded in the chequered history of the humanities. Let me

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try to trace some other, much earlier changes that have been more or less disregarded in the genealogy of late twentieth-century textualism. A crucial move – even though one firmly rooted in German hermeneutic scholarship – happened in Schleiermacher, who today (if at all evoked in literary studies) is often considered one of the dated originators of psychologist hermeneutics. However, in his Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838) he was one of the foremost and most influential spokesmen of the centrality of language, thus epitomizing a view that was current in much German Romanticism. Andrew Bowie hardly overstates the case in claiming that Schleiermacher in fact ‘initiates a “linguistic turn” ’24 in his hermeneutics by, for instance, claiming that ‘there are no thoughts without speech’ (‘es gibt keinen Gedanken ohne Rede’) and ‘no one can think without words’ (‘niemand kann denken ohne Worte’).25 In devising the first universal hermeneutics Schleiermacher helped to spread the linguistic turn, which already had been suggested by Herder and Humboldt and which later was restated in hermeneutics and echoes throughout Gadamer’s magnum opus.26 (We need not here be concerned with the fact that Schleiermacher in other, less wellknown writings, such as his Dialektik, had a much broader and still rather up-to-date understanding of the relation between thought and language.27) Despite the fact that, as noted above, Schleiermacher is considered one of the originators of psychologist hermeneutics and that his entire hermeneutic project is a premeditated fusion of linguistic and psychological study (something we are finally realizing today after the efforts of Peter Szondi, Manfred Frank, and Andrew Bowie),28 it is precisely the linguistic turn launched in his hermeneutics that has informed the human sciences through a succession of influences forming a line from Schleiermacher through Dilthey, Husserl, and Sartre to Heidegger and Gadamer. It is ironic that as the writings of Schleiermacher and Dilthey are slighted, misunderstood, and neglected by Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur and their followers, the very textualist or interpretivist positions that most of them explicitly or implicitly espouse actually draw on those two towering figures in nineteenth-century hermeneutics.29 As for Dilthey: he is seminal for another aspect of the rise of textualism at the end of the twentieth century – its considerable semantic expansion. In his important study Society as Text Richard Harvey Brown traces how, during the rise of the social sciences in the nineteenth century, the study of society employing the metaphor of language and text gained ground, and he finds Dilthey ‘a prime source for responses to criticisms and misunderstandings of the methods of social-textual

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analysis’.30 Brown surveys the humanist attempts at understanding the interrelation between reality (cf. society) and symbols (cf. the metaphor of society as text) to the entire tradition of studying human artefacts, from the Renaissance notion of ‘man as a maker of his world’ through Machiavelli, Kepler, and Vico to Kant, Dilthey, and Husserl.31 Such a brief summary of some of Brown’s study suggests, I hope, that the metaphor of society as text was firmly in place in the nineteenth century when it was given a central place in the fledgling science of sociology by Comte and Durkheim. With the linguistic turn and the metaphor of society as text rooted in the human sciences, adopting Saussurean linguistics as a base for anthropology and mythology in mid-twentieth century France (Lévi-Strauss, the early Barthes) is a natural and easy next step. Interdisciplinary cultural studies on the basis of a structuralist, synchronic view of language (at times termed ‘grammar’) or text were already being conducted by Barthes, among others, before he in the late 1960s announced the death of the author and the definitive move from work to text. As the ‘intrinsic’ study of the text gained ground, not least through the marriage of New Criticism and Russian Formalism in René Wellek’s and Austin Warren’s classic Theory of Literature and by the rise of narrative theory in the guise of structuralist narratology, liberal-humanist New Criticism was put on the defensive and the anti-humanist tendency grew in the humanities of the late 1960s.32 What the structuralist kind of language-based interdisciplinarity and the spread of the textual metaphor across the arts and the humanities brought with it was the renunciation of two central tenets of the modified textualism in the early and mid twentieth century: (1) the tenacious link between the work and its creator/s, and (2) the admonition that the work should be studied – (1) notwithstanding – as an independent object. These I would claim are the definite, if well-prepared, steps to fullyfledged textualism – steps perhaps most memorably taken by the later Barthes. By a decisive severing of the connection between author and text in ‘The Death of the Author’, the authority of the author and his or her intentions were so forcefully ousted that it took literary studies (despite philosophical aestheticians and a few other exceptions) a generation before intentional issues were again brought under scrutiny.33 The coupling of author and authority and the dismissal of both was topical in the France of 1968, but it also signalled what would become an axiom – grounded in the prevalent notion of society as text – for some decades to come: all (literary) interpretations are ideological.

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Before that could happen work would have to become text, but simply exchanging one term for another was not enough for Barthes, who in 1971 redefined the very notion of text. If work had been the primary notion of the original document of which a number of editions or copies were the physical manifestations (that is, texts), Text – note the capital T – was to replace it, however not as ‘a defined object’, but as ‘a methodological field’.34 This abstract notion was made even more general by the use of textuality, which in the OED is only recognized as a synonym for textualism, defined as ‘Strict adherence to the text, esp. of the Scriptures’. In other words, as it gained ground as a term in the late 1960s, textuality already included the semantic expansion inherent in intertextuality, the term later advocated by Julia Kristeva.35 Since text now had become ‘a methodological field’, literary critics were not considered competent to deal with it but it was to be left to literary theorists or literary scholars drawing on them. This led to the historically unparalleled idolization of literary theory and theorists, since literary-critical and literary-historical praxis, having been relegated to a secondary pursuit, had little effect on the theory on the basis of which it was exercised. Together with the textualist turn in literary studies (with its neglect of real authors and readers), this privileging of theory led even at the outset to a horror vacui: if all of culture is seen as text, how do you relate it to the world as we know it? One attempt to forge a link between text and world was to commit what I have elsewhere termed the interactional fallacy.36 Since the author had been textualized or slain but the reader could not completely be done away with without losing all credibility, many literary theorists and scholars, some with a focus on reader response, maintained that interaction or negotiation is taking place between the text and its reader – as if the text indeed could be an agent in literary communication. As I have tried to show (and still notice in discussions with colleagues), the interactional fallacy is widespread in literary studies, and – if reflected on – variously motivated, often not unexpectedly by analogies with oral communication. Perhaps most surprisingly the interactional fallacy is not only found but quite prevalent in Wolgang Iser’s work.37 Indeed, post-war reader-response theorists – especially Stanley Fish – often implicitly or explicitly tried to corroborate I.A. Richards’ famous but rather questionable empirical test results, which supposedly proved that there is little inter-subjective agreement in literary interpretation.38 In other words, here as elsewhere in literary studies textualism was prone to lead to interpretivism, that is, an exaggerated openness to any interpretations, however subjective or implausible.

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What was to become the most widespread interpretivist reaction to the communicative vacuum that extreme textualism entails was first evident in Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is an Author?’ from 1969. By defining the author as ‘the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’,39 Foucault simply makes explicit what was largely implicit in Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ from the previous year: (a) that the author must be dismissed on ideological grounds, and (b) that dismissing the author entails a ‘proliferation of meaning’, that is, in theoretical terms, interpretivism. First, this meant that however vacuous literary communication may seem – theoretically, at least – in thoroughly textualist literary studies, any misgivings about its vacuity can be written off because they promise to analyse what is more ubiquitous than any communicative act: ideology. Second, ‘the proliferation of meaning’ suggested – or can in retrospect be said to have led to – a number of conclusions: (1) formalistically inclined structuralism was not merely inadequate in not studying meaning in literature but misguided (because it was not aware of ideological or interpretive issues); (2) theorists and critics alike should put their theoretical and ideological cards on the table, so that their analysis can be judged according to the ideology adhered to; and (3) as meanings multiply, there is no way of judging between ideologies or ideologically coloured theories on which to base literary studies. That is, as post-structuralist theory reached its textualist apex, it also made literary theory ideological through and through. This is why an abstract, even abstruse theory with a textualist basis could at the very outset with such ease enter into intermarriages with Marxist, Feminist, and Psychoanalytical theory and later make its polygamy cover Postcolonial, Gay, Lesbian, and Queer theory. The textualist foundation of post-structuralist literary studies that theories such as those just listed could in effect do little to further, let alone reach, any of their respective social goals, which were more important than any scholarly goals. Another consequence soon became evident: if – theoretically speaking – one ideology is as good as another, how do you compare them or deal with utterly unacceptable ideologies? This kind of reasoning led to attempts at including moral theory into theoretical approaches according to which literary communication lacked agents and tangible meanings and was by definition immersed in ideology. (Not unexpectedly, moral issues were defined by yet another abstraction: the Other, a notion already in use in French moral philosophy.)

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I have discussed the textualist turn at some length, so that we can better understand its unexpected consequences and the strange liaisons it formed with more socially inclined theories, which had been largely prepared for such developments through the influence of structuralism. Frankly, I would not be surprised if in a few decades the late twentieth century is considered the Dark Ages in the humanities, precisely because of the extensive grip this paradoxical blend of textualism, ideology, and theory had on academic disciplines in the arts. However, any survey of western cultural history would probably suggest that it could not have been avoided: for instance, liberal humanism was ideologically untenable after the world wars; rigid theories, such as positivism, structuralism, and behaviourism were bound to backfire; and interpretive relativism was written in the stars of the humanities after Heidegger, Gadamer, and the onslaught of textualism-cum-ideology on the bourgeoisie after 1968. Hence, apparently, textualism had to reach its endpoint before the pendulum could start swinging back.

IV. The textual aspect of literary studies today Despite my relatively gloomy assessment of the state of the humanities in the late twentieth century, let us not forget that much of literary studies were little affected by post-structuralist theory and the textualism it entailed. This goes primarily for some disciplines which did not occupy centre stage in literary studies: philosophy (that is, philosophical aesthetics devoted to literature) and psychology (empirical aesthetics). But also Comparative Literature, English and other language departments with literary interests have had scholars, who for various reasons – intellectual inertia, academic integrity, pedagogical insight or simply autonomous thinking – were able to steer clear of the dangers of textualism. After all, the heyday of textualism was quite short: between two and three decades, depending on how fast it caught on at different universities and academic fora. At the start of the twenty-first century the textualist moment and its offspring, the moment of theory and ideology, seem at long last, if not entirely over, at least to have rid themselves of some of their most vacuous extremes. How fast things are changing is perhaps best seen in that the five axioms of contemporary theory stated in a textbook on literary and cultural theory less than a decade ago – ‘Politics is pervasive, [/] Language is constitutive, [/] Truth is provisional, [/] Meaning is contingent, [/] Human nature is a myth’40 – would either be rejected or considerably qualified by most scholars in the humanities today.

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There is a growing awareness in the humanities of the untenability of post-structuralist theory, which propounded such notions. I would venture to speculate that it was largely the advent of a real (that is, not narrowly language-based, as in Barthes and other (post)structuralists)41 kind of interdisciplinarity, however beset with problems, that made many scholars see the pitfalls of narrowly theoretical, ideological, and textualist pursuits. Any situating of research in the humanities within the considerably broader and more empirical view of man and his surroundings that, for instance, recent neurological, cognitive, psychological, ethological, sociological, and anthropological studies have been able to present in the last few decades would suggest that: politics is important in human interaction but not ‘pervasive’; language is of paramount importance for man but not ‘constitutive’ in human communication; truth and meaning can be determined and defended if the concepts are clearly defined and studied in their sociohistorical (etc.) context; and humans develop their respective ‘human nature’ by a complex and emergent blend of nature and nurture. Apparently this kind of reasoning based on an up-to-date view of cognition and culture has seeped and will keep on seeping into the humanities. But before attempting a brief assessment of the textual aspect of literary studies in the changing field of the humanities today, let us briefly consider one of the most recent and radical attacks on textualist study in general: Anders Pettersson’s Verbal Art (2000). In a way an antitextualist reaction was to be expected as the pendulum is swinging away from textualism. However, Pettersson’s position is cogently argued and draws on a broad spectrum of positions: ‘conventionalism [in language use], reader-response criticism, and intentionalism’. He argues that since an actual printed text is ‘a physical object’, ‘it cannot literally contain feelings; it cannot even, literally, contain words’.42 This is how he clarifies his claim: The traces [of ink on paper] represent graphemes, and indirectly words or sentences. But it is not the case that the traces in themselves are graphemes, words, or sentences.43 Hence, in stressing that what the reader does is reconstruct the intended meaning of the author, Pettersson presents an analysis of the communication process in which, he admits, ‘there is no room for the concept of a text as traditionally understood’.44 In attempting to discard what he calls ‘the container metaphor’ of textual communication according to which texts ‘carry’ meaning, he opts for a thoroughly mentalist view

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of linguistic communication. As far as I can see, his dilemma is the opposite of textualism: he prioritizes the author’s intention and the reader’s response, but disregards the text as we know it (by which I mean the commonly held view that the text of a literary work exists as a kind of abstract object – or several abstract objects, if there are several versions of it – of which any copy is a specimen). This points to the conclusion that this is the time to see literary communication in a holistic light and to situate the writing, mediation, and reading of literature in the real-life contexts in which such communication has taken and still takes place. To be sure, all aspects of literary communication have been studied by various factions and movements – in the last few decades largely with a strongly textualist bias – but very little has been done to analyse that communication as a whole.45 One starting-point would be to define literary communication in relation to human communication in general as well as to analyse the different meanings of communication.46 For instance, Roger D. Sell has recently presented a study of literary communication by ‘mediating criticism’ based on literary-historical, linguistic-pragmatic and interpretive parameters.47 Still, what at the start of this section I maintained about recent, truly interdisciplinary studies would suggest that we need an even greater and more encompassing rapprochment within the humanities and even more broadly between the human sciences and life sciences. By this I certainly do not mean to imply that we should throw the textual baby out with the textualist bath water: the text – or, perhaps preferably, the work – should certainly remain at the very centre of literary studies – not least since the apparent human need to write and read literary works is why literary studies exist in the first place. Still, I think that Anders Pettersson’s call (in this volume) to study the concept of literature in various cultures is just as valid for the literary-theoretical notion of text. Any understanding of text in this sense must be based on an understanding of the various genres for which it provides an umbrella, since genres are prone to change and, what is more, tend to have different modes in different cultures. What is more, since literarycommunicative approaches seldom specify the features that distinguish various literary modes and genres textually or interpretively, we still need philosophical aesthetics48 and empirical aesthetics, and hopefully at long last more co-operation between the two fields. Hence, literary studies must include an awareness of so much more than before – of, at the very least, historical, cognitive and cultural aspects – in order to reach a deeper understanding of literary texts, their creation, mediation, and interpretation.

