Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis?

The current debate about the nature of English studies has questioned the status of English as a discipline. Josephine ...

Author: Josephine M. Guy | Ian Small

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The current debate about the nature of English studies has questioned the status of English as a discipline. Josephine Guy and Ian Small set this so-called 'crisis in English' within the larger context of disciplinary knowledge. They examine the teaching of English and literary studies in the United States and Britain, and argue that the explicit attempt by some radical critics on both sides of the Atlantic to politicize the discipline has profound consequences for the nature of English studies. They describe the current state of disciplinary knowledge, together with its social and philosophical preconditions; they analyse recent proposals for reform; and they discuss the ways in which these proposed reforms would affect the three main practices of the discipline-literary criticism, literary history and text-editing. In the process they demystify issues and arguments which have often in the past been obscured by jargon and polemic.

POLITICS AND VALUE IN ENGLISH STUDIES

POLITICS AND VALUE IN ENGLISH STUDIES A discipline in crisis?

JOSEPHINE M. GUY University of Nottingham AND

IAN SMALL University of Birmingham

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521112130 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Guy, Josephine M. Politics and value in English studies: a discipline in crisis? by Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 44253 2 1. English philology—Study and teaching (Higher)—Political aspects-Great Britain. 2. English literature-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 3. Politics and literature-Great Britain. I. Small, Ian. II. Title. PE68.G5G85 1993 420'.71'141-dc20 92-47281 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-44253-4 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-11213-0 paperback

Contents

Preface

page ix

Introduction 1

i

Preliminaries

8

I The uses of theory II Theory: institutional and intellectual arguments

2 The nature of disciplinary knowledge I Specialization and social utility II Multiculturalism and the canon

3 Authority and value

Value in literary history

99

Value in text-editing

101 112 129

135

I Text-editing: identity and authority II Annotation: intention and meaning

6

38 56 69 79 92

I Literary history and literary criticism II Literary history and historiography III Literary history and politics

5

29

68

I Facts and values II Value-laden facts III Fact-laden values

4

13 19

The discipline of English

143 151

156

Select bibliography Index

183 191

Vll

Preface

Our motivation for writing this book came from our experience as teachers of English at civic universities in Britain. In particular it was conceived as a response to a number of questions which students, with varying degrees of precision, ask about their subject: what does it mean to c do' English, and to 'do' theory; and how does theory in English relate to their practice of reading texts? Our interest in trying to answer these questions was initially prompted by a number of essays: 'Usefulness in Literary History' (British Journal of Aesthetics, 31 (1991)); 'Re-writing Re-reading English' (English, 40 (1990)); 'Critical Opinion: English in Crisis?' (Essays in Criticism, 39 (1989)); 'Critical Opinion: English in Crisis? (2)' (Essays in Criticism, 40 (1990)); 'The "Literary", Aestheticism and the Founding of English' (English Literature in Transition, 33 (1990)). These articles rehearsed in a schematic form some of our preliminary ideas. However, the present book, while it incorporates some of these earlier points, is largely new, and most of the material in it is published for the first time. We are conscious of the fact that we write as British academics. This experience prevents us from laying claim to comprehensiveness, and it would be over-ambitious to pretend an exhaustive knowledge of pedagogy in other countries, particularly the United States. However, it is clear to us that teachers of literature in the United States and Britain encounter a large number of similar problems, particularly those concerning politics and value, and we have tried to identify and analyse these areas of common interest. We would like to thank the following for the help they have IX

x

Preface

given us over the past three years: Peter Barry, T. J. Diffey, Martin Dodsworth, Robert Langenfeld, Stephen Wall and the Field Day Theatre Company. We have benefited from informal discussions with Marcus Walsh, and formally from collaborative work on Ian Small and Marcus Walsh (eds.), The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing (Cambridge, 1991). We have also drawn upon collaborative work between both of us and Marcus Walsh in 'The Profession of English', English Association Newsletter', nos. 131 and 132 (1989). Finally we should like to thank Steve Ellis, Anne McDermott and Nigel Wood of the School of English in the University of Birmingham; and Bernard Bergonzi for sharing with us his own thoughts on the status of English studies.

Introduction

Put briefly, the subject of this book is what has recently been termed the 'crisis in English'; 1 put less polemically, it is concerned with the current state (and status) of English studies in higher education. The topic is of course not new; indeed, it has produced a veritable corpus of essays, books and lectures on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the particular forms of these debates have been different in Britain and the United States, they nevertheless have many issues in common. In our opening chapters we discuss some of the local differences between Britain and America, but our main interest lies in addressing the ground common to both countries - in short, the issue of value and politics in English studies. In most accounts of English a simple but important fact has frequently been overlooked: that within higher education the study of English constitutes a discipline of knowledge. The contribution of the present book to the controversy over English lies in its attempt to locate that controversy within the context of disciplinary knowledge in general, and this, we maintain, enables us to point out some of the limitations of recent discussions about the nature of the subject. More precisely it makes clear that some of the issues which have been so heatedly debated — particularly those 1

The term 'crisis' occurred regularly during discussions of English studies in the 1980s. Recent use of it has been made by Terry Eagleton, 'The Enemy Within', NATE News (Summer 1991), 5; and by Gary Day in a review of Colin MacCabe (ed.), Futures for English (Manchester, 1988) in Textual Practice, 6 (1992), 513-19. Day's opening remarks are typical of a common attitude towards the alleged crisis: 'As we all know, English is dead ... The age of innocence is past and in its place we have a literature riven by history and unconscious desire, a literature always other to itself, a battle site of and for meaning, not the place where meaning finds its most perfect expression. All this can be taken for granted' (p. 513).

2

Politics and value in English studies

concerning the ideology or politics of literary criticism - have been fundamentally mischaracterized. This conviction that English studies should not be viewed as an isolated case has led us to devote several chapters to developing a general thesis about the nature and function of disciplines of knowledge. That thesis makes two large claims. The first has to do with what we argue is the social nature of disciplinary knowledge. Here a central concept in our argument is what we term the 'mechanisms of intellectual authority', or the ways in which status is ascribed to particular forms of knowledge. By the term 'mechanisms of intellectual authority' we mean the processes by which one or more competing explanations within a discipline of knowledge come to be seen as the dominant ones. Our argument is that the processes whereby one explanatory paradigm achieves prestige or dominance, although socially defined, possess a degree of autonomy. In English studies on both sides of the Atlantic, these very processes now tend to be seen as exclusively political in character - that is, to be attributable to ideology. For example, it is now commonplace to read that the authority of a particular interpretation of a text is based solely upon shared values which are in turn perceived to be political. This assumption makes possible the frequently stated claim that the primary aim of English studies is, in Gerald Graffs words 'to become an instrument of social transformation'. 2 It is our argument that in disciplines of knowledge in general, intellectual authority, far from being reducible to politics, is autonomous in the sense that the initial decision to employ certain mechanisms to ascribe status to knowledge, and those mechanisms themselves, although they have a social basis, cannot be collapsed into political issues. Our second large concern is to outline the philosophical preconditions for the existence of disciplines of knowledge and to distinguish them from any political functions which that knowledge might possess. Here the central concept which we employ is that of a 'community': more precisely, we are concerned with the distinction between a sociological or 2

Gerald Graff, quoted in John Searle, 'The Storm over the University', New York Review of Books, 37 (Dec. 1990), 34.

Introduction

3

political understanding of the term 'community' (roughly meaning those agreements which unite particular interest groups) and a philosophical understanding of it - one which refers to the kind of agreement necessary for knowledge to be possible in the first instance. The concepts of' community' and of' mechanisms of intellectual authority' are connected by the problematic issue of value in disciplinary knowledge - the extent to which the existence of value-judgements purportedly compromises the 'objectivity', and hence the authority, of that knowledge. Here we argue that in disciplines of knowledge in general the mechanisms of intellectual authority are made possible by the existence of a philosophical — that is, a nonpolitical - community. The question which we then consider is whether this situation can or does obtain in English studies: that is, whether the value-judgements which English allegedly embodies are wholly political in nature; and secondly, whether they are different in this respect from the judgements which operate in other disciplines of knowledge. Our apparent attempt to minimize the role of politics in the structure of disciplinary knowledge may seem surprising, especially in light of the attention which the influence of politics on academic life has attracted over recent years. In the United States, this influence has been felt in heated arguments, most famously at Stanford University, over the ways in which issues of class, gender and particularly race impinge upon the curriculum (or canon) and upon teaching methods. 'Political correctness' is the most public and controversial manifestation of this process, and it is one which is also affecting British university life — at the time of writing Stanford has found its British counterpart in the University of Loughborough.3 However it is precisely because political controversy has so dominated discussion of the teaching of English that other aspects of disciplinary knowledge - its philosophical conditions and social nature - have been neglected. The consequences of this neglect are documented in our first chapter, where we argue that there is an important and necessary distinction to be made between 3

See Sandra Barwick, 'English as she Should be Taught?', The Independent (13 June 1992), 3i-

4


what we term the 'institutional' and the 'intellectual'. The tendency to conflate the latter with the powers of the former has been largely responsible for the recent concentration on politics by critics and theorists. We should, however, emphasize that in making this distinction we are not suggesting that politics has no role to play in disciplines of knowledge (indeed we document these very public political arguments in later chapters). Rather, we argue that understanding the philosophical and sociological issues will change the ways in which we see the role of politics. The topic in English studies which more than any other focuses the current confusion over the role of politics and value in the discipline is that of'theory', and it is therefore central to our argument. We suggest that the issue of what it means to ' do' theory is at the heart of the problems concerning the disciplinary status of English: in particular it raises the questions, what body of knowledge does English teach; and how is that body of knowledge authorized, taught and examined? To identify ' theory' as the focal point of the problems in English studies is not of course original. The most famous instance was the polemic of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels against theory in 1982; but the tradition has survived in anthologies such as Ralph Cohen's The Future of Literary Theory (1989) and Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller's Re-Thinking Theory (1992). However the most familiar way in which the centrality of theory and its attendant problems is encountered is in the daily work of teachers of English — in particular in the pressing question of the problematic relationship between theory and practice. Teachers of English are aware that theory tends to be taught in isolation: today in universities and other institutions of higher education there are often courses on contemporary critical theory - on structuralism, formalism, Marxism, feminism and cultural materialism, for example — which are quite distinct from courses on the material which that theory is supposed to explain — literary periods, author or genre studies, and so on. Indeed a familiar complaint of students is that they cannot connect the so-called theory of reading texts with what they actually do in practice. 'Doing theory' is often assumed by them (and is implicit in the structure of the courses taught by

Introduction

5

lecturers) to be an end in itself, and not a theory of a practice. Characteristically, the solutions to this dilemma have often been piecemeal ones; remedies, particularly the provision of 'readers' which demonstrate theory c at work', simply perpetuate rather than resolve the problem, for invariably such anthologies fail to engage with the vexed issue of the contemporary multiplicity of theories. It is precisely this multiplicity which, we argue, makes the question of authority problematic. In practical terms students are often no wiser as to which theory is 'right', nor are they given the ability to test the ' rightness' of a particular theory, nor indeed the ability to understand what theoretical 'Tightness' might be. Not surprisingly, for most undergraduates in English departments, theory seems a dispensable luxury — one which accompanies but which is quite distinct from their main studies. Throughout this book we argue that disciplines of knowledge have two main functions. The first is the accumulation and explanation of knowledge about their object of study (or, as this function is usually described, research); the other is the dissemination of that knowledge through teaching (or pedagogy) . The role of theory in each of these functions is generally clear. In the former case, theories explain both the object of study and the practices used to investigate it; in the latter, they are part of the knowledge which is disseminated to students. So, to take an ideal if hypothetical example: history undergraduates studying the First World War might be taught the ' facts'materials and sources - which have been used to write a history of it; then they might be taught explanations of the war based on those facts and materials; and finally they would be taught the historiographical principles and values which have allowed historians to identify the facts about that war which they have identified, and which have allowed them to explain it in the ways in which they have explained it. So students in this hypothetical instance would be taught a body of knowledge about the past, and the theory of how that knowledge is produced. In other words, the processes and mechanisms whereby that body of knowledge is authorized, or given status (processes which we have termed the mechanisms of intellectual

6


authority) are a central part of their studies. Here - certainly in higher education - theory and practice are inseparable, in the sense that the value of particular facts about (or explanations of) the object of study cannot be determined without reference to the particular theory which initially led to those facts being identified (or that explanation being arrived at). However the current teaching or use of theory in English studies is not at all like this hypothetical example. In the first place, theory does not explain the object of study of the discipline. On the contrary, it is often used to problematize it, to the extent that in some cases it threatens to abolish it altogether; proponents of theories such as Marxism or formalism not only disagree about interpretations of particular works, they also disagree about which works should be interpreted. They contest not the relative value of works within a literary canon, but what constitutes that canon, and often whether indeed it should exist at all. (It is precisely these disputes which have formed the basis of the public controversies at institutions such as Stanford and Loughborough.) In the face of these disagreements, logically speaking all that is left to study is 'theory' itself. However, without any agreement about what theory is supposed to explain (a canon of works), English studies is left with a set of critical tools, but no clear notion of what to apply them to. It has a means of producing knowledge (by virtue of the fact that it has a variety of contested theoretical paradigms) but paradoxically cannot lay claim to any specific body of knowledge. In this sense, as we shall argue in later chapters, it runs the risk of failing to fulfil the fundamental criteria of a discipline of knowledge, not least of which are those concerning pedagogy. The basic questions here are: what can a discipline which produces no ' authoritative' knowledge actually teach; and how can what it claims to teach - a means for producing knowledge - b e examined? The paradoxical situation in English studies today is that the introduction of explicit theorizing within the discipline has both produced the current' crisis' and prevented it from being resolved. This paradox is easy to see when present disputes are set in a historical context. In the third chapter we argue that a general epistemological discussion generated in the

Introduction

7

philosophy of science in the 1960s was widened in the 1970s and 1980s to include the role of value-judgements in all disciplinary knowledge. When current debates about English are placed within this context it is possible to see the disagreements among literary theorists in an entirely new light. And in turn this context permits us to ask whether the problems which have been perceived to be the cause of the present ' crisis' are in fact real problems at all. Our discussion of these issues forms what is perhaps the most controversial aspect of this book. We argue that programmes for reform (conceived as a response to a number of political imperatives for the discipline) are flawed, first because they are predicated upon incorrect assumptions about how disciplines of knowledge work, and secondly because they are internally inconsistent. We further suggest that far from 'saving' the discipline, such reforms, if pursued rigorously, actually place it in a crisis more genuine and more profound than that which is alleged to exist at present - one which would logically result in the dissolution of English departments and the disappearance of literary criticism as an academic activity.

CHAPTER I

Preliminaries

Today it is virtually impossible for practising critics not to be aware of some need to 'justify' what they d o - t o 'theorize' their practices. Indeed theory has now become a subject in its own right in English studies, with its own undergraduate courses, postgraduate degrees, text-books and so on. The rapid growth of the 'theory industry', however, has not passed unnoticed or unchallenged; along with the enthusiasm for this new theoretical abundance there has in recent years been something of a countervailing movement. United by a general feeling of dissatisfaction rather than by any particular thesis, an increasing number of critics have been calling for a halt or, at the very least, a pause to take stock of the current situation. In their view the popularity and growth of the theory industry, far from reinvigorating the discipline, have led to what they see as a 'crisis' in which the 'traditional 5 conception of English seems on the point of disappearance.1 Within this countervailing movement it is possible to identify two groups. On the one hand there are those critics who, while accepting the value and necessity of explicit theorizing, have 1

This phenomenon has been noted by a variety of commentators. See, for example, Peter Washington, Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English (London, 1989); Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English (Oxford, 1990); Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller, Re-Thinking Theory (Cambridge, 1992). It is important to note here that the significance of the term 'traditional' differs in Britain and the United States. In the United States the teaching of literature has usually been part of a general humanities education - that tradition which has been polemically described by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (London, 1987) as the 'old Great Books conviction' (p. 51). In Britain, by contrast, the traditional teaching of English refers to the period when the autonomy of the subject was assumed: one prior, that is, to the rise of cultural studies in the 1970s. For a fuller account of these distinctions, see chapters 2 and 3.

8

Preliminaries

9

nevertheless voiced some reservations about the ways in which theory is currently used in English studies. In particular they have pointed to the vexed relationship which now obtains between theory and pedagogy, and have suggested that there might be some important and (as yet) unresolved issues concerning the relationship between theory and practice in the discipline. On the other hand there is a lobby which may be broadly characterized as 'anti-theory', although a distinction needs to be made between two positions within it. One position attacks the very idea of theory, arguing that it has no relevance to English studies. Here prominent voices include, in the United States, Stanley Fish, and Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels and, in Britain, Patrick Parrinder and Peter Washington. The second position within the anti-theory lobby has concentrated on attacking the coherence of particular theories. Here theory in itself is not rejected; rather it is the application of particular theories which is criticized. Representative spokesmen for this position are Howard Felperin, Philip Smallwood, and Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller.2 The rejection of the very idea of theory is the most radical of all these reactions to the theory industry. The polemic against theory by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in 1982 is perhaps the best known of these criticisms, certainly in the United States. However their definition of theory, limited as it was simply to questions of interpretation and intention, now seems idiosyncratic and dated, although at the time of its publication it proved to be highly controversial.3 Moreover it 2

3

See Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Oxford, 1989); Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, 'Against Theory', Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), 723-42; Patrick Parrinder, The Failure of Theory (Brighton, 1987); Peter Washington, Fraud; Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction (Oxford, 1985); Philip Smallwood, Critical Portraits of British Literary Critics (Hemel Hempstead, 1990); and Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller, Re-Thinking Theory. These critics' specific criticisms of specific theories are discussed at appropriate points in later chapters. Knapp and Michaels's argument provoked major responses in separate issues of Critical Inquiry. Volume 9 (1983) contained the following essays: Daniel T. O'Hara, ' Revisionary Madness: The Prospects of American Literary Theory at the Present Time', pp. 726-42; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., 'Against Theory?', pp. 743-7; Jonathan Crewe, 'Toward Uncritical Practice', pp. 748-59; Steven Mailloux, 'Truth or Consequences: on Being Against Theory', pp. 760-6; Hershel Parker, 'Lost Authority: Non-sense, Skewed Meanings, and Intentionless Meanings', pp. 767-74;

io


does not attend to the general question of the role of theory in disciplines of knowledge. As the relationship between theory and the disciplinary status of English studies is our main concern, we have taken Patrick Parrinder's more recent The Failure of Theory (1987) as more representative of this kind of criticism. In that work Parrinder outlines a number of objections to the general use of theory in English studies.4 His list includes the quasi-scientific authority claimed for theory; the divorce of theory as an abstract or general explanation from its usefulness in practice; and the failure of different theorists to engage in coherent debate with each other. These objections then become for Parrinder the justification for a wholesale rejection of theory as theory; for him they demonstrate that literary judgements are simply incapable of theoretical analysis. In Parrinder's view literary critics have no need to theorize their work (and indeed they should not even attempt to do so) because the special nature of English studies renders theoretical enquiry inappropriate : The failure of theory need not be accompanied by literary suppression or political defeat, still less by martyrdom. It is, after all, simply the passing of a form of scholasticism. The brave new world of the theoreticist canon... is not one which can release creative energies or make the slightest contribution to liberating the world's dispossessed ... Changing the canon is the key to changing the literary system. A canon is the consensus of the answers we should give if the proverbial Martian ethnographer, or for that matter the ghosts of William Empson or Max Raphael, were to turn up and ask, not 'What is literature?' but 'What is your literature?' And in answering that question we become not theorists but literary critics.5

It is interesting to note that Parrinder's conclusions are very similar to those of Knapp and Michaels - that literature is by its very nature incapable of being theorized. However, unlike

4

Adena Rosmarin, 'On the Theory of "Against Theory'", pp. 775-83; William C. Dowling, ' Intentionless Meaning', pp. 784-9. In 1985 a second group of responses was published in the same periodical. See Stanley Fish, ' Pragmatism and Literary Theory. I: Consequences', pp. 432-58; and Richard Rorty, 'Pragmatism and Literary Theory. I I : Philosophy without Principles', pp. 459-65. Patrick Parrinder, The Failure of Theory (Brighton, 1987). It is perhaps worth noting that Peter Washington in Fraud shares Parrinder's view that theory can and should 5 be rejected by English studies. Ibid., 105.

Preliminaries

11

Knapp and Michaels, Parrinder tacitly employs a disciplinary framework; that is, his argument depends upon the presupposition that there are certain standards by which the use of theories in disciplines of knowledge needs to be judged standards which are not met in English studies. Parrinder does not, however, enumerate, far less describe, these standards. More importantly, he does not explain why they are not applicable to English studies. In other words, hidden in Parrinder's account is an assumption (one which, we shall indicate, he is not alone in holding) that the status of English is unique among disciplines of knowledge, and that this uniqueness demands that it be treated as a special case. In contrast to the uncompromising stance of figures such as Parrinder, there is, as we have indicated, a group of more conciliatory critics who are much less willing to reject out of hand the idea that explicit theorizing is a necessary component of English studies. Broadly speaking, they acknowledge the impossibility of a return to a 'pre-theoretical' time, and concentrate instead on programmes for reforming the ways in which theory is at present used in the discipline. The bestknown representative of this group is Gerald Graff who, acknowledging the perennial ' theoretical impulse in academic literary studies', has written in detail about the institutional problems which it has produced, problems which he describes as a result of the 'diversity of conflicting subjects, methods, interests, ideologies, and values'. 6 The special nature of GrafFs institutional argument is discussed later in this chapter; however the general issues can be more easily glimpsed in the work of a fellow American, William E. Cain. Surveying the contemporary 'state of criticism', Cain has come to the following conclusion: One of the depressing facts about literary theory as it is now being written is that it is becoming increasingly less critical, less skeptical, about itself and its reason for being. The theory industry grinds along, and books, articles, and symposia multiply, but much of the material seems arid and unreal, out of phase with concrete issues in critical 6

Gerald Graff,' The Future of Theory in the Teaching of Literature', in Ralph Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory (London, 1989), 253 and 258.

12


practice and pedagogy, and out of touch with human needs and interests ... Our discipline remains fundamentally intact, with minor adjustments and shifts in emphasis... The basic shape of English studies is unchanged, and its shortcomings and deficiencies remain unexplored and unarticulated.7 The major 'shortcoming' which Cain goes on to discuss is the mismatch between the various theories and practices of criticism, a situation which, in his view, possesses profound implications for pedagogy and research: I see no way of ignoring the disparity between theory and practice, particularly' classroom' practice: the two rarely make contact and are basically separate domains... Theory ought to be slanted towards questions of pedagogy, education, social and cultural practice, and should be placed in dialectical relationship with research. But in most cases ' theory' is directed towards nothing but itself and its advocates.8 Parrinder's proposals to eliminate theory from the discipline of English run the risk of being criticized either for their naivete or (and this is more likely) for their arrogance; by contrast, Cain's prescriptions suffer from the fact that they address symptoms and not underlying causes. His remedies for the 'crisis in English' (set out in his views about pedagogy and research) involve surface changes in that they concern only institutional reforms - that is, Cain appears to believe that problems in a discipline of knowledge may only be resolved by changes in the institutions where that discipline is located. Although they work with different assumptions and offer quite different proposals, Cain and Parrinder (and critics like them) have isolated real problems in English studies - problems, that is, concerning the use of theory, its utility and its relationship to practice. However, neither seems to have realized that these issues are symptoms of a much larger problem, that of the intellectual authority of the discipline which they practise. What is at stake are not local disputes between pro-theorists and anti-theorists, or proponents of particular theories; rather it is the whole disciplinary status of English studies within the academy. Questions about theory 7

William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies 8 (Baltimore, 1984), xi and xii. Ibid., 248-9.

Preliminaries

13

and its use are questions about authority and epistemology; moreover, they pertain not only to English but to all disciplines of knowledge. These questions cannot therefore be dismissed as irrelevant (as in Parrinder's argument), nor can they be marginalized by treating the discipline of English studies as an isolated case (as in Cain's proposals). The shortcoming of both Cain's and Parrinder's critiques of current practices in English studies is that, despite their differing approaches, neither engages adequately with the problems which they have isolated. Neither, that is, relates the specific problems of English studies to the broader issue of disciplinary knowledge in general.9 It is precisely this topic which we address. It is important to make clear, however, that in initially focusing our argument on the issue of theory, our intention is not to adjudicate between theorists and anti-theorists, nor to weigh the merits of particular theories. Our central concern is the status and authority of literary critical statements, one which involves a more preliminary and general exercise: that of establishing the grounds upon which such adjudications may be made. Our interest in questions of theory lies therefore in their relationship to questions of authority and epistemology as they pertain to disciplines of knowledge in general and to English studies in particular. I

T H E U S E S OF T H E O R Y

One of the main problems of the use of theory in English studies, as both Cain and Parrinder agree, is the divorce of theory from practice. This in turn has led to a failure on the part of many theorists to address a variety of questions which are commonly encountered in other disciplines of knowledge. The most important of these questions concern the internal coherence of any particular theory, and the relationship between a theory 9

An exception to this pattern of intellectual parochialism is the work of Stanley Fish, and in particular his discussion of the relationship between English studies and the professions in Doing What Comes Naturally. Some of his arguments are referred to in chapter 2. It is worth noting too that Knapp and Michaels also discuss theory in relation to questions of epistemology but, unlike Fish, they do not consider the nature of disciplinary knowledge.

14


used and the kinds of explanation which it gives. Comparisons with other disciplines of knowledge (and, indeed, common sense) suggest that only when these issues have been considered will it be possible to decide upon the utility (or ' Tightness') of a theory, and therefore to adjudicate between rival theories. What is alarming is the failure of many literary theorists to take account of such basic questions, a tendency which is particularly marked in texts for teaching theory - in other words, those works most commonly encountered by students and the majority of the profession. So, for example, in his widely used (at least in Britain) Literary Theory at Work (1987), Douglas Tallack anthologizes a number of competing readings of a group of literary works, one of which is D. H. Lawrence's St Mawr. Each reading of St Mawr is underwritten by a different literary theory, and Tallack comments on the explanations which they provide as follows: The essays ... are undoubtedly readings of the same text and, by being collected in the same book, they coexist and perhaps will strike some readers as equally convincing... Do choices need to be made between readings and, if so, on what grounds? ... For Roger Poole, there are ' events' in an author's mind that are independent of the relations of production and political and historical circumstances. To write on Lawrence ... is to insist on the truth of this position... Steve Giles's reading could not be more different. From Lukacs' standpoint, the presuppositions which St Mawr works with can certainly be characterized as broadly psychological - and that is what is wrong with the text. St Mawr concentrates on the psychological and interpersonal, instead of the socio-economic. Yet... the socio-economic base can be identified, and Lawrence ... located historically. It is precisely Elaine Millard's point that the disagreements between the other two readings of St Mawr ignore gender differences... ' Reading as a woman' questions explanatory models of history... and the psyche.10

Tallack's intention is to demonstrate the benefits which the current multiplicity of theories produces, but what is disconcerting about his anthology is precisely the blithe concession that competing explanations can co-exist in an unproblematic way. Tallack seems unaware of the idiosyncrasies of this 10

Douglas Tallack (ed.), Literary Theory at Work (London, 1987), 4-5.