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Notes 1. Manina Jones, ‘Textuality’, in Irena R. Makaryk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory. Approaches, Scholars, Terms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 641. 2. See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, ‘Text’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Vol. 4, pp. 370–5; and Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Texts and Textuality. Medieval and Modern’, in Barbara Sabel and André Bucher (eds), Der unfeste Text. Perspektiven auf einen literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Leitbegriff (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), pp. 109–31, and its references. 3. See Jones, ‘Textuality’, and Di Leo, ‘Text’. 4. See Albert Bates Lord, ‘The Influence of a Fixed Text’, in Albert Bates Lord, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 185. 5. See John Miles Foley, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Interpretation’, in A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (eds), Vox Intexta. Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 34. 6. Foley, ‘Orality, Textuality, and Interpretation’, p. 36, pp. 43–4. 7. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), and David R. Olson, The World on Paper. The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 8. Ziolkowski, ‘Texts and Textuality. Medieval and Modern’, p. 119. 9. See W.W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography III (1950–51), pp. 19–36, reprinted in O.M. Brack Jr. and W. Barnes (eds), Bibliography and Textual Criticism. English and American Literature, 1700 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 41–58; Fredson Bowers, ‘Current Theories of Copy-Text, with an Illustration from Dryden’, Modern Philology, XLVIII (1950), pp. 12–20, reprinted in O.M. Brack, Jr. and W. Barnes (eds), Bibliography and Textual Criticism, pp. 59–72; and G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 10. See Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992). 11. Textual instability is the central thesis in Philip Cohen (ed.), Texts and Textuality. Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation (New York: Garland, 1997) and in Sabel and Bucher (eds), Der unfeste Text. However, the claim that texts are unstable is little more than a rhetorical trick: the fact that there are multiple versions of a particular work does not mean that it (or any version of it) is unstable. 12. See Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure. A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995). 13. Johan Svedjedal, The Literary Web. Literature and Publishing in the Age of Digital Production. A Study in the Sociology of Literature (Stockholm: Kungliga Biblioteket, 2000), pp. 175–88. 14. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, pp. 38–49. 15. Jerome J. McGann, Radiant Textuality. Literature after the World Wide Web (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. xiii, xv. 16. Ibid., p. 74.

144 From Text to Literature 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 79. Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet (London: Routledge, 2001). Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, and D.C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838), ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 283–5, and Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 195–6. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902), trans. D. Ainsle, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1922). Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 44–63, and Umberto Eco (with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose) Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 64–6, 69–73. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 157. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, p. 9; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 77. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), 2nd rev. edn trans. W. Glen-Doepel; rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989). See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermachers Dialektik (1942) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), and Bo Pettersson, ‘Schleiermacher and the Future of Literary Hermeneutics’ (forthcoming). See Pettersson, ‘Schleiermacher and the Future of Literary Hermeneutics’. See Bo Pettersson, ‘On the Study of Imagination and Popular Imagination: a Historical Survey and a Look Ahead’, in Sven-Erik Klinkmann (ed.), Popular Imagination. Essays on Fantasy and Cultural Practice (Åbo/Turku, Finland: Nordic Network of Folklore, 2002), pp. 18–19, 28, and ‘Schleiermacher and the Future of Literary Hermeneutics’. Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text. Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 134. Ibid., pp. 118–19. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942), 3rd rev. edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). See Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Roland Barthes, ImageMusic-Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142–8. Originally published as ‘La mort de l’auteur’, Manteia, 5 (1968) pp. 12–17. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies. Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 73–81; trans. Harari. Originally published as ‘De l’oeuvre au texte’, Revue d’esthétique, 3 (1971). Cf. Jones, ‘Textuality’, p. 642. For a discussion of the terms work and text, hypertext and hyperwork, see Svedjedal, The Literary Web, pp. 51–63. Bo Pettersson, ‘Towards a Pragmatics of Literary Interpretation’, in Arto Haapala and Ossi Naukkarinen (eds), Interpretation and Its Boundaries (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1999), p. 49, p. 62n.

Bo Pettersson 145 37. See Wolgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 107–08, 163–70, and Wolgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), passim. 38. However, in two separate empirical tests Colin Martindale and Audrey Dailey have redone Richards’ experiment. Their results suggest that there is significant inter-subjective agreement and that Richards most likely misinterpreted his data, since (interpretive) disagreement is often over-represented in memory. See Colin Martindale and Audrey Dailey, ‘I.A. Richards Revisited: Do People Agree in Their Interpretations of Literature?’, Poetics, 23 (1995), pp. 299–314. 39. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies, p. 159. Revised version of Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 63 (1969), trans. Harari. 40. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 36. Despite the fact that they seem rather untenable today, the five axioms have not been changed in the second edition of 2002. 41. Again, Barthes was seminal by the textualist view of interdisciplinarity suggested in ‘From Work to Text’. 42. Anders Pettersson, Verbal Art. A Philosophy of Literature and Literary Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), p. 90. 43. Ibid., p. 91, emphases original. 44. Ibid., p. 94. 45. For some such attempts in theory and practice see Bo Pettersson, ‘Towards a Pragmatics of Literary Interpretation’; ‘Who Is “Sivilizing” Whom? The Function of Naivety and the Criticism of Huckleberry Finn – A Multidimensional Approach’, in Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds), Writing in Nonstandard English (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1999), pp. 101–22; ‘Seven Trends in Recent Thematics and a Case Study’, in Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer (eds), Thematics. Interdisciplinary Studies (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2002), esp. pp. 244–7; ‘What Interpretive Divergence Can Teach Literary Semantics: Reconsidering Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” ’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 1 : 2 (2002), pp. 199–214. 46. For a first effort see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air. A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. pp. 6–10. 47. Roger D. Sell, Literature as Communication. The Foundations of Mediating Criticism (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2000). 48. An important recent contribution is Michael Krausz (ed.), Is There a Single Right Interpretation? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), which presents the best arguments for both monism and pluralism in (mostly) literary interpretation.

7 The Literary Work as Pragmatist Experience Erik Bjerck Hagen

I. Introduction Early on in Art as Experience John Dewey states that ‘the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience’.1 This seems like an exciting and dynamic way of apprehending a work of art, but also one that may lead to chaos and relativism. The idea was certainly too anarchistic for Monroe C. Beardsley, who quickly dismissed it before proceeding to defend Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics in a manner rare among analytic philosophers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.2 Since the 1980s, Dewey and other pragmatists have had a major revival, and Dewey’s notion of the work of art has been taken up – explicitly or implicitly – by for example Richard Shusterman, Joseph Margolis, and Stanley Fish. In their hands, the work has lost most of what it once possessed of semantic identity and stability. For them it exists as a highly volatile field of meaning, and any strong interpretation is assumed to have the power to change (rather than merely to describe or to illuminate) any given work. Indeed, in pragmatist aesthetics a work is seen as identical to what someone at any given moment can get away with saying about it.3 Still, also in pragmatist aesthetics interpretation continues to be seen as very much a regulated discipline though the interpretive communities imposing the regulation may be diverse and the reading practices they define even more so. And literary critics working within a pragmatist perspective still feel able to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable interpretations. The need for dialogue and consensus seems to increase rather than to decrease as the literary work appears to lose its former stability. Hence, even pragmatists may still want to answer questions like these: Is it possible to establish an idea of the work of art that leaves room for the varieties of interpretation 146

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while also illuminating the conditions of agreement and disagreement that make interpretations speak to one another? Is it perhaps conceivable that a specific pragmatist description of a literary work may be able to renew interpretation in a specific way, without being reified into a pragmatist method, and without losing the flexibility and unpredictability that has seemed a hallmark of pragmatist readings? In what follows I will first sketch an outline of what such a description may look like. I will rely on the view of experience found in William James rather than in Dewey. To my mind, James’s often oblique and unpolished writings are the most powerful in the American pragmatist tradition. They seem immensely suggestive for aesthetic thought, despite the fact that James barely published anything that directly examined aesthetic questions. One main purpose of this article is simply to develop a usable conception of a work of art in terms of experience. Another is to make clear the central role which experience plays in our idea of literary value and hence in our idea of literature itself. It seems difficult to talk about literary quality without talking about the concrete experience of this quality. Yet such experiences are notoriously hard to describe, and literary criticism too often resorts to stock terms like originality, sincerity, strangeness, coherence, or vivacity without reflecting on the nature of the experience to which these notions are supposed to refer. In the second half of the article, I shall therefore attempt to describe my experience of the opening paragraph of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady. A third and final purpose is to show that the ensuing conception of work may produce real and productive change in how we conceive of and do literary interpretation.

II. Experience in Dewey and James In order to analyse the literary work as experience, we must first distinguish between text and work. Dewey writes: A work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience. As a piece of parchment, of marble, of canvas, it remains (subject to the ravages of time) self-identical throughout the ages. But as a work of art, it is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced.4 The literary text, then, is simply the words on the page such as they are organized by the author and the publisher in whatever edition the

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reader is reading. Such editions may, of course, be argued over indefinitely, but most readers will sooner or later settle for one authoritative version of the text. The work, on the other hand, is a much more evanescent entity. It starts out as the very experience we undergo when we read, and it ends up as the experience in which our critical or interpretive labour temporarily issues. As such an end product it can be grasped as ‘a consummation and not a cessation’, as Dewey puts it in the chapter called ‘Having an Experience’. He continues: ‘Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and selfsufficiency. It is an experience.’5 The word reading contains both aspects of the experience, since it names a process as well as an endpoint. One standard objection to this conception of a work of art is that it leaves the work with extremely fuzzy edges. Yet it is meant to have. Dewey’s stated goal is to ‘restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.’6 To accomplish this, it seems that we need to pay as much attention to the indeterminate areas where different experiences merge into each other as to the specific qualities that distinguish them. A literary work has no clear boundaries, but will always merge with our overall sense of life. It may also be objected that Dewey makes far too much of the unity of the experience, and that he conceives of the work of art in now obsolete organicist terms. This seems a valid criticism to which I will return. However, I will not make too much of it, since James’ notion of experience, which in this regard is closer to that of British empiricism than to Dewey’s Hegelianism, is far less vulnerable to this line of criticism. Third, it may be objected that identifying work with experience seems highly counter-intuitive or at least at odds with the common usage of the words ‘work’ and ‘experience’. Yet it is not absolutely clear that this is the case. If you ask a common reader what it is that constitutes Hamlet as work, there is no reason to think that he will unequivocally answer something like ‘the words on the page’ or ‘whatever has found its place between the covers of the existing editions’. There are certainly stronger contextual and spiritual overtones to the word ‘work’ than to the words ‘text’ or ‘book’. A fourth obvious objection is that the work conceived as experience may totally lose its identity, since different readers may have totally different experiences when they read the same text. It seems quite possible happily to embrace such relativism, at least in the aesthetic realm,

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but the classical pragmatists strive to free the word experience from its subjectivist overtones. Experience in the Jamesian and Deweyan sense is not a sensation or an affective response; it is neither subjective nor objective, but resides, at least initially, beyond these realms. An experience is first and foremost an event that takes place in such a way that it is obviously our own, yet just as obviously something we participate in along with others. This is a basic point in James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism. Towards the beginning of the essay called ‘Does “Consciousness” exist?’ he writes: Experience, I believe, has no . . . inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition – the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds. The paint will . . . serve here as an illustration. In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain, a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, plays the part of a knower, of a state of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known.7 James calls the originary and undivided experience pure experience, and this purity is what all experiences have in common. If we assume that ‘red!’, ‘rabbit!’, ‘literature!’ and ‘Oliver Twist!’ designate four such experiences, they all have the quality of being experience before they are relegated to our subjective streams of consciousness or else to the world of objectively existing entities. As pure experience, the literary work is logically prior to the split between the objective text and the subjective use of the literary experience. In ‘How Two Minds Can Know One Thing’ James gives a phenomenological description of a pen: The pen, realized in [a] retrospective way as my percept, . . . figures as a fact of ‘conscious’ life. But it does so only so far as ‘appropriation’ has occurred; and appropriation is part of the content of a later experience wholly additional to the originally ‘pure’ pen. That pen, virtually both objective and subjective, is at its own moment actually and intrinsically neither. It has to be looked back upon and used,

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in order to be classed in either distinctive way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of the other experience, while it stands, throughout the operation, passive and unchanged.8 There are, then, three layers in each experience. Any experience can be approached as a) a pure event which constitutes the experience as experience; b) a perceptual event in which we articulate the experience within our habitual frameworks of comprehension; c) an interpretive and fully conceptual activity which explicitly relates the experience to other experiences.9 Each layer may remain in a state transcending subjectivity and objectivity, yet that will depend on the concrete experience. A stone is readily objectified, while a pornographic picture or a piece of advice is just as readily subjectified. An aesthetic experience will be predominantly perceptual, and the conceptual activity engendered in the experience will seek more to elucidate the perceptions for their own sake than to put them to immediate use in our practical lives. Hence, the aesthetic experience will tend to remain suspended as far as ontological specificity is concerned. In ‘The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience’, James writes: With the affectional experiences which we are considering, the relatively ‘pure’ condition lasts. In practical life no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or rigorously physical facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the world goes, their equivocality is one of their great conveniences.10 It is only when our conceptual activity no longer seeks to elucidate the perceptual (and properly aesthetic) experience, but instead wants to classify it – historically or generically – that it becomes a definitive object. Correspondingly, the work becomes a definitively subjective experience when it is no longer appreciated as mainly an end in itself (existing largely for the sake of creating aesthetic pleasure) but is instrumentally used in our lives. The main advantage of the concept of pure experience is that it emphasizes the decidedly realist bent of pragmatist thought. At one point James calls his epistemological position a natural realism,11 and the specific purity of the experience is meant to explain how different perceiving agents perceive the same object, and not only so many different representations of an object. James wants to argue that when we perceive the coffee mug on the table, we perceive it directly, without any mediating mental images.12 Our hands and eyes and thoughts all reach

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out to the actual mug. For James, it was of the utmost importance that we were able to thus meet each other in our respective bodies, or else solipsism, or at least Humean scepticism, might ensue: In that perceptual part of my universe which I call your body, your mind and my mind meet and may be called conterminous. Your mind actuates that body and mine sees it; my thoughts pass into it as into their harmonious cognitive fulfillment; your emotions and volitions pass into it as causes into their effects.13 The three aspects of the experience – and, hence, of the work – shade into each other. We are never able to isolate the purely perceptual stage, but we may still assume that this constitutes the intersubjective aspect of the experience. Radical empiricism stipulates that aesthetic perception confronts us directly with the object itself while our respective conceptions prevent us from ever perceiving exactly the same object: It is . . . not a formal question, but a question of empirical fact solely, whether, when you and I are said to know the ‘same’ Memorial Hall, our minds do terminate at or in a numerically identical percept. Obviously, as a plain matter of fact, they do not. Apart from colorblindness and such possibilities, we see the Hall in different perspectives. You may be on one side of it and I on the other.14 This passage should be read as pointing simultaneously in two directions: Our perceptions work their way towards the centre of the experience – and thus the centre of the work – where they meet the perceptions of others. At the same time our conceptions make us aware that we approach this centre from our own perspective, our very own stream of experience. Hence, the perception of, say, The Portrait of a Lady does not originate as a private and highly subjective experience which then needs to be objectified and cleansed of irrelevant prejudices through an act of careful interpretation. A Jamesian pragmatist will rather regard the immediate experience as the most objective part of our commerce with the text, while the work of interpretation may take us as far into the idiosyncratic as our sense of truth, propriety, and originality will allow. This does not mean that the perceptual or emotional aspects of the experience are infallible, nor does it mean that they do not change when they fully emerge into language and conceptual thought, but it does mean that they will remain a source of aesthetic authority at some distance from the authorities residing elsewhere in

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the literary world: in conventions, traditions, received interpretations, basic aesthetic principles, and so on. At the very least, we are thus invited to keep an interior dialogue between our own subjectifying and objectifying tendencies, between our interpretive explorations and our more immediate sense of what the work perceptually feels like. Such a dialogue seems essential for good literary criticism. For all the epistemological realism of pragmatist thought, there is no getting away from the fact that a work changes with every new reading, which again means that we all take part in different versions of the works (great or small) of literature. This seems strange until one is ready to acknowledge that each reading always constitutes the facts of the work. This interpenetration of fact and interpretation takes place as soon as we stop treating textual facts as loose and separate descriptive statements devoid of higher semantic purposes and instead start viewing them as meaningful statements that are active in building up the literary experience itself. We can list a number of Protokollsätze about, say, Ibsens’s Rosmersholm, like ‘Rebekka West crochets a white shawl’, ‘Rosmer is forty-two years old’, and ‘Rosmer and Rebekka both die in the final scene,’ but as soon as we look more closely at the situations which these sentences purport to describe, we may get as many facts as there are interpretations. In one interpretation ‘White shawl’ can be construed as having the connotation x, in another as having the connotation y, and, in a third, the connotation z; ‘forty-two’ can be interpreted as ‘young’, ‘middle-aged’ or ‘old’; and Rosmer’s and Rebekka’s fall can be read either ironically, tragically, romantically, or comically. This priority of interpretive scheme over facts is at the heart of Stanley Fish’s view of textual analysis. There are several reasons why this view of interpretation as constitutive of facts does not send us right back to an unbridled relativism. First, each literary experience is based on a text that remains the same no matter how often it is perceived. It is only by actually reading these words in the right sequence that we can have the specific experience that we name by the work in question. If we want to repeat the particular experience of reading The Portrait of a Lady, we will have to return to the words on the page. Second, in a given culture the possible responses to a set of textual facts will be disciplined and standardized in a number of ways. Third, the work is defined in a public realm in which different readers will want to continue to talk to each other about their experiences in order to improve and refine them. In this institutionally governed dialogue, the experiences will seek common ground as well as uniqueness. There is obviously both agreement and disagree-

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ment about what constitutes the work of Hamlet and this situation is never likely to change. Fourth, by describing how the field of meaning and reference that constitutes a work of literature is normally structured, we may get a clearer sense of how we go about making a text into a work, that is, of how a literary experience moves interpretively ahead towards its consummation in what Dewey called an experience. It is this aspect that I will focus on in the remainder of the essay. Again, I emphasize that I talk about one possible description. There may be numerous others, also within a pragmatist framework.

III. The structure of a literary experience There is perhaps not much to say about our initial feeling of literary quality – the ‘Lo, literature!’ feeling – but we can talk a great deal about the perceptual field that surrounds that feeling and connects it to our streams of experience. This field can also be called a relational field, since the work comes into being not as a self-enclosed unit, but rather as a multitude of possibilities existing in a complicated network of relations between how we perceive ourselves in the experience, how we perceive the author behind the text, and so on. In William James’ Weltanschauung – his ‘world of pure experience’ – the world consists of just such a network of different relations between different experiences, and ‘the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experiences relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as “real” as anything else in the system.’15 This world is not centred; it contains no almighty God, no rationalist concepts like Reason, Substance, or the Absolute, no primary sense data, no cogito or privileged part of the self. When we place certain experiences and certain truths at the centre of our world, we do so at our own risk and without any final guarantees against imminent revision and change.16 When it comes to literary experiences, I would suggest that it is useful to single out five major kinds of Jamesian, non-hierarchical relations: The different words and sentences in a literary text may refer to what the reader takes to be a) the reader and his world; b) the author and his world; c) the historical world in which the text was written; d) the other words and sentences in the text; and e) other works of literature and art. We can further say that these referential relations are the work’s intentions. Here I use intention in the phenomenological sense as ‘aboutness,’ and I take the work to be an activity that aims to talk about a number

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of things in a number of different directions, about readers, about authors, about historical events, about other works, and about itself. Thus we can distinguish between a pragmatic intention, an authorial intention, an historical intention, an intertextual intention, and a coherence intention. A word like ‘London’, when it appears in a novel by Dickens, say, will typically invoke a number of perspectives all at once: the reader’s sense of the city; what he takes to be Dickens’ own experience of London; his knowledge of the London of Dickens’ time; the ‘London’ of Blake’s poems or any modern novel; and its connection to other related words in the novel itself, such as ‘Paris’, ‘countryside’, ‘town’, etc. Now, the important point is that there is no way to distinguish sharply between these intentions. The pragmatic intention is certainly the primary one, since it is the reader who releases the referential potential of the words and sentences and paragraphs in the text, but how that intention influences, and is in turn influenced by the others, is difficult and often useless to decide. They all come together in the words and sentences and paragraphs, and collaborate to give literary works their characteristic plenitude. This is especially evident at the stage of reading where perceptive appreciation is more in the forefront than conceptual interpretation. As the pragmatic impact clarifies itself into a fully interpretive experience, one may be able to distinguish the intentions, and there would be no way to isolate one of the intentions from the impact of the others. And why should we want to? Different texts invite different ways of reading, but there is no valid or cogent way to decide what makes up a work before we have seen where the process of reading actually has ended up. In this way, we also prevent theoretical disputes over fictional reference from occurring. A fictional text is made to refer whenever the reader establishes a connection between elements perceived to fall within the aesthetically satisfying boundaries of the work. There are no relations and no structures in the text as such.

IV. Experiencing The Portrait of a Lady In order to get a clearer picture of how this may work in practice, I now intend to look more closely at the opening of The Portrait of a Lady. The novel opens in the following way: Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the

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tea or not – some people of course never do – the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple story offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure. The persons concerned in it were taking their pleasure quietly, and they were not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony I have mentioned. The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wicker-chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of him. The old man had his cup in his hand; it was an unusually large cup, of a different pattern from the rest of the set and painted in brilliant colours. He disposed of its contents with much circumspection, holding it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house.17 Reading this is no minor experience, especially if one is already familiar with the story of Isabel Archer’s quest for American freedom and authenticity in the increasingly disconcerting European world of alltoo-helpful benefactors and morbidly refined antagonists. A full-blown interpretation of the passage would have demanded a close scrutiny of the entire novel, and I can here only touch upon the main tendencies of the beginning of my own experience. The logic of my argument should become clear in the discussion of the pragmatic intention and the authorial intention. I will therefore deal much more briefly with the other three. By the pragmatic intention of the passage, I understand first of all its immediate literary power, which again seems generated by at least three elements: the poetic qualities of the language, the vividness of the scene depicted, and the ability of the description to evoke our own notions

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and memories of ‘the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon’. Thus the reader is invited to share language, a world, and an experience, all of which seem worthy of careful attention and make the passage worthy of rereading. Partly we take pleasure in the fictional world for its own sake, more or less detached from the lives we live outside the fiction, and we may judge the passage to be a brilliant specimen of Jamesian prose, poetic realism, realist writing, or whatever. At the same time – and with equal aesthetic force – we may ask questions like ‘How well does the passage depict the mood of an actual summer afternoon?’ ‘How can it serve to remind me of how my idea of a splendid summer afternoon plays a part in my life and my way of living?’ It is through questions like these that we perhaps ‘restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience’.18 An analysis of the pragmatic intention will also draw attention to the particular sense of stylistic repose offered in these sentences. The casual repetitions of words like ‘circumstances’, ‘afternoon’, ‘what was left’, ‘eternity’, ‘pleasure’, ‘shadows’, and ‘cup’ slow down the tempo so that the reader is led to share the same ‘sense of leisure still to come’ which lies at the heart of the passage. The material opulence of the place and the spiritual opulence of the mood combine in an effort to make the reader feel at rest and serve to prepare him for the fact that this fictional world is about to introduce at least one character of such considerable complexity that we should take care not to judge her with any kind of haste: ‘[T]he quality of expression in the novel informs us that we may imagine many things [about a character like Isabel] but that we are not to believe all of them,’ as Richard Poirier writes in what is still probably the best commentary on The Portrait of a Lady.19 James’s style is concerned, as it were, to avoid the restrictive definitions that all the other characters, with the sole possible exception of old Mr Touchett, have in store for Isabel. Instead, the reader is given a notion of how to expand his vigilance indefinitely, so that his perceptions of Isabel and her world may become as strictly perceptual as possible, which again means that his conceptions are supposed to wander across the perceptual field rather than prematurely to establish its boundaries. Since the pragmatic intention involves considerations of the truth value of literature, I should be more precise as to what I take a literary text to be true about, and the answer (or at least the beginning of an answer) has to do exactly with such elusive qualities as mood, tone, attitude, voice, or style. Literary works attack or address our moods, they