Preliminaries

15

position, but his account only reflects the situation which has obtained for a decade in most departments of English in Britain. Interestingly Gerald Graff has made similar assumptions, but for different reasons. He too appears to assume that a multiplicity of theories is beneficial. Indeed, in his proposals for the discipline, Graff argues for a 'conflict-model' for the humanities, one where theory is conceived ' not as a specialized idiolect... but as the generalized language for staging conflicts in ways that increase rather than lessen institutional visibility \ n Generally speaking, in other disciplines of knowledge, the purpose of adjudicating between theories is assumed to be that of providing the best possible single interpretation or explanation of data, or, at the very least, that of placing limits on the possible number of explanations - ideally to limit them to one. It is clear from Tallack's (and Graffs) arguments, however, that this is not how theory is thought of or currently used in English studies. Interestingly, the question which Tallack poses (' Do choices need to be made, and on what grounds ?') seems to indicate some unease with this position. Tallack, however, provides no answer to his own question, and there is only one conclusion to be drawn from this omission: that there can be no way of resolving competition between rival theories in English except on ideological or other non-logical grounds. Such a conclusion is deeply ironic in the light of Tallack's ambitions for his volume, for to pose the issue in these terms forces the superfluousness of literary theory to be acknowledged. If disputes about the appropriateness of various literary theories cannot be resolved at a theoretical but only at an ideological level, then there is no need for literary theory, nor, for that matter, for literary theorists. Theory is simply doing no work: it becomes only an arena, and a relatively unimportant one at that, for ideological debate. To present Tallack's position in these terms may seem unfairly reductive, but it has the advantage of highlighting two issues which are central to our concern with the disciplinary status of English studies. One shortcoming of Tallack's volume 11

Graff, 'The Future of Theory', 263.

16


lies in its too easy acceptance of a situation which appears so strikingly different from the aims of other disciplines of knowledge. If Tallack's (and Graffs) characterization of the use of theory in English studies is correct, then at the very least it demands some sort of explanation. Why does English enjoy a unique position where adjudication between different theoretical positions, and therefore by implication the authority of particular explanations of texts, may only be ' resolved' at the level of ideology? In the following chapters we shall refer to this question as the problem of the 'particularity of English' because, as we shall argue, it is by no means self-evidently true that English is, or should be treated as, a special case among disciplines of knowledge. The question is important because much of the impetus behind the recent expansion of the theory industry in both Britain and the United States has come from proposals to reform English studies — to replace the traditional conception of the discipline with a new and self-consciously political critical practice. And these proposals have in turn rested upon the presupposition that English is unique and therefore is an intellectually anomalous discipline. The other shortcoming of Tallack's book is that the relationship between theory, value and ideology, one which is central to the mechanisms of intellectual authority in any discipline, is more complex and problematic than anthologies such as his suggest.12 Despite the enormous attention given to one of its terms, ideology, the relationship between all three terms has received scant discussion in any of the proposals to reform the discipline. In attempting to redress this imbalance, we examine the epistemological rather than simply the political implications of the relationship. That there is a pressing need to do so may easily be illustrated by another example. Tallack is by no means the only critic interested in theory 12

Tallack is, of course, not alone in this respect. See, for example, David Murray (ed.), Literary Theory and Poetry. Extending the Canon (London, 1989). For other examples of anthologies of literary theory which assume that the coexistence of rival theoretical paradigms is unproblematic, see, for example, Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds.), Modern Literary Theory, a Reader in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory and Method

(London, 1989); Rick Rylance (ed.), Debating Texts (Milton Keynes, 1988); Raman Selden (ed.), The Theory of Criticism: a Reader (London, 1988).

Preliminaries

17

who ignores the complexity of the relationship between theory, value and ideology. A group of explicitly political theorists, of whom Catherine Belsey and Terry Eagleton are the best known in Britain, hold positions very similar to his. Their programmes to reform English studies (a topic which will be referred to frequently and in greater detail in later chapters) represent prime examples of non-logical decisions about the appropriateness of particular theories as explanations in English studies. Belsey, for example, has clearly indicated that the grounds for choosing between what she calls' scientific' criticism (the programme for criticism which she outlined in her widely read Critical Practice1*) and what she terms 'humanistic' criticism are anything but scientific or theoretical. On the contrary, Belsey concedes that they are explicitly derived from ideology: [My] proposal is to reverse the Leavisian enterprise of constructing (inventing) a lost organic world of unfallen orality, undissociated sensibility and uncontested order. In fact, in so far as it concerns the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the kind of archaeology I have in mind uncovers a world of violence, disorder and fragmentation. The history of the present is not a history of a fall from grace but of the transformations of power and resistances to power. The claim is not that such a history, or such a reading of literary texts, is more accurate, but only that

it is more radical. No less partial, it produces the past not in order to present an ideal of hierarchy, but to relativize the present, to demonstrate that since change has occurred in those areas which seem most intimate and most inevitable, change in those areas is possible for us... I want to add this: the literary institution has ' fictioned' a criticism which uncritically protests its own truth; we must instead 'fiction' a literature which renders up our true history in the interests of a politics of change.1*

Belsey's argument demonstrates a widespread if unsettling assumption in English studies, that differences between contemporary critical theories exist simply at the level of ideology, and not at the level of an appropriate theory of practice. The consequence of all this has been that the issue of what constitutes 13 14

Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London, 1983). Catherine Belsey, 'Literature, History, Polities', Literature and History, 9 (1983), 26 (emphasis added).

18


the appropriate ground for competition between theories, and the issue of their relationship to practice, have been noticed but not properly addressed or resolved. A situation which is hard to imagine being tolerated (or, at the very least, left unquestioned) in other disciplines of knowledge is either accepted in English studies or, alternatively, its outcome is characterized in terms of stark choices: either, as Parrinder suggests, English departments must disown theory entirely - logically, as well as practically, a difficult argument to justify; or they must accept, with Cain, Tallack and Graff, the consequences of the present inability to adjudicate logically between rival theories. However, these positions do not represent the only ' solutions' to - or even the only way of understanding - the problems which attend the current uses of theory in English. It is possible to describe and analyse literary theory as theory first, and as literary theory second. This is precisely the task we attempt in the following chapters: in chapter 2 we consider the use of theory in disciplines of knowledge in general, comparing that general use with the contemporary use of theory in English studies (primarily in Britain). In later chapters we consider whether and how the concept of literary identity problematizes such usage. In so doing we shall be led to examine arguments, already alluded to, which allege the inherently political nature of English studies, for it is a thesis common to a number of literary theorists that literary judgements are nothing but disguised political judgements. This proposition concerning the political identity of literary judgements becomes in its turn the main justification for the view that English is a unique discipline with unique kinds of problems. In other words, in these arguments the singular use of theory in English studies is traced back to the singular nature of its object of study: that is, to its allegedly political nature. The authority for this argument has in its turn come principally from rewritings of the history of English in which it is alleged that from its very inception in the late nineteenth century, English studies has always been 'politicized'.15 15

A comprehensive history of the discipline would be a complex task and beyond the scope of this book. However, in chapter 6 we give an indication of the direction which such a history might take. We emphasize, however, that the founding of the

Preliminaries II

19

T H E O R Y : I N S T I T U T I O N A L AND I N T E L L E C T U A L ARGUMENTS

However, there is one further issue, again already glanced at, which needs to be discussed in rather more detail. It concerns a distinction between what we shall call an ' institutional' and an 'intellectual' account of the current 'crisis' in English studies. We have argued that questions concerning the relationship between theory and practice - the internal coherence of one particular theory, the grounds upon which one explanation is to be preferred to another, the verifiability of a particular theory, and so on - are primarily epistemological issues in the sense that they are concerned with the status and grounds of knowledge in disciplines. For this reason the problems posed by the recent proliferation of theories within English studies should also be understood to be primarily epistemological, and therefore they need to be resolved initially on epistemological grounds. Central to our overall thesis is this distinction between an epistemological account of the problems which attend the current use of theory in English, and the institutional analysis to be found in the work of critics such as William E. Cain and Gerald Graff. There are obvious and important differences between intellectual activities (by which we mean all the processes involved in using, testing and adjudicating between theories) and the institutions in which those activities are practised. Many discussions of the problems within English studies, though, have assumed that the institutional and the intellectual are identical, or that intellectual dilemmas - here the problems concerning the uses of theory - are a product of, or caused by, institutional factors. It is for this reason that most accounts of what we have referred to as the contemporary ' crisis' in English have failed to take account of the epistemological issues involved. This tendency can be illustrated by examining three slightly different accounts of the present crisis which have been discipline was a much more complicated process than recent historians have realized. In particular it cannot be explained wholly in terms of political or ideological interests; nor is there any evidence from its early practitioners that it was inherently crisis-ridden.

20


published in the last seven years in both Britain and the United States. At first sight these examples appear to be both geographically and culturally unrelated, but they are united in their use of the institutional analysis which we have described. The first example concerns the teaching of English in the University of Oxford. There has been a long-standing debate in the Oxford periodical News from Nowhere about the future of English studies within that university. This debate has been characterized in terms of a conflict of interests: between, on the one hand, an alleged institutional bias within Oxford in favour of teaching canonical texts, and, on the other, the relevance of recent theoretical speculation to teaching practices. The editorial in the May 1987 News from Nowhere offers the following contrast: As the Canon crumbles, as the Great Tradition... totters, literary theory becomes increasingly the only place in literary studies where a general discourse on values is sustained ... Within the context of a rigid canon, an option in Critical Theory looks like an arcane specialism, an ingenious toolbox complete with Derridean drills and Kristevan calipers... Unless literary theory in this strong sense is put centrally and formatively within the new Oxford syllabus, the Faculty Syllabus Committee might as well give up now and go back to the Senior Common Room sherry.16 The unstated assumption behind this and similar observations is that there is a necessary relationship between the institutional and the intellectual. Tony Pinkney, the author of the article, seems to believe that the conditions governing the use of critical theory in English studies are wholly dependent upon the principles which govern institutional organization; he assumes, that is, that the introduction of critical theory into the Oxford English syllabus requires only institutional consent. An essay by Robert Welch, published in Britain at about the same time and which took as its declared subject' the study of literature and its relevance', confused categories in an equally naive manner: Academics are prone to inertia. They do not like change. Who can blame them? Change is terrifying. It is no accident that the 16

[Tony Pinkney], 'Editorial', News from Nowhere, 5 (1987).

Preliminaries

21

practitioners of new literary theory are often agitated by the need to get a job or gain promotion in an academic world which has not recruited effectively since the middle seventies. To borrow a term from soccer: the ' work-rate' of young doctoral students has increased dramatically since the mid-seventies, because of the scarcity of jobs. They look at the lecturers, senior lecturers and professors comfortably ensconced in their positions and ask themselves when last did these tenured drears have an idea. The reckless and ambitious young want change because they want the jobs which are held by Arnoldians and Leavisites.17 Welch's case is that there is a simple correlation between the (allegedly) different motivations of individual academics of different ages and the acceptability or otherwise of theoretical paradigms. However, as we shall argue in the following chapter, decisions about changes within disciplines are not taken on such an arbitrary basis, and certainly not according to the age or seniority of their proponents. A further example of this tendency for an institutional explanation to be used as a means of addressing an intellectual issue occurred earlier in an American volume edited by Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons which discusses the nature of academic criticism.18 Graff and Gibbons describe the ways in which intellectual dissent within American universities has been contained by the institutional strategy of increasing specialization. They argue that specialization prevents the clash of divergent 'viewpoints' or theories and therefore also prevents the possibility of any resolution of those theoretical conflicts. Graff and Gibbons thus characterize the 'crisis' in English studies in terms of a failure to engage in ' fruitful' theoretical debate. They highlight, that is, an intellectual dilemma. However, they attribute the failure to resolve this dilemma to the constraints imposed by institutions. Disappointingly, too, British reviewers of Graff and Gibbons's volume perpetuated rather than clarified this confusion. So Roger Poole, in a review of the book in Textual Practice, notes that 'this academic habit of 17

18

Robert Welch, 'Arnold's Sofa and Derrida's Gymnasium', Times Higher Education Supplement, no. 742 (23 Jan. 1987), 15. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (eds.), Criticism and the University. Tri-Quarterly Series on Criticism and Culture (Evanston, 111., 1985).

22


thinking exclusively in specializations, areas and "fields" certainly has a great deal more to answer for than perhaps we realized... Divided up into "fields",... the department marginalizes opposition and avoids authentic debate.' 19 Whether Poole's description is accurate or not, it entirely misses the point. Institutional specialization is, as will become clear in later chapters, itself a product of intellectual dissent, occurring when there is no intellectual or epistemological consensus within a discipline. The American example cited by Graff and Gibbons merely proves that specialization within disciplines of knowledge tends to occur at precisely the point when theoretical conflicts have proved themselves incapable of resolution at a theoretical level: specialization does not in itself cause that impasse. Thus Roger Poole's review puts the institutional cart before the intellectual horse, for in fact, as we elaborate in chapter 2, the evidence suggests that the relationship between the intellectual and the institutional is often the opposite to that which has been assumed: intellectual crises may produce institutional crises to which specialization is one kind of solution. None the less while institutional and intellectual crises clearly may coincide, and while they have perhaps done so over the past decade, they are in no sense identical, nor is there necessarily any causal relationship between the two. In both Britain and the United States it is generally agreed that institutional crises in English (and literary) studies have occurred and are continuing. They have taken two forms. The first has to do with the widespread perception that institutions of higher education over the past ten years have been underfunded and undervalued, due in part to the conservatism of recent American and British administrations. And the second is that, given all this, humanities or arts faculties have increasingly perceived themselves to be marginalized within the particular institutions which house them. Discussions of underfunding and marginahzation as causes of an institutional crisis have tended to use the following line of argument. Underfunding leads to marginalization, which in its turn leads to low 19

Roger Poole,' In America' (review of Graff and Gibbons, Criticism and the University), Textual Practice, i (1987), 352-3.

Preliminaries

23

morale and an undermining of professional status because the 'body' or 'discipline' of knowledge (English literature) of that profession (literary criticism) is no longer valued. This devaluation in its turn has precipitated the questions, ' What are English studies?' and 'What does it mean to " d o " English?' The logic of this kind of argument is to suggest that an institutional crisis has directly led to an intellectual crisis. Thus the term ' crisis' in English is invariably understood to mean the loss of any clear notion of what it means institutionally, rather than intellectually, to ' d o ' English. Once this collapsing of categories has taken place, a very simple, persuasive, but none the less erroneous line of reasoning occurs in which the status of the discipline is seen to reside in the prestige, and ultimately in the power, of the institutions where intellectual activity is practised. But, as we have already suggested, the reasons for the present problems in adjudicating between various theories in English studies - problems, that is, concerning the authority of the explanations which those theories produce — are in fact intellectual or epistemological ones: they relate to questions concerning the utility of a theory, its inner coherence, its relations to practice, and so forth. So without wishing to diminish the importance of the institutional argument (there is little doubt that, in our experience in Britain at least, English departments have been underfunded and that, for the past decade at least, English as a discipline has been undervalued 20), we nevertheless wish to emphasize that the present crisis in the discipline, in so far as it involves problems of authority arising from the use of theory, is not intrinsically related to particular institutional structures or decisions. As a consequence, it cannot be adequately understood solely in terms of institutional power structures, or of any government or federal decisions about educational policy. Rather the ' crisis' is better understood in terms of the general epistemological conditions which govern disciplines of knowledge. 20

The most recent example of such undervaluing in Britain concerns the failure of university administrations, particularly in the universities of Oxford and Birmingham, to allocate financial resources in accordance with the University Funding Council's research selectivity exercises. See Sian Griffiths, 'UFC Quality Ratings I g n o r e d ' , Times Higher Education Supplement (12 Apr. 1991), 1.

24


There is a further limitation to the exclusive focus on institutional rather than intellectual issues. The institutional reasons advanced to explain the present problems concerning the use of theory in English studies cannot describe the reasons for the changes which have occurred in the discipline; they can only suggest a mechanism for their occurrence. Institutional explanations, that is, cannot account for why a multiplicity of theories (such as formalism, structuralism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction and so on) appeared in English studies at the particular moments when they did. This is a much more complicated issue than it first appears to be: a theory such as formalism, for example, was a dominant form of literary explanation at the hands of some Russian and Czech critics for decades prior to its assimilation into English studies in the West. Structuralism, too, provided the dominant explanatory paradigm both in French linguistics and in British and French anthropology for many years before literary critics discovered its use in explaining literary works. Those who wish to describe the recent history of English studies solely in terms of institutional decisions have to give a reason why the power of particular institutions brought about the acceptance of structuralist explanations into a discipline such as anthropology while at the same time resisting its introduction into English studies.21 These limitations, however, cease to be problems if intellectual changes are understood in the first place in terms of the intellectual conditions which produce them. We describe in chapter 3 how the introduction of new theoretical paradigms into English studies from the late 1960s on was prompted not by dissatisfaction with institutional structures, but rather by an intellectual dilemma: it was objections to the allegedly valueladen nature of literary judgements which led critics to become dissatisfied with the traditional practices of the discipline. So the earliest programmes of reform concentrated on attempting to rid English of values altogether; the proponents of structuralism, for example, saw in the structuralist paradigm a scientific 21

An example here is the simultaneous criticism of structuralism by anthropologists and acceptance of it by some literary critics at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s.

Preliminaries

25

or value-free method of analysing literary works. Later reformers of the discipline moved in a different direction. Reacting against what they saw as the naive pretensions to objectivity of their immediate predecessors, they argued that value was intrinsic to English studies, and for that very reason should become the explicit object of study of the discipline. In this view the task of the literary critic was held to be one of uncovering the covert values (usually assumed to be political) underlying all literary judgements. We argue that these debates about value, and the various programmes for reform which they produced, can be understood not in terms of changes in the structures or power relations in institutions, but rather in terms of a major epistemological debate which took place around the same time - t h e 1960s-in the philosophy of science. This philosophical debate was concerned with the nature of rationality, and with the long-standing opposition between such terms as 'objectivism' and 'subjectivism' and 'foundationalism' and 'relativism'. Although initially confined to philosophy, it later came to have profound effects on the conception and organization of knowledge in all disciplines, English studies included. It is a debate which goes some way towards explaining the nature of the changes which have taken place in English studies in the last two decades; more precisely, it provides an intellectual (rather than institutional) context for the popularity of theorizing in general, and of certain theories in particular. Structuralism is not, of course, the only theory in English studies to have originated in another discipline; Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction, all these theoretical paradigms are in one way or another exogenous, or were in the first instance extrinsic to English studies.22 Institutional accounts of changes in the discipline have taken little notice of the widespread nature of this borrowing; certainly they have not explained it. Such a wholesale importation of explanatory paradigms into a discipline does, however, present something of an anomaly, and it is surprising that the recent dependence of 22

The term 'exogenous' (in this specialist sense) is one borrowed from the social sciences where it is used to describe changes or influences which are not produced by any internal dynamic.

26


English upon other disciplines has not been more widely noticed.23 It is even more surprising in the light of the fact that theories usually undergo a process of continual criticism and revision in their native disciplines; hence it is not unusual to find that by the time a migrating theoretical paradigm arrives in English studies its status in its original disciplinary habitat has changed. So, to return to our previous example, the introduction of structuralism into English studies took place some time after its status had been diminished in its home discipline, that of anthropology. Few of the champions of structuralism in English, however, seemed aware of this circumstance; few, at any rate, perceived that there might be a need to explain why a theory which had been so comprehensively criticized on theoretical grounds in anthropology should somehow become unproblematic when it was imported into English studies. Ironically those critics who did object to the introduction of structuralism into English invoked quite different arguments. In a manner which anticipated Parrinder's later critique of the theory industry, they suggested that it was the apparent theoretical 'rigour' of structuralism (rather than, as in anthropology, the very absence of such rigour) which made it inimical to the practices of English. Moreover structuralism is not the only case where a flawed explanatory paradigm has migrated from one discipline to another. The explanatory paradigms which English studies have borrowed from psychoanalysis and from Marxism have also been subject to such a process.24 It is a cause for some surprise that of all the explanatory paradigms developed in psychoanalysis, literary critics have focused their attention principally on the theories of Freud and Jacques Lacan.25 What is never explained is precisely this partial use of psychoanalytic paradigms. Why these particular theories, rather than any 23

It has been noted, but not explained, by Jonathan Culler in his essay ' Criticism and Institutions: the American University', in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds.), Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), 87.

24

25

Similar criticism of the use of Marxism by literary critics has been noted by Freadman and Miller, Re-Thinking Theory\ 72-8. Very occasionally Jung's or Melanie Klein's work is used as an authority.

Preliminaries

27

others? What particular relevance do they, rather than any other psychoanalytic explanation, have for explaining literary works? After all, it certainly cannot be the case that, as explanatory paradigms, they are to be preferred on theoretical grounds - on the grounds, that is, that in their own discipline it has been demonstrated that they provide the best possible explanation of the human mind. Rather such a use seems to have been made simply on the grounds of accessibility, supported, in the case of Freud at least, by the weak argument that some of his writing was concerned with artistic creativity. It might of course be the case that there are some theoretical paradigms whose status remains unimpaired over time: here some aspects of feminist theory, developed in sociology, provide the strongest examples. But even in cases such as these, the question of the relevance of particular paradigms remains. An admittedly bizarre example will make the point clearly. In 1980 Philip Brockbank used Rene Thorn's catastrophe theory as a partial explanation of the conclusion of Julius Caesar. He did so in a disarming manner: denying that a theory produced as a mathematical explanation of probability was appropriate to literary studies, but at the same time exploiting the resources of such a comparison. Brockbank claimed that Thorn 'demonstrated that there are seven topologically distinct kinds of predictable discontinuity that can occur in the dynamical systems of the physical world - that is, those composed of four variables (three in space and one in time) \ 2 6 Brockbank acknowledged that these' forms belong strictly to mathematics', and that 'it would not be wise to look for a swallow-tail or elliptic umbilic in the large structure of Julius Caesar. The symmetries of dramatic art ask for a different account and mode of perception.' None the less such a denial of any close relationship between pure and applied mathematics and the theatre did not deter Brockbank from mischievously pointing out that the 'plotting of... Thorn's seven equations yields seven beautifully ordered forms that a modern oracle of literary mysteries might delight in'. 27 Brockbank's example was, in fact, 26

Philip Brockbank, 'Julius Caesar and the Catastrophes of History', in his On 27 Shakespeare (Oxford, 1989), 122. Ibid., 123.

28


only the reductio ad absurdum of a pattern of intellectual indebtedness very familiar among his colleagues. There is one final observation to be made concerning the anomalies produced by this borrowing of theoretical paradigms. We have referred already to the plurality of theories which currently exists in English studies. This situation has come about because explanatory paradigms developed in other disciplines have not been used sequentially in English. Although paradigms have been appropriated over a period of twenty years or so, their introduction into the discipline has led to a simple accumulation of theories rather than to the supersession of one by another. Few literary critics have questioned such a situation; fewer still seem aware that it might produce difficulties. The consequences of this multiplicity of theories - the absence of debate between theorists, and the protean qualities of the ever-expanding discipline of English studies - are the first questions to be addressed in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2

The nature of disciplinary knowledge

The distinction made in the previous chapter between the intellectual and institutional dimensions of disciplinary knowledge might appear to be a crude one. Nevertheless it provides a useful framework for understanding the social nature of such knowledge. There are two ways in which social factors affect the production of disciplinary knowledge. The first concerns dayto-day decisions about funding, resources, and so on; these are primarily institutional decisions in the sense that they serve primarily institutional interests. For this reason, as we suggested in the previous chapter, they can indeed be understood in institutional terms. The second way in which the social impinges upon the production of disciplinary knowledge concerns the intellectual preconditions for the foundation of disciplines of knowledge in the first instance, and the mechanisms of intellectual authority which safeguard the prestige of the knowledge produced by a discipline. In other words, the social impinges upon decisions about both the status and the grounds of disciplinary knowledge; such decisions, that is, are never individual or arbitrary. In the case of the grounds (or foundations) of disciplinary knowledge, these decisions concern agreements about social utility and specialization (terms which we define later); in the case of its status (or its mechanisms of authority), they concern agreements about the implementation of a formal structure by which theories may be tested or evaluated. In both cases these decisions are distinguished by virtue of the fact that they cannot be identified in any straightforward way with the interests of institutions or of a particular institution (in the way that the first kind of social 29

30


decisions can be). One of the general aims of this book is to show that the intellectual decisions which affect the foundation, conduct and authority of disciplines of knowledge (and of English studies in particular) are neither arbitrary nor individual; and, more importantly, to show that they are not necessarily merely political, in the sense that they do not simply serve the ends of particular interest groups. Our immediate concern, however, is with the use of theory in English studies, and the way in which it affects the authority of the discipline, and here it will be helpful to clarify a little what we mean by the ' social' (as opposed to political or institutional) nature of intellectual authority by examining what the term intellectual entails when it is used to describe either an individual or a body of work. Intellectualism is not simply equated with intelligence. This much can clearly be seen in the figure of the brilliant eccentric, an example of an individual considered to possess intelligence but not held to be an intellectual. The reason is that the term 'intellectual' locates a person (or a body of work) in relation to certain social norms, and the nature of these norms can be seen by examining the history of the term. The present understanding of intellectualism evolved in the late nineteenth century in response to fundamental changes in the social organization of knowledge which took place at that time.1 The processes which brought about these changes were complex, but they can be broadly summarized in the following way. The explosive growth in science and technology in the last quarter of the nineteenth century led to a situation where knowledge became both increasingly complex and increasingly diverse. In order to claim competence in a particular field, individuals were required to narrow their interests; the overall result was that the generalists of the early half of the nineteenth century began to give way to a new breed of specialists. Moreover, these specialists introduced new standards of scholarly rigour in order to establish their status as experts. One result of this process was that the possession of expertise could only be demonstrated through 1

See T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, 1982).