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change them, and they clarify them. That much seems fairly uncontroversial. Surely, there is also at least some traffic between our moods and our beliefs. Reading literature is unlikely to change our beliefs about the death penalty, abortion, the environment, international trade, and terrorism, yet it may change our attitude to our entire body of beliefs. In the literary experience, we are led to reflect about how we have come to believe what we believe, which in its turn seems crucial in determining how we shuffle the priorities among our beliefs. Hence, as long as we grant that our attitudes pervade the multifarious web of beliefs that is constituted through our epistemic powers, our moral and political sentiments, and our religious predilections, there is a chance for literature to get in fairly regular touch with the epistemic core of our being. And such beliefs include our beliefs about literature, our expectations of what we will learn from literature and how it may change our lives. So there is a circle here: The more we believe in literature’s ability to influence our lives, the more we may be changed by reading literature, which again may strengthen the belief, and so on. There are many terms we can use to describe our more or less literary attitudes to the world. Following Northrop Frye, we may for instance divide them into four large categories: romantic, ironic, comic, and tragic. The tone of the passage from The Portrait of a Lady, which prepares us for our meeting with the novel’s heroine, contains a mixture of these modes. Here is Poirier’s interpretation: [James] sounds like an overly impressed American who has ‘gone’ English, who is more English than the English. None the less, the voice teases itself, as of a man who does take delight in English habits, but with such amused and self-assured adaptability that he can exaggerate and gently spoof them.20 The gentle comical touch highlighted here is not necessarily incompatible with quite different modulations in the narrator’s voice. He may be on his way towards articulating the romantic quest for meaning and truth that Isabel herself holds on to through all her misfortunes; or he may already be prepared to find in her story an inscrutable irony, which will leave unexplained why she wants to return to Gilbert Osmond at the end of the novel; or he may have an imminent sense of the tragedy involved in Isabel’s fatal marriage. All of these modes may be recognized in a sensitive reading, yet it does not make much sense simply to find the novel’s tone in the balance or reconciliation of such opposite modes. That would be one interpretive choice among others, even if it

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superficially appears to avoid such a choice. A pragmatist will tend to treat such a choice much as William James treats W.K. Clifford’s scientific caution in ‘The Will to Believe’: [H]e who says, ‘Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!’ merely shows his own preponderant horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine anyone questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford’s exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.21 Moving on to what I have called the work’s authorial intention, I claim that our experience of literary quality will often entail an interest in the author behind the text. We want to know who was capable of writing the texts that we like, and we frequently recognize the writer’s personality in his style. In this particular instance, such an interest in the work’s authorial intention seems facilitated by expressions like ‘[t]hose that I have in mind’, ‘what I should call’, ‘the scene’, and ‘I have mentioned’. The extra-diegetic narrator wants us to notice his presence, and nothing in this work serves to cut the narrator loose from Henry James himself. It is striking, rather, that several commentators prefer to keep the author, the narrator, and the main character intimately united: Here are two examples: In The Portrait of a Lady there is a kind of continuous endowment of the characters with aspects of their author and the questions arising in his life even as he was writing the book – as if he were putting on different hats and different neckties and looking at himself in a series of mirrors.22 No novelist – not even Cervantes or Austen or Proust – had James’ vast consciousness. One would have to go back to Shakespeare to find, as Emily Dickinson phrased it, a larger demonstration that the brain is wider than the sky. . . . Since Isabel is Henry James’ selfportrait as a lady, her consciousness has to be extraordinarily large, almost the rival of her creator’s. This renders any reader’s moral judgment of her character rather irrelevant.23

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Of course, such comments are based mainly on empirical observations, which may be contested by rival interpretations. But they may also be said to contain theoretical implications about how we ought to look upon the relation between author and narrator in the first place. Studies inspired by modern narratology tend to treat author and narrator as entities that are split apart as the soon as the writing has begun. Maybe we rather ought to see them as one and the same until we have good reasons to separate them. At least we can postulate all kinds of relations between author and narrator, for instance those suggested by the four so-called master tropes: metaphor (similarity or identity), metonymy (proximity, family likeness, sympathy), synecdoche (narrator as part and author as whole, or vice versa) and irony (contrast, opposition, hostility). The same possibilities exist when it comes to describing the relations between narrator and protagonist, between protagonist and reader, and so on. Clearly a reader may identify himself with Isabel, sympathize with her, regard her as a part of himself, or view her with different degrees of hostility. In the last instance, we may say that the reference to the reader is ironic, or that the pragmatic intention is ironical. Yet if we have an authorial intention that is metaphorical, as may be the case in The Portrait of a Lady, we have said absolutely nothing about exactly what kind of biographical information may prove relevant to the reader’s aesthetic concerns. On my part, I have, for example, not yet seen the point in connecting Isabel to James’ cousin Minny Temple, who died very young, who obviously left a great impression on both William and Henry, and who regularly shows up among the sources for the heroine of The Portrait. An episode related by Leon Edel, by way of Alice James, seems much more pertinent. Alice describes how in their youth she and Henry once spent parts of a summer afternoon together in France: The occasion had been an outing to the home of their French governess Marie Boningue at Bolougne. The American children were fed sundry items, including an enormous frosted cake, and then were turned into a sandy garden to play with their French friends. William did not accompany his brothers and sister. At fourteen he had his own resources. Henry, twelve or thirteen, was senior-in-charge. Alice remembered that her younger brothers ‘disappeared not to my grief,’ with some of the French children, and she was left alone with Henry. He had taken possession of a swing and sat in it meditatively. She stood near by. The dreary minutes passed; the sun slanted, and Henry remained lost in thought. Then he remarked casually to his sister:

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‘This might certainly be called pleasure under difficulties.’ Alice recorded ‘the stir of my whole being in response to the exquisite substance and original form of this remark.’24 This scene easily ties in with the opening scene of The Portrait of a Lady, partly because it offers a vivid impression of the young Henry James, a writer it is difficult to imagine as a youth at all, partly because Henry in the swing seems somewhat similar to Mr Touchett in his chair, and most of all, perhaps, because the remark ‘pleasure under difficulties’ comes across as something close to a Jamesian poetics in its own right. Reading the stories and novels from especially James’ later phase is certainly a ‘pleasure under difficulties’, just as Isabel’s immense difficulties constitute a chief source of the aesthetic pleasures elicited by The Portrait of a Lady. In fact, there are almost no limits to what parts of James’ life we can put to aesthetic use. Consider, for example, his famous remark on marriage, in a letter congratulating William on his engagement to Alice Howe Gibbens: ‘I had long wished to see you married; I believe almost as much in matrimony for most other people as I believe in it little for myself – which is saying a good deal.’25 Viewing such a statement in the light of the customary identifications of Isabel and Henry, we may surmise that Isabel married Osmond partly because he offered a much less definitive possessiveness than either of her other suitors, Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, would have done. As it turns out, Osmond loves to display Isabel as just one of his possessions, but his very superficiality and sterility at least gives her a considerable measure of negative freedom within the marriage, which she is not likely to forfeit as she returns to Osmond at the end. Indeed, she may actually want to return because the marriage, for all intents and purposes, already is dead, and because she has started to believe as little in matrimony as did Henry James himself. Harold Bloom hopes that she goes back to turn her freedom into an authentic Emersonian self-reliance, while Richard Poirier fears that death itself is now the only realm of freedom left to her. Both hypotheses seem a shade too realistic in spirit, because we may also conjecture that James is not about to send her back to Rome at all, but rather straight back to where she came from in the first place, that is, to his own large imagination, which the reader by now has been a part of for several hundred pages. The historical intention also contributes to the pleasure and insight of interpretation. It first of all directs our attention toward the general pastness of the novel. Even though The Portrait of a Lady speaks effortlessly

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and directly to readers of today, it could hardly have been written after the First World War. Its presence is a presence of the past. Its voice would not have been what it is if we did not perceive that it speaks from out of its own era. Every considerable literary experience includes this sense of belonging to a cultural and literary tradition. And from this general historicity, we may descend into the historical specifics of the 1870s and 1880s, depending on our knowledge and our taste for contextual readings. If we study the coherence intention, we ask how the opening of The Portrait of a Lady points toward the rest of the text. These are the usual questions of textual analysis: Why does the novel start out like this, and not in an entirely different way? Why do we meet Lord Warburton and the Touchetts before we meet Isabel Archer? One obvious answer is that the readers are meant to share in the reception of the young and innocent American lady as she steps into the more cynical world of experience represented by old Mr Touchett, by Europe and England, and by the time of day. This same sophisticated tone is conveyed, albeit with the irony noted by Poirier, in James’ narrative voice. Finally, we may find that the opening paragraph refers to other texts and other heroines. We may ponder how Dorothea Brooke and Emma Woodhouse or even Brett Ashley and Daisy Buchanan would have fared in this Jamesian setting. A prominent novel like The Portrait of a Lady will rather easily be seen to extend its referential tentacles to an almost limitless number of textual spheres. Again, however, this number will depend on what will work for the actual interpretations of the novel. This overview of the five intentions outlines the directions in which an interpretive experience might actually work with this example. For a pragmatist, it makes no sense to elevate one intention at the expense of others; the literary work – its meaning, its quality, and its poeticity – is to be found throughout the web of intentions, and the pragmatist reader will work his way across the experiential field as he finds useful in each instance. Personally, I have relatively little taste for intertextual studies, so that particular intention would not have been likely to play a large part if I were to proceed with my interpretation. For some reason, James’ life interests me more than most other novelists’ lives, so I would have looked for clues in Edel’s biography, in the letters, etc. I probably would find use for Theodore Roosevelt’s remark about James and Henry Adams that they were ‘miserable little snobs’ (even though it reveals more about Roosevelt than about James), or in George Santayana’s description: ‘Henry was calm, he liked to see things as they are, and be free afterwards to imagine how they might have been.’26 This last

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statement appears to throw as much light on the work as on the man and the style that holds the work and the man together. Contra Roman Jakobson, then, I would say that literariness or poeticity is absolutely everything that contributes in making the work a good one. Hemingway shooting a lion in Africa contributes as much to his literariness as some of his best paragraphs of writing, because such extratextual gestures have become an integral part of the experience we call ‘Hemingway’. Likewise, a good essay on Moby-Dick may be a more integral part of the work than one of its least interesting chapters. Readings that pay less attention to such extra-textual elements of the work and much more to the intra-textual relations (of themes, motives, plots, symbols, or whatever) would simply be different, not more scientific or more objective or more aesthetic. Now, it certainly may be argued that a reader might fully enjoy The Portrait of a Lady without much, or indeed any, knowledge of the author. This may be true, yet this fact does not in the least prevent an interpreter from abandoning the intrinsic approach to the work. The pragmatist reader, as I conceive of him, has simply given up or grown tired of intrinsic criticism, which in many ways reached its historical zenith with the close readings of deconstruction. Such a reader has learned to expect more from various extrinsic approaches but without ever leaving the aesthetic as such behind. Our notions of aesthetic pleasure or aesthetic experience or aesthetic quality can be retained at the very centre of our work with texts even when we concentrate as much on ourselves and on the author as on what we take to be the work’s internal structures. Henry James’ principle from his preface to Roderick Hudson seems to apply here: Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.27 The reader must be assumed to draw the same circle. Literary relations stop nowhere, but the reader draws a circle every time he closes off the experience. The aestheticity of the experience is nowhere in danger as long as we do not use, for example, the authorial intention to explain the text by putting too much emphasis on the psychology of the author or on his manifest purposes in writing the text. It is crucial that we regard our experience of the author as at least as complex and relational as our experience of the text. Again we can take a hint from Henry James himself, this time from his famous commemoration of James Russell Lowell:

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After a man’s long work is over and the sound of his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held a high place find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The hand of death, in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, made it more typical and general. The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities.28 Except for the characteristic tone, this remark might have been written by William, who always warned against thinking that concepts ever could do justice to our perceptual lives. Any author can be seen as a field of relations which we sometimes close off by our interpretations of him and his works, but which essentially is as uncentred as the universe (or pluriverse, as James also calls it) itself. It is this heterogeneous and expansive aspect of Jamesian pragmatism that seems the most fruitful way of further developing an aesthetic of experience that steers clear of Dewey’s and Beardsley’s efforts to establish general descriptions of the aesthetic experience. In addition, it seems to have consequences for how we do literary interpretation: Making the work into a pragmatist experience does not dissolve or diminish the work, but helps to free interpretation from the many boundaries that literary theory and method too often has set for it.

Notes 1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) (New York: Perigee Books, 1980) p. 3. 2. In ‘Aesthetic Experience Regained,’ Beardsley writes: ‘Most of us, indeed, have – I think fortunately – refused to follow some of the more cryptic passages in Art as Experience where Dewey proposes to identify the work of art with an experience.’ (Monroe C. Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 78). 3. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Joseph Margolis, What, after All, Is a Work of Art: Lectures in the Philosophy of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 4. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 108. 5. Ibid., p. 35. 6. Ibid., p. 3. 7. William James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), pp. 1144–5.

164 From Text to Literature 8. Ibid., p. 1189. 9. The following passage from the book The Meaning of Truth is also illuminating here: ‘This notion of a first in the shape of a most chaotic pure experience which sets us questions, of a second in the way of fundamental categories, long ago wrought into the structure of our consciousness and practically irreversible, which define the general frame within which answers must fall, and of a third which gives the detail of the answers in the shapes most congruous with all our presents needs, is, as I take it, the essence of the humanistic conception’ (James, Writings 1902–1910, p. 863). 10. James, Writings 1902–1910, p. 1210. 11. Ibid., p. 1176. 12. According to Hilary Putnam, James was the first western philosopher who actually succeeded in conquering the epistemological dualism that had dominated and plagued philosophy since Descartes. See especially Hilary Putnam ‘Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: an Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind’, Journal of Philosophy, 91 (1994), pp. 445–517. 13. James, Writings 1902–1910, pp. 1176–7. 14. Ibid., p. 1178. 15. Ibid., p. 1160. 16. Putnam writes: ‘That one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the basic insight of American Pragmatism.’(Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 21). 17. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 17. 18. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 3. 19. Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James: a Study of the Early Novels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 204–05. 20. Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James, p. 192. 21. William James, ‘The Will to Believe’, in Writings 1878–1899 (New York: Library of America, 1992), pp. 469–70. 22. Leon Edel, Henry James: the Conquest of London 1870–1883 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 431. 23. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), pp. 173, 176. 24. Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870–1883, pp. 46–7. 25. William and Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 114. 26. Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870–1883, p. 497. 27. Henry James, ‘Preface to the New York Edition’, in Roderick Hudson, ed. Geoffrey Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 37. 28. Henry James, ‘James Russell Lowell’, in Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 516.