31

formal qualifications, and knowledge therefore became not only specialized, but also professionalized. These twin processes of specialization and professionalization, and the effects they had on the organization of knowledge in late nineteenth-century society, have been fully documented.2 Our interest is in the role played by institutions, in particular the universities. It has been noted, for example, that the comprehensive university reforms set in motion in nineteenth-century Britain — the expansion of the curriculum, the formalization of written examinations, the review of entrance qualifications - were partly a response to, and in turn partly helped to bring about, changes in the organization of knowledge.3 Universities were one of the main channels through which the new specialists were trained and qualified; they thus possessed an essential function in safeguarding the status of specialist knowledge. It is no accident that nearly every burgeoning profession sought to locate itself within a university structure. And the consequence of this relationship is that for the past hundred years universities themselves (and now other institutes of higher education) have been under fairly constant pressure to professionalize their own procedures. The clearest evidence of the role played by universities in these changes in the organization of knowledge can be seen in the rapid decline from about 1870 onwards in the prestige of what is often referred to as the Victorian ' sage' - figures such as John Stuart Mill or Thomas Carlyle.4 In the first half of the nineteenth century the authority of the sage had principally resided in his status as an individual, in the kind of person he was (sages were never women). But by the late 1880s confidence came to reside instead in the judgement of a collective body, the 2

For an account of the professionalization and institutionalization of disciplines of knowledge in the nineteenth century, see W. J. Reader, Professional Men: the Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1966). See chapter 6 for

3

4

a discussion of the consequences of the processes of professionalization and institutionalization for the history of English studies. The widespread changes which took place in British universities in the late nineteenth century have been described by Sheldon Rothblatt in The Revolution of the Dons (London, 1968) and Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (London, 1976). For a classic account of this phenomenon, see John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London, 1953).

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' experts' - a community of scholars or academics or professional peers who were invariably housed in, or connected with, institutions, typically universities. The evolution of the term ' intellectual' at this time was part of this general shift from a concept of intellectual authority based on the individual to one based on the judgements of a community. By the turn of the century, then, to be called an intellectual was only indirectly related to individual prestige; rather, it referred to the fact that the work of the person concerned complied with the new standards of scholarly rigour which had been recently institutionalized within university structures. In the years since that time intellectual prestige has increasingly derived from this source. It might be concluded from all this that changes in late nineteenth-century intellectual culture represent nothing more than a shift of prestige or power from the individual to that of the institution, and consequently it might be tempting to identify that intellectual authority with institutional interests. But the changes which took place in academic institutions were not simply structural ones - reforms to the curriculum, to entrance qualifications and to examinations. Simple accommodation was not the only (nor even the principal) problem posed by the enormous expansion of knowledge. Much more important was the problem of discrimination. How was it possible to establish some kind of hierarchy within the rapidly expanding corpora of specialist knowledge? The solution to this problem can be seen in a parallel set of changes which took place in what we have called the forms or mechanisms of intellectual authority. These mechanisms involved the new standards of scholarly rigour which we have already alluded to; in particular they included firmer strictures concerning the weighing and the testing of evidence, and demands for greater methodological and theoretical precision. A clear example of the ways in which they were implemented can be seen in the developments which took place in historiography in the 1880s and 1890s. These changes mainly involved new methods for establishing the status of historical knowledge. They included a new emphasis on archival research and on the critical exam-


33

ination of sources, procedures which, it was believed, would lead to more scientific and more authoritative methods of verifying evidence. It is significant that few British twentiethcentury critics of English studies have taken any account of the development of new mechanisms of intellectual authority in the late nineteenth century.5 These mechanisms, however, are still in operation in disciplines of knowledge today, and an indication of how they operate is important for understanding contemporary disputes about the nature of English studies. Initially, however, there are two historical details to be emphasized. Both have already been mentioned, but both have important implications for our overall argument. The first is that since the 1880s mechanisms of intellectual authority have been socially organized, and so it has made little sense for the past hundred years to talk of intellectualism in terms of individual agency. The second is that the social organization of these mechanisms is not (and never has been) wholly commensurate with, or determined by, institutional interests. Another brief example from the nineteenth century, the reputation of the work of the British economist William Stanley Jevons, illustrates these points very clearly. Jevons is one of the figures responsible for what economic historians refer to as the marginal revolution.6 His work, 5

6

For a description of some of the limitations of current histories of the foundation of English as a discipline, see chapter 6. The marginal revolution in economics has given rise to a considerable body of work, much of it concerned with debating its causes and effects. For details of the issues involved in that debate see R. D. Collison Black, 'W. S. Jevons and the Foundation of Modern Economies', History of Political Economy, 4 (1972), 364-78; S. G. Checkland, 'Economic Opinion in England as Jevons Found it', The Manchester School, 2 (1951), 143-69; A. W. Coats, 'The Economic and Social Context of the Marginal Revolution of the 1870V, in R. D. Collison Black, A. W. Coats and Craufurd D. W . Goodwin (eds.), The Marginal Revolution in Economies'. Interpretation

and Evaluation (Durham, N.C., 1973), 37-58; Mark Blaug, 'Was There a Marginal Revolution?', in Black, Coats and Goodwin (eds.), The Marginal Revolution in Economics, 3-14; Robert B. Ekelund and Robert F. Hebert, A History of Economic Theory and Method (1975; 2nd edn, New York, 1983); Robert M. Fisher, The Logic of Economic Discovery: Neoclassical Economics and the Marginal Revolution (Brighton, 1988); T . W. Hutchison, On Revolutions and Progress in Economic Knowledge (Cambridge,

1978); Lionel Robbins, 'The Place ofJevons in the History of Economic Thought', The Manchester School, 50 (1982), 310-25; Warren J. Samuels, 'The History of Economic Thought as Intellectual History', History of Political Economy, 6 (1974), 3O5-23-

34


together with that of Leon Walras in Switzerland and Carl Menger in Austria, brought about a fundamental change in the nature of economic thinking, a change from which the modern discipline of economics emerged. However, this seminal quality of Jevons's work was not perceived by his immediate contemporaries in the 1870s. Indeed, Jevons's career was marked by disillusionment and self-doubt. Throughout his life he remained an outsider to the established intellectual circles of Oxford, Cambridge and London, where his work was initially received with very little favour. It was not without justification that on one occasion he bitterly referred to the 'noxious influence of authority' exercised by the contemporary academic establishment. Moreover, his work continued to be resisted even after his death. In 1885 the chair in political economy at Cambridge was given to Alfred Marshall, a traditionalist who resolutely ignored the implications of Jevons's marginal utility theory. The school of economics which Marshall went on to establish in Cambridge was backward-looking, based on a revival of many of the old, and in Jevons's view, discredited concepts associated with classical political economy.7 All of this might seem to suggest that changes in intellectual culture do indeed involve the identification of intellectual authority with the coercive and perhaps arbitrary power of institutions, and that Jevons's work was undervalued in his lifetime simply because he was located outside the main academic institutions of Oxford, Cambridge and London. But these circumstances, while they go some way to explaining the initial hostility to Jevons's work, clearly cannot account for the fact that his theories eventually succeeded in convincing established academic centres, nor for the fact that marginal utility theory proceeded to become the foundation of modern economic thought. It seems implausible that the ultimate success ofJevons's work was entirely arbitrary or simply accidental, for his observations were simultaneously and independently confirmed by Leon Walras and Carl 7

For an account of Marshall's role in the development of economic thought in Britain see A. W. Coats, 'Sociological Aspects of British Economic Thought (CA. 18801930) \ Journal of Political Economy, 75 (1967), 706-25; and John Mahoney, Marshall: Orthodoxy and the Professionalisation of Economics (Cambridge, 1985).


35

Menger. Clearly there must be some other reasons, those involving precisely the new social mechanisms of intellectual authority, and their relative independence from institutions, which

were beginning to be set in train at the time. The eventual widespread acceptance of marginal utility theory in Britain can be attributed only to a social agreement about the intellectual coherence and utility of Jevons's argument; it was such an agreement which had the effect of forcing the final rejection of classical political economy, despite Marshall's strenuous attempts to revive it. Of course the individuals responsible for these agreements were located within institutions (predominantly within the universities), and those institutions clearly recognized that the criteria which Jevons's argument met (in, for example, the coherence and utility of his theory) were appropriate for the evaluation of a new explanatory paradigm. But these criteria were not arbitrarily chosen, nor did the judgements based upon them exist to serve the interests (however they are defined) of institutions. For instance, it might be asked what common interest could possibly be shared by institutions in places as varied as Britain, Austria (the home of Menger) and Switzerland (the home of Walras) which would account for the development and success of marginal utility theory in each of these countries simultaneously but quite independently. As we have suggested, the increasing complexity and diversity of knowledge required new procedures for its organization. The appearance of new social norms of intellectual authority was a reasonable response to this need.8 The new social mechanisms of intellectual authority which emerged in the late nineteenth century were, then, a response to 8

In this respect, it is significant that Jevons was neither the first nor the only critic of classical political economy. That body of thought had been attacked on several occasions from the 1840s onwards. However, the different norms of intellectual authority which operated earlier in the century made it easier to marginalize dissenting voices; they could simply be dismissed as individual eccentricities. The general question - why particular theories become accepted at particular points in time - is in fact one which has occupied a number of intellectual historians. A common approach is to focus on the concepts and ideas developed in other areas of knowledge in order to see how they hinder or facilitate the acceptance of new theoretical paradigms. See, for example, Francois Jacob's intellectual history of biology, The Logic of Living Systems, trans. Betty E. Spillman (London, 1974).

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a rapid increase in knowledge, and they provided a formal method for ranking that expanding knowledge in terms of its status or prestige. As such, they represent an important element in a larger and more general process, that of the transformation of bodies of knowledge into formal disciplines of knowledge.9 This general process is described in more detail later in this chapter when we examine the intellectual and social preconditions for the foundation of disciplines, and in particular the importance of the criteria of social utility and specialization. For the moment we should emphasize that this transformation did not (and still does not) come about in an arbitrary or haphazard way, nor could (or can) it be based solely on institutional exigencies, such as the availability of resources. Moreover, disciplines of knowledge had to employ certain standards of explanatory rigour in order to maintain their status as disciplines, and it was precisely these standards which were established and maintained by the implementation of the new social mechanisms of intellectual authority (which remain largely in place today). In other words, mechanisms of intellectual authority are themselves part of the intellectual preconditions for knowledge to be considered disciplinary. The significance of these mechanisms for the overall argument of this book lies in their intimate relationship with the status and structure of disciplines of knowledge in general, and of the discipline of English studies in particular. It is therefore important to begin any discussion of the problems concerning intellectual authority within English studies (problems, that is, which derive from the use of theory) with an account of the general intellectual structure of modern disciplines of knowledge. The account which follows, however, is descriptive and not prescriptive. It is not meant to deny that there may be other, and even perhaps better, means of organizing knowledge than 9

Disciplines of knowledge had of course existed prior to this time: law, divinity and physic, for example, have the oldest and most distinguished pedigrees of any discipline. (See Reader, Professional Men.) However, the variety and complexity of disciplinary knowledge recognizable today can be traced to developments in intellectual culture in the late nineteenth century.


37

current disciplinary structures, and that there may also be other and better means of authorizing that knowledge than the current mechanisms of intellectual authority. At the moment, however, there is no agreement about what these alternatives might entail, and consequently the present crisis in English cannot be understood in terms of them. Until an agreement about alternative means of organizing and authorizing knowledge is reached, the current crisis can hardly be remedied by recourse to them. As we shall point out in later chapters, arguments to reform English studies which insist upon, or implicate, changes in its disciplinary structure can only have force if those changes can be demonstrated to be equally applicable to (and indeed to be equally necessary for) all other disciplines. However none of the recent proposals to reform English which involve changes to the discipline's structure have taken account of these larger arguments.10 A further point which also needs emphasis is that our attention in the rest of this chapter to the intellectual and social preconditions for a discipline of knowledge should not be understood as arguing that they are the only conditions for the existence of a discipline, nor that the establishing of a discipline is a purely intellectual process. We argue that intellectual conditions are necessary, but 10

A similar point has been made by Stanley Fish, although in a slightly different context. In essays by Walter Jackson Bate and Edward Said, Fish identifies two varieties of what he terms 'anti-professionalism', and he argues that, despite their very different political objectives, both arguments suffer from the same limitation: 'Bate and Said think that the choice is between professionalism and some extrainstitutional form of behavior (of which, of course, they would give very different descriptions), whereas it seems to me (i) that choice is between the various forms professional life can take and (2) that the notion of extra-institutional activity is incoherent. To put it another way, one can agree (as I do) with Said's distress at the marginality of the humanities without agreeing that the way to escape marginality is to break out of "confining institutions". Marginality is not a function of professionalism but of a particular turn that professional life, at least professional literary life has taken in this century. And if one wishes (as Said and I do) to change the conditions of marginality, then one must work not to eliminate professionalism but to see that it takes another turn. This is no simple matter... The way... is not to wave some magic moral wand (whether it bears the slogan "back to the great tradition" or "forward to the political awakening") but to set in motion other forces, equally institutional and professional, which eventually one hopes, will have the effect of restructuring professional life' (Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Oxford, 1989), 212-13).

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not in themselves sufficient, and our intention is to highlight an aspect of disciplines of knowledge which has so far been ignored and which cannot be collapsed into political issues.

I

S P E C I A L I Z A T I O N AND S O C I A L U T I L I T Y

Defined in intellectual terms, the three constituent elements of a discipline of knowledge are: the object of study of the discipline in question; the practice or practices used to carry out the study of that object; and finally, a theory of that practice (that is, the explicit elaboration of both the principles which underlie it, and of the appropriateness and utility of the explanations which that practice produces). Moreover, in general terms there has to be a social agreement, or the grounds for a social agreement, in each of the three areas we have outlined. Of those decisions an agreement about an object of study is the most fundamental in the sense that if there is no agreement in the first place about what to study, questions of how to study must be an irrelevance.11 Such a claim is not of course to deny that as knowledge about a particular object of study increases, so in turn it may become modified through the passage of time. It is not uncommon, for example, for a particular discipline to become sub-divided into further specialisms, each of which has its own object of study. A good example of this process is to be found in the history of biology and the gradual development of specialisms such as biochemistry and A similar point has been made by Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller in ReThinking Theory (Cambridge, 1992): 'We need initially to make a distinction that is anathema to many avant-garde literary theorists: the distinction between a theory and its object. The theory itself will consist of a set of claims or principles in respect of some object or phenomenon; and the objects or phenomena may be widely varying in nature ... It is in our view imperative to resist the temptation - and indeed the tendency - to collapse the distinction between object and theory. Theories... may strongly condition conceptions of their objects, but they cannot literally construct those objects or entirely determine our conceptions of them. Were they able so to construct and determine, we would be unable to apprehend, or even to posit the existence, of the object; and it would follow from this that theorizing would literally be inconceivable since there would be nothing to theorize about. Quite simply, a theory is a theory of something' (196).


39

biochemical engineering. Within any discipline there also has to be, in principle at least, an agreement about the adequacy of the theories used to describe and explain the object of study. And in the eventuality of theories being in competition with each other as explanations of the same phenomena, there has also to be agreement about the grounds whereby choices between them may be made. Such agreements are necessary for academic debate; and such debate is in its turn necessary if an increase in knowledge is to be accompanied by a greater understanding that process which is often referred to as intellectual 'progress'. It may of course be denied that such progress actually takes place. It has been argued, for example, that the notions of order and development which the term progress implies are illusory, and that they lead to a misrepresentation of intellectual history.12 Nevertheless it should be recognized that 'progress' or, to use more neutral terms, an increase in knowledge which leads to 'understanding' rather than to a mere accumulation of data - is a central aim (whether realized or not) of disciplines of knowledge; and that in order to try to achieve it, there must be some grounds for debate between theorists who hold different or opposing views. The clearest examples of how these processes work are to be found in the natural sciences. For the sake of clarity we should emphasize that in using the sciences as a model we are not implying that all the conditions which govern the organization of knowledge in them necessarily obtain elsewhere. On the contrary: there has been a long-standing debate about the differences between the kinds of knowledge produced in the natural sciences on the one hand, and the kinds of knowledge produced in the social sciences and the humanities on the other. (These differences are discussed in detail in the next chapter.) Here our concern is with the similarities between the structures of various disciplines of knowledge, an issue which is different from but not unrelated to the kinds of knowledge which disciplines produce. Invariably within the natural sciences the structure of One of the most stringent critics of the idea of progress in disciplines of knowledge, in particular the sciences, is Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975).

40


the relationship between the object of study in a discipline and the practices used to investigate it is unproblematic in the sense that explanatory theories are generally sequential. The history of the use of theory in science disciplines is that of the supersession of the less useful by the more useful, or the subsuming of the former into the latter. Such a characterization of the sciences is not to ignore the fact that there has been, and continues to be, a great deal of debate among philosophers of science about the exact nature of the relationship between theory and practice, and that this debate has naturally had consequences for how the object of study of various scientific disciplines is perceived. Broadly speaking, it has taken the form of a discussion about the relative merits of induction and deduction. More precisely it has concerned the different relationships between the object of study and the practices appropriate to it which those two models of scientific enquiry propose. Nevertheless it is significant that what has remained constant throughout these debates is an agreement that the relationship between theory, practice and the object of study must be a structured one. There seems to be little argument among scientists, then, that choices do need to be made between opposing explanatory paradigms, and that the grounds for those choices must reside in some kind of formal disciplinary structure.13 In contrast to all this, in the debates about the use 13

A comparison of the arguments of three leading philosophers of science, Thomas Kuhn, Ernest Nagel and Imre Lakatos, bears this point out. Nagel identifies three criteria which all deductive explanations have to meet, namely the logical (which 'specify various formal requirements for explanatory premises'), the epistemic (which ' stipulate in what cognitive relations one ought to stand to the premises') and the substantive (which ' describe what sort of content... the premises ought to have'). He goes on to discuss how scientific explanations must possess a high degree of generality - they must either possess a comprehensiveness, or permit their accommodation into a more comprehensive theory. (See Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1961; 2nd edn, London, 1979),

3off.) In addition, Thomas Kuhn has suggested how explanations in the natural sciences are achieved through the construction, testing and acceptance or rejection of paradigms. (See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (London, 1962).) Although Nagel and Kuhn are in disagreement about specific details in scientific explanations, their requirements for coherence and comprehensiveness in theoretical explanations have a great deal in common. In contrast to Kuhn and Nagel, Imre Lakatos has rejected both those theories which view scientific knowledge as proven or probable, and those theories which claim it can be disproved.


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of theory in English studies the issue of disciplinary structure has rarely been noticed, much less addressed. These observations about the structure of scientific disciplines remain true in general terms of those disciplines of knowledge which are outside the natural sciences, and which are thus susceptible to the accusation that they are much less rigorous or less pure. The discipline of history, which in recent years has been the subject of a major methodological critique, provides a particularly apt example. The dominant voice in this critique has been that of Hayden White. In general, White's concern has been to challenge the epistemic certainties underlying traditional historiographical practices; more particularly, he has been keen to expose as illusory the assumption that historians can aspire to the same kind of objectivity as scientists purportedly do. White argues that historical explanations are not susceptible to confirmation or negation 'in the way that the principal conceptual schemata of the sciences are'; historians, that is, unlike scientists, cannot adjudicate between different explanations of events simply by reference to empirical evidence.14 Rather, in White's view, choices between different c histories' have to be made by paying attention to the narrative and literary elements involved in historiography. The interesting point to notice about these proposals is that even if such a radical view of history were to become widely accepted (and this has not yet proved to be the case), White is confident that the structure of the discipline, and in particular the status of its object of study, would remain intact: If histories were to recognize the fictive elements in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology... By drawing historiography back once more to an intimate

14

Nevertheless he still argues that theories can and should be improved, and this is made possible because they can be compared. He argues that the scientific process is not a two-sided relationship between theory and an empirical base, but rather a three-sided contraposition among two rival theories and an empirical base. The important point to notice, however, is that even Lakatos agrees that the aim of science should be towards a simple or 'single' explanation, and that such an explanation is dependent upon a process of correction'. (See Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (London, 1970).) Hayden White,' The Historical Text as Literary Artifact', in Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (eds.), The Writing of History (London, 1978), 43.

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connection with its literary basis,... we will be arriving at that ' theory' of history without which it cannot pass for a ' discipline' at all.15 Even a proposal as novel as White's, seeking as it does to change profoundly the ways in which we understand the writing of history, and so too the grounds upon which we may adjudicate between different histories, acknowledges the necessity of a structured relationship between the object of study and the practices used to investigate it. Unlike a number of critics in English studies, White clearly sees that choices do need to be made between different theoretical or explanatory paradigms, and that these choices must be made within a formal (that is, a logical or non-ideological) framework. Without such a framework history runs the risk of relinquishing its disciplinary status. In the terms which we have used above, White is suggesting little more than an alternative practice (and thus an alternative theory of that practice) for investigating broadly the same object of study. (It should of course be noted that the reason why his programme has not been taken up has to do with precisely the social elements of disciplines of knowledge which we have described above. There is — at least as yet — no general consensus about the acceptability of White's proposals.) As White recognizes, the reason for the existence of a structured relationship between theory, practice and an object of study in a discipline is that it provides the means by which adjudication between different explanatory paradigms may take place — or, to use the terms which we employed earlier, it provides the means for assigning status or authority to particular explanations. Given that this structured relationship possesses such a function, how does it 'work' in practice? The main point to stress is that the use of theory within a discipline is always related intimately to its object of study, for within a discipline a theory exists only to explain that object of study. Moreover, as we have indicated earlier, initially an agreement about an object of study must precede, in the sense that it makes possible, any subsequent theorizing. To put matters bluntly, there has to 15

Ibid., 61-2.


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be something to theorize about; theory is only ever a means to an end - it is never an end in itself- and that end must be the explanation of the object of study. If the relationship between a theory and an object of study is no longer structured in these ways, then the status of particular explanations, and thus the possibility of adjudicating between them, become vexed. It is precisely this problem, as we shall argue in the remainder of this chapter, which is at the heart of contemporary debates about the use of theory in English and literary studies in Britain and the United States. Before addressing that issue, however, it will be useful to illustrate the extent of the confusion among literary critics and theorists about the structure of disciplines of knowledge. In the closing chapter of Literary Theory, an Introduction, Terry Eagleton, one of the most polemical theorists in Britain today, sets out some proposals for the reform of the discipline. Central to his proposals is the proposition that the object of study in his 'new' discipline should not have any practical or theoretical limits placed upon it: The point is whether it is possible to speak of' literary theory' without perpetuating the illusion that literature exists as a distinct, bounded object of knowledge, or whether it is not preferable to draw the practical consequences of the fact that literary theory can handle Bob Dylan just as well as John Milton. My own view is that it is most useful to see ' literature' as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called 'discursive practices', and that if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled 'literature'.16 Eagleton goes on to elaborate his views for the extension of the object of study of his new discipline, suggesting that it should include everything which falls under the general rubric of 'media-studies'. His argument is made in the following way: As far as the object of study goes, what you decide to examine depends very much on the practical situation. It may seem best to look at Proust and King Lear, or at children's television programmes or 16

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: an Introduction (Oxford, 1983), 204-5.

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popular romances or avant-gardefilms.A radical critic is quite liberal on these questions: he rejects the dogmatism which would insist that Proust is always more worthy of study than television advertisements. It all depends on what you are trying to do, in what situation. Radical critics are also open-minded about questions of theory and method: they tend to be pluralists in this respect. Any method or theory which will contribute to the strategic goal of human emancipation, the production of'better people' through the socialist transformation of society, is acceptable.17 Although he is far from consistent in his views, Eagleton's definition of the object of study here places no limits - not even notional ones - on its scope. As a result, it becomes impossible to define. Eagleton, however, seems to be partly aware of the problems raised by such a proposal and he anticipates them by asserting that in practice there are, or will be, limits; the particular 'situation' will dictate what an appropriate object of study will be. This might be true, but it does not attend to the problem; the question has merely been shifted from that of an appropriate object of study to what constitutes an appropriate situation. The only answer which Eagleton offers to this question is that of individual choice; appropriateness is determined by reference to an individual's particular interests. In effect, then, in Eagleton's programme choices about an object of study remain individual choices. And clearly there is no fundamental difference between a hypothetically infinite number of individual choices (based in turn on a hypothetically infinite number of appropriate situations) and an indefinable object of study. If the object of study of Eagleton's new discipline literally includes a 'whole field called "discursive practices'", then it encompasses everything written. In a recent essay Catherine Belsey has made just this claim. She argues that 'cultural history' - her name for the reformed discipline - ' would refuse nothing... no moment, no epoch, no genre and no form of signifying practice would be excluded a priori from the field of enquiry'. 18 In fact she goes further than Eagleton by including 17

Ibid., 2 1 0 - 1 1 .

18

Catherine Belsey, 'Towards Cultural History - in Theory and Practice', Textual Practice, 3 (1989), 160.


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in her 'discipline' practices other than writing. She describes the consequences of such a proposal as follows: Cultural history would necessarily take all signifying practices as its domain. And that means that the remaining demarcation lines between disciplines would not survive the move. Signifying practice is not exclusively nor even primarily verbal. We need, for example, to align ourselves with art historians. I have invoked portraits in the analysis of changing meanings of gender relations... And perhaps more eccentrically, but only marginally so, the allocation of domestic space is replete with meanings for the cultural historian. The medieval move of the feast from the hall to the great chamber... and the subsequent isolation of the family dining from the servants' quarters is as significant in charting the history of the meaning of the family as is the current vogue for open-plan living.19 Defined in ways such as these, the area of study which Eagleton and Belsey propose should supersede English can have no limits placed upon it: in their arguments there are, for example, no prima facie reasons why contemporary speculation about the origins of the universe should not fall within the ' radical' critic's purview. It is interesting to observe in passing that a concern with extending the object of study in English is not confined to radical critics. So, for example, Stanley Fish has noted Peter Jay's recommendation that English should concern itself less with ' Texas-lesbian-feminist poets' and more with ' the study of life itself; Fish goes on to comment that such a position commits Jay to ' opposing any focus narrower than the very broad - indeed, totally unbounded - focus he celebrates'.20 However the main significance of these proposals (from either the left or the right) for the expansion of the traditional subjectmatter of English studies lies in the consequences which they have for the use of theory in the new discipline. If the object of study expands infinitely in the ways which Belsey and Eagleton 19 20

Ibid., 161. Fish further observes that such an extension of the object of study has some unforeseen consequences: 'it may be stretching a point to conclude that anyone who attacks academic specialization is attacking the academy, but the conclusion is inevitable because specialization is the business of the academy, and if an argument against specialization is pursued far enough, it will shrink the area in which the academy can do business' (Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, 199). The issue of specialization is discussed in detail later in this chapter.

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(or Jay) suggest, then there cannot be any agreement about what is to count as a theory appropriate to it. In the first place, the grounds for such an agreement have disappeared; without some sort of consensus about the object of study of English - a consensus, that is, about what precisely theories are supposed to explain - there can be no way to adjudicate between theories on the basis of their explanatory power. Different theories will after all simply be explaining different things: in this sense they will be incommensurate. Second, and more importantly, it is extremely difficult to see how such an all-embracing theory could possibly exist. No single theory, nor group of theories, could ever be adequate to such a task. The only theory which could conceivably explain the putative object of study proposed by Belsey and Eagleton would have to be so general as to be useless for all practical purposes.21 The utility of a theory is usually measured in terms of the specificity of its explanations - in, that is, its ability to describe the particular as well as the general case. Inevitably, to achieve this level of specificity, and therefore to fulfil the criterion of adequacy of explanation, there has to be some principle of limitation, initially one which is implied by the specialist nature of the object of study, on the explanations produced by any particular theory. However, Eagleton's and Belsey's proposals for a new all-embracing discipline explicitly preclude the possibility of any kind of limitation; indeed, they see such a prospect as a threat to individual liberties. But this apparent liberalism (Eagleton's hypothetical 'pluralism') leads only to a situation which we described in the previous chapter - one where there are no grounds, except ideological ones, for debarring any object of study and thus any theory from the proposed new discipline. Eagleton and Belsey thus advocate an impossible situation: a discipline which attempts to explain everything in every conceivable way.22 21

22

Indeed, the proposal for a 'political' criticism concedes as much: 'polities', in the sense which Belsey uses the term, can be applied to any discipline of knowledge. For an amplification of this point, see chapter 3. Such a situation is in fact beginning to occur in the sense that in some English departments critiques of law, of advertising, of philosophy and of medicine are all seen as part of the literary critic's domain - in other words, English has pretensions


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Once again, Eagleton seems to be aware of the problems inherent in such a proposal. However, in trying to avoid them he only succeeds in becoming entangled in a series of contradictions. They arise mainly as a result of an insistence that a notional control may be placed upon his potentially limitless discipline by making an appeal to a common political objective, that of human emancipation. However, the main consequence of invoking such a concept is that Eagleton compromises his definition of the 'social'. His earlier description of the object of study of English, as we have indicated, seems to have assumed that the social nature of the discipline resides solely in the sum of the interests of the individuals who practise it - that is, in their individual decisions about what would constitute an appropriate object of study. But the notion of the social implied by a concept of human emancipation is that of a collective interest, one in which some individuals must subordinate their immediate interests to an assumed or proposed collective good. Eagleton's argument slides between these two quite different definitions of the social, an elision which reveals his failure to appreciate the importance of one of the most basic intellectual requirements for a body of knowledge to become established as a discipline, namely that disciplinary knowledge must not only be socially available, but also, and more importantly, it must be socially defined. To invoke a notion of human emancipation is, as we have suggested, to acknowledge tacitly (albeit in the vaguest of ways) the need to place some kind of limits (or constraints) on the kind of knowledge which a discipline may produce; it also suggests by implication that there ought to be some criteria by which the explanatory power of different theories may be evaluated. In addition it further acknowledges, although once more very vaguely, that those principles of limitation or constraint have to be reached by social agreement, and that they are not therefore at the disposal of an individual. But earlier in his argument Eagleton had explicitly refused to countenance the imposition of any kind of limitation, and he had done so in the name of to become a kind of meta-discipline. See, for example, Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London, 1988).

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what he termed theoretical 'pluralism'. However, this principle of pluralism is compromised by the objective of human emancipation in exactly the same way as Eagleton's earlier concept of the social is compromised. His proposals for the reform of English are thus little more than a sleight-of-hand, a sliding between definitions: rather than (in his terms) 'liberalizing' the discipline, he has merely replaced one set of constraints (which he claims to be reprehensible) with another. The fact that he neglects to define his notion of 'human emancipation' (which historically has been interpreted in a variety of ways) does not free it from operating as a constraint. So although Eagleton seems to reject the principle that disciplines of knowledge should have a structured relationship between an object of study, the practices appropriate to it, and the theories of those practices, he is nevertheless covertly utilizing just such a structure to impose his own (individual) criterion of value - his own principle of limitation, that is - on the knowledge produced by the discipline. Catherine Belsey's proposals for English studies involve similar contradictions; like Eagleton, she too appears to ignore the nature and structure of disciplines of knowledge. For example, she admits to finding a description of how her discipline would actually work 'difficult to formulate'. The admission is revealing, for Belsey proceeds to outline a set of conditions which directly contradict her earlier proposal that cultural history 'would refuse nothing' and would have 'no interest in ranking works in order of merit': ' Cultural relativity ... [is not] a simple libertarianism, making texts do what ever we like... I am persuaded that we should not abandon the notion of rigour, the project of substantiating our readings, or a commitment to historical specificity. We shall need principles of selection, since without them no individual project would be thinkable. ' 23 Moreover, again like Eagleton, Belsey is unspecific as to what these principles might entail. 'Political intervention' 23

Catherine Belsey, 'Towards Cultural History', 167-8. Similar contradictions in Belsey's work have been noted by Philip Smallwood in his essay on her work. See Philip Smallwood, 'Radical Theorists I I : Catherine Belsey', in his Critical Portraits of British Literary Critics (Hemel Hempstead, 1990), 41-71.

The nature of disciplinary knowledge is the only criterion she acknowledges for imposing limits on critical practices. However, the definition of 'political intervention', like that of'human emancipation', is a vexed one. Either it is very general, and therefore has little practical use; or, conversely, it is defined in narrow ideological terms and thus acts as exactly the kind of prohibitive constraint which Belsey claims she is trying to remove. The failure on the part of Belsey and Eagleton to take account of their own value-system (and the limitations it imposes) in their attack on the values of other critics has been described by Steven Connor (borrowing a phrase from Jiirgen Habermas) as an instance of' performative self-contradiction': The problem... for a theory that depends on negative interpretation or the hermeneutics of suspicion, on an essentially hygienic practice of extricating itself from error, delusion and ideology, [is that] the category of value along with the practices of evaluation may seem to be contaminated from top to bottom. But value... tolerates no negativity, since every negative evaluation, even of the practice of evaluation itself, must always constitute a kind of evaluation on its own terms ... A theory driven by an ethic of extrication and embodied in negative interpretation, is always steeped in value.24 John Searle has also drawn attention to this omission, but in a rather more pragmatic way. Commenting on Gerald Graff's proposals to reform the curriculum, he notes ' the unfortunate fact that universities also contain professors who are not "leftist" and who do not want their courses to become "an extension of the politics of the left"'. Searle goes on: 'There seems to be no answer to the question, "What is to be done with those constituencies which do not happen to agree... that social transformation is the primary goal of education?" What indeed?' 25 The main point, then, to be made about recent and apparently radical proposals for the reform of English is that they incorporate a recognition that there are constraints or limits to be placed on the knowledge produced by a discipline. 24 25

Steven C o n n o r , Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford, 1992), 15. John Searle, 'The Storm over the University', New York Review of Books (6 Dec. 1990). 35-

49

50


To use the terminology we introduced at the beginning of this chapter, it is conceded, albeit inadvertently, that disciplines are not simply concerned to accumulate knowledge, but that the knowledge so accumulated must be directed towards some end or goal. So although Belsey and Eagleton would probably not accept such a conclusion, it is nevertheless implicit in their work that, in Douglas Tallack's words, choices do have to be made between rival theories; and that those choices cannot simply be made on an individual or arbitrary basis. Even radical critics of English studies do not seem able to envisage a discipline which does not embody the same or similar structures as existing disciplines of knowledge. There is, however, a further problem hidden in Belsey's and Eagleton's proposals and once more it relates to their definitions of the function of literary criticism in terms of 'political intervention' or 'human emancipation'. We have already suggested that these definitions represent a tacit acknowledgement that some kind of limits do have to be placed on disciplines of knowledge; we also suggested that even as principles of limitation they present problems: either they act as narrow political constraints, or they are so general as to be barely constraints at all. Another way in which they raise difficulties concerns their relationship to the criteria of social utility and specialization which, as we suggested at the beginning of this chapter, form part of the social and intellectual preconditions for the foundation of disciplines of knowledge. In order to see precisely where these problems lie, it is necessary to examine these criteria further and explain how they operate. A useful starting point is provided by the work of sociologists, since their descriptions of the preconditions and processes involved in the institutionalization and professionalization of knowledge provide an instructive contrast with the assumptions made by many academics within English studies, in particular those of Belsey and Eagleton. Sociologists have tended to insist upon a distinction between the social processes which bring about the establishment of a discipline of knowledge, and the social functions to which the knowledge in that discipline is subsequently put. In the second category, the notion of social utility


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is particularly important. Significantly the treatment of the concept of social utility by many historians and critics in English has involved collapsing it into a notion of political activity. So, for example, once again Terry Eagleton has recently argued: The question of the uses of theory... is in the first place a political rather than intellectual one. Literary critics do not in my view divide most importantly between those who are enthusiastic about theory and those who regard it as the final death rattle of the Free World. They divide, rather, between those who understand what Walter Benjamin meant when he declared that there was no document of civilisation which was not also a record of barbarism, and those who do not... A materialist criticism is one which seeks to... remind culture of its criminal parentage. What method, theory, approach or technique it employs for these ends is an entirely secondary matter.26 The consequence of such a view is that political functions become the only means of describing the uses of disciplinary knowledge; indeed they become its explanatory principle. Just such a process lies behind both Belsey's and Eagleton's proposals that' political intervention' and ' human emancipation' should be the declared goals of literary or cultural criticism. However, the equation of 'use' with 'politics' scarcely addresses the complex elements in what is generally understood by the term 'social utility'. Sociologists understand the concept of social utility, at least in so far as it affects the professions, in a very precise way. While it is true that most general sociological accounts of the professions are complex,27 and that literary historians and critics interested in the professional structure of universities have encountered special problems in applying to them categories derived 26 27

T e r r y E a g l e t o n , The Significance of Theory (Oxford, 1990), 3 2 - 3 . For some examples of the large body of sociological work devoted to the professions, see the edition of Daedalus, 92 (1963) devoted to the professions; A. H. Halsey and M. A. Trow, The British Academics (London, 1971) ;J. A.Jackson (ed.), Professions and Professionalization (London, 1970); M . S . Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: a Sociological Analysis (London, 1970); G. Millerson, The Qualifying Associations: a Study in Professionalization (London, 1964); Talcot Parsons, 'Professions' in D. L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, xn (London, 1968), 536-47; Reader, Professional Men; WilliamJ. Goode, 'Community within a Community: the Professions', American Sociological Review, 22 (1957), 194-200; Philip Elliott, The Sociology of the Professions (London, 1962); Andrew Abbott, 'Status and Strain in the Professions', American Journal of Sociology, 86 (1981), 819-35.

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principally from the study of the professions, nevertheless there is enough common ground for us to be able to discriminate fairly precisely what is meant by the term 'social utility', and to characterize it in such a way as to make it quite distinct from the idea of a political function. The sociological framework which has been proposed by Bernard Barber is particularly useful in this respect so long as we use it with the caution which he advises.28 Barber lists what he considers to be the four major attributes of professions: a high degree of generalized and systematic knowledge; primary orientation to the community interest rather than to individual selfinterest ; a high degree of self-control of behaviour through codes of ethics internalized in the process of work socialization and through voluntary associations organized and operated by the work specialists themselves; and a system of rewards (monetary and honorary) that is primarily a set of symbols of work achievement and thus ends in themselves, not means to some end of individual self-interest.29 To these we may also add the emphasis placed by Everett Hughes on the 'esoteric' nature of the professions' services, and upon the professional claim that these services depend upon some branch of knowledge to which the professionals are privy by virtue of long study and by initiation and apprenticeship under masters already members of the profession.30 It is in relation to all of these attributes that the criterion of social utility is to be understood. Many critics of English studies, however, have tended to focus on only one of them, the proposition that knowledge should be of use to a community; and in so doing they seem to have assumed that social utility is measured solely in terms of the ways in which knowledge satisfies the needs of a particular interest group (which is the usual way in which these 28

29

B e r n a r d Barber, ' S o m e Problems in t h e Sociology of Professions', Daedalus, 92 (1963), 669—88. T h e s e caveats a r e : t h a t professionalization is ' a l w a y s a m a t t e r of degree'; and that the particular aspects which he describes, by virtue of being based on twentieth-century American examples, have only an approximate relevance to different cultures and different times. To claim therefore that Barber provides a framework with which to understand the present nature of disciplines is not to imply a blueprint for all future disciplines. On the contrary: sociologists, including Barber, have also been keen to criticize the processes which they describe. They have noted, for example, the negative consequences of the exclusivity of disciplines. 30 Ibid., 672. Everett H u g h e s , 'Professions', Daedalus, 92 (1963), 6 5 5 - 6 7 .


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critics understand the term 'community'). 31 However, there are many forms of knowledge which do indeed serve the needs of interest groups and which are not established as disciplines of knowledge; a good if simple example is that of philately, a body of knowledge highly valued by an interest group, but of negligible social utility. It might of course be objected that the interests which critics such as Belsey and Eagleton have in mind are explicitly political ones, in particular those political interests which can be identified with an academic establishment or a particular group within it. But in general terms it is difficult to see how, say, medical knowledge (considered in toto) or geographical knowledge (considered in toto) could serve one particular political interest (whether or not identified with academic institutions) better than any other interest. Of course particular aspects of the knowledge produced by any one discipline may sometimes be put to political uses, and such knowledge may in practice benefit relatively few members of the population. However this observation does not imply that a political interest was solely responsible for the foundation of that discipline in the first place. Moreover that the knowledge produced by any particular discipline can be (and often has been) put to various political uses, without ever threatening the status of the discipline as a whole, tends to controvert any such simple thesis. It is clear from all this that the criterion of social utility is more complex than many critics and historians of English studies have been prepared to concede. Indeed the most significant attribute of the professions as far as the notion of social utility is concerned is that of specialization. An important element in the evaluation of professional knowledge is the perception that it is restricted to a specific group of practitioners - to specialists; such knowledge is recognized to be of the kind that the general public can no longer acquire. Of course, it goes without saying that the existence of such restrictions and exclusions, even if they are not in themselves inherently political, 31

There are some other problems with this interpretation of the concept of 'community', especially when it is used in relation to the value-judgements in the discipline. See chapter 3.

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may still have political implications. They may, for example, be used to justify the exclusion of particular groups of the population, such as working-class men, or, more recently, women and ethnic minorities, from academic life. But again this concession does not mean that the knowledge produced in a discipline is inherently political, nor does it entail defining the professions entirely in terms of their political functions. If we all possessed the specialist knowledge of, say, architects or surveyors, there would be no use or need for the professions of architecture or surveying; conversely, it is precisely because we all do not, or rather cannot, possess such knowledge that these professions do exist, and are valued. The complexity of the concept of social utility lies, then, in its simultaneous relationship to both general and specialist criteria. The general criterion concerns the recognition that, in a discipline such as medicine, social utility depends not on the particular value of, say, embryo research to infertile couples, but rather on a general agreement that knowledge of human illness, its symptoms, aetiology and treatment is important to the survival of us all. To use the terms we employed before, it is the utility of medical knowledge in toto which justifies the existence of the medical sciences. The specialist criterion concerns the companion recognition that human illness is so complex and diverse a subject that it requires a specially trained person to investigate it - a specialist, that is, in medical knowledge. Indeed the special training and formal examinations which we have alluded to exist not simply to enable the professions to safeguard their specialist knowledge; they also exist to ensure that the professions maintain certain standards of expertise which are vital to the retaining of public respect. A clearer example of the complexities involved in the concept of social utility, and one which we have used before, is provided by economics. The social utility of the discipline of economics exists in a general recognition that economic activity represents an important aspect of our lives; more specifically, its utility exists in the ability of the discipline to influence, and at times determine, economic policy. But such a function of economic knowledge in turn rests upon a perception that it is highly specialized;


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economic knowledge is the property of the economist and is not available to the general public. To put this point in general terms: the perception that a discipline possesses a degree of general or overall social utility is directly related to the perception that the knowledge a discipline produces is highly specialized and restricted. Moreover, it is the complex interrelatedness of these two criteria - utility and specialization which makes it difficult to describe the foundation of disciplines of knowledge solely in terms of political interests. The distinction which we have been drawing between social processes and social functions can be made clearer by examples drawn from the present day. Contemporary controversies over the uses of some kinds of medical research are a case in point. Parliamentary debates about embryo research clearly indicate that discussion about the uses of highly specialized medical knowledge will inevitably have a significant political dimension. However it only makes sense for that knowledge to have a political significance after it has gained intellectual prestige: in this case, after it has been proved that embryo research is intellectually coherent and that it 'works'. Such a distinction is one based in common sense: there would, after all, be little point in debating the ethics of research which had no likelihood of ever becoming a practice. The distinction between the intellectual and social conditions for the establishment of a discipline and its subsequent functions (sometimes political) is of exactly the same kind, and it was one as widely recognized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it is today.32 As we have indicated, the first and fundamental intellectual condition for the founding of a discipline of knowledge concerns the specialized nature of the knowledge it produces. That concept of specialism is in turn posited on an agreement about a discrete or autonomous object of study, and on an agreement about the practices appropriate to explaining it. The second intellectual condition concerns the social utility of the discipline, and, as we have argued, that utility is directly related to the specialist nature of the knowledge produced. The problem with 32

Indeed some of the clearest evidence for such a situation is to be found in the history of the foundation of the discipline of English. See chapter 6.

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the proposals of Belsey and Eagleton is that to define the study of literature only in terms of the political functions which it might possess (or have possessed) is to invoke a notion of utility so general as to dissolve the grounds upon which that study could ever enjoy disciplinary status. In what sense, for example, could knowledge of politics - defined as 'political intervention' or 'human emancipation' - ever require a specialism?33

II

MULTIGULTURALISM AND THE CANON

The proposals for the reform of English studies in Britain by radical critics such as Eagleton and Belsey are clearly underwritten by 'leftist' politics. Such a politics might be contested by, for example, the ' non-leftists' referred to by Searle, who are as numerous in Britain as in the United States. The political correctness of these positions is not, however, our concern. Rather we have argued that attempts to ground a new discipline in politics in the manner of Eagleton and Belsey (and whether those politics are of the left or of the right is irrelevant) are illjudged because they fail to fulfil the social criteria for the establishing of disciplines of knowledge - the criteria of social utility and specialization. In the United States debates about the reform of English teaching have taken a different turn. There the question of politics has usually been posed not in terms of some abstract ideals such as human emancipation or political intervention, but rather in the more concrete form of debates about multiculturalism and the canon. The structure of American higher education is quite different from that in Britain. Until very recently a far greater proportion of the youth of America attended higher education than their counterparts in Britain. Designed to be comprehensive and more representative than in Britain, American higher education is much more broadly based. Single-subject specialization comes at a later stage in American students' careers than that of their 33

It is interesting in this respect to note that the discipline of political science is very precise about the ways in which it defines politics. That definition relates to the mechanisms and institutions of power, in particular, those of government, knowledge of which can justifiably be described as requiring a specialism.


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British counterparts - typically at postgraduate level. This emphasis on a generalist undergraduate education means that in the United States literary studies are usually taught as part of a humanities or liberal-arts course; they do not, as in Britain, comprise virtually the totality of an undergraduate degree programme. Hence questions about the autonomy of English studies (its status, that is, as a specialist discipline) are neither as visible nor as pressing in the United States as they are in Britain. Neither are the institutional consequences at all comparable. In Britain, for example, proposals which collapse English studies into cultural studies have an obvious consequence - the merging of what are currently two distinct departments offering very different undergraduate courses. In American universities, English studies does not in practice possess the same autonomy. A good example of this difference is given in the teaching programme set out by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom's canon of texts has of course been bitterly criticized by a number of prominent American academics, mainly on political grounds. But none of his critics has seriously questioned the institutional practicality of implementing his programme. In Britain, however, Bloom's canon (whether or not it is desirable on its own terms) would simply be unthinkable. Undergraduate degree courses in British institutions of higher education are not structured in a way which can encompass the interdisciplinary teaching which Bloom's eclectic choice of texts - political, literary, historical - requires.34 The generalist character of American undergraduate programmes is partly driven by economic pressures. The most costeffective method of teaching large numbers of students is held to be by modularization — a process which militates against specialist teaching. Topics are taught in discrete classes (or modules) over a limited number of weeks. Such prescriptions naturally have implications for the range and detail with which a given topic is taught. Considerations of cost also dictate that 34

In Britain the nearest comparison to America is cross-faculty teaching in three subjects, such as politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, and joint honours in other universities. But these courses are still rooted in co-operation between autonomous disciplines. Invariably each discipline makes an individual judgement of a student.

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anthologies are the most practical texts for such discrete courses. Indeed the development of new course modules is often dependent upon the availability of a relevant anthology. So, for example, Henry Louis Gates's recent enthusiasm for the new Norton anthology of Afro-American literature is in part to be attributed to his perception that Once [the] anthology is published, no one will ever again be able to use the unavailability of black texts as an excuse not to teach our literature. A well-marketed anthology - particularly a Norton anthology - functions in the academy to create a tradition, as well as to define and preserve it. A Norton anthology opens up a literary tradition as simply as opening the cover of a carefully edited and ample book.35 Here Gates makes very clear that the use of an anthology fixes the canon in a particularly visible and inflexible way. The anthology literally is the canon; embodying particular, and perhaps arbitrary values, it provides a reading of culture and of literary history which is difficult in practical terms for students (or indeed tutors) to contest.36 It is also worth noting Gates's passing reference to the economics of publishing. Given the large readership for anthologies, it is clear that canon-formation is partly informed by non-academic criteria. Proposals for an alternative anthology (and therefore for an alternative canon) will have to satisfy the commercial instincts of the publishing world - a new anthology must represent a canon which the market can bear.37 In Britain (except perhaps in the case of poetry) anthologies are much less often used in higher education. For example, in an 35

36

37

See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 'Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the AfroAmerican Tradition: from the Seen to the Told', in Houston A. Baker, J r and Patricia Redmond (eds.), Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990J (Chicago, 1989), 37Barbara Herrnstein Smith has also commented on the evaluative function of anthologies:' anthologies... may be taken as a metaphor for the operation of various social determinants of literary value. The recommendation of value represented by the repeated inclusion of a particular work in anthologies of "great poetry" not only promotes but goes some distance towards creating the value of that work' (Barbara Herrnstein Smith, The Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 10). The fact that Norton are willing to finance an anthology of Afro-American literature is significant; whether the publisher would have been as enthusiastic over proposals for, say, an anthology of New Zealand immigrant writing in English is a moot point.


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undergraduate course in a British university on, say, Renaissance literature, students would be asked to acquire single and complete texts of most, if not all, of the works studied. Such a custom means that, in practice, there is more scope for flexibility in the teaching of canonical texts. Flexibility is further increased because the choice of individual works is left to individual institutions and to individual teachers within those institutions. (Indeed tutorial, or small group, teaching practised at Oxford and Cambridge, and at institutions modelled on them, has famously encouraged the widest kind of eclecticism.) So a course on, say, modernism in two British universities could teach the works of quite different writers (James Joyce rather than Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson rather than D. H. Lawrence, H. D. rather than Pound, and so on). Moreover tutors in any single department, especially in the larger institutions, will also often teach quite different canons.38 It is for these reasons that polemic about changes in the canon (in, for example, Tony Pinkney's complaints about the narrowness of the canon taught at Oxford, quoted earlier), has sometimes fallen on deaf ears. Of course this is not to deny that in Britain some tutors (and some courses) still tenaciously adhere to a narrowly defined canon of works, and that in so doing they have attracted criticism as vehement as that in the United States. The significant distinction is that in Britain, unlike the United States, it is possible to accommodate disagreements about the canon at a local level (that of the individual institution). So, for example, in a British university the inclusion of, say, more women writers on a course on nineteenth-century fiction in practice presents few difficulties. As Belsey's and Eagleton's accounts demonstrate, British critics pressing for reform in A further point worth noting is that the use of anthologies also pre-empts any practical choice about bibliographical matters. For example, a part of any undergraduate Shakespeare course in Britain would be devoted to studying the merits of different contemporary editions and the role which editors play in producing texts. In practical terms this might involve a tutor in university X recommending the Penguin edition of The Tempest and the Oxford edition of King Lear, and a tutor in university Y recommending the opposite. The use of an anthology not only prevents such flexibility, but tends to give students the false impression that such matters are fixed and uncontentious.

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English studies tend to discuss canon-formation in the abstract. They argue for a principled extension (or, more accurately, a dissolution) of the canon, rather than focusing (as in contemporary American controversies) on the details of which groups and interests a canon ought to represent. So in Britain the issue of canon-formation has not been debated so publicly as it has in the United States, and is therefore not at the centre of debates about the teaching of literature in the way that is familiar to American academics.39 The last and probably the most important reason for the different nature of debates about reform in Britain and the United States concerns the different impact which the issue of multiculturalism has had. It is certainly true that the politics of multiculturalism has affected canon-formation in both Britain and the United States, but in America it has acquired a prominence unknown in Britain (and, indeed, in the whole of Europe). The explanation of this is that multiculturalism in itself (divorced, that is, from its effect on the teaching of literature) is a much more dominant issue in American politics. This phenomenon in turn has its origins in the different history and demography of the United States. Multiculturalism is an issue which goes well beyond the walls of the academy. It involves fundamental ideas about rights - equality and the law, housing, welfare, equal employment opportunities, and so on. So its higher political prominence in the United States is easily accounted for. In America ethnic diversity exists on a much larger scale than in Britain; demographically, rather than politically or economically, it will soon be difficult to identify one dominant group within American society. In Britain the reverse is true. There ethnicity is still seen in terms of a small number of minority groups (defined demographically as well as politically and economically) on the margins of a large and historically well-entrenched host culture. So the politics of 39

Interestingly, the recent adoption by the British government of a national curriculum may alter this situation; for example, there has very recently been a public disagreement between Terence Hawkes, Professor of English at Cardiff University, and the present secretary of state for education, John Patten, over the canonical status of Shakespeare in schools. See Jennie Brookman,' Canon-fire over Shakespeare Texts', Times Higher Education Supplement, no. 1037 (18 Sept. 1992), 1.