8 The Poem as Perfect Sensate Discourse: Literature and Cognition According to Baumgarten Søren Kjørup

I. Introduction In 1749 the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) wrote on the very first page of his preface to the third edition of his Metaphysica: I said in the first dissertation that I published, that the poem is the perfect sensate discourse. I think that I said this truly. Somebody wrote, however, that I had said that the poem is the completely sensuous discourse. (Dixeram in prima, quam edidi, dissertatione poema sensitivam orationem perfectam. Vere dictum adhuc puto. Fuit autem, qui scriberet me dixisse poema orationem perfecte sensitivam.)1 The bitter tone in Baumgarten’s remark is caused by the fact that through this slight verbal misunderstanding, the very intention behind the masterstroke of his youth was changed. In the dissertation of 1735, when he was only 21 years of age, he had tried to show how a rationalist aesthetics could be constructed out of the partly contradictory contemporary theories about art and aesthetic experience while staying within the confines not only of contemporary philosophical thinking, but also of traditional rhetoric and poetics. He had hoped to be able to free the aesthetic field from the fields of ethics as well as of logic and metaphysics, thereby giving it a dignity of its own. Then dramatist Theodor Johann Quistorp in his review of the book in Der neue Büchersal (‘The New Library’, I, 5, 1745), published by the poet and important cultural figure Johann Christoph Gottsched, wrote that Baumgarten 165

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belonged among those who ‘see the essence of poetry only in the sensuousness of discourse’ (welche in der bloßen Sinnlichkeit der Rede das Wesen der Poesie setzen), and that should this concept of a poem ever become general, our Low German countryman, the late Lauremberg, would have to be preferred far above others, even above the poets recognized as the greatest both in the past and in the present, such as our Opitz, Flemming, Canitz, Besser and first of all Messrs Breitinger and Haller. Because he often writes so sensuously that one has to hold one’s nose in front of this poet. (Denn, sollte dieser Begriff von einem Gedichte jemals allgemein werden können, so ist gewiß unser platdeutscher Landsmann, der sel. Lauremberg allen übrigen, auch den kundbar größten Dichtern alter und neuer Zeiten, unsern Opitz, Flemming, Canitz, Besser, und vor allen andern dem Herrn Breitinger und Haller unendlich weit vorzuziehen. Denn er schreibt oftmals so sinnlich, daß man die Nase vor dem Dichter zuhalten muß.) That the attack was unjust had already been pointed out by Baumgarten’s disciple Georg Friedrich Meier in his Vertheidigung der Baumgartenschen Erklärung eines Gedichts (‘A Defence of Baumgarten’s Definition of a Poem’) of 1746 (the very same year Baumgarten became professor in Frankfurt an der Oder and Meier took over his chair in Halle). In this pamphlet Meier tries to demonstrate the excellence of his master’s view by showing 1) that Baumgarten’s definition is perfectly adequate for distinguishing a poem from everything else; 2) that it is an extremely fertile concept, and that it captures the essence of a poem; and 3) that it is in agreement with the concepts of poetry of the most thorough arbiters of poetry. (1) daß die Baumgartische Erklärung vollkommen hinreichend say, ein Gedicht von allen andern Dingen zu unterscheiden. 2) Daß sie ein überaus fruchtbarer Begriff say, und das Wesen eines Gedichts ergründe, und 3) daß sie mit den Begriffen der gründlichsten Kunstrichter von der Dichtkunst übereinstimme.2) Nowadays we cannot claim that misunderstandings of Baumgarten’s definition of a poem are widespread. If Baumgarten is remembered at

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all, it is as the founder of aesthetics, or at least as the inventor of the term. That he proposed a definition of a poem worth discussing, is forgotten – maybe because his definition never entered the critical and philosophical tradition exactly because of the initial misunderstanding of it. The year 1750, when the first volume of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica was published, is normally cited as the year when the term ‘aesthetics’ was first used.3 But Baumgarten had actually introduced the word as an afterthought in the above-mentioned essay on the nature of a poem: Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (literally, ‘Philosophical Meditations on a Few Things Concerning the Poem’, standardly translated into English as: Reflections on Poetry).4 And even though I cannot argue against any present-day misunderstanding, the task I have set myself in this article is not very different from the one that Meier set himself in 1746, that is, to explain Baumgarten’s concept of the poem (and expanding on that: of literature in general), to show how his thoughts on poetry and aesthetics have been influential, even though in a more roundabout way and more in epistemology than in the philosophy of art, and to point out how his concept of a poem agrees with at least one important modern notion. But what is ‘perfect sensate discourse’? To answer that question we shall have to start out about half a century before.

II. Poetry, truth – and a little bit more In his poem L’Art poétique from 1674 the French poet Nicolas BoileauDespréaux (1636–1711) claimed that reason must be the highest judge in matters of art.5 Even though he dutifully mentions natural talent as necessary for a poet, education and reason are more important: ‘Before starting to write, you should learn to think’ (‘Avant donc que d’écrire apprenez à penser’, I, 150), and ‘You must love reason so that your writings will always take from her alone both lustre and value’ (‘Aimez donc la raison: que toujours vos écrits /Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix’, I, 37–8). And in his ninth ‘epistle’ you find the explicit formulation that ‘Nothing is beautiful but the true, only the true gives pleasure’ (‘Rien n’est beau que le vray; le vray seul est aimable’). In his treatise La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’ésprit (‘The Right Way of Thinking in Works of Wit’) from 1685 Boileau’s contemporary, the Revd Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702) quotes this latter phrase with approval.6 But he adds that ‘when it comes to ideas of wit, the true is not enough, and you have to add something special that

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strikes the spirit’ (‘je vous disois qu’en matière de pensées ingénieuses, le vray ne suffisoit pas, & qu’il y falloit ajoûter quelque chose d’extraordinaire qui frappat l’esprit’).7 He even adds that ‘when ideas should really be true, they often become trivial’ (‘les pensées à force d’être vray, sont quelquefois triviales’).8 Obviously, one would prefer the poet to be able to present something completely new and interesting in every single work, but one cannot really expect that. Often the poet can only give some common idea a new, maybe elegant twist, adding some ‘delicate’ detail (as Bouhours calls it). What is characteristic of this ‘delicacy’ is that it is undefinable. The delicate, artistic, or aesthetic element cannot be captured by any kind of precise explanation. In a certain sense it is something that we have no real knowledge about. This view is reflected in the language used in this period about this element: ‘non so que’, ‘je ne sais quoi’, ‘ich weiss nicht was’, ‘nescio quid’, or ‘I know not what’. This is the Enlightenment version of ‘the inexpressible’, of what we today would call ‘that very special something’ that was used in the rhetoric of weeklies of the 1960s and 1970s in a narrower sense when writing about girls with ‘it’. By way of concepts like ‘the delicate’, which again were connected to concepts like ‘spirit’, ‘feeling’, ‘genius, and ‘wit’ (the latter not as the capacity to tell funny stories, but to grasp connections) and above all this ‘I know not what’, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century theorists were moving towards a concept of the specifically aesthetic or artistic experience. The problem was, however, that the ‘undefinable’ character of these concepts denoting something that might be experienced and pointed to but not given any precise description, had as a consequence that the specifically aesthetic had to be seen as something of no value in itself. At best it was a stepping-stone to more valuable types of experience and cognition. This view was due to the particular logic that this period saw as governing concepts and knowledge and to the hierarchy of values attached to this logic.

III. The enlightenment of concepts The cornerstone of conceptual logic in the Enlightenment was Descartes’ distinction between ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ concepts or ideas, a simple dichotomic system that had, however, been expanded by Leibniz. You have a clear idea about something that you can distinguish and recognize, but you have a distinct idea if you also know the criteria by which you make the distinction and are able to point to the features

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or characteristics defining whatever you have the distinct idea about. As an example Leibniz mentions that most people have a clear idea of gold since they are able to recognize a golden object, whereas the goldsmith has a distinct idea of gold since he knows how to analyse the material to make sure that it really is gold, that is, to establish its defining characteristics. The clear, but indistinct idea would often be called ‘confused’, not in the sense of ‘bewildered’, but in the sense of ‘having the distinctive marks mixed’. Progress in cognition would be seen as a movement from clear to distinct ideas, and this would be achieved through conceptual analysis. Enlightenment philosophy was a kind of analytical philosophy, and what should be ‘enlightened’ was not primarily humanity, but concepts or ideas. Like Bouhours adding a delicate ‘I know not what’ to Boileau’s true and reasonable ideas in poetry, Leibniz added a deeper, unconscious level to the basic Cartesian distinction between the clear and distinct ones: les petites perceptions, the minute ideas. ‘The Cartesians have been very wrong in considering ideas of which you are not conscious, as nothing’ (‘Et c’est en quoi les Cartesiens ont fort manqué, aïant compté pour rien les perceptions dont on ne s’apperçoit pas’) Leibniz wrote in his Monadologie, § 14.9 These vague perceptions are important because they are the point of departure for the analysis that will lead to clear and distinct ideas, and because we here find the ‘I know not what’. An unclear or obscure idea is what you have about some flower or animal that you have once seen, but which you are now unable to recognize even should you see it again (or unable to distinguish from some similar flower or animal). Or it may be the idea you have about the sound of each little wave if you are standing on the beach, listening to the roar of the sea. You know that the roar must consist of the fusion of the tiny sounds of all the tiny waves, but you are not able to distinguish the single waves in the roar, so you only have a confused idea of each one. Leibniz also enlarged the conceptual system in the opposite direction, inspired by some remarks of Spinoza’s. As I just explained, we have a distinct idea of gold if we know the defining characteristics of gold, for example specific mass, colour, and reaction to acid. The question is, however, if we also have distinct ideas about each of these characteristics, or if we only have clear ideas about them. In the latter case, we do have a distinct idea about gold, yet an ‘inadequate’ one. We have an adequate concept if we also have distinct ideas about the characteristics, and once again distinct ideas about the characteristics of the characteristics and so on.

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Leibniz doubted that human beings can ever reach adequate ideas of anything (maybe with mathematical ideas as the only exception), but he saw adequate ideas as a kind of limit, just as the completely obscure ideas at the other end of the continuum that he imagined between the various degrees of enlightened or ‘purified’ ideas. The capacity to have obscure and clear ideas he referred to as the ‘lower’ part of the cognitive faculty, whereas the capacity to have distinct ideas and to approach adequate ones he referred to the ‘higher’ part (or the ‘intellect’). Nobody could doubt the hierarchy of values in this continuum of concepts and cognition: obviously, man had to strive towards clarity, distinctness, and if possible adequacy in his ideas.

IV. The aesthetic paradox and the concept of taste On this background it should not be difficult to grasp what in a modern phrase might be called ‘the aesthetic paradox of enlightenment’: What for modern eyes would give a poem high quality and make it interesting and aesthetically satisfying, that is, its ‘I know not what’, had to be taken as a sign of its inferior value, since we here meet something obscure, something that is rooted in the lowest level of the lower part of the cognitive faculty. The paradox may be expressed in various ways (and was in the period). A specifically puzzling one is that it must be impossible for God to have aesthetic experiences. According to this way of thinking, aesthetic experiences are due to a weakness of human cognition; we are unable to have clear and distinct ideas about everything all the time, but fortunately we find a kind of delicate challenge and aesthetic satisfaction in certain forms of obscurity. God, however, not only has perpetual adequate cognition of everything; he is even exempt from the task of doing analysis, since his cognition is intuitive: With a kind of conceptual Roentgen glance he is able to see the whole and its parts all at once. But exactly in this kind of reasoning we find the germ of the most common solution to the aesthetic paradox of the beginning of the eighteenth century. Even though man should not dare compare himself with God when it comes to unmediated insight and comprehensive reason, man does have a capacity of the same type, at least when it comes to aesthetic matters, i.e. taste. According to standard surveys of the history of aesthetics the metaphorical concept of taste dates from the first half of the seventeenth century (and credit for its construction is normally given to the

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Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracian y Morales, 1601–58). It seems, however, that the concept only reached Germany – or rather the German language – in 1727, when it was used by the poet Johann Ulrich König (1688–1744) in a short treatise called ‘Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht- und Redekunst’ (‘An Essay on Good Taste in Poetry and Rhetoric’), published as a postscript to his edition of the collected poems by Friedrich Rudolf Ludwig Canitz.10 That the concept really was brand new in Germany at the time, can be seen by the fact that König feels obliged to make it explicit that he is writing about taste ‘in verblühmter Bedeutung’, that is, metaphorically, just as when Spaniards, French, and Italians use the words ‘gusto’ or ‘goût’. König is not writing about ‘the taste of the senses’ (‘Geschmack der Sinnen’) he notes, but about what he calls ‘the taste of reason’ (‘Geschmack des Verstandes’). For König as for most other contemporary theorists in this field, taste is the special faculty that makes it possible to pass judgment in matters of value, for example of a poem, relying on only obscure ideas and without making any kind of analysis. There was, however, no agreement as to whether taste (and similar faculties) should be seen as appreciating directly and spontaneously what also reason would have appreciated had it had time to make its analysis, or whether taste in a more radical fashion should be seen as the capacity to judge specific properties of things that reason would never be able to grasp. The first opinion was by far the most common, and shared not only by König, but also, for example, by Leibniz, by Bouhours, and by the French philosopher Jean-Pierre de Crousaz (1663–1748) in his Traité du beau (‘Treatise on Beauty’) from 1715.11 They all presupposed some kind of ‘preestablished harmony’ between taste and reason. The more radical opinion we find in the Reflexions critiques sur la Poesie et sur la Peinture (‘Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting’) from 1719 by the French abbot Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670–1742) who writes, for example, that ‘what analysis would never find, feeling grasps at once’ (‘Ce que l’analyse ce sçauroit trouver, le sentiment le saisit d’abord’).12