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multiculturalism in Britain have also historically taken a different (and much less prominent) form.40 Indeed it is not an accident that the most bitter controversies about multiculturalism and education in America have taken place at Stanford University; California is one of the most ethnically diverse states in the union, and one where the issues in multiculturalism have been most fiercely debated. 41 As the Stanford example shows, the politics of multiculturalism are larger than the local debates taking place in literature departments; it is those politics which inform what happens in universities and curricula, rather than the other way round. The historical congruence between campaigns for political representation and curriculum reform in America may make the connection between the politics of multiculturalism and canon-formation in literary studies seem self-evident — indeed even necessary. The most obvious examples concern the relationship between the civil-rights movement and complaints about the absence of black writers on literature courses; or the relationship between the feminist movement and pressure for women's writing to be more fully represented; or the relationship between gay activism in the 1980s and the rise of gay criticism.42 However, little attention has been given to the question of precisely how such large-scale political movements bring about changes in a canon of literary texts. The apparently self-evident Tightness of multiculturalism has led some American critics to be careless of the details of the relationship between politics and canons in much the same way as Eagleton's and Belsey's commitment to abstract ideas such as human emancipation or political intervention led them to be careless of the relationship between politics and disciplinary knowledge. 40

41

42

The most prominent issues in multicultural politics in contemporary Britain have concerned pressure for state-funded Muslim schools; and, in the wake of the Rushdie affair, pressure for reform to the laws on blasphemy to include Islam as well as Christianity. For a brief summary of the details of the Stanford controversy, see John Searle in 'The Storm over the University'. For a fuller account of the historical relationship between various campaigns for political representation - that is, civil-rights movement, feminism and gay politics and pressures for curricula reform see Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York,

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How might the connection between multiculturalism and canon-formation actually work? Proposals (whether American or British) to expand the canon in order to encompass the ethnic diversity identified by multiculturalism presuppose a necessary relationship between literature and nationalism, one where the primary (and perhaps defining) function of the canon is to represent a national identity, and where the primary function of teaching literature (within both schools and universities) is to socialize students into their culture. These assumptions (which are rarely articulated, let alone examined) appear to derive from the institutional contexts in which literature is (and has been) taught. In Britain, for example, it is significant that universities most often contain English43 (or French, or Italian, or German) departments, but not literature departments ;44 and that they offer degree courses in English (or French, or Italian, or German) literature, but not courses simply on literature. Furthermore, within an English department in a British university, the majority of works taught are by writers native to the British Isles.45 Such a situation dovetails neatly with the particular nature of British (or indeed European) nationalism - namely, that it is based upon the identification of a specific people which is historically, linguistically and geographically defined. On the other hand, American nationalism is postulated on an adherence to a set of abstract ideals embodied in the American constitution; anyone who holds to these ideals (regardless of their ethnicity) can in principle (although not, as immigration laws demonstrate, in practice) become an American. As Allan Bloom has polemically argued, 'Americans were, in effect, told that they could be whatever they wanted to be or 43

44

45

I n discussions of nationalism the term English stands for British - a practice which is clearly political. A n exception to this general rule is to be found in t h e (relatively few) d e p a r t m e n t s of comparative literature in British universities. There is an important caveat to add here. Some Irish-born writers are regularly taught. Examples include Wilde and Shaw. Such figures have traditionally been thought of as possessing an honorary English status on the grounds that they spent much of their lives living or working in that country. Interestingly, there have recently been attempts to reappropriate them for their native cultures. So, for example, the Field Day Anthology (discussed in note 48) includes Wilde and Shaw under the generic heading of'London exiles'.


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happened to be as long as they recognized that the same applied to all other men and they were willing to support and defend the government that guaranteed that dispensation. It is possible to become an American in a day.' 46 The reference to Bloom is apposite here, for the quotation occurs in his controversial Closing of the American Mind — a work in which questions of nationalism and the curriculum are seen as necessarily intertwined. The issue, for Bloom, is not the teaching of literature as such, but rather what constitutes a liberal education, and it is in response to this question that he proposes his controversial canon: Plato, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Heidegger, and so on. As we suggested above, in British eyes, this eclecticism seems institutionally odd, not least because it encompasses writers whose nationality would normally despatch them to separate courses (and departments) in British universities. However, the (to British eyes) unusual composition of American undergraduate programmes - that, for instance, courses may often encompass ethnically and indeed nationally distinct writers may derive from the particular nature of American nationalism: that American-ness is defined in relation to a set of abstract ideals, rather than a specific, geographically located people. In practice, there is obviously some kind of connection between the canon and nationalism. However, there is no evidence that the relationship is either determining or necessary. Proposals for canon reform which assume such a necessary relationship between the canon and nationalism merely on the basis of current institutional practice are seriously weakened by 46

Bloom goes on to illustrate the distinctive nature of American-ness by reference to European (in particular French) nationalism: 'It is, however, impossible, or it was until only yesterday, to become a Frenchman, for a Frenchman is a complex harmony, or dissonance, of historic echoes, from birth on ... In America there are in principle no real outsiders, while in France persons who, although citizens, are marginal to this tradition, for example, Jews, have always had to think hard about what it is they belong to. In France, the Jew's relation to what is constitutively French is a great and complex literary theme... A Jew in America, by contrast, is as American as anyone; and if he is singled out or treated differently, unconditional outrage is the appropriate response' (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 53). The reasons for the situation he describes relate to the different demographic patterns in the two countries mentioned above: the greater ethnic diversity in America has made it difficult for an American identity to be predicated of any particular group.

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the fact that it is only an assumption. Indeed, if there are no prima facie reasons why a literary canon must represent nationality, and if it is not self-evidently true that the aim of teaching literature is only to socialize students, then it is possible to reject the multiculturalist position by suggesting alternative criteria for canon-formation which have nothing to do with nationalism. It is perhaps worth noting here that certain accounts of the history of English studies in Britain may seem to strengthen the multiculturalist premise by grounding the relationship between the canon and nationalism in history. For example, it has been observed that the institutionalization of the canon in late nineteenth-century Britain coincided with the rise of British nationalism - events which have led some historians to posit a causal (and therefore political) relationship between canonformation and nationalist politics. However, even if this interpretation were correct (and we shall suggest in chapter 6 that it is not), it does not provide any evidence for a necessary relationship between the canon and nationalism. To be fully persuasive, what the multiculturalist position requires, then, is a principled argument about why the canon ought to represent a national identity. Given that such a case could be made (and accepted), how can multiculturalist politics be put into practice in canon-formation? Here another sort of problem comes about. Is it in fact possible to construct a canon faithful to the ideals of multicultural politics? The central issue concerns the compatibility of the concept of canonicity (which by definition must be selective, hierarchical and evaluative) and the politics of multiculturalism (which claim to be inclusive, non-hierarchical and relativist). Logically, a canon cannot represent every group (and thereby fulfil the demands of multiculturalism) and still be a canon. In Canons and Contexts, Paul Lauter has glimpsed precisely these problems: Formulating the case for pluralism simply by asserting the value of representation obscures what is in question. For how can any canon be fully representative? Even if one ignores the problem of room at the inn - and I would be the last to deny that in anthologies, curricula, and literary histories this is a problem, though not always insuperable - do not the very processes of canonization necessarily reflect the

The nature of disciplinary knowledge-

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structures of social and political power and thus embed in their product an unrepresentative, if widened, set of texts organized even at best along hierarchical lines? Does it not follow, then, that the goal must be to abolish canons altogether and to substitute, rather, the authority of various individual or ethnic group experiences freed from the constraints of any official discipline? 47 There are some local contradictions about representation in Lauter's case which he appears not to notice. For example, if a multicultural canon is unrepresentative, what guarantees can there be about the representativeness of' ethnic group experiences ' — representative of which members of that group, one might wish to ask. But these caveats aside, the fundamental conundrum which Lauter isolates is profoundly disturbing. When applied rigorously, multiculturalism must lead to the complete dissolution of the canon. But the alternative, individual choices which embody no hierarchical values, by definition debars itself from academic study. Multiculturalism's potentially limitless object of study is problematic in exactly the same way as the object of study invoked by Eagleton and Belsey. Their prescriptions for 'human emancipation' and 'political intervention' were also in practice unteachable. Lauter's account lays bare in an arresting way the logical consequences of canon reform based on the politics of multiculturalism. One reason for what appears to be a general reluctance to acknowledge the paradox he describes may be because it is one inherent in multiculturalism itself; and to acknowledge it at source is to jeopardize larger projects than those of teaching literature. Despite explicitly propagandizing representedness, multicultural politics typically operates selectively in that it does not advocate political (or cultural) representation for every minority group in society. So much is evident from the semantics of the term 'multicultural' itself. To employ it presupposes a non-negotiable and limited group of categories for differentiating between people — generally, those based on race, class, gender and occasionally religion. In this sense multiculturalism draws only some hinds of groups to our attention; meanwhile it steadfastly ignores others. What it 47

See Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts, 158.

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proposes is thus a species of false pluralism. This limitation has a pragmatic dimension; in both public policy decisions and academic arguments about curricula and canon-formation, representation is generally limited to the most visible and vocal of minority groups, historically women and African-Americans.48 The logic of the ' pure' multicultural argument, then, is that the canon is disabled, and the works which it proposes to put in the place of the canon are non-hierarchical and thus potentially infinitely diverse. Although they are responding to quite different institutional practices, American reforms thus encounter exactly the same kind of problems as their British counterparts: they cannot be theorized, taught or examined. In short the body of knowledge which multicultural reformers propose cannot be accommodated within disciplinary structures. Hence, although the local details of the programmes to politicize literary studies in the United States and Britain are quite distinct, their overall consequences are the same. Eagleton, Belsey, the polemicists for cultural studies in Britain and American advocates of multiculturalism all claim authority for their proposed reforms by appealing to a value-free or valueneutral study of texts. We have argued that Eagleton's and Belsey's proposals contain hidden political values; what constitutes 'human emancipation', as we suggested, can be disputed. In a similar way, the practical application of multicultural 48

A striking illustration of these dilemmas occurred in the recent publication of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991). The aim of the anthology was to recharacterize Irish writing in a way which contested narrow definitions of Irish nationalism. The editors claimed that their anthology was much more representative than previous anthologies. Indeed, the general editor, Seamus Deane, argued that the very comprehensiveness of the anthology allowed the processes underlying canon-formation and nationalism to be revealed. Deane paradoxically claimed to be deconstructing the process of canonization while at the same time the anthology, by virtue of being selective, was willy-nilly constructing another canon - precisely the contradiction isolated by Lauter. Interestingly reviewers were quick to pick up this contradiction; much of the controversy that surrounded the publication of the Field Day Anthology centred on the discrepancy between the editorial claim for comprehensiveness and the perceived biases of many of its actual choices. The underrepresentation of women writers was the main area of contention; many critics objected that gender was not among the categories for differentiating between the groups represented. See, for example, Ailbhe Smyth, 'A Quarter for One Half, Fortnight (Oct. 1992), 50.

The nature of disciplinary knowledge programmes also entails hidden political values, for the only way they can be implemented in institutions of higher education is by being partial or selective: by, that is, deploying exactly the same kind of political value-judgements which they claim to be rejecting.

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CHAPTER 3

Authority and value

Current debates about the status or authority of English and literary studies have at their centre a controversy about the nature and function of value in literary judgements. Indeed a dissatisfaction with the value-judgements embodied in 'traditional ' literary criticism has been the point of departure in programmes for reforming the discipline. A critique of value, that is, provides the fundamental rationale for change. We have argued that these programmes for reform in both Britain and the United States take no account of the general conditions (intellectual and social) for the establishment of disciplines of knowledge. A more fundamental question is whether or not such reforms are needed in English studies in the first place; or rather, whether the critiques of value which underwrite proposals for reform are themselves valid. There are two main issues involved. The first concerns the correctness of the description of the values allegedly embodied in English - more specifically, the claim that all literary judgements are value-judgements, and that all value-judgements in English are ideological or political. Our suggestion will be that literary judgements are indeed value-laden, but that they also have a basis in fact, and the values which they embody are not simply ideological. The second issue is whether the presence of value-judgements in English (or literary) disciplines is a justification for reforming them. How does English compare with other disciplines of knowledge in respect of its valuejudgements? We shall suggest that the problem of value is a problem of knowledge per se- a variety of what Arthur C. Danto has called an uberhaupt problem, and not one exclusive to 68

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any particular discipline. Is it really the case that the kind of knowledge produced in the discipline is dependent upon a specific kind of value, and that the nature of that value produces particular kinds of problems? I

F A C T S AND V A L U E S

Discussion of the role of value in knowledge has been a preoccupation of philosophy for over a hundred years, and is often characterized as the problem of the ' fact/value dichotomy'. A general concern with the relationship between fact and value in knowledge is of course of a much older ancestry. Our interest, however, is with the crystallization of that discussion into a more formal debate in the late nineteenth century. This debate coincided with, and was perhaps prompted by, changes in the organization of knowledge which took place around the same time - by, that is, the processes of specialization and professionalization described in the previous chapter. More specifically, the debate arose as a reaction to the pervasive influence of positivism, and in particular to the positivist assumption that facts and values could be separated absolutely: that fact belongs to the domain of explanation and that value belongs to that of understanding. This distinction between explanation and understanding was typically used to prescribe the conditions for disciplines of knowledge in that facts were assumed to have an objective existence which made them a proper object of study, whereas values were considered to be subjective and, for that reason, were to be eliminated as far as possible from disciplines. Such an argument in turn allowed disciplines of knowledge to be arranged into a hierarchy depending upon the extent to which they were thought to be free from 'contamination' by values. In this view the paradigmatic examples of' perfect' disciplines were taken to be the natural sciences, and the least ' perfect' were the social sciences and the humanities disciplines, especially English studies. Indeed, the debates about the founding of the discipline of English (in both British and American universities) in the late nineteenth century had at their centre precisely this fact/value

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dichotomy. So one reason for the initial choice of philology as the basis of the new discipline was because it was considered to deal exclusively with facts; philology, that is, purportedly did not involve value-judgements in the way that literary criticism manifestly did.1 However, at around the time that philologists and literary critics were arguing over the shape of their infant discipline, some philosophers began to challenge the very view of disciplinary knowledge which had dictated the terms of their argument. The most prominent of these was the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, and his challenge has been continued to the present day in the tradition of hermeneutic criticism which his work inaugurated, a tradition in which philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur are prominent figures.2 The main distinction between the arguments of Dilthey and those of his modern successors is that although Dilthey challenged the hierarchical arrangement of disciplines of knowledge, he none the less accepted that there is a fundamental difference between the Naturwissenschaften (broadly speaking, in Anglo-Saxon tradition, the natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (again, broadly speaking, the social sciences). Dilthey defended the status of the Geisteswissenschaften on the grounds that they yielded a special kind of knowledge - a knowledge different from, but equally valuable as that produced by the Naturwissenschaften. Dilthey, then, accepted that positivism could constitute the basis for the natural sciences, but argued that this was not a reason for suggesting that it was the only paradigm for disciplinary 1

2

For details of the processes in Britain, see chapter 6; for the American example, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, The Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), I7-I9It ought to be pointed out here that modern hermeneutics, as it is represented by these figures, does not involve the same issues as 'classical' hermeneutics. The main concern of classical hermeneutics is with the theory and practice of interpretation, more precisely with the vexed relationship of the part to the whole. It is concerned, that is, with the limitations to, or contingent nature of, historical knowledge. In contrast, modern (or philosophical) hermeneutics is concerned with epistemology, that is the grounds upon which any knowledge of the past is possible. The figure generally credited with inaugurating this broadening of hermeneutics, from a concern with local problems of exegesis to an interest in elaborating the general principles of understanding, is Friedrich Schleiermacher.

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knowledge. The strategy of more recent critics has been rather different. In contrast to Dilthey, Gadamer, for example, has argued that positivism cannot provide an epistemology for any discipline of knowledge - the natural sciences included. In Gadamer's view, the paradigm for all knowledge is rather to be found in the Geisteswissenschqften. Within them the individual mind (the perceiving subject) had been held to be part of the object of study in a way that was purportedly not true of the natural sciences, where the observer was usually thought to be distinct from what was observed. The novelty of Gadamer's insight lay in his suggestion that the relationship between subject and object, which had previously distinguished the Geisteswissenschaften by giving the knowledge in those disciplines a special character, was in reality a condition of all knowledge, and therefore of all disciplines.3 In Gadamer's work, then, the authority — and thus the status — of the social-science disciplines (and, by extension, of the humanities, too) is restored, not by revaluing the knowledge they produced, but rather by eliding the differences between what had hitherto been seen as two distinct kinds of knowledge. Gadamer, in other words, shifted the debate about fact and value from the level of methodology alone to that of epistemology.4 This emphasis on the epistemological dimension of value-judgements has had a decisive impact on how the issue of authority in disciplines of knowledge is perceived, and the disputes which we have described in the previous chapter can be clarified by reference to it. Although the relationship between fact and value has been discussed for a long time in philosophical thought, systematic 3

4

In this respect it is significant that Gadamer, unlike Dilthey, did not base his analysis of the Geisteswissenschaften solely on an examination of economics, political science, sociology and anthropology. Instead he extended the category to include the humanities and, indeed, developed his argument mainly from interpretations of works of art and literature. The problems which result from these different views about what disciplines of knowledge the Geisteswissenschaften encompass are discussed below. Another way of understanding this shift is in terms of Gadamer's concern with ' philosophical hermeneutics' rather than with ' theoretical hermeneutics'; that is, he is interested in discovering what is common to all modes of understanding rather than elaborating a general theory of interpretation. For a cogent discussion of the difference between these two objectives see Joel Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory (New Haven, 1991), 24-40.

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debate over the role of value-judgements in English departments is a relatively recent phenomenon.5 One reason for this situation may be that until the work of Gadamer, debate about the fact/value dichotomy did not make any explicit reference to the humanities, and so practitioners in those disciplines did not consider it to have much relevance to their work. The intellectual parochialism mentioned in chapter i ensured that the humanities in general (and English studies in particular) carried out their work immune from the ' large' debates about epistemology and methodology conducted in other disciplines. Generally speaking, these issues were, until relatively recently, the preoccupation, and thus the province, of the philosophy of science. Moreover, in Britain and the United States, this situation was exacerbated by a local cultural difference. It has been a tradition in Anglo-American thought to make a tripartite distinction between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. Continental thought, on the other hand, has tended to make only a binary distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences, where the humanities are included by implication in the latter category.6 In Germany and France, then, unlike in Britain and the United States, the relevance of debates in the philosophy of science to those in the humanities could be much more readily perceived, and Gadamer's use of humanities disciplines to discuss general questions of epistemology, although thought at the time to be innovative, was not considered particularly remarkable. However, by the early 1970s, the tendency in Britain and America to compartmentalize the humanities had begun to change. The gradual introduction of Gadamer's thought from the late 1960s onwards (the first major review of his work was by E. D. Hirsch in 1965) helped to bring about a shift of perspective in those countries.7 It cast new light on the relationship between the sciences and 5

6 7

Such a statement needs some qualification. The issue of value had been the focus of local disputes in English from as early as the 1930s; it did not, however, become a topic for general debate until the 1960s. Moreover, as we argue below, the way in which value is discussed in later debates is quite distinctive. See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford, 1983), 35. For the reception of Gadamer's Truth and Method in Britain and America, see Roy J. Howard, Three Faces of Hermeneutics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), xii-xiii.

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the humanities, with the important consequence (for the purposes of our argument) that the debate about fact and value, hitherto confined to the natural and social sciences, was now seen to have a bearing on English and literary studies. More particularly, that debate helped to recharacterize long-standing, if poorly articulated, local dissatisfactions with the values embodied in literaryjudgements. Objections in English studies to the value-laden nature of literary judgements have historically taken three forms. The first, dominant for over half of this century, is exemplified by the sharp exchanges which took place in the 1930s and 1950s between figures such as F. R. Leavis and Rene Wellek, and between F. W. Bateson and Leavis. One example, the exchange between Leavis and Bateson in the 1950s over the founding of the Oxford periodical, Essays in Criticism, will illustrate the nature and form of these early debates, and their difference from more recent controversies. In launching their new journal, the editorial board of Essays in Criticism, and Bateson in particular, were explicit about its aims: it was to provide an alternative kind of criticism to that practised by the contributors to the Cambridge publication, Scrutiny. In Bateson's view, the work of most of the contributors of Scrutiny suffered from what Bateson termed 'sheer subjectivism'. Bateson believed that this tendency could be countered, and literary judgements could therefore be made more rigorous, by a greater attention to scholarship, by which he meant ' factual' knowledge about the 'social context' of literary works; for Bateson, no literary judgement was possible without such 'scholarly knowledge'. It should be emphasized, however, that Bateson was not trying to eliminate value-judgements from the discipline; rather he was simply trying to make them more 'objective', and by implication, more authoritative. He wanted, that is, to provide a criterion by which literaryjudgements could be deemed right or wrong: A poem ... is not good or bad in itself but only in terms of the contexts in which it originated. For us to be able to use it, to live ourselves into it, the essential requirement is simply an understanding of those original contexts, and especially the original social context. A social

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order, as such, is necessarily the affirmation of certain values. In the social context, therefore, the values implied in the poem become explicit, and its relative goodness or badness declares itself. Because of itsfinaldependence on the setting of the poem within its social context the mere process of responsible reading includes the necessary valuejudgements.8 Leavis's main response was to point out that Bateson's proposals did not in fact offer the objective rigour he had claimed for them. The notion of a 'social context', Leavis argued, was only meaningful if some limits were placed upon it; but the placing of those limits (the employment of some principle of selection) involved the exercise of precisely those value-judgements (the 'subjectivism') which Bateson had claimed to be eliminating from the discipline: What is this 'complex of religious, political and economic factors that can be called the social context' [?]... How does one set to work to arrive at this final inclusive context[?]... Mr Bateson doesn't tell us, and doesn't begin to consider the problem ... All he could do ... would be to go on [taking random notes from his historical reading] more voluminously and industriously. For the total' social context' that he postulates is an illusion ...'Context', as something determinate is and can be, nothing but his postulate; the wider he goes in his ambition to construct it from his reading in the period, the more is it his construction (in so far as he produces anything more than a mass of heterogeneous information alleged to be relevant) ... The student who sets out in quest of such a ' context'... willfindthat the kind of context that expands indeterminately as he gets from his authorities what can be got contains curiously little significance — if significance is what, for a critic, illuminates a poem. And he may go on and on - indeterminately.9 At a general level, Leavis was rehearsing an argument familiar in hermeneutics: that any account of the past, because partial, is always a construction placed upon it. More particularly, he argued that it was a literary judgement which determined the relevance of the 'social context' to literary texts, and not, as Bateson seemed to be suggesting, the other way 8

F. W. Bateson, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' [Essays in Criticism, 3 (!953)> I~27)> quoted in F. R. Leavis, 'The Responsible Critic, or The Function of Criticism at Any Time (1953)', in F. R. Leavis (ed.), A Selection from Scrutiny 9 (Cambridge, 1968), 11, 294. Leavis, 'The Responsible Critic', 292.

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round. In his short and rather apologetic rejoinder, Bateson conceded the point; he noted that there were as many dangers in 'too subjective an approach' as there were in 'too much objectivity (the scholarship that is mere pedantry, to which I must often plead guilty) \ 1 0 At the time the dispute seemed to have been squarely resolved in Leavis's favour. However, the significance of the exchange lies not in the apparent 'victory' for 'subjectivism', but rather in the questions which the protagonists did not consider. Bateson's proposals only carry weight given an assumption that 'subjectivity' threatens the authority of literary criticism, and that, in order for English to maintain its intellectual (or academic) status, literary judgements have to be more 'rigorous' or 'objective'. However, this connection between the objectivity of literary judgements and their intellectual authority was one never actually addressed by Leavis. In fact Leavis only countered half of Bateson's proposition - the assumption that objective literary judgements are possible in the first instance. Leavis omitted to make a coherent argument for the intellectual authority of value-judgements in themselves. Leavis of course did make a strong argument for the authority of the particular values he believed literary judgements to embody, and which he took to be self-evident: 'if you don't see that literature matters for what really gives it importance, then no account you offer... can be anything but muddle and self-delusion'.11 But to argue for the prestige of literary criticism on these grounds is quite a different matter from arguing that value-judgements in themselves do not compromise the intellectual authority of English studies, and it was precisely this kind of answer that Bateson's original proposition properly required (although Bateson's rejoinder suggests that he did not fully realize it at the time). The Tightness or otherwise of Leavis's particular values is irrelevant to this more general question. The exchange between Leavis and Bateson is marked by a failure to relate the particular case of the value-judgements in English to the general case of value-judgements in disciplines of knowledge. 10 11

F. W. Bateson, 'Postscript', in F. R. Leavis (ed.), A Selection from Scrutiny, 316. Leavis, 'The Responsible Critic', 299.

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The pattern of the debate between Leavis and Bateson was repeated in the better-known disputes between New Critics such as Allan Tate, Yvor Winters and R. P. Blackmur, and contemporary American academic opinion. The New Critics rejected the assumptions of contemporary scholarship, particularly its claim to be scientific or 'objective'. In its place they promoted the explicitly evaluative practice of criticism, by arguing, like Leavis, that evaluation has to precede scholarship. Winters, for example, claimed that 'every writer that the scholar studies comes to him as the result of a critical judgment'. 12 The subsequent reputation of the New Critics followed a pattern similar to that of Leavis; in due course the values underlying their canon also came under attack. Moreover, they too failed to defend value-judgements on general grounds. However, it is precisely a willingness to engage with this general issue which distinguishes later objections to the value-laden nature of literary judgements. More recent debates, then, attempted to answer directly Bateson's original anxiety about the way in which value-judgements may compromise the authority of disciplinary knowledge. Although Leavis and the New Critics won their local arguments, their conception of English (or literary) studies did not convince for long. The second kind of objection to the valuejudgements embodied in English studies, that represented by structuralist critics, was partly motivated by a dissatisfaction with that conception of the discipline. Structuralists took as their point of departure Leavis's (and the New Critics') assumption that the connection between value and authority was self-evident and unproblematic. They held that the opposite case was true: that authority could only be guaranteed in the absence of value-judgements. Hence the popularity of structuralism with literary critics lay in its (illusory) promise of a scientific or objective (that is, purportedly value-free) study of texts; it appeared to restore prestige to English studies by offering a 'knowledge' of literary texts comparable to the 12

Winters, quoted in Rene Wellek, The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Brighton, 1982), 91. For a fuller account of the history of New Criticism, see Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, v (London, 1986).

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knowledge produced in the natural sciences.13 Indeed it is significant that many structuralists used the term ' scientific' to describe their new study of literary works. In the light of these ambitions, however, it is ironic that at around the very time that structuralism was being introduced into English, the whole concept of objective knowledge (hitherto thought to be exemplified by the natural sciences) was itself being called into question in a debate provoked by the influence of the work of figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Michael Polanyi in the late 1950s and early 1960s.14 With the benefit of hindsight, the relatively short-lived enthusiasm for structuralism in English studies is not surprising, for by the time that it was introduced into the discipline, the criterion to which it was supposed to answer, value-free knowledge, was already thought in other disciplines to be an impossible goal. It is equally unsurprising that literary theorists soon caught up with these developments; and, as we have suggested, the popularization of Gadamer's work ensured that they did so sooner rather than later.15 The third and most recent debate about value-judgements in English is often collectively identified by the umbrella term 13

14

15

Such a promise, as Joel Weinsheimer has suggested, was based on structuralism's claim to offer a systematic approach to literary texts, one which simply by-passed, rather than addressed, the problems associated with interpretation: '"Linguistics is not hermeneutic", Jonathan Culler asserts. " I t does not discover what a sequence means or produce a new interpretation of it but tries to determine the nature of the system underlying the [speech] event" ... The application of Saussurean linguistics to literary study promoted poetics rather than hermeneutics; and as structural poetics came to dominate the field of literature, the result was not just an avoidance of interpretation but a positive animus against it. "There are many tasks that confront criticism", Culler contends, "many things we need to advance our understanding of literature, but one thing we do not need is more interpretation of literary works"' (Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 17-18). See in particular, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (London, 1962); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975); and Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago, 1958). Moreover, there is a further irony in the observation that as early as 1975 structuralism had been criticized even in Britain precisely on the grounds that it did not possess the status of an epistemology. See Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge, 1975)- (The French edition of the work was published in 1974.) Indeed, as we suggested in chapter 1, a general feature of the use of literary theory in English is precisely the uncritical and uninformed importation of explanatory paradigms from other disciplines of knowledge. Literary theorists at the time failed to realize that even if value-free knowledge had been considered a possible goal, structuralism would have failed to provide it.

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'post-structuralism'. Post-structuralist critics have engaged with strictures about 'subjectivism' in a quite different way from their structuralist predecessors. Focusing on the nature of the values in literary judgements, rather than on the possibility of value-free knowledge, post-structuralist critics have drawn attention to the relationship between the authority of literary judgements and their politics. In so doing they have received widespread support within the discipline, and have established what is today the dominant paradigm for discussing literary value. However, post-structuralist programmes are negative rather than positive in their attitude towards authority. Unlike structuralists, who were and are concerned with new methods of authorizing literary judgements, post-structuralists have tended to concentrate on exposing the 'false' authority underlying traditional judgements (including those of structuralism). The consequence of this strategy is that post-structuralist concepts of what would constitute an appropriate mechanism of intellectual authority remains relatively unelaborated - it is implied in a method of critique rather than positively argued for within the general context of disciplinary knowledge. In this respect, poststructuralists exhibit something like the same weakness inherent in Leavis's and the New Critics' work - a shortcoming to which we return below. The distinguishing feature, then, of most post-structuralist approaches to the problem of value in the discipline exists in the rejection of the objective/subjective dichotomy which had informed previous responses. This is to say that post-structuralism's interest in literary value is produced by a perception that objectivity - the search for non-evaluative criteria - is an impossible goal. Such an insight in turn partly derives from recent debates in philosophy about facts and values, in particular from Gadamer's work. Post-structuralist critics have been able to restore the status of the discipline (or, rather, the status of the discipline which they wish to substitute for English) by challenging the basis of the hierarchy which had hitherto been instrumental in demoting the humanities as a whole. For them, value, far from being eradicated from the discipline, is to become its explicit object of study. Moreover, the practices

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appropriate to that new object, as we have indicated in chapter 2, are also to be explicit about the values they employ. 'Human emancipation' and multicultural representation have as their aim anything but objective knowledge. Such a strategy might seem to suggest that recent theorists in English have an intimate acquaintance with the general philosophical debate about the fact/value dichotomy, in particular with its most recent developments. A useful way of examining current conceptions of ' the problem of value' in English, therefore, is by summarizing the main lines of argument in the philosophical debate. In the comparison that follows, however, it is the discrepancies between philosophers and literary critics rather than the similarities which prove to be more revealing.

II

V A L U E - L A D E N FACTS

In general terms contemporary discussion in philosophy of the fact/value dichotomy (and therefore also of the hierarchy of disciplines of knowledge which that dichotomy has permitted) has demonstrated that facts and values have a mutual interdependence; and, moreover, that this interdependence is a characteristic of all knowledge. However, the aspect of this general debate which seems to have the most appeal for recent critics of English studies is a proposition concerning only the value-laden nature of facts - the proposition that all facts, even those in the natural sciences, are in some respects determined by values. (There are, of course, several other dimensions to contemporary discussion of the fact/value dichotomy. They include what are sometimes termed fact-laden values, the ontological status of facts and the ethical nature of values. We refer to one of these, the fact-laden nature of values, later.) A cogent summary of the issues involved in characterizing the value-laden nature of facts has been set out by Marinus C. Doeser: Looking at the world around us we can produce an endless stream of true statements of fact by simply enumerating whatever we happen to see. But what would be the point of this growing mass of factual

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statements? Perhaps collecting them would be an interesting hobby or a way of killing time. But whatever would we do with the collection itself? What is the significance or the relevance of such statements? Generally, people are hardly interested in mere facts. Seeking to know the world they are in search of statements that are both true and, in one way or another, relevant. They seek answers to questions and solutions to problems which confront them and which are important to them. Collections of facts are most often selections based on criteria of relevance reflecting human value and concerns. Not only selections of factual statements but even a single statement of fact presupposes criteria of relevance. Often such criteria refer directly or indirectly to values and interests.16 The view which Doeser summarizes here is to be distinguished from an argument from narratology which is already familiar in English studies: that of the function of narrative in cognition. The proposition that we cannot make sense of facts outside of the narrative structure in which we organize them, and that the significance of a particular fact depends upon its position in a narrative sequence, has been a commonplace in the analysis of literary works for some time.17 The case which interests Doeser is more fundamental. It proposes that the identification of facts in the first instance assumes the operation of certain values. These values are implicit in the limitations of our language, our conceptual schemes, our theories, our expectations and our prejudices. So we identify the facts which we do identify because of the prior existence of a certain value-system. It might seem that this proposal is a prescription for relativism: if the criteria by which we identify facts are determined by values, and if there can be no non-evaluative criteria by which we can determine the status of particular facts, then we can have no means at arriving at 'truth', when truth is defined in terms of objective (that is, 'factual') knowledge. Nor have we any non-evaluative means of deciding which facts for the time being are 'relevant'. In this view, then, facts are to be treated with caution and 16

17

Marinus C. Doeser, 'Can the Dichotomy of Fact and Value be Maintained?', in M. C. Doeser and J. N. Kraay (cds.), Facts and Values (Dordrecht, 1986), 6. See, for example, Louis Mink, 'Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument', in Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (eds.), The Writing ofHistory (London, 1978), 129-49.

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suspicion, rather than with confidence; they are to be investigated in order to uncover and to interrogate the valuejudgements which have produced them. It is precisely this line of reasoning which underlies the recent charges made by radical critics in Britain and the United States against the traditional epistemic assumptions of English studies. It has been argued that the facts traditionally identified as pertinent to literary works - what might be called ' literary facts' - are wholly dependent upon value-judgements, that these values are never or rarely made explicit and that they have a politics. Literary theorists have shown that values may operate in a variety of ways in the identification of ' literary facts': deconstruction, for example, emphasizes the role of language in such a process; feminism, on the other hand, concentrates on the evaluative functions of gender. Common to all forms of this argument, however, is the claim that what are thought to be objective literary facts are rather determined by a certain (and subjective) value-system, and that this valuesystem is underwritten by a politics. Political values, that is, bring about the identification of literary facts. Stated in such terms, the assumption that all literary facts are value-laden may seem convincing; and the claim that the values involved in the identification of literary facts are always political may seem equally winning. So unlike the use of structuralism, these kinds of arguments to disable the traditional basis of English studies may seem to have an explicit endorsement from debates about epistemology in the philosophy of science. However, when examined more closely, the philosophical debates about the value-laden nature of facts turn out to weaken radical critiques of English studies. It will be recalled that these critiques employed an argument involving a transition from an assumption that in English (or literary) studies all facts are value-laden, to the proposition that all values are political. Is this argument true? Here it is helpful to return to Doeser's summary of the other issues concerning the value-laden nature of facts, issues which seem to have been ignored by literary critics. Having broached the issue of relativism, Doeser goes on to anticipate how the problems it raises might be met. He suggests

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that there may exist what he terms a 'neutral rationality', and that this rationality could be used to verify the status of particular facts, and so eventually lead to a view which could be said to be 'true'. The most obvious instance of disciplines of knowledge where such a ' neutral rationality' might seem to be in operation are the natural sciences. Doeser tests the plausibility of this assumption in the following way: Suppose a neutral form of rationality does exist whose application would lead to true knowledge. How could its existence be discovered? Somebody claims that C is the criterion of rational acceptability in terms of which true statements of fact can be recognized. How can he be proven right or wrong? Applied to many statements, G selects a number of them that are supposedly true. How do we ascertain that they are true indeed? One can call them true by definition. But you can do that with criteria other than C. We can compare statements that answer to G with statements that we already know to be true. But how could we know those without appealing to C? Here the circle closes upon itself. True statements are those that meet the requirements of C, and C is to be accepted because it proves applicable to true statements.18 The viciously circular reasoning which Doeser describes here may seem to make the case for relativism an unanswerable one, and it may seem an insuperable obstacle to any notion of objective knowledge, especially to the long-held assumption that the natural sciences enjoy access to a uniquely value-free knowledge.19 However, arguments about the value-laden nature of facts have a further element, one which has no counterpart in any contemporary arguments about the valueladen nature of literary facts. Doeser goes on to suggest that the impossibility of a neutral form of rationality, even in the natural sciences, is not the limitation it may at first sight seem to be: Scientific truths ought to satisfy the criteria of scientific acceptability. Why do scientists accept those criteria? Among other things, because the criteria are applicable to statements concerning which a consensus 18 19

Doeser, 'The Dichotomy of Fact and Value', 8. Moreover, even if the existence of a neutral rationality in the natural sciences could be assumed, it is worth noting that it is especially difficult to see what form an equivalent rationality could take in relation to judgements about art and literature; and, more importantly, what use judgements derived from it would have.

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says that they must be accepted as scientifically true. Criteria concerning that which ought to be accepted are derived from truths already accepted and functioning paradigmatically. The circle is broken only when no progress seems possible any longer and no new truths can be discovered which satisfy the criteria hitherto observed. The search is on for a modification of the criteria that can generate agreement among the majority of investigators concerned... The rational acceptability of things depends in part on the community, tradition, or culture in which the criteria of rational acceptability are put to use ... What it... mean[s] is that the choice for a specific form of rationality always takes place on the basis of what people consider relevant and important.20 As it stands, the suggestion that the status of particular facts depends upon a ' consensus' or c community' is a weak response to the problems of relativism. However, it is made in the context of a larger account of the nature of rationality. The issues involved in this debate are complex, but broadly speaking, they have centred on a fundamental revision of the traditional understanding of rationality as inseparable from the concept of objectivity. In this view, to designate knowledge as rational was to imply that it could be validated by objective criteria, and that such a validation in turn assigned status to it. However, when objectivity was demonstrated to be an impossible goal, as it was in the work of philosophers such as Gadamer, what was understood by the term 'rationality' also changed. Knowledge considered to be rational was now seen to have its status guaranteed by the agreement of a community rather than by an appeal to 'objective' criteria. Given that the existence of a community, in this view, is a necessary condition for rational knowledge (and therefore also for any discipline of knowledge), then the central epistemological question becomes, what is the nature of that community? Or, more precisely, what kind of values do the judgements of that community embody? Or, in the terms favoured by some critics in English studies, do the agreements which a community reaches merely serve the aims of particular interest groups? And does the term 'rational' therefore possess or imply a politics? The notion of' community' which philosophers have used in 20

Doeser, 'The Dichotomy of Fact and Value', 8.

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these arguments is a specialized one, and is to be distinguished from the use of the term made by some contemporary literary theorists. The latter's criticism of the values embodied in literary judgements, as we have indicated, is based upon an identification of those values with the interests of a particular community; and these interests are invariably taken to be political ones. By contrast the philosophical understanding of the term 'community' is a more fundamental one in the sense that it concerns the conditions for knowledge. The shared knowledge which forms the basis of interest groups is a quite different matter from the agreements which make knowledge possible in the first instance, and it is these latter agreements which philosophers refer to when they use the term community. The idea that knowledge is to be construed as a communal activity was developed from arguments about the nature of rationality put forward in the late nineteenth century, in particular in the work of the American semiologist Charles Peirce. In reaction to Cartesian scepticism and the process of individual justification which it enjoined, Peirce offered a view of knowledge based on the laws of logic and involving three interrelated concepts: 'truth', defined as 'the ultimate agreement of investigators'; 'reality', defined as 'that which is represented in that agreement'; and 'community', defined as 'the ultimate ground of both logic and reality'. 21 One of the clearest statements of Peirce's views is the following comment taken from his seminal paper, ' Some Consequences of Four Incapacities': The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge. And so those two series of cognitions - the real and the unreal - consist of those which, at a time sufficiently future, the community will always continue to reaffirm; and of those which, under the same conditions, will ever after be denied.22 21

See Charles Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Max H. Frisch and Christian 22 J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 11, xli. Ibid., 239.

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This argument has been elaborated by subsequent philosophers to suggest that the rational basis of knowledge (and therefore also of a discipline of knowledge) has to reside in the notion of a community, or, in what is often termed an 'intersubjective' agreement. Like the philosophical debates about fact and value, the topic of intersubjective agreements is a complex one. The positions in it can be briefly summarized in the following way. On one side are the views of Jiirgen Habermas, who has argued for the possibility of'an ideal speech situation', one characterized by 'the intersubjective communality of mutual comprehension, shared knowledge, reciprocal trust and accord with one another'. 23 Steven Connor has usefully summed up the implications of such a proposition: ' to be rational and legitimate, [Habermas's] consensus must be unforced, which is to say, free of every kind of duress, distortion or constraint, and must be governed by no strategic or purposive intention other than that of establishing truth'. 24 Habermas uses linguistic arguments to demonstrate that such an ideal situation can be actualized, and he seeks to prove that this conception of a rational consensus is more than a Utopian ideal - that it is in fact scientific. In so doing Habermas has provoked criticism, notably from Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Smith's commitment to the heterogeneity of experience and value leads her to be deeply suspicious of Habermas's whole project. Viewing it as a 'fantasy', she accuses Habermas of ignoring what she calls the' economy' of discourse: The linguistic market can be no more a 'free' one than any other market, for verbal agents do not characteristically enter it from positions of equal advantage or conduct [in] their transactions on an equal footing... Individual verbal transactions are always constrained, therefore, by the nature of the social and political relationships that otherwise obtain between the parties involved, including their nonsymmetrical obligations to and claims upon one another by 23

Jiirgen Habermas, 'What is Universal Pragmatics?' (in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London, 1979), 3), quoted in Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford, 1992), 104. The following discussion of Habermas, Smith, Lyotard and Rorty is heavily indebted to Connor's excellent chapter, 'The Ethics of Discourse: Habermas, Lyotard and Rorty', in Theory and Cultural Value.

24

See Connor, Theory and Cultural Value, 105

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virtue of their nonequivalent roles in those relationships, as well as by their inevitable unequal resources and nonsymmetrical power relations within the transaction itself}b More seriously, for Smith, any attempt to iron out these 'inequalities' and 'nonsymmetries' amounts to 'social engineering'. 26 However, as Connor points out, in her critique of what she calls ' Utopian theories of communication' (of which Habermas's work is just one example) Smith 'mistakes ethical for ontological universalism, the claim that ethical imperatives should operate indifferently for the claim that there is no essential difference between people'. Connor goes on: In fact, it could be said that the heterogeneity of human interests is precisely what makes the orientation towards consensus most necessary and desirable, not in order to annul this heterogeneity, but to preserve it. If the conflicts of interests which imperil the structure of responsible intersubjectivity are precisely what seem to require the continuing supposition of such intersubjectivity in moral argument, then, far from it being the case that an ideal speech situation is impossible or undesirable in our corrupt sublunary world, this is the only world in which there would be any point in maintaining an orientation towards the ideal speech situation.27 Although recognizing the ethical imperative underlying Habermas's project, Connor does not deny that there are serious difficulties with his description of a rational consensus, many of which derive from Habermas's reliance upon speechact theory. A similar kind of criticism of Habermas's notion of community can be found in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. Like Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Lyotard also sees Habermas's whole orientation towards consensus as dangerous. Lyotard proposes instead a communicative model based on an alleged heterogeneity of language use which valorizes dissent and difference. The difficulty with this account, once again cogently identified by Connor, concerns its inner contradiction. Despite Lyotard's vociferous objections to all forms of universalism, the validity of his non-coercive model of communication pre25

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value, 111

27

Connor, Theory and Cultural Value, 105-6.

26

Ibid.

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supposes precisely a universal value, the possibility of which he seeks to deny: To assimilate others forcibly to one's own project of emancipation ... is an unjust violation for Lyotard, precisely because he assumes, as he must assume, the universal right of all peoples, groups and even individuals, not to have their autonomy violated in this way. Such an assumption would be disclosed by asking the question, who could Lyotard possibly wish to exempt from the protection of this ethical norm? How could he make such an exemption without practising the same violence as he is condemning?... Lyotard would presumably extend such ethical protection to any and every culture, of any and every period in history, except those whose discursive and other actions systematically violated the discursive rights of others. The imperative dimension of Lyotard's ethics of discourse would be disclosed correspondingly by asking the question, who would he wish to exempt from the responsibility of not unjustly violating the discourses of others?28 A road between the extremes of Habermas on the one hand and Lyotard and Smith on the other is that indicated by American pragmatism, particularly as it is practised by Richard Rorty. In his book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty accepts

Pierce's idea of truth as consensus, but modifies it to allow for some of the claims of figures such as Lyotard. So Rorty's model of communication postulates the desirability of improving knowledge via democratic discussion and freely achieved consensus, but without committing itself to accepting the existence of absolute truth and universal human nature. The discourse which he feels can best realize this dual aim is that of the literary or aesthetic, for in Rorty's eyes such discourse best embodies the irony necessary to correct foundationalism or truth claims. Again, Rorty's account may provoke objections, most obviously to his assumption that the politics of liberal democratic society are sufficient conditions for the operation of such a community, and less obviously to his argument that a poetic or rhetorical account of language use constitutes a successful replacement for foundationalism. It is possible to draw some conclusions from this outline of some of the positions in philosophical debates about inter28

ibid., 113-14.

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subjective agreements. First, it is clear that if there is no possibility of Habermas's idea of' mutual comprehension' then there can be no knowledge, no grounds for debate, no disciplines of knowledge, and indeed no way of substantiating a denial of Habermas's claim. Secondly, even if we accept that in practice there may be difficulties in realizing Habermas's ideal, this does not necessarily entail its rejection. As we have seen, those who criticize consensus models of communication must themselves invoke exactly the kind of rational consensus they dismiss in order to validate their claims. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, any discussion of politics (whether or not in English or literary studies) depends upon intersubjective agreements; without such agreements there would be no way of 'knowing' what politics are. The extent to which many literary theorists have misunderstood the philosophical use of the term 'community' is illustrated by a recent review of Umberto Eco's The Limits of Interpretation by Terence Hawkes. Hawkes noted Eco's use of Peirce's work, and in particular he commented on Eco's employment of Peirce's concept of community in the following manner: Should not the political implications of the word 'community' give us at least as much pause as those of ' true' ? An ideological inertness yawns as these conceptual wagons draw into a protective circle. Where is this culture in which truth never changes and whose apprehension of the world is so fundamentally and so peaceably agreed? It looks, in fact, remarkably like that comforting invention we call the 'Middle Ages'. And we have only to raise the question 'whose community?' to lift the curtain on covert structures of power and subjection that will always be in place at its foundation and always open to change. Societies - even ' communities' - are characterized by disagreement as much as by its opposite; by a permanent struggle between competing factions for the categories and distinctions out of which meaning is made.29 In this review Hawkes misunderstands, and therefore misrepresents, the philosophical tradition which Eco is drawing 29

Terence Hawkes, 'Is there Anything out there?', Times Literary Supplement (i Feb.

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upon. So when he criticizes the concept of a community on the grounds that it is a 'covert structure of power and subjugation', Hawkes slips from Eco's explicitly philosophical use of the term, which is made in reference to epistemology, to a sociological understanding of community, which implies some notion of compromise or contract (imposed or otherwise) between different interest groups. Hawkes thereby misses the point of the particularity of the use of the term in philosophy - that an 'intersubjective' community is an essential prerequisite for all knowledge, whether that knowledge is about the physical world, or indeed about what it means to talk of a 'structure of power and subjugation'. It is of course true that such a community may have normative as well as descriptive aspects - and, as philosophers and scientists as diverse in their interests and politics as Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, the iconoclast Paul Feyerabend and even Peirce himself have argued, these normative aspects may themselves serve as constituents of rational enquiry. However, to concede this much is in no way to assume that an intersubjective community is merely a form (or result) of political coercion, nor is it to assume that the agreements upon which such a community depends will always be of a political character, even covertly so. Exactly this point has been cogently made by Gadamer himself in reaction to what he has seen as misappropriations of his work: If it were the case that there were no single locus of solidarity remaining among human beings, whatever society or culture or class or race they might belong to, then common interest could be constituted only by social engineers or tyrants, that is, through anonymous or direct force... / am concerned with the fact that the displacement of human reality never goes so far that no forms of solidarity exist

any longer. Plato saw this very well: there is no city so corrupted that it does not realize something of the true city; that is what, in my opinion, is the basis for the possibility of practical philosophy.30 Less passionately, but no less emphatically, Richard J. Bernstein has come to a similar conclusion about the role of rationality in 30

'A Letter by Hans-Georg Gadamer', in Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford, 1983), 264 (emphasis added).

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disciplines of knowledge. He sums up this 'new' view of rationality, one based on 'communal agreement', rather than on absolute or universal categories as follows: Central to this new understanding [of knowledge] is a dialogical mode of rationality that stresses the practical, communal character of this rationality in which there is choice, deliberation, judicious weighing and application of universal criteria', and even rational disagreement about which criteria are relevant and most important... What is to count as evidence and reasons to support a proposed theory can be rationally contested - even what is to count as proper criticism. Hunches, intuitions, guesses all have a role to play in scientific enquiry, but the scientist never escapes the obligation to support his or her judgements with the best possible reasons and argument. Communal decisions and choices are not arbitrary and merely subjective.31 Some political values are involved in some ways in most disciplines of knowledge. Most obviously, as we suggested in chapter 2, political values are involved in the practical ends to which knowledge is put; and they may also be involved in arranging particular lines of research into a hierarchy of priorities. Political values are also present in decisions about the funding of research made, for example, by publishers. However, such arrangements are contingent: they are not necessary to disciplines of knowledge in the sense that funding could equally well come from a variety of sources without affecting the structure of disciplines. Medicine, nuclear physics, law and economics provide the most obvious instances of these processes; but they are also at work in disciplines such as history, anthropology and sociology. For example, the categorization of certain kinds of history, and certain kinds of writing, clearly involves a political judgement: to identify a branch of history as 'Irish history' or 'women's history', or 'Irish writing' or 'women's writing' clearly presupposes a decision which is informed by a politics. However, there are other, and more important, aspects of disciplinary knowledge upon which politics do not impinge in any way. These aspects include the methodological and theoretical procedures involved in re31

Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism, 172.

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search, precisely the issues we are concerned with in this book. Initial decisions to establish standards of theoretical and methodological rigour (that is, to establish recognized procedures for testing evidence and so forth) will be based on a value-judgement. Such a judgement might include a belief that such standards are necessary for scholarly debate, and moreover that such scholarly debate is in itself desirable. However, as Richard Bernstein points out, the existence of such valuejudgements (which may or may not have a political element to them) does not imply that the procedures themselves are inherently political, or that in executing them the scientist, lawyer or historian is exercising a political judgement. A good example of these distinctions is to be found in recent controversies in AIDS research. It has been alleged that the direction of recent research, particularly with regard to the HIV hypothesis, has been primarily motivated by political interests.32 However, whether or not such an observation is true, on its own it does not invalidate the methodological and theoretical procedures of that research; nor, on its own, does it permit us to say anything about them. Indeed it is difficult to see how particular prescriptions for methodological or theoretical rigour could be correlated with any particular political values. Of course it may be the case, as Paul Feyerabend has argued, that the existence of such standards encourages an intellectual conservatism — or, more accurately, an intellectual inertia; but, again, this concession does not mean that intellectual procedures themselves possess a political identity.33 All this indicates that the general issue of the value-loadedness of facts, in so far as it is an epistemological problem, does not endorse recent criticism by literary theorists of the value-laden nature of'literary facts'. In the first place, the issue of value in knowledge is an iiberhaupt problem; it concerns the 'understanding of understanding', affecting all knowledge, and all disciplines of knowledge. As it stands, therefore, the issue of the value-loadedness of facts can have no special force when applied to English studies. Secondly, and more importantly, nor can the 32 33

See, for example, Jad Adams, AIDS: the HIV Myth (London, 1989). See F e y e r a b e n d , Against Method, 2 2 - 8 .

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absence of a neutral rationality be used to support the proposition made recently that the values underlying literary facts are inevitably political ones. As we have indicated, decisions about the status or authority of particular facts are communal in character, but that community (which makes knowledge possible) is not identified in terms of political interests. However, it is precisely arguments concerning the political nature of such communities which, as we have indicated, have formed the basis of recent objections to literary facts. But why should the comments made by Gadamer and Bernstein not apply to English studies? Why can there not be a 'form of solidarity' in the discipline? Why must all 'communal decisions... [be] arbitrary and merely subjective'? And therefore why is all discussion about value taken to be political? Ill

FACT-LADEN VALUES

Radical critiques of English or literary studies in both Britain and the United States assume the political identity of its object of study. In such a view, this political identity both makes the intellectual procedures of the discipline also inherently political, and the 'communal decisions and choices' mentioned by Bernstein politically determined. There are, however, some significant non sequiturs in this line of reasoning. For example, if an object of study within a discipline is politically determined, it does not logically follow that the procedures for its study are also political, in the sense that the criteria which Bernstein identifies are independent of any discipline. This objection apart, however, there are three stronger arguments against the general direction of recent radical critiques of English, and they concern its basic premise, the political identity of the category of literature. The first is that recent political critiques are tautologous. The allegation that everything in the discipline (its object of study and its intellectual procedures) is politically defined admits of no counter-claim. In its own terms it is impossible to contest, because the grounds for refuting it will also be seen to be political. Here we have a further example of performative self-

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contradiction. The assumption that all values in English studies are political requires for its justification some non-political value; but this possibility is precisely what the assertion precludes. The second objection is a pragmatic one, and it concerns two of the central practices of the discipline. As we demonstrate in the following chapters, literary history and textediting presuppose - and have to presuppose - a concept of literary identity. Strong evidence for the existence and integrity of literary identity can be found on the discipline of English itself (and no radical political critique of English or literary studies has had anything to say about this point). 34 The third objection concerns the understanding of how value-judgements work - in brief, the assumption that it is impossible to escape from the realm of value. To examine this assumption we must return to a further element in the argument about the fact/value dichotomy. This element, also summarized by Marinus Doeser, concerns what is termed the factual character of values. Ironically this proposition probably has greater relevance to the discipline of English than the notion of the value-laden nature of facts does, but it is one which has never been explicitly considered by literary critics and theorists. It is possible to understand the fact/value dichotomy in terms of an objective/subjective opposition, whereby 'subjective' is 34

To claim that the aesthetic is not wholly determined by politics is not, however, to assert that it must therefore be an essentialist concept. On the contrary: the claim that the aesthetic is a conventionalism is entirely compatible with the claim that it cannot be reduced to politics. It is worth noting in passing that Terry Eagleton's recent book, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), despite its title, does nothing to further the case that the aesthetic is wholly determined by politics. Eagleton's admittedly limited concern with the political functions of 'the category of the aesthetic' - he sees it as both repressive and liberating - allows him simply to avoid rather than answer those questions which have proved so intractable to political enquiry, and which have been (and continue to be) routinely debated by the many of the 'important aestheticians' which his volume is content to 'pass over in silence'. In this respect Eagleton's omission of any 'examination of works of art', and his decision to remain ' resolutely silent about particular artefacts' is surprising. As we argue in chapter 6, discussion about the integrity of aesthetic value in philosophical aesthetics has a long tradition. For an overview of the debate, see Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London, 1983); for more recent accounts of the centrality of aesthetic value see Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge, 1987); Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature (Cambridge, 1989); and David Novitz, 'The Integrity of Aesthetics', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 , 9-2O.

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understood to pertain to the expression of individual states of mind or attitudes, and 'objective' is understood to pertain to the properties or features of an object. (As we argued earlier, however, this is not to suggest that the identification of such properties or features does not in itself depend upon a prior value-judgement.) For this reason, it has sometimes been argued that only factual statements (understood as statements about an object) can ever have objectivity as their aim. Marinus Doeser suggests that, while on some occasions this argument might be true, there is also a class of evaluative statements which are both subjective and objective at the same time: there are, that is, evaluations which also involve facts about an object. The example he gives is the statement 'John is cruel'. On the one hand, this statement is an evaluation in so far as it depends upon a value-judgement about cruelty; on the other, however, the 'rational acceptability' of the evaluation may be made through an 'appeal to (objective) fact', in this instance to information about John's behaviour. Thus there is a conceptual connection between the evaluative term 'cruelty' and certain kinds of (empirically verifiable) behaviour. In other words, we can have no concept of cruelty without designating a certain class of actions as 'cruel'. For this reason Doeser concludes by asking ' Does this not mean ... that the statement ['John is cruel'] must be taken as a factual statement describing John - even if the description makes use of the value property "cruel"?' In general terms this argument suggests that there is a class of evaluative statements which are permeated by facts to the extent that those evaluations (states of mind or attitudes) cannot be understood apart from the facts which they imply; and in this sense certain value-judgements may be said to have a factual character, in that they refer to properties of an object as well as to states of mind or attitudes or judgements. As Doeser concludes: ' in given instances the line between a statement of fact and a judgement of value fades'. 35 The question which interests us is whether these observations about fact-laden values have any relevance to literary judgements. Do some of 35

Doeser, 'The Dichotomy of Fact and Value', 11.

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the values which literary judgements embody have a factual character, and can this factual character provide the foundation of what might be called literary knowledge? Some concrete examples will point to an answer. Most evaluative statements to be found in literary criticism fall into one of two groups. A kernel example of the first group would be a statement such as ' The Prelude is a profound poem'. Here the adjective 'profound' can stand as representing a class of predicates which are solely evaluative - which, that is, refer to states of mind or to attitudes. Typical examples would include the terms 'thoughtful', 'significant', 'serious', and so forth; these terms tell us only about the responses of a critic, and nothing about the work itself. In the terms we have used above, they pertain to a state of mind or attitude, and not to properties or features of the object in question. The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden recognized this distinction and characterized such statements as referring to what he calls an 'aesthetic object' rather than to an 'art-object'. Ingarden took an 'aesthetic object' to denote the actualization or 'concretion' brought about by a transaction between an individual perceiving consciousness and an art-object, where 'art-object' designates the object of perception.36 It might be the case that such evaluations are largely ideological or political in character in the sense that, in making such a statement, critics refer to a set of values which they see embodied in a particular work and which they share with it. So, to assert that ' The Prelude is profound' might be based on a belief that the views on education or childhood which the poem expresses are serious or significant, and that they coincide with similar views held by the critic in question. Moreover it might also be the case that such an evaluation could be disputed on political or ideological grounds. So a second critic who did not think education an important issue, and who moreover held that the views expressed about it in The Prelude were also unimportant, would disagree with the judgement of the first critic that the poem is profound. But such a disagreement would not be about facts in the poem - not, that 36

See Roman Ingarden, 'Artistic and Aesthetic Values', in Harold Osborne (ed.), Aesthetics (1972; 2nd edn, Oxford, 1978), 39-54.

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is, to use Ingarden's term, about the art-object - but about politics. Precisely these kinds of disputes have led to the by now familiar arguments about the canon in English studies. So, for example, controversy over the status of Dickens's work has dwelt upon issues such as his portrayal of women. In this controversy it is alleged that to label Dickens a profound writer is to endorse as equally profound his use of certain deprecated stereotypes of femininity. The basic form of the second group of statements is typified by an assertion such as ' The Prelude is an original poem'. Here the adjective 'original' can stand as representing a different class of predicates which do more than simply evaluate: they refer, that is, to more than just an attitude of mind. Other examples would include the terms ' experimental',' innovative', ' repetitive', and so on. The statement' The Prelude is an original poem' is a value-judgement in the sense that to designate something 'original' is not neutral; moreover, the criteria for what is to count as originality will also be based upon valuejudgements. But to designate a poem as original is also to say something about the properties or features of it. Such a statement refers to facts about The Prelude - that, for example, some of the features of the poem are not to be found in earlier writing. (Although, of course, as we have argued, it is clear that the identification of such features in the first place will depend on prior value-judgements.) In Ingarden's terms this class of statements refers to the art-object as well as to the aesthetic object. In this sense, then, such statements may be contested in two ways, only one of which is ideological. It is possible to argue that the statement is incorrect because the facts are wrong; so it could be asserted, for example, that The Prelude does not contain any feature which cannot be found in any earlier writing. Such a statement can be proved — notionally at least — by an appeal to evidence: to, that is, the factual basis of the judgement. A second way of disputing the statement, however, would be to agree with the facts, but to dispute the criteria of originality. It is only this second disagreement which could be attributed to ideological factors. Indeed, it is because statements such as ' The Prelude is an original poem' possess a certain 'factual' character

Authority and value

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- or that they make no sense outside of the facts which they imply - that they represent examples of what Doeser has identified as fact-laden values. There are, then, two kinds ofjudgements which can be made about literary works. The first kind, like the statement ' The Prelude is profound', is wholly evaluative, and conceivably could be wholly ideological in origin; the second kind, like the statement ' The Prelude is original', implicates facts, and therefore is not simply evaluative. This observation about the kinds ofjudgements made by literary critics is particularly important for the disciplinary status of English studies, for to concede that some literary judgements have a factual basis is also to concede that English and literary studies can possess a body of knowledge which can be taught and examined. To sum up these points briefly: to claim in general terms that English is a value-laden discipline is not to distinguish it in any significant way from other disciplines of knowledge, for all knowledge is value-laden. Moreover, it should also be clear that the values which do exist in the discipline are not only political in character. More importantly, however, it can also be argued that some of the values used in English are fact-laden: that is, they implicate facts about an object (a literary work), and this in turn implies that the study of English literature is not simply a ' site for competing subjectivities', in the sense that some of the knowledge in the discipline may be said to have an 'objective' character. These arguments may be unfamiliar to students and scholars of English, but they are commonplace (in practice at least) in other humanities disciplines. One example will illustrate the general trend: in musicology it has been usual to talk of valuejudgements as 'informed', in so far as the principal way of disputing a judgement is by means of contesting its factual basis. The musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has made precisely this point: In order to be tenable, value judgments, including the apparently harmless 'subjective' ones, must be supported by factual judgments at least roughly adequate to the case. Anyone missing expressive melodies in a sonata form built on the principle of thematic-motivic development and therefore condemning the work aesthetically articu-

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lates not an unarguable taste but rather passes an incorrect judgment rendered irrelevant by the misinterpretation of the sonata form as a miscarried potpourri.37 Moreover, a practice very similar to this characterizes what many teachers of English do when they encourage students to use textual evidence to justify their judgements about a particular work. Critics, too, constantly attempt to validate their judgements of a particular work by recourse to facts. As our next two chapters show, an unproblematic relationship between values and facts underlies the other two main practices of the discipline, literary history and text-editing. 37

Carl Dahlhaus, Analysis and Value Judgment (Monographs in Musicology no. 1), trans. Siegmund Lavarie (New York, 1983), 6.

CHAPTER 4


Literary history has two basic elements: a subject-matter, 'literary' works, which distinguishes it from other kinds of history; and a historiography, the theoretical principles and methodology which determine the kind and status of historical accounts of those works. Any attempt to rewrite traditional literary history involves contesting one or both of these elements.1 Arguments which question traditional literary history have frequently assumed that political decisions underlie the identification of works as 'literature'. These arguments hold that as literary identity is a value-laden concept, so to designate works as literature necessarily involves endorsing certain values (which are generally defined as political), which in their turn become silently encoded in histories of those works. In this view it follows that the aims of any new or revised literary history should be to uncover both those values and the processes by which they are endorsed and perpetuated by historians; it would aim, that is, to make manifest the politics which underlie traditional literary history. In broad terms, this procedure has been the route of most Marxist and feminist rewritings of traditional literary history. Another and quite different critique of the subject-matter of traditional literary history is that implicit in theories such as structuralism and deconstruction. Once again, the value-laden nature of literary identity is implicated in these critiques, but in a way which is quite distinct from Marxist and feminist 1

We are using the term traditional for convenience rather than accuracy to designate those histories which treat their subject-matter and their methodology as unproblematic and which use an empiricist historiography.

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rewri tings of literary history. As we have argued in the previous chapter, structuralism does not address the issue of value directly in the sense that in the taxonomies of textual features which it isolates literary works are denied any special identity, and therefore also denied any privilege (or value) which can accrue from it. In structuralism the question of value, rather than being contested on political grounds, is simply avoided. The consequence of this position is that literary history is once again deprived of its traditional subject-matter; without the means to identify literary works from non-literary works, there is nothing for literary history, as it has been traditionally conceived and practised, to be a history of. A further consequence of structuralism in this respect is that its emphasis on synchrony (rather than diachrony) makes historical knowledge in general (and therefore by extension literary history too) irrelevant to an understanding of literary works. Structuralism, then, does not merely problematize the subject-matter of traditional literary history; it also makes historical enquiry itself a superfluous practice. The implications of deconstruction for traditional literary history are even more far-reaching, in the sense that deconstruction makes impossible what for structuralism is merely irrelevant. So, as we shall argue later, the 'discursive play' identified with deconstruction not only deprives literary history of a subject-matter; it also makes historical enquiry itself impossible to execute. Similar difficulties occur when the other term of traditional literary history - historiography - is contested. In the past thirty years there has been a great deal of argument among philosophers and historians not only about the methodological procedures in history proper, but also (and more fundamentally) about what constitutes historical understanding. The pivotal issue in this latter, epistemological debate has been the possibility of an objectively knowable past or, more precisely, the problems posed by the operation of value-judgements in all historical enquiry. Broadly speaking, the empiricist assumptions embedded in traditional historiography (and, by extension, in traditional literary historiography) have been challenged by various forms of philosophical scepticism. Some of the issues


ioi

raised in this debate, like those concerning discussion of the fact/value dichotomy, have intruded upon English studies in the form of critiques of traditional literary history which address not only the value-laden nature of its subject-matter, but also the value-laden nature of history itself. In general terms, these critiques have taken two forms, that of new historicism, which attempts a radical relativization of literary history, and that of cultural materialism, which aims to make explicit the politics underlying all historical judgements, including those concerning literary works. In both kinds of history, the historical value of literary works changes profoundly from that assigned to them in traditional literary history. In new historicism, literary works lose their privilege: they become only one of the many ways in which cultural representation can occur. Hence, in this view, literary history, conceived of as a specialist practice, ceases to be viable. Instead the historical study of literary works is subsumed into a larger cultural history. In cultural materialism a similar process is at work, but for different reasons. In this view it is their relevance for contemporary cultural concerns which renders literary works important.

I

L I T E R A R Y H I S T O R Y AND L I T E R A R Y C R I T I C I S M

Like discussion of value-judgements in literary criticism, debate about the subject-matter of literary history is not a recent phenomenon. The first academic literary historians in the nineteenth century, and in particular William Courthope, were also confronted with the basic question of what a literary history was to be a history of.2 Courthope realized that literary history, conceived of as a discrete academic practice, was only possible after the specialist nature of its subject-matter had been determined, for to identify the relationship between works, and therefore to write their history, depends upon employing some previously established principle of selection. Both logically and historically, then, literary criticism, in the sense that it formal2

See William Courthope, A History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1895-1910).

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ized definitions of literariness, preceded literary history in that it made it possible.3 Hence changes in the nature of literary criticism (whatever that term is, for the moment, taken to include) inevitably bring about accompanying changes in the practice of literary history. This process has been particularly noticeable in the past twenty years. The first theory significantly to problematize the writing of literary history was structuralism. To understand how this process occurred, it is useful to look briefly at the implications of its initial introduction into English. Structuralism was developed from a general theory of language - a theory, that is, which could be applied to all linguistic phenomena, and not just to the linguistics of literary works. Indeed, in a famous essay, the Russian theorist Roman Jakobson denied that literary judgements had any basis in linguistics, pointing out that literary works exhibited no linguistic features which could not be found in a variety of other non-literary works.4 Jonathan Culler, one of the earliest popularizers of structuralist theories in English, made explicit the implications of such a view for the assumptions of traditional literary criticism. The identification of literary qualities, he argued, is principally a consequence of expectations brought to the text; they are a consequence, that is, of reading practices and not qualities which inhere in the language of the text: In reading poetry we are disposed not only to recognize formal patterns but to make them something more than ornament attached to communicative utterances; and thus, as [Gerard] Genette says, the essence of poetry lies not in verbal artifice itself, though that serves as catalyst, but more simply and profoundly in the type of reading (attitude de lecture) which the poem imposes on its readers ... This is to say that neither the formal patterns nor linguistic deviation of verse suffices in itself to produce the true structure or state of poetry... To analyse poetry from the point of view of poetics is to specify what is involved in these conventional expectations which make poetic language subject to a different teleology or finality from that of 3

4

See David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore, 1992). Some of Perkins's conclusions complement the argument of this chapter. Roman Jakobson, 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics', in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass., i960), 367.


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ordinary speech and how these expectations or conventions contribute to the effects of formal devices and of the external contexts that poetry assimilates.5 In its initial form in English studies structuralism on its own could say very little about literary identity, and by extension very little also about the subject-matter of literary history. More precisely, what it could say was wholly negative: the theoretical premises of structuralism ensured that it could only describe literary identity in terms of what it was not (that it was not a purely linguistic phenomenon). Given the relationship which we have described between literary criticism and literary history, it is clear that such a position makes structuralist assumptions incompatible with the postulates of traditional literary history. The reason is simple: because structuralism is not concerned with accounting for the differences between literary and non-literary works, on its own it cannot provide a rationale, a methodology, nor indeed a subject-matter, for a literary history. But more importantly, if followed rigorously, structuralism makes the whole need for historical understanding redundant, for to argue that all texts ' work' because of their structural relations is to imply that historical knowledge can add nothing extra to our understanding of them. Hence the practice of literary history, as it is traditionally defined, can have no useful application within structuralism. Another distinguished theorist of structuralism, Gerard Genette, addressed this very problem: Apparently, structuralism ought to be on its own ground whenever criticism abandons the search for the conditions of existence or the external determinations - psychological, social, or other - of the literary work, in order to concentrate its attention on that work itself, regarded no longer as an effect, but as an absolute being. In this sense, structuralism is bound up with the general movement away from positivism, 'historicizing history' and the 'biographical illusion'.6 To use the terms which structuralism itself popularized, Genette suggested that texts, literary texts included, could be 5 6

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London, 1975), 164. Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1982), 11.

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best understood in terms of synchrony rather than diachrony. However, for Genette this proposition did not make literary history obsolete, but it did involve a change in its nature. Under the aegis of structuralist theory, literary history would be defined as the history of an underlying grammar: ' Literary history becomes the history of a system: it is the evolution of the functions that is significant, not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relations necessarily precedes that of the processes ... The structural history of literature ... is simply the placing in diachronic perspective of these successive synchronic tables.'7 However, Genette's attempt to accommodate structuralism to literary history involved him in a paradox: changes in the 'grammar of texts' which such a 'structuralist' history documents cannot be understood adequately in historical terms. Genette's 'structural history of literature' did not account for the predominance (at any particular time) of any of the relationships between the different structures which it isolated; nor could those structures be related to any wider cultural or intellectual circumstances. In other words, a structuralist literary history can only cite changes: and in this sense it is a simple list rather than a history. A good example of these limitations occurred in David Lodge's influential Modes of Modern Writing (1977), a work which attempted to put the theoretical insights of structuralism to practical critical use. Lodge defined modern writing in terms of the dominance of either its metaphoric or metonymic poles, terms and explanatory paradigms derived from Roman Jakobson's earlier classic study of aphasia. In particular Lodge saw modernist works characterized by their use of metaphor and realist works by that of metonymy. His intention in Modes of Modern Writing was to 'examine the possibilities of the distinction when applied to more historical concerns of criticism the discrimination of periods, schools and movements in literature, and the examination of an individual writer's development through his oeuvre\8 In concluding his project, Lodge comments: 7

Ibid., 2 0 - 1 .

8

David Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing (Ithaca and New York, 1977), 123-4.


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The history of modern English literature... can be seen as an oscillation in the practice of writing between polarized clusters of attitudes and techniques: modernist, symbolist or mythopoeic, writerly and metaphoric on the one hand; anti-modernist, realistic, readerly and metonymic on the other. What looks like innovation... is ... a reversion to the principles and procedures of an earlier phase ... The metaphor/metonymy distinction explains why at the deepest level there is a cyclical rhythm to literary history, for there is nowhere else for discourse to go except between these two poles.9 That Lodge should arrive at this cyclical view of literary history is not at all surprising: it is an inevitable consequence of the limitations of his analytic tools - that is, of the inability of structuralism to provide any means for explaining why one particular mode of writing should be dominant at any particular time. What is absent from Lodge's account is an explanation of the historical specificity of any of the works he discusses. So, for example, his suggestion that both Wordsworth's and Larkin's poetry exist at the metonymic pole of discourse has necessarily to ignore the manifest differences which result from their specific locations in history. Such an elision is not a failure of critical rigour: it is rather an inevitable consequence of a thoroughgoing prosecution of a structuralist paradigm. In this way Lodge's thesis clearly illustrates the fundamental paradox which structuralism poses for literary historians. It can only produce a literary history which is devoid of historical specificity, and therefore as a history it is of limited practical use.10 In general terms, however, despite the obvious problems which structuralist theory poses for literary history, in practice it has done little to threaten its status within the discipline. Structuralism, for the most part, has tended to be used in conjunction with a given definition of literary identity, and the canon of literary works constructed by traditional literary history, as Lodge's book demonstrates, has remained virtually unchanged. Subsequent developments in literary criticism, however, have threatened the status of traditional literary history, but by 9

10

Ibid., 220.

Recently David Lodge has acknowledged some of the limitations of structuralism. See After Bakhtin (London, 1990).

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contesting its premises in quite different ways. These developments have represented in their turn two different kinds of reactions to limitations identified in structuralist theory. The first has been an explicit answer to the charge that structuralism is ahistorical. This project has found its most cogent formulations in a new, revised Marxist criticism and in the introduction of feminist theory into English studies. Both Marxism and feminism have sought to rehabilitate historical understanding - to use the term which they have popularized, to ' reinsert' works into history. But they have done so by a route which has not been a simple return to pre-structuralist assumptions - that is, to those of traditional literary history. This reinsertion into history has therefore required a new rationale. Feminist and Marxist histories of texts have involved a critical examination of the relationship between concepts of literature and the historical circumstances which produce them. In this rationale, far from providing a simple 'context' for literary works (the value of which was taken as a given), history is now to be used as a critical tool. More precisely, historical knowledge is seen as a way of enabling the critic to uncover the processes by which certain works come to be privileged (or valued) above others, and thus to be designated as 'literature'. As we have indicated in the previous chapter, these processes are often alleged to be ideological in character, and one of the consequences of explaining the canonization of literary works in this way has been that they are stripped of any special identity. The implications of these strategies for traditional literary history have been far-reaching: with no concept of literary identity to work with, literary history is deprived of its traditional subject-matter. Works hitherto considered to be distinctive now become elements in cultural, social or political histories. The premises of Marxist and feminist literary criticism not only involve changes in the subject-matter of literary history, but they also implicate larger historiographical changes. Moreover, in terms of the disciplinary status of literary history, it is these last changes which are most significant, for they lead to a situation which, paradoxically, is very close to that implied by the premises of structuralism. If literary works


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are to become part of a general cultural or materialist history, then there can be no justification for a specialist practice concerned exclusively with historicizing them, and so no justification either for the existence of the activities of literary historians or for the practice of literary history. In this respect it is significant that the actual modifications to traditional literary history which feminist and Marxist theorists have brought about, like those following the application of structuralism, have not been as far-reaching as their prescriptions required. So, for example, Shakespeare and Milton are still read; indeed they still have prominent places in any new c political' history. The difference is that in the eyes of cultural historians their significance is seen to exist not in their ' literary' qualities, but rather in the relationships between their work and other discourses. So typically the significance of Milton's oeuvre can be seen when it is set against the discourses of patriarchy - power and religion: Milton's poems reproduce as questions some of the issues at the heart of the historical transformation they also helped to bring about... The questions humanism raises recur throughout Milton's works: what are the limits of human autonomy and human obligation? what is the place of human beings in the world and in history? and what, beyond all history and all locality, does it mean to be human? The questions are not fully answered, cannot be fully answered in so far as they presuppose a Christian or a humanist metaphysics. But if the texts cannot make present for the reader a transcendent essence of the human, they nevertheless succeed in displaying how deeply the problems they pose are implicated in related questions concerning the specificities of gender, power, and, above all, the textuality of meaning itself.11 On occasions such as these, in Britain the canon inherited from traditional literary histories has changed little; it has certainly not changed in the dramatic ways which the advocates of Marxism and feminism had originally envisaged. A group of works (often the self-same works) is still valued, but for different reasons. So, for example, the controversial Re-Reading English series did not set up a new canon; it merely reinterpreted writers 11

Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Power, Gender (Oxford, 1988), 17-18.

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in the old one: Catherine Belsey wrote on Milton, Terry Eagleton on Richardson and Germaine Greer on Shakespeare. Nevertheless the values found in the works of these authors were now quite different. In the United States (and in some secondary-school syllabuses in Britain), however, changes in the canon have been more far-reaching, although they have generally taken the form of a compromise - additions to an existing canon rather than its replacement. A second reaction to the limitations of structuralism has been that made, principally in the United States, by deconstruction. Marxism and feminism, although questioning the ahistorical nature of structuralism, had in part assimilated the structuralist tenet of the arbitrariness of language. However, for deconstructionists, this notion becomes their point of departure. So in deconstruction the logic of the structuralist assumption of the arbitrary relationship between sign and signifier is reinterpreted as pointing to the inherent instability of all language. It results in an interpretative indeterminacy, or, put more positively, because in Derrida's famous dictum ' there is nothing outside of the text', it results in the infinite signification of language, and so in a 'discursive play'. M. H. Abrams, one of deconstruction's most committed critics, provided a cogent summary of this position: Any attempt to define or interpret the significance of a sign or chain of signs consists in nothing more than the interpreter's putting in its place another sign or chain of signs, 'sign-substitutions', whose self-effacing traces merely defer laterally, from substitution to substitution, the fixed and present meaning (or the signified 'presence') we vainly pursue... Derrida coins what in French is the portmanteau term differance... to indicate the endless play of generated significances, in which the reference is interminably postponed... What Derrida's conclusion comes to is that no sign or chain of signs can have a determinate meaning.12 Thus the implications of deconstruction clearly posed a more fundamental challenge to traditional literary history than either Marxism or feminism did. Deconstruction not only threatens to 12

M. H. Abrams, 'The Limits of Pluralism n: The Deconstructive Angel', Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), 430-1.


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abolish the subject-matter of literary history, it also undermines the status of historical knowledge per se. If instability exists at the very heart of language, then certain concepts, literary identity included, which manifestly rely upon linguistic stability, are simply meaningless. So if the tenets of deconstruction are true, any attempt by literary historians to identify a subject-matter for their history is pointless. More precisely, if the meaning of particular texts can no longer be determined, then those texts cannot possibly count as evidence in a history. As Abrams also argued, deconstruction, taken seriously, makes 'impossible anything that we would account as literary and cultural history'.13 In a famous reply to Abrams's criticism, J. Hillis Miller, far from defending deconstruction from this charge, merely revealed and embraced the thoroughgoing nature of its scepticism: A certain notion of history or of literary history, like a certain notion of determinable reading, might indeed be an impossibility, and if so, it might be better to know that, and not to fool oneself or be fooled. It might, or it might not. That something in the realm of interpretation is a demonstrable impossibility does not prevent it being ' done', as the abundance of histories, literary histories, and readings demonstrates. On the other hand, I should agree that ' the impossibility of reading should not be taken too lightly'. It has consequences, for life and death, since it is inscribed, incorporated, in the bodies of individual human beings and in the body politic of our cultural life and death together.14 The circularity of arguments such as this was later clarified by J o n a t h a n Culler in The Pursuit of Signs (1981): Deconstruction enjoys announcing the impossibility of the semiotic activity it inhabits as it undertakes the task it has set itself: reading the major texts of Western literature and philosophy as sites on the boundaries of logocentrism and showing, in the most subtle interpretations that scholarship has yet produced, how these texts are already riven by the contradictions and indeterminacies that seem inherent in the exercise of language.15 13 14

Ibid., 425. J. Hillis Miller, 'The Limits of Pluralism in: The Critic as Host', Critical Inquiry, 3 15 (1977), 440. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (London, 1981), 43.