V. Geometric poetics At first it may be difficult to see how Baumgarten’s small treatise on the art of poetry cuts straight through this discussion and creates a new paradigm. What a reader notices, is rather Baumgarten’s extremely ‘unpoetic’ exposition, his use of the schematic more geometrico (best known to most of us now from Spinoza’s Ethics). The treatise comprises only

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40 small pages and is divided into 117 numbered paragraphs. Nearly all paragraphs start with a short statement in the form of a heading. In particular in the first paragraphs these statements often take the form of a definition. In later paragraphs they take on a more descriptive or argumentative character. From the first to the last paragraph new concepts are occasionally introduced and defined. Later statements contain references back by number to earlier paragraphs from which they are (claimed to be) logically derived as theorems (the definitions being used as axioms). Most of these statements are followed by scholia, pieces of explaining and exemplifying text, often with quotations from Horace or other great precursors like Aristotle or Cicero (and following the habit of the period, nearly always without precise references and often with minor mistakes to show that the author quotes by heart). It should also be noticed that the definitions and other initial statements may be read on two or three levels, indicated by the use of three kinds of type: Capital letters are used to indicate concepts that are defined in the statement, and if you only read what is written in capital and italic letters, you get the gist of the definition; the gist of non-defining statements you get by reading only the words in italic (and of course if you read the whole statement – capital, italic and plain type – you get the whole thought).13 Baumgarten defines ‘a poem’ as what he calls ‘the perfect sensate discourse’ (§ 9), which means the type of text that makes the most of obscure and (specially) clear ideas (but not distinct ones, since these do not belong to poetry according to rationalist thought). And the point in all the deductions is to show which rules for the poem must follow from this definition. Many of the rules turn out to be rationalist reformulations of suggestions known from the ancients and not least from Horace; a sceptic might even say that Baumgarten simply reformulates Horace’s poetic rendering of the rules of poetry (in his Ars Poetica or Epistle to the Pisones14) and forces them into rationalist logic. Towards the end of this article I shall argue, however, that Baumgarten’s concept of a poem (and of literature in general) is just as much in accordance with modern concepts as with the classics. The whole treatise is structured according to the principles of rhetoric: First we must consider content to see what would be the most suitable subject matter for a poem (§§ 12–64), then the relationship between the different parts of the content, that is, disposition, questions of decorum, and the scope of renderings (§§ 65–76), and finally the very words (§§ 77–107), both as bearers of content (tropes, §§ 79–90) and as sound (rhyme and rhythm, §§ 91–107). And before the very last paragraphs in

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which Baumgarten, as I have suggested, introduces the concept of ‘aesthetics’ (to which I shall return), he just manages to compare his own definition of the poem with two very recent attempts by Daniel Heinrich Arnold (1732) and Johann Georg Walch (1728).

VI. Sensate cognition It is impressive that Baumgarten is able to cover so much ground in so few pages, using the more geometrico, and that he is able to integrate so much classical material, including a number of illustrative quotations. Yet all of this points backwards into the history of aesthetics, logic, and rhetoric. More important in our context are the elements that point forward and create the new paradigm, and here one can take one’s point of departure in Baumgarten’s use of the term ‘sensate’. In the classic rationalist vocabulary with its hierarchy of concepts whatever did not reach the level of distinctness was defined negatively as indistinct. As a first step forward, Baumgarten gives the indistinct ideas an independent, positive name: They are sensate. This renaming – ‘By SENSATE REPRESENTATIONS we mean representations received through the lower part of the cognitive faculty’ (‘REPRAESENTATIONES per partem facultatis cognoscitiuae inferiorem comparatae sint SENSITIVAE’) – comes in § 3 after the definition in § 1 of ‘discourse’ as ‘a series of words which designate connected representations’ (‘ORATIONEM cum dicimus, seriem vocum repraesentationes connexas significantium intelligimus’) and the (nearly) symmetric statement in § 2 that ‘Connected representations are to be apprehended from discourse’ (‘Ex oratione repraesentationes connexae cognoscendae sunt’). After this Baumgarten makes it clear that it must be possible for the special sensate cognition to reach its own kind of perfection, that is, not by analysis, striving towards distinctness and abstraction, but in a way that recognizes the special character of sensate cognition. This demands a revision of the assumption that there is one faculty of cognition with a lower and a higher part. Instead it has to be assumed that we have two independent faculties, even though connected at bottom in obscure cognition. While Baumgarten in the first paragraphs of his Reflections on Poetry still (like Leibniz) writes about the two parts of the faculty of cognition, in the final paragraphs he writes about a lower faculty and a higher one. Alongside traditional analysis of concepts or ideas that leads from obscurity towards more and more of what Baumgarten now baptizes intensive clarity (and distinctness, etc.), he proposes the possibility of growing extensive clarity (§ 16). And while intensive clarity strives to

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become more and more abstract, extensive clarity strives to become more and more concrete; while intensive clarity is reached by digging deeper and deeper into the conceptual system, extensive clarity is reached by the accumulation of characteristics on the same level – and its perfection is reached in the complete determination of a specific thing. Baumgarten does not need a concept of taste that through some kind of pre-established harmony might be able to judge intuitively in the obscure field with the same result that reason would have reached through analysis. The value that taste might find is of quite another kind from that which would interest reason. In Baumgarten there is no longer just one hierarchy of values; there are two.

VII. The rules for attaining perfect sensate discourse Having established this novel conceptual and terminological basis, Baumgarten is ready to set about deriving the poetic rules for content, general structure, and language from his definition of a poem. How can the highest degree of extensive clarity be obtained in a discourse? What will be ‘more poetic’ (as he consistently phrases his main question), what less so? I shall point to a few selected main theses. It goes without saying that it must be more poetic to be specific in description than to be general. The main topic of poetry must be ‘individuals’ (§ 19), and if one wants to treat some abstract topic, one should do this through a concrete example (§ 22). Products of the imagination (‘phantasmata’, to which dreams also belong) based directly on experience should stay as close to real sense representations as possible in order to be as extensively clear and therefore as poetic as possible (§§ 28–38). Products of the imagination that stem from a recombination of elements, i.e. ‘fictions’ (‘figmenta’), are only poetic if they are possible either in our world (and are then called ‘true fictions’) or at least possible in some world; if they are impossible in all possible worlds, they are called ‘utopian’ and are not poetic (§§ 50–3). It is not easy for Baumgarten to make room for emotions in this poetic theorizing focused on content, but his rhetorical background forces him to find a place for it. He succeeds, but we may take it as a sign of his difficulties that he actually gives two quite different reasons for the poetic value of eliciting passions (‘affectus’). One is that the passions are experiences of pleasure and pain, hence something only confusedly experienced, hence ‘poetic’ (§ 25). The other is that something that is represented as good or bad (on top of whatever else), and hence as some-

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thing that affects the passions, will have more characteristics or features than if this aspect is not considered. It must therefore be poetic to elicit passions or stir the emotions (§ 26). It may be worth while to observe in passing that in a small insertion connected to the discussion of the products of the imagination, Baumgarten discusses the relationship between poetry and painting (§§ 39–41). In the scholium to § 39 he actually quotes Horace on the relationship between poems and pictures, but in the eighteenth-century fashion he erroneously quotes the well-known passage as ‘ut pictura, poesis erit’, making the sentence mean ‘a poem ought to be like a picture’ rather than the correct ‘a poem is like a picture’.15 Poetry and painting are closely related, Baumgarten notes (they are ‘resemblances’ in the sense that they fall under the same umbrella concept, i.e. of representation). But in § 40 he produces his own little paragone: after all the poem is more ‘perfect’ than the painting because painting can only show one aspect of its subject and not show movement at all, while the poem manages both. The discussion of the general structure of the poem in a standard rhetorical treatise would have been labelled ‘disposition’, but in accordance with the Cartesian, anti-humanist trend in German rationalism, Baumgarten presents it as dealing with ‘method’. And he goes straight to the main point: it is not enough that a poem consists of a number of single ‘poetic’ elements; the many different elements should all be subsumed under one common ‘theme’ (‘thema’, §§ 65–8 – behind this we sense clearly the classical criterion of ‘unity in the manifold’). Baumgarten even makes it clear that elements that do not fit in, should be discarded so that what he calls an ‘intrinsically or absolutely brief discourse’ can be achieved (§§ 74–6). And not only should the elements be subsumed under the theme; the structure of the poem should be such that they follow one another as cause and effect, progressively creating a clearer and clearer understanding of the theme. Exactly this way of structuring a text is called ‘method’, and since Horace wrote about ‘lucidus ordo’ (v. 41) in the fine poem, the poetic method shall be called the ‘lucid’ one (§ 70). The most interesting part of what in rhetoric would be the elocutio section of the presentation, is the one where Baumgarten comments on the ‘poetic terms’ (‘ad terminos poeticos’ as he says in the introduction), since also the ‘words’ (‘voces’, § 72) have to be poetic. It comes as no surprise to the reader that Baumgarten takes a positive attitude to figurative speech, and especially metaphor (§ 83), metonomy (§ 84), and allegory (§ 85), since through these it is possible to focus the message

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in a suggestive way, thereby contributing to the ideal of intrinsic brevity. In principle, epithets too are poetic if they are non-distinct in their way of adding a complex notion to the noun, yet often they should be discarded as superfluous (only slightly connected with the theme) or tautologous (§§ 86–7). Finally, Baumgarten reaches the question of words as articulate sounds, that is, as producers of sense perceptions. Only one consideration seems really important here, the one that is summed up in the statement that ‘Not every instance of [metric] verse is a poem’ (§ 105), since rhythm does not guarantee sensate discourse; rhythm is not a sufficient condition for a discourse reaching sensate perfection. Obviously, it is tempting to turn this consideration around and conclude that Baumgarten’s reflections on poetry are relevant also for prose – even though strict logic does not permit deducing ‘not necessary’ from ‘not sufficient’. In addition, what engages the reader’s attention in the section on sound is not so much what Baumgarten has to say, as his ingenuity in integrating standard subject matter into his deductive system. One may point to his observations about metrics (§§ 98–105), or to the question of how the pleasure of poetic sound may contribute to the perfection of a poem: the evaluating response to the sound is of a sensate character and therefore poetic, and the stronger the response, the better. However, such a response may be both positive and negative, and Baumgarten has to give reasons why a strongly negative response should not be seen as making a contribution to poetic perfection. The problem is solved in § 95: If the highest displeasure is produced in the ear, it will distract the attention of the listener. Hence, either few or no representations can be further communicated and the poem fails altogether of its purpose, § 5. Therefore, it is poetic to produce in the ear the highest pleasure, § 94. After these considerations, Baumgarten is ready to introduce his concept of aesthetics.

VIII. Aesthetics as epistemology § 9 not only contains the definition of ‘poem’. The numbered statement here pinpoints a whole set of fundamental concepts and first of all a hierarchy of textual types:

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§ 9. By POEM we mean a perfect sensate discourse, by POETICS the body of rules to which a poem conforms, by PHILOSOPHICAL POETICS the science of poetics, by POETRY the state of composing a poem, and by POET the man who enjoys that state. (§ IX. Oratio sensitiua perfecta est POEMA, complexus regularum, ad quas conformandum poema POETICE, scientia poetices PHILOSOPHIA POETICA, habitus conficiendi poematis POESIS, eoque habitu gaudens POETA.) Towards the end of the treatise Baumgarten returns to these distinctions. In § 115 he reminds us that his own achievement has been within philosophical poetics since he has been formulating a poetics, a set of rules guiding sensate discourse to perfection. But how about the other side of the coin, not the formulation of more or less perfect discourse, but the poet’s use of his lower cognitive faculty? When it comes to our use of our higher cognitive faculty, we are guided by logic, and obviously logic ought also to guide us using the lower one, but it has not been developed to perform that task. Alongside traditional logic there must be room for a so far undeveloped science (or ‘metascience’ as we would say) that might guide and describe sensate cognition. But what should be the name of this new kind of logic, this epistemology for sensate cognition? This question is dealt with in § 116: since classical antiquity philosophers have made a distinction between ‘noe¯ta’ and ‘aisthe¯ ta’ (and of course Baumgarten writes these words with Greek letters), thoughts and impressions of the senses, ideas and sensations, of which the first belong to the higher faculty of cognition and therefore to logic, and the latter to the lower one – so why not call the new science ‘aesthetics’? And there we have the word, the first time ever, and with the capitals used for a definiendum: AESTHETICA. Since the theme of this essay is the concept of literature and not the concept of aesthetics, this is not the place for exploring the implications of this way of conceiving of aesthetics. Let me just emphasize the obvious fact that in this original formulation, aesthetics is not defined as having anything to do with beauty – or with art, for that matter. The furthest Baumgarten ever gets in this direction is in one of the four alternative (parenthetic) designations that he gives to ‘aesthetica’ in the very first paragraph of his major opus: ‘ars pulchre cogitandi’, ‘the art of thinking beautifully’ – which of course has no relation whatever to ‘beautiful art’. The other three designations are ‘theoria liberalium artium’, ‘gnoseologia inferior’ and ‘ars analogis rationis’ (i.e. ‘theory of

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the liberal arts’, ‘the lower epistemology’, and ‘the art of what is analogous to reason’), and all are defined as ‘scientia cognitionis sensitivae’, ‘the science of sensate cognition’.

IX. Sensuousness, aesthetic analysis, and things in themselves Even though Baumgarten is remembered, if at all, for his great Aesthetica (yet probably more for its title than for its content), the small dissertation from his youth did not go unnoticed. It immediately went through at least two printings, which was probably just as unusual for doctoral dissertations then as it is now (though I do not know the number of copies printed).16 It received a few critical notices in the course of the first couple of years, and it was even partly translated into German in 1744.17 It provoked the year-long polemic that took its point of departure in the confusion of ‘the perfect sensate discourse’ with ‘the completely sensuous discourse’. In the later polemic even Baumgarten’s term ‘aesthetics’ was transformed into an adjectival invective, ‘aesthetic’, that was used as a label for a bombastic and obscure work of art because of a similar misreading of his definition of ‘beauty’ in the Aesthetica: ‘perfect sensate cognition’ (‘cognitio sensitiva perfecta’, § 14) – and not the completely sensuous one. As I mentioned initially, it was first of all Baumgarten’s former student Georg Friedrich Meier who rose to his defence. It is arguable, however, that Meier’s Anfangsgründe aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (roughly ‘Introduction to Aesthetics’, 1748–50), and his Auszug (‘Abstract’, 1758) of the same work did Baumgarten more harm than good.18 The problem is that Meier (with a somewhat false modesty) made it clear that he did not deserve the credit for the content of these works since he had it all from Baumgarten, his teacher, namely from Baumgarten’s lectures and notes from the period in which the Aesthetica was written. But Meier did not use Baumgarten’s definition of ‘beauty’ that I just quoted, but the more traditional one: ‘an indistinctly or sensately known perfection’. This latter definition had been used by Baumgarten himself in his Metaphysica, but in many ways that book should be seen as a compendium of the works of Leibniz and Wolff and it made use of their concepts. In his own time it was first of all the extremely popular Metaphysica that created Baumgarten’s reputation. Of special importance was the fact that Baumgarten introduced notes in the fourth edition (1757) with suggestions of how to render Latin philosophical terms in German. It

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is often said that German philosophical terminology was created by Wolff, who was the first philosophical author to abandon Latin (and French, as used by Leibniz, for example) for the vernacular. But if one compares Wolff’s German terms with those proposed by Baumgarten, one will see that where there are differences, it is the terms introduced by Baumgarten that have survived – as when ‘in se’ becomes ‘vor und an sich’ in Wolff’s writings, whereas Baumgarten proposes what we know from Kant: ‘an und für sich’.

X. Kant and Baumgarten Kant himself was among the many who lectured on Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (and on his corresponding compendium on ethics), but because in the eighteenth century authors rarely acknowledged their sources (as we also see in Baumgarten’s dissertation), Baumgarten’s influence on Kant, though pervasive, is not easily noticed. Two examples may be relevant here: One is Kant’s use of the notion ‘aesthetics’ in Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), of which the first (and smallest) section of the first (and largest) part is called ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’ (and where space and time are analysed as ‘forms of intuition’). Here he actually mentions ‘the excellent analyst Baumgarten’ in a footnote (p. 21 in the first edition), yet with a remark that can almost be read as a bizarre criticism of Baumgarten for having misunderstood the real meaning of the word he himself invented. Only in German, Kant says, is the term ‘aesthetics’ used to refer to what in other languages would be called ‘the criticism of taste’. He makes it clear that he prefers to use the term in what he considers a more precise and etymologically correct way for his discussion of what he in the main text calls ‘the principles of sensate knowing’ (‘Prinzipien der Sinnlichkeit’), as opposed to ‘logic’, which he will use for ‘the principles of thinking’ – and then in the footnote he mentions the classical concepts of ‘aisthe¯ ta’ and ‘noe¯ ta’ (written with Greek letters).19 With these formulations, however, Kant is much closer to the real Baumgarten of the by then nearly 50 years old Reflections on Poetry than he could or wanted to admit. That Kant could adopt not only concepts but also ways of thinking from Baumgarten, can be most clearly seen in his Latin inaugural dissertation from 1770 (when he at long last succeeded in becoming a professor in Königsberg): De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (‘On Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World’).20 The usual way of reading this dissertation is as a preliminary study for the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (and some passages from the

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dissertation actually reappear in that work, in particular in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’). However, it is also a work that shows quite clearly how Kant continues Baumgarten’s work. Baumgarten’s distinction between ‘sensualis’ and ‘sensitivus’ (‘sensuous’ and ‘sensate’) here plays a major role, and Baumgarten’s distinction between extensive and intensive clarity reappears as a Kantian distinction between ‘coordination’ and ‘subordination’ – and then it turns up in the Kritik as the decisive distinction between ‘synthetic’ and ‘analytical’ knowledge. Most important of all, however, is the distinction emphasized already in the title of the dissertation, that is, between the two worlds, the one of the senses and the one of the intellect. From the point of view of the history of philosophy we would normally claim that we here see Kant using a philosophical topos that goes back at least to Plato and his distinction between the world we perceive and the world of ideas. But this long perspective must be supplemented with the short one that Kant completes the separation of the two types of cognition that Baumgarten had identified. What I find so brilliant in Baumgarten is that he recognizes that sensate cognition and intellectual cognition each has its own kind of value, yet that he maintains that they are connected through a common basis; they are not opposed to one another, they do not belong to different realms. Since Kant, however, we have had to struggle with the dissociation of sensation and thinking, feeling and reason, the emotive and the cognitive.

XI. Emotive and cognitive language Baumgarten’s basic move to cut through the aesthetic paradox of the Enlightenment, that is, to introduce a distinction between two kinds of cognition, may seem to rely more heavily on tradition than it actually does. The philosophical and rhetorical tradition teems with ever-new dichotomies intended to solve problems and cut through paradoxes – in the spirit of Plato’s distinction between the two worlds. But Baumgarten’s distinction is of a new type. As far as I can judge, Baumgarten is the first to make a distinction between two kinds of language. It brings to mind the distinction, introduced by twentieth-century analytic philosophy for a similar purpose, between cognitive and emotive language. The introduction of the notion of ‘emotive’ (as opposed to ‘cognitive’) language in analytic philosophy also represented an attempt to cut through a paradox, and philosophers in this tradition also made the proposal to conceive of literature as emotive language.21 Still, there is a

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fundamental difference between Baumgarten’s distinction and the one proposed two centuries later. The need for a concept of emotive language stems from empiricist theories of meaning, and in particular from the introduction of the ‘verifiability criterion of meaning’ (or rather of meaningfulness), that is, that only sentences for which truth conditions can be formulated are meaningful.22 If one accepts this criterion, moral and religious discourse become meaningless and so do the statements one finds in poetry and fiction. However, this is counterintuitive since ethical statements and religious statements as well as the sentences one finds in poetry and fiction seem perfectly intelligible. To try to solve this problem, a distinction was introduced between a cognitive (or referential) use (or function) of language and an emotive use. Sometimes this distinction was made as if there were two different types of language: a cognitive language and an emotive one. The bestknown early proponents of this distinction are C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning, the first edition of which was published in 1923.23 And the next year Richards published his Principles of Literary Criticism with the chapter ‘The Two Uses of Language’, in which occurs this lengthy explanation: Fictions whether aroused by statements or by analogous things in other arts may be used in many ways. They may be used, for example, to deceive. But this is not a characteristic use in poetry. The distinction which needs to be kept clear does not set up fictions in opposition to verifiable truths in the scientific sense. A statement 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. The distinction once clearly grasped is simple. We may either use words for the sake of the references they promote, or we may use them for the sake of the attitudes and emotions which ensue. Many arrangements of words evoke attitudes without any reference being required en route. They operate like musical phrases. But usually references are involved as conditions for, or stages in, the ensuing development of attitudes, yet it is still the attitudes not the references which are important. It matters not at all in such cases whether the references are true or false. Their sole function is to bring about and support the attitudes which are the further response. The questioning, verificatory way of handling them is irrelevant, and in a competent reader it is not allowed to interfere.24

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Richards gets very close to defining poetry and fiction as emotive language – and he gets even closer in the next chapter, ‘Poetry and Beliefs’, with formulations like this: ‘Poetry affords the clearest examples of this subordination of reference to attitude. It is the supreme form of emotive language.’25 The poem as perfect sensate discourse or as the supreme form of emotive language – the parallel is striking. So is the difference. For in the vocabulary of modern analytic philosophy, Baumgarten’s sensate discourse is still cognitive, not emotive. Baumgarten does not claim that the purpose of literature is to trigger emotions; it is to describe the world for us in an engaging way. The emotions that Baumgarten has some trouble to make fit into his scheme, are not in themselves a goal but have the purpose to render the cognitive experience more engaging. For Richards, on the other hand, ‘references’ have ‘the sole function . . . to bring about and support . . . attitudes’. In fact, in the rationalist vocabulary of the eighteenth century, Richards’ definition would be the one that Baumgarten was mistakenly assumed to subscribe to: poetry as completely sensuous discourse.

XII. A belletristic concept of literature Baumgarten’s sensate discourse is not emotive discourse. If we want to find a modern parallel to his concept of literature, the nearest at hand is the belletristic one, represented in this book in the essays by Paisley Livingston and Torsten Pettersson. Pettersson claims that the markedly characteristic components of literariness (even though not making up a full definition) are ‘expressiveness, representativity, and form’.26 ‘Expressiveness’ is the result of the creative effort and artistic freedom of the author, ‘representativity’ is the special kind of cognitive value we find in fiction, and ‘form’ the structures and patterns which are pleasing in themselves (parallels, contrasts, expectations that are first established and then satisfied), but which may also support expressiveness and/or representativity (parallels and contrasts that bring out the author’s artistic stance and/or the relevant connection between the fictional characters and a group of people in real life).27 Pettersson here gives examples of what Baumgarten calls the ‘lucid method’. ‘Representativity’ catches the content of Baumgarten’s reflections on how knowledge is conveyed in poetry through concrete

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situations and examples. The only component difficult to fit into Baumgarten’s scheme might be ‘expressiveness’, since Baumgarten does not have the modern concept of the creative literary artist. His conception of the ‘poet’ is that of the reflecting and selecting practitioner with the capacity to compose poems. The rules that Baumgarten develops in his dissertation are directed to him. In Livingston’s essay we find the following definition of a literary work of art: literary utterances are those intended primarily by their authors to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character, in the very broad sense sketched above, which means that in writing a work of literature, the author or authors aim to create a work the contemplation of which can be intrinsically valued.28 And the ‘experience with marked aesthetic character’ is described in the following way: aesthetic response, which embraces thought and imagination as well as perception and sensation, must be a direct, active contemplative attention to the qualities of some item issuing in an intrinsically valued experience.29 Again we recognize Baumgarten’s concept of the poem as a special kind of discourse that demands various kinds of cognition, also of an imaginative kind. By pointing to this parallel, I am of course in no way claiming that Baumgarten has had any direct or even indirect influence on the modern belletristic concept of literature. Yet with his Reflections on Poetry, for all its backward-looking classicist subject matter and contemporary rationalist form, he did manage to be one of the first theorists to formulate a concept of literature that may be said to presage the later modern notion. And ‘belletristic’, by the way, isn’t that – not unlike, for example, Meier’s ‘schöne Wissenschaften’ – an eighteenthcentury notion?