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Behind the comments of Culler, Hillis Miller and Abrams there persists the classic impasse of philosophical scepticism: that if such propositions about the past are true, then they cannot be made with any certainty.16 However, in the light of Culler's (albeit unwilling) acceptance of such a paradoxical position, his slide from a general proposition concerning acts of communication ('semiotic activity') to the more restricted category of'Western literature and philosophy' is revealing. As we have argued apropos of the use of theory in English studies in chapter 2 and of the role of value-judgements in chapter 3, the epistemological problems posed by deconstruction (and by philosophical scepticism) are uberhaupt problems: they apply to all knowledge (and, indeed, to all forms of verbal communication). Hence the argument concerning the particularity of English which we raised in those chapters applies equally well here. There is no a priori reason to suppose that English or literary studies (any more than any other discipline or area of knowledge) should be especially problematized by the scepticism enjoined by deconstruction. Moreover, no such reason has been supplied by its practitioners. Indeed if such a reason could be advanced it would have to suggest that there was something unique to literary language, a proposition which deconstruction in principle denies. Logically deconstruction must jeopardize all disciplines of knowledge equally; the study of literary texts within English departments cannot be an exceptional case. In this respect it is interesting to notice that very few other disciplines of knowledge seem to have taken any account of deconstructionist precepts, and so in practice, if not in principle, the consequences of deconstruction are only felt in English studies.17 The point to stress here is not that practitioners of other disciplines are ignorant of deconstruction (although of course they may be); rather they operate with a 16

17

Interestingly some critics have argued that deconstruction does not necessarily involve the radicalism that is sometimes claimed for it. See, for example, James M. Byrne, 'Deconstruction and the Text: Theological Perspectives', Hermathena, 148 (1990), 7-23; and Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh, 1992). The only real exception has been a debate about the implications of deconstruction for theology. See Byrne, 'Deconstruction and the Text'.


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theory of knowledge which cannot tolerate the scepticism which deconstruction implies. What is never made clear by deconstructionists in English studies is why their discipline should be different in this respect. In the light of this failure, it is interesting to observe that once again the scepticism of deconstruction has not in practice been employed at all rigorously even in English studies. The work of individual writers may have been 'deconstructed', but the canon of literary works enshrined by traditional literary history has once again remained to all intents and purposes intact, suggesting that deconstructionists are silently acceding to a hierarchy of value which such a history imposes, in spite of the fact that they explicitly repudiate the principles which make such a hierarchy possible. Once again, deconstructionists still value Shakespeare, but on changed grounds; they value features such as absence, aporia and differance, rather than those of traditional literary history - such as coherence, expressivity and unity. In the terms which we used in chapter 2, deconstruction is invariably used as a methodology, rather than as an epistemology.18 What conclusions may be drawn from this brief examination of the relationship between theoretical developments in recent literary criticism and traditional literary history? All the theories recently imported into English studies contest the subject-matter of literary history, and they do so in one of two ways. Either, as with structuralism and deconstruction, they are unable to define it; or, as with Marxism and feminism, they define it in ways which deprive it of its unique identity and so no longer allow literary history to be seen as a specialist practice. In both cases, however, the consequence for the discipline is precisely the same: if the premises of all these theories are implemented rigorously, there can be no justification for the retention of literary history within English studies, for those premises hold that it is either non-existent or that it is impossible 18

The discrepancy between the claims made for theory by critics in English studies, and what those same critics actually do when putting them into practice, has been noted by a number of figures. See, for example, Stanley Fish's distinction between theory and practice in English in his essay' Introduction: Going Down the Formalist Road', in Doing What Comes Naturally (Oxford, 1989), 1-33.

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to execute. Ironically such a situation has not occurred, and nor do the proponents of any of the theories we have mentioned seem willing to reject completely the canon of texts established by traditional literary history. II

L I T E R A R Y H I S T O R Y AND H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y

The second group of issues involved in writing a literary history are those concerning historiography, and they are rather more complex. The simplest question concerns the kinds of literary history which can be written. So, within traditional literary history it is possible to identify histories of styles - of neoclassicism, or euphuism, for example; histories of movements such as Aestheticism or Imagism; histories of genres - such as the novel; or, more usually, traditional literary histories can be a combination of all three. Alternatively, traditional literary history may simply be the history of the relationship between works or authors. In each case the kind of history undertaken will determine in advance which works are to count as evidence in it. For example, it is possible for one kind of literary history to find a work important while another kind of literary history finds the same work of minimal interest. So Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray might be central to a history of the Aesthetic Movement, but be of little interest in a history of the novel. (In practice there are, of course, some works whose significance most historians agree upon, albeit for different reasons. So a history of the epic, a history of Romanticism and a biography of Wordsworth would all probably find The Prelude important.) All these differences are well known and are not particularly contentious in the sense that many kinds of traditional literary history can co-exist without conflict or contradiction. The main reason for such a situation is that they agree on a notion of literary identity and so on a basic subjectmatter for literary history. They therefore all tend to draw upon broadly the same canon of works; they merely assign to those works a different significance. The differences between various kinds of traditional literary histories do not amount to disputes about historiography.


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However, there is a dispute in traditional literary history which is historiographical in nature and which has been far less frequently discussed. It stems from the dependence of all literary histories (both traditional and the more recent critical varieties) upon the methodologies and concepts developed in history proper. Literary history is as vulnerable to larger changes in the methodologies of mainstream history as it is to changes in the practices of literary criticism. An example, once again taken from the nineteenth century, makes this point clearly. The proliferation of literary histories in the last decades of that century, by as varied a group of writers as Edmund Gosse, John Morley and George Saintsbury, all drew upon (and indeed were made possible by) methodological paradigms recently developed in history proper. These paradigms had in turn been derived from the Rankean school of history then dominant in Germany. Ranke's methodology had attracted the interest of British historians because it seemed to offer a solution to a crisis which had occurred in British historiography in the late 1860s. As J. W. Burrow has argued, the reasons for the popularity of Rankean (as opposed to, say, Comtean) history lay in its nationalist origins and its evolutionary paradigms, features which made it easy to assimilate to the native British tradition of Whig historiography.19 The new British historiography was a composite of Rankean and Whiggish models and it affected the writing of literary history in Britain in several ways. In the first place, Rankean historiography valorized archival evidence and the scrupulous examination of sources. These principles found a precise parallel in literary history in the proliferation of authoritative editions under the direction of scholars such as Frederick Furnivall and the other leading lights of organizations such as the Early English Text Society and the Browning Society. The editorial projects of these societies aimed to provide a literary archive of source material equivalent to that of the Rolls Series established in history proper by the dominant presence in contemporary British historiography, William 19

See J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent (Cambridge, 1983). For an account of the crisis in British history, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838-1886 (Cambridge, 1986).

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Stubbs. In the second place, the new historiography placed a premium on verifiable evidence, especially in the form of biographical and bibliographical detail, a strategy which in its turn drew upon a more traditional element in British historiography, that of the primacy of individual agency. A representative example of the effects of these developments in literary history is to be found in the 'Great Writers Series' established by Eric S. Robertson in 1887. I* w a s a s e t of studies by distinguished critics on what were seen to be major literary figures, the first volumes being on Longfellow, Coleridge, Dickens and Rossetti. The aims of ' this series of little monographs ' were, in Robertson's introductory note, to provide ' a chronicle of the chief events in a famous author's life;... a critical history of that author's works;... a full bibliography of these works; and ... an analytical Table of Contents, that will summarize the biography on a new plan'. 20 Moreover, the series explicitly advertised itself by invoking the kind of scholarly rigour now standard in history proper: It will not be merely a critical essay divided into chapters. It will accurately chronicle all the facts of any value in the career of the man or woman of letters who is under consideration... [The individual volumes] will contain facts in such quantity as to be UNRIVALLED TEXTBOOKS OF LITERATURE ... The Editor chooses the Biographers on

account of their special knowledge of the subjects about which they undertake to write.21

More important than all these local influences, however, was the impact of the evolutionary model of thought upon which both Whig and Rankean historiography was based. By adopting this model of historical change, literary history now came to be seen as an explicit narrative rather than as a mere list of works or authors. Exponents such as George Saintsbury and Edmund Gosse told a 'story' of the 'development' of literature. As we suggested earlier, even a list is informed by a narrative structure. But the difference between Gosse or Saintsbury's histories, and the work of earlier historians such as Thomas Warton, was that in the formers' work the narrative structure was placed in the 20

Eric S. Robertson, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (London, 1887), 'Introductory 21 Note'. Ibid., endpages.


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foreground and its direction - the idea of' development' - was made explicit. Hence Gosse's allusion in the conclusion to his A Short History of English Literature (1898) to the most famous 4

evolutionist' of that time, Charles Darwin:

Where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of literary evolution, does he [the literary artist] take his place, and in what relation does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but to those who are of his own kith and kin... The serried and nervous expression of Pope and the melodic prosody of Milton have passed, by a hereditary process, into the veins of their intellectual descendant. He is a complex instance of natural selection... Every producer of vital literature adds an offshoot to the unrolling and unfolding organism of literary history in its ceaseless processes of growth.22 The whole emphasis upon a tradition of English literature which underwrote Gosse's and many subsequent projects was inconceivable without the development in history proper of this new model of historical change. Moreover, it served as the dominant paradigm in British literary history for over half a century. So, although subsequent literary histories may have taken as their subject-matter different groups of writers, and they may have described the development of different sets of features, they all still told a 'story', and the basic structure of that story was always the same: a narrative of evolutionary development. This situation did not change until the paradigm which literary history had borrowed from history proper had itself been challenged. The occasion was the introduction and increasing popularity in Britain of Marxist historiography (as distinguished from Marxist literary criticism, a later development) . The changes which that philosophy of history brought about in historiographical concepts were far-reaching in the sense that they allowed a wholly new kind of historical narrative to emerge. In contrast to the Whig/Rankean model of evolutionary development, the narrative underlying Marxist historiography was one of rupture and change. When applied to literary history, however, Marxist historiography did not simply alter the structure of the story from development and tradition 22

Edmund Gosse, A Short History of English Literature (London, 1898), 391-2.

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to revolution and change. It also changed the scope of literary history's subject-matter from that of the narrowly defined area of literary works to the larger context of the social, political and economic activity which explained them. A good example of this new literary historiography is to be found in L. C. Knights's influential study, Drama and Society in the Age of Ben Jonson

(1937). In Knights's account the significance of late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama lay in the decisive break which it made with the literature of the preceding period. Such a view of literary historical change was, of course, explicitly derived from the revolutionary model of history proposed by Marxism; moreover the new literary story thereby produced had of necessity to be underwritten by the discovery of a new set of relationships between the literary work and its culture. Hence over half of Knights's study is devoted to an analysis of what he calls the ' background': the economic order, the development of capitalist enterprise and the material changes to the social structure. Here again, a dependence upon the base/superstructure paradigm of Marxism is self-evident. The point to be emphasized is that Knights's appropriation of the Marxist model of history was limited; the narrative paradigm had been assimilated, but the political philosophy which underwrites Marx's model of social change certainly had not. Marxism was not used as a body of political theory. Rather his notion of historical change had been abstracted from the corpus of his political thought, deprived thereby of its ideological sting, and then applied to literary history. For Knights, Marxism ceased to be a politics or even a philosophy of history; it simply provided him with a methodology. On this point, however, Knights was quite explicit about his aim, and he openly acknowledged the limitations of his project. When 'mapping' what he called 'the social and economic bases of Elizabethan-Jacobean culture' he claimed only to be making some 'profitable correlations' between those bases and the 'dramatic literature' of the period.23 The term 'correlation' is revealing. By diluting Marx's notion of causality into one of correlation, Knights assumed both the 23

L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Ben Jonson (1937; 2nd edn,

Harmondsworth, 1962), 121 (emphasis added).


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autonomy of the processes of literary production and the autonomy of economics, whereas the insight of Marxism is to explain literary production wholly in terms of an economic base. It is precisely this assimilation of categories which Knights rejected: It is, however, true that the Elizabethan drama owed, if not its existence, at least its fortunate development to the persistent patronage of the governing class ... May it not, then, reflect the 'ideology' of that class in more subtle ways than can be explored in the explicit social attitudes... which have been examined? To ask the question is to display its ineptitude. It can only be answered affirmatively by some such formula as that ' Shakespeare's tragic outlook on the world was consequential upon his being the dramatic expression of the feudal aristocracy which in Elizabeth's day had lost their former dominating position' - a remark which, since it clearly does not spring from the complexity of full experience of Shakespeare's poetry, does not lead back to anything that can be grasped and discussed.24 Perhaps it should be re-emphasized at this point that there have been two distinct ways of applying Marxism to literary history. One way, that of more recent materialist critics to whom we alluded earlier, is to use the Marxist philosophy of history to revalue the whole notion of literary history - that is, to contest its traditional subject-matter by seeing it as politically determined. The consequence of such a strategy, as we have said, is that literary history is replaced by a political history in which the value of canonical works is questioned, and in which the real centre of interest is the process by which works are canonized. A different and weaker method of applying Marxism to literary history (and this is Knights's way) is to use the narrative models of Marxism to reinterpret the relationships between a culture and its literary works, the value of which is taken as given. In this method the concept of literary identity is not disputed. Here again Knights is explicit about his assumptions : The claim that I am making is that the essential life of a period is best understood through its literature; not because of what that literature describes, but because of what it embodies ... The approach is mainly 24

Ibid., 19.

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the literary-critical one ... It is easy to collect and classify references to usurers, patentees, the newly rich, and so on. But for investigation of this kind we need more delicate tools, and a method of approach that keeps constantly before us the question of relevance. If Ben Jonson appears to have a disproportionate amount of space, it is because he seems to me so immeasurably superior to all his contemporaries ... and because his greatness as a poet makes clear the value of the popular tradition which is only dimly apprehended in the work of the lesser men such as Dekker and Hey wood.25 In Knights's view it is Jonson's literary significance which gives value to the social, political and economic insights to be gleaned from his work. To adopt such a position was not unusual at the time. Generally speaking, in early Marxist literary history the process of canonization is given, and the main interest in literary works is taken to be their special status as evidence, for (as with Knights) it is their literary identity which gives them a privileged perspective on the economic base. In this respect it is worth reiterating that in the years between 1890 and 1940, the years, that is, between Gosse's and Knights's work, the concept of literary identity remained unproblematic. Indeed Gosse had made an assumption very similar to that of Knights when he claimed that We should recognise only two criteria of literary judgment. Thefirstis primitive, and merely clears the ground of rubbish; it is, Does the work before us, or the author, perform what he sets out to perform with a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers are exercised ? if not, he interests the higher criticism not at all.26 It is reasonable to conclude that the historiographical differences between literary historians up to the middle decades of this century derived largely from their adoption of either evolutionary or revolutionary paradigms of historical change. Hence disagreements about literary historiography in the first half of this century can be loosely but not inaccurately characterized in terms of an oscillation between these two models. However these disagreements in no way threatened the disciplinary status of literary historiography. And in this respect it is the similarities, particularly those of epistemology, between 25

Ibid., 149-50.

26

Gosse, A Short History of English Literature, 390-1.


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the two approaches which are more significant than their differences, for both histories were in complete agreement on three fundamental points. First, that historical knowledge is possible in the sense that the past is 'there' to be uncovered; second, that a literary history can tell a 'story' of past works, even if the nature and details of that story change; and third, that what makes that story unique is the distinctiveness of its subject-matter - the identity of literary works. The disagreements which took place among historians in the 1970s and 1980s are in marked contrast to the disputes about evolutionary and revolutionary paradigms, for they involved epistemological rather than methodological differences; they concerned not the nature of the story which history is telling, but rather its status. These more recent arguments about the status of literary historiography once more have their origins in developments in the discipline of history; they draw upon a general epistemological critique of the nature of historical understanding developed by a number of philosophers and historians some years earlier.27 In brief it was argued that empiricist assumptions about historical objectivity (the existence of a past capable of being known objectively) were mistaken in that they failed to acknowledge that historians themselves were also historically situated: that is, that their view of the past was the product of a whole variety of attitudes, values and assumptions specific to their culture in general and to themselves, as individuals, in particular. Objectivity, in other words, was an illusory goal. Rather, all historical knowledge was by definition value-laden and therefore was understood to be a construction placed upon the past. The main issues in these critiques of traditional or empiricist historiography have been cogently summarized by Arthur C. Danto as follows: Historical statements are made by historians, and historians have motives for making historical statements about one past thing rather than another. Not merely that, but historians have certain feelings about the past things they are concerned to describe. Some of these 27

For details of this context, see Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985), ix-xiv; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Tubingen, i960; London, 1975), 179-235.

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feelings may be personal, some may be shared by members of various groups the historian belongs to. Such attitudes induce historians to make emphases, to overlook certain things, indeed to distort. Because of the baggage of attitudes they bring with them, they themselves are not always able to detect the distortions they make. But those who pretend to detect distortions have themselves a special set of attitudes, and hence their own manner of emphasizing, overlooking and distorting. Not to have attitudes is not to be a human being, but historians are human beings, and cannot, accordingly, make perfectly objective statements about the past. Every historical statement, as a consequence of unexpungeable personal factors, is a distortion, and hence not quite true. So we cannot succeed in making statements about the past which are quite true.28 The scepticism which this view of historical enquiry enjoins is related to the more general debates about the relationship between facts and values we have described in the preceding chapter. Such a characterization of the limits to our knowledge of the past is also consonant with the general or uberhaupt scepticism of deconstruction acknowledged and embraced by J. Hillis Miller quoted earlier.29 Indeed, Danto concedes that, on its own terms, such scepticism cannot be answered: There are perhaps differences of belief which resemble differences of attitude, differences of so fundamental a sort that we might term them disagreements of principle. One can perhaps do little better here than to speak of certain basic decisions, decisions of a sort which will determine what other kinds of decisions one is to make at higher levels. And such differences may disappear only when one or another party decides to cross over to the other side, to change his ultimate commitments. So, in a general way, one might say that whatever we believe finally is relative to some such basic decision, and that, in an important sense, such decisions are arbitrary. They are arbitrary in the sense that they are not made in accordance with any criteria, for they determine, finally, what are to be the criteria we shall accept.30 In the terms used earlier, history understood in this way is a conventionalism. However Danto goes on to caution that this limitation is not unique to historical knowledge. And, to repeat 28 29

Danto, Narration and Knowledge, 3 1 - 2 . It is ironic to note that both Miller and proponents of philosophical scepticism trace, with equal certainty, the pedigree of such views to a historical figure - Friedrich 30 Nietzsche. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, 109-10.


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an argument which we have frequently reiterated, it therefore has no special force when applied to history: If one chooses to regard these facts as a basis for a scepticism with regard to history, one has no good grounds for doing so. Not because history is not relative to such basic decisions, but because every human cognitive enterprise is. One could not be sceptical about history without being sceptical about everything else, and this, finally, destroys whatever specific force relativism might be thought to have with regard to history... History is no more and no less subject to the relativistic factors than science is. And if one says that there is a special pity in the fact that history is, there is nothing to say except this is a prejudice, and that one could not legitimately demand any exemptions here ... If one were to demonstrate that it is impossible to make a true statement, it would follow, of course, that one could not make a true statement about the past. But why then call this historical scepticism? It is scepticism 'uberhaupt', and we are not obliged to deal with 'uberhaupt' scepticism.31 To return to the parallel between philosophical scepticism and deconstruction: both Danto and M. H. Abrams suggest that to make an argument (in whatever form) about scepticism is also to make one about cognition, for scepticism affects all cognitive acts. Logically it cannot work in a local or restricted way. Hence it is not an issue uniquely relevant to history (nor to literary history, nor indeed, as we have suggested in the previous chapter, to literary criticism). As Danto hints, were the case for an uberhaupt scepticism to be generally accepted and acted upon, there could be no reason for the continuing existence of any disciplines which depend upon historical knowledge. Furthermore, in the train of such scepticism, it would become virtually impossible to justify the existence of institutions of learning, such as universities. Uberhaupt scepticism, then, destroys the case for all literary study, and all literary history, be it new historicist, Marxist, feminist or traditional. Despite these general limitations to the sceptical position, aspects of the critique of the epistemological assumptions of empiricist historiography have partly provided the basis for the most recent challenge to traditional literary history - that of new historicism - a practice which at the present time is 31

Ibid., n o .

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particularly prevalent in the United States. The argument of new historicism can be broadly summarized in the following terms. It assumes that all study of past periods or former cultures involves the use of value-judgements, and that the newhistoricist critique is different from those it attempts to supersede by insisting upon a self-consciousness about its methods and its theoretical assumptions. Stephen Greenblatt has recently summarized the new elements of new historicism in the following manner: An older historicism that proclaimed self-consciously that it had avoided all value judgements in its account of the past - that it had given us historical reality wie es eigentlich gewesen - did not thereby avoid all value judgements; it simply provided a misleading account of what it had actually done. In this sense the new historicism, for all its acknowledgement of engagement and partiality, is slightly less likely than the older historicism to impose its values belligerently on the past, for those values seem historically contingent.32 The first point of departure of new historicism is the overt acknowledgement that the subject position of historians determines the nature of the history which they write. Its second distinctive feature (found in the work of its most recent practitioners) is the companion insistence that the past is itself constitutive of that subject position - of the historian's values, assumptions, beliefs and so forth. In terms more emphatic than Greenblatt, Marjorie Levinson has pointed out that the 'old' historicism took as its project the restoration 'to the dead [of] their own, living language'. She argues that, in contrast to this misconceived aim, the project of new historicism involves an acknowledgement of the interrelatedness of past and present: ' in a real and practical way, we are the effects of the particular pasts, to which we are related by distance and difference': We know there are moments when two ages call to each other in powerful ways. Naturally, there are strong local reasons... for these conjunctions. But we must also wonder if there aren't other orders of explanation. Might we not be part of a developing, leap-frogging 32

Stephen Greenblatt, 'Resonance and Wonder', in Peter Collier and Helga GeyerRyan (eds.), Literary Theory Today (Cambridge, 1990), 77.


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logic? Are we, or could we make ourselves the consciousness of the Romantic movement produced as a moment in the accomplishment of that action? To ask this is to wonder who we are that we produce the Romantics in just this way. It is also to inquire who they are, to have produced us in just this way. Once again, we go back to the future. To ask these questions is to insist that we rewrite the past with the full complement of contemporary knowledges. It is also to name ourselves as producers of the past as past and thus of history's meaning, even as we bring out the historical overdetermination of our productive acts and even as we renounce a fully dialectical knowledge of ourselves.33 Taken separately, the assumptions of new historicism seem to have the ring of common sense. Few historians would deny that the present is in some ways the product of the past; equally, few would deny that our description of the past - history - is a construction made by the present. However, when taken together as a programme for a new kind of historical enquiry, the two claims, while logical and plausible separately, are incompatible with each other. For to assert that past actions or beliefs constitute my present prejudices or assumptions is in turn to assume a neutral or unmediated access to my past against which my present prejudices or assumptions can be measured. But the possibility of such an unmediated access to the past is explicitly denied by the first tenet of new historicism - that knowledge of the past is always a construction placed upon it by contingencies of the present (by my prejudices, assumptions, beliefs, and so forth). The tension between the two claims of new historicism might seem to offer the prospect of a fruitful dialectic - what Levinson calls a ' transhistorical dialectic' - but in reality the newness of this new historiography does little more than disguise a logical contradiction. This contradiction arises because new historicists use a form of philosophical scepticism to justify their position, but they do so in a partial way. Scepticism is employed chiefly to disable the claim made by traditional literary historians (and many 33

Marjorie Levinson, 'The New Historicism: Back to the Future', in Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann and Paul Hamilton (eds.), Rethinking Historicism (Oxford, 1989), 51-2.

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Marxists and feminists) that there can be a single authoritative history of any aspect of the past — for example, a single history of the Elizabethan stage. Scepticism is not used by new historicists, however, to disable history per se. So, for their own purposes, they still assume that the past is, under certain conditions, knowable, and that texts form an important source of evidence for knowledge of that past. In this sense new historicists are certainly not uberhaupt sceptics, although they are on occasions prepared to use the arguments of 'all-over' scepticism to suggest that historical knowledge is, in Greenblatt's words, contingent. Greenblatt's opening essay in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) makes precisely this point. His argument is that historians in 're-creating' the past can hear only their own voices: This desire [to speak with the dead] is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies ... If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces made themselves heard in the voices of the living. Many of the traces have little resonance, though every one, even the most trivial or tedious, contains some fragment of lost life; others seem uncannily full of the will to be heard.34 Encapsulated in Greenblatt's description of his activities are the two contradictory claims of new historicism — that the present constructs the past, and that the past constructs the present. Philosophical scepticism can only be used to support the first claim; and if it supports the first, it denies the second. Hence Greenblatt's disclaimer is, to use Danto's terms, little more than a trick of rhetoric. Indeed, a little later Greenblatt appears to concede that his' new' history is doing little more than changing the subject-matter of the 'old' history. Here Greenblatt is not sceptical about knowledge of the past at all: 34

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford, 1988), 1.


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In the essays that follow I propose something different: to look less at the presumed center of the literary domain than at its borders, to try to track what can only be glimpsed, as it were, at the margins of the text... My vision is necessarily more fragmentary, but I hope to offer a compensatory satisfaction: insight into the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered.35 Howard Felperin notes exactly this inconsistency (although in a slightly different way) when he comments that ' American new historicism is not all that "new" in the sense that it posits in the first instance an historically knowable past: 36 My point... is that in moving from Tillyard to Greenblatt only the political valorization of [Elizabethan] society had been completely inverted; the terms of its cognition and construction deployed by Tillyard, the early Greenblatt, and many others were not essentially different. Those terms remain basically 'empiricist' or 'realist'. That is, they all' posit' Elizabethan society as a historical reality not simply present... but one whose historicity exists in its own right... despite its survival only in the form of traces.37 In so far as historiography involves the discrimination and selection of evidence, it will of course, as we indicated in chapter 3, involve value-judgements. Hence a value-free history, like a value-free literary criticism, is a contradiction in terms. All that has occurred with the advent of new historicism is that some historians have become openly sceptical of other historians' descriptions of the past. Despite using some arguments from philosophical scepticism, they have not become sceptical of historical knowledge per se. In new historicism the logical and practical differences between scepticism and hermeneutic