Notes 1. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica (7th edn, 1779) (Hildesheim: Olms, 1963), (no page number). The first edition of Metaphysica was published in Halle in 1739, the third in 1749. Italics are from the original. All

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

translations in this article, also of titles of books and articles, are my own, except the ones from Baumgarten’s dissertation, see note 4. Georg Friedrich Meier, Vertheidigung der baumgartischen Erklärung eines Gedichts, wider das 5. Stück des I. Bandes des neuen Büchersaals der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (Halle: C.H. Hemmerde, 1746); my quotations from Quistorp above are taken from Meier. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Vols 1–2 (Frankfurt an der Oder: Kleyb, 1750/58); important excerpts are published with German translation in Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Ästhetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der ‘Aesthetica’ A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe des lateinischen Textes und deutscher Übersetzung (Basle: Schwabe, 1973). Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Halle: Grunert, 1735). In 1968 Per Aage Brandt and I published a translation into Danish with an introduction by me: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Filosofiske betragtninger over digtet, trans. with notes by Per Aage Brandt and Søren Kjørup and with an Intro. by Søren Kjørup, Poetik Bibliotek (Copenhagen: Arena, 1968). The English translation is Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, trans. with Intro. and notes by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (with a facsimile of the original text from 1735) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). In this article I quote from Baumgarten in Aschenbrenner and Holther’s translation. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, L’Art poétique (1674), ed. Jean-Clarence Lambert and François Mizrachi (Paris: Union Génerale, 1966). Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’ésprit (1687), 3rd edn (Paris: F. Delaulne, 1705). My quotation from Boileau’s Epîtres is taken from Bouhours, p. 33. Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’ésprit, p. 85. Ibid., p. 82. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘Monadologie’ (1714), trans. Artur Buchenau; Intro. and notes by Herbert Herring, in André Robinet (ed.), Vernunftprincipien der Natur und der Gnade und Monadologie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956), p. 30. See Friedrich Rudolph Ludwig von Canitz, Des Freyherrn von Canitz Gedichte: mehrentheils aus seinen eigenhändigen Schrifften verbessert und vermehret: mit Kupffern und Anmerckungen, nebst dessen Leben, und einer Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht- und Rede-Kunst, ed. Johann Ulrich König (Berlin and Leipzig: Ambrosius Hauden, 1727). Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Traité du beau, où l’on montre en quoi consiste ce que l’on nomme ainsi, par des exemples tirés de la plupart des arts et des sciences (Amsterdam: F. L’Honoré, 1715). Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la Poesie et sur la Peinture (Paris: Mariette, 1719), II, p. 352. To compose this kind of sentence is not very difficult in a language like Latin which does not depend on word order and articles to express grammatical relationships, but instead uses inflexion; to render Baumgarten in other languages, like English or Danish, takes a lot of ingenuity. Aschenbrenner and Holter gave up (pp. 14–15), Per Aage Brandt and I succeeded in our Danish translation. Aschenbrenner and Holter render Baumgarten’s definienda in

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

bold letters, but to get a bit closer to Baumgarten, I use capital letters in my quotations. The reader may see the whole system in the full Latin quotations below. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica (1926), trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1964). In the modern Fairclough edition of the Loeb Classical Library the whole sentence goes: ‘Ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si propius stes, / te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes’ (v.361–62), and Fairclough translates ‘A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away’ (pp. 480–1). Aschenbrenner and Holther miss the point in their translation by rendering the modern understanding (‘Poetry is like a picture’, p. 52), not Baumgarten’s version. Per Aage Brandt and I seem to have been the only ones to notice the two printings: Comparing the original copy belonging to the Royal Library in Copenhagen with the facsimile published as an appendix to the English translation, we detected some – minuscule – differences, first of all a different distribution of minor typographical errors (like wrong type, but also a few misprints). The interested philologist will find the very first difference on the title page: The facsimile has a ‘(5)’ in the bottom right-hand corner that is absent in the Copenhagen copy. I have this information from A. Riemann, Die Ästhetik A.G. Baumgartens unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der ‘Meditationes’, nebst einer Übersetzung dieser Schrift (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928). Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, Vols 1–3 (Halle: C.H. Hemmerde, 1748–50); and Auszug aus den Anfangsgründen aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Halle: C.H. Hemmerde, 1758). Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956), p. 70. Immanuel Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, ed. Klaus Reich (Darmstadt: Meiner, 1958). In his Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958) Monroe C. Beardsley discusses various variants of definitions of literature by way of emotive language (see p. 119 ff. and p. 147 ff.). The principle has been given many different formulations, the most famous being perhaps the two following: We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition that it purports to express. (A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 16.) . . . the meaning of a statement lies in the method of its verification. A statement asserts only so much as is verifiable with respect to it. (Rudolf Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’, trans. Arthur Pap, in A.J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959), p. 76.)

23. C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: a Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), 10th

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), the main discussion of emotive use of language, as opposed to the ‘symbolic’ one, is on pp. 149 ff. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), 2nd edn (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1926), pp. 267–68, italics in the original. Ibid., p. 273, italics in the original. P. 85 in this volume. P. 87 in this volume. P. 46 in this volume. P. 41 in this volume.

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Index aesthetic the aesthetic, 36–9 aesthetic attitude, 42, 48 aesthetic contemplation, 41, 45, 48 the, in eighteenth-century theory, 168 aesthetic experiences, 37–48, 150, 162 aesthetic perception, 151 aesthetic qualities, 18, 42 Åhlberg, Lars-Olof, 4–5, 6, 9, 36 Anderson, Chris, 95–6 Anderson, James C., 60, 61 appreciation, of literature and art, 18–19, 40, 48, 58–9, 117 Aristotle, 92–3, 100 art aesthetic definitions of, 45 evaluative definitions of, 59–60 generic concept of, 53–5 historical definition of, 62–3 institutional theory of, 14–18, 57–9 as an open concept, 54–5 procedural definitions of, 36, 57, 58 artworld, 16–18, 57 Austen, Jane, 22–4 Baldick, Chris, 12 Barthes, Roland, 11, 13, 129, 137–9 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb Aesthetica (1750), 167, 178 his concept of aesthetics, 177 his definition of poetry, 165–6, 172, 177 intensive vs. extensive clarity, 173–4 inventor of the term ‘aesthetics’, 167, 173 Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Reflections on Poetry, 1735), 167, 171–9, 183 Metaphysica (1749), 165, 178–9

perfect sensate discourse, his idea of, 172–3 , 176, 182 on the value of poetry, 174–5 Beardsley, Monroe C., 43 de Bellis, Jack, 91–2, 95 Bennett, Tony, 12–13, 61–2 biography, 47 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 167 Bouhours, Dominique, 167–8 Bowie, Andrew, 136 Bradbury, Malcolm, 95 Bradley, A.C., 70 Brown, Richard Harvey, 136–7 Carroll, Noël, 55, 56 Cohen, Ted, 58 Collingwood, R.G., 60–1 Collini, Stefan, 12 concepts, 113, 121–2 conceptual relativity, 121 conventions constitutive and regulative, 20–1 Crane, R.S., 30 creativity, 56 Culler, Jonathan, 88 Danto, Arthur, 16, 25–6 Davies, Stephen, 57 deconstruction, 2, 69, 162 definitions, types of, 114–15 Dewey, John, 43, 146–9, 153 Dickie, George, 14–18, 39, 53, 55, 57–60, 67 disinterestedness, 39–40 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 171 Dummett, Michael, 31 Edel, Leon, 159–60 Eagleton, Terry, 70, 71, 118–20 experience (William James) as conceptual activity, 150 as a perceptual event, 150–1 pure, 149–50

203

204 Index experience – continued of relations, 153 streams of, 149, 153 family resemblances, 54, 56, 60, 107 feminism, 2, 69, 70–1, 139 Fenner, David, 42 fictionality, 1–2, 84 see also literature (the phenomenon), and fictionality Foley, John Miles, 129–30, 132 form, 87 see also literature (the phenomenon), and form formalism, Russian, 1, 135, 137 Foucault, Michel, 139 Frankena, William K., 41 Freeland, Cynthia, 56 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 69, 71–2 Greg–Bowers tradition, 130–2 Grice, H.P., 46 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 30 Hagen, Erik Bjerck, 7–8, 9 Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva, 87 hermeneutics, 136 Hernadi, Paul, 82 Hollowell, John, 91, 95 Hutcheon, Linda, 71–2 hypertextuality, 131–3 ideas (eighteenth-century theory of) adequate, 169–70 clear vs. distinct, 168–9 minute, 169 obscure, 169–70 In Cold Blood (Capote), 88–92, 94–8 In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (George), 69, 72 institution, literary, see literature (the phenomenon), as a practice or an institution institutional facts, 121–2 intentions (types of aboutness) authorial, 153–4, 158–60 coherence, 153–4, 161 historical, 153–4, 160–1

intertextual, 153–4 pragmatic, 153–4, 155–8 intentions (the author’s) action-orienting, 46 to invoke the literary response, 69 in planning or projects, 46 relevance/irrelevance of, 131, 139 retrieval of, 130 textualized, 135 interactional fallacy, 138 interpretation the concept of, 27 as creating a work/text, 28 deep and surface, 25–7 see also interpretative communities interpretative communities, 26–31 intertextuality, 138 Jakobson, Roman, 1, 162 James, Henry, 160, 162–3; see also The Portrait of a Lady (James) James, William, 147–51, 153, 158, 163 Jones, Marina, 128 Kant, Immanuel, 179–80 Kazin, Alfred, 96 Kermode, Frank, 13 King Lear (Shakespeare), 69–71 Kivy, Peter, 60 Kjørup, Søren, 8–9 Knight, Wilson, 70 König, Johann Ulrich, 171 Kramer, Hilton, 90, 91, 97 Krieger, Murray, 73 Kristeva, Julia, 129, 138 Lamarque, Peter, 67–9, 72, 116–18 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 169–70 Levinson, Jerrold, 62–3 Lewis, C.I., 41, 44 literariness, 83, 100, 162 literary competence, 87–8 literature (the concept) contemporary understanding of, 1–2, 106, 108–9 definitions of: aesthetic, 4; belletristic, 36, 39, 45–7, 82,

Index 205 182; descriptive or evaluative, 66–7, 68, 73, 110, 118–20; examples of, 116, 117, 118, 120; in terms of foregrounding, 1, 82; as ‘the literary’, 2, 120; unified-concept mistake in, 115–16, 118–19 evaluation of, 122–3 as an evaluative concept, 62 as an everyday concept, 1, 106–10, 113, 115–16, 120, 122–3 historical versions of, 112, 123 history of, 20, 64–5, 109 applied to literature for children and young adults, 110 the point of, 31–2, 122–3 applied to popular literature, 72, 110 pre-theoretical conception of, 61–2, 65 specialized versions of, 106–7, 110–12, 115–16, 122–3 systematic versions of, 112, 120, 122–3 literature (the phenomenon) aesthetic experience of, 9 aesthetic substance of, 3 and expressiveness, 85–6, 90–2, 96, 98–100 and fictionality, 1, 66, 68, 84–8, 98–100, 116 and form, 85, 87, 96–100 ideological function of, 13–14, 19, 70–1 as a practice or an institution: analytic notions of, 2, 3, 15–16, 19–26, 31–2, 67–9, 117; sociological notions of, 11–14, 16–17, 21, 24, 67 and representativity, 85, 86–7, 92–6, 97, 98–100 study of: history of, 1–2, 12, 31; literary history, 111–12, 138; literary theory, 9, 138; present situation in, 24–6, 30–1, 140–2 work of: created in interpretation, 28, 146, 152; distinct from other texts, 2, 11, 121; as an

experience, 147–50, 152–3, 162–3; as an utterance, 46 see also roles of artist and audience; value, of literature and the arts; work/text distinction literature (the word) and the concept, 20 history of, 62, 63–5, 108 Livingston, Paisley, 4, 6, 9, 182–3 Lyas, Colin, 17, 18, 56 Marxism, 2, 139 McGann, Jerome, 130–2 McHale, Brian, 71 McLuskie, Kathleen, 70–1 meta-fiction, 71–2 narratology, 135, 137 Newell, Stephanie, 117 New Criticism, 135, 137 New Historicism, 2, 130 Nobel Prize in literature, 111 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 3–4, 6, 9, 67–9, 72, 116–18 Olson, David R., 130 Ong, Walter J., 130 the oral and the written, 129–30 Parry–Lord tradition, 129 perceptual fields, 153 Pettersson, Anders, 6–7, 9, 31, 36, 141–2 Pettersson, Bo, 7, 9 Pettersson, Torsten, 5–6, 9, 47, 182 Pizer, Donald, 94, 97 Poirier, Richard, 156–7 The Portrait of a Lady (James), 154–62 post-structuralism, 2, 69, 129–30, 133, 139–41 pragmatism, 3, 146–7, 150, 152, 161–3 see also Dewey, John; James, William Prall, D.W., 41 psychoanalytic literary theory, 69, 139

206 Index Quistorp, Theodor Johann, 165 Rabine, Leslie, 87 Richards, I.A., 181 Robbins, Bruce, 65 Robson, W.W., 66–7 roles of artist and audience, 15–19 Roosevelt, Theodore, 161 Santayana, George, 161 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 131 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 136 Searle, John R., 20–3, 121 Sibley, Frank, 37–9 Sim, Stuart, 69 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 84 sociology of literature, 2, 133 Sparshott, Francis, 41 Stecker, Robert, 46, 62–3 Swift, Jonathan, 30 Tanner, Tony, 90 taste, 170–1, 174 text the concept of: its content, 2, 128–30, 133; its history, 128–30, 133–4 as tied to its origin, 28 the term: its history, 128 see also work/text distinction

textualism, 128, 134, 136, 139–40 textualization, 129–30, 133 textual scholarship, 129–33 Thagard, Paul, 113 Trilling, Diana, 90, 91, 94 unified-concept mistake, see literature (the concept), definitions of, unified-concept mistake in value and experience, 147 inherent, 41, 43–4 intrinsic, 40–1, 43, 45 of literature and the arts, 13, 17, 19, 117–18 truth value of literature, 156–7 Vico, Giambattista, 26 Walton, Kendall, 43 Warren, Austin, 84, 116, 137 Weitz, Morris, 54, 56, 60 Wellek, René, 63, 65, 84, 116, 137 Wells, Stanley, 69–70 Widdowson, Peter, 20, 26, 120 Wiegand, William, 96 Wollheim, Richard, 53 work/text distinction, 2, 134–5, 138, 142, 147–8, 153 Yanal, Robert, 57, 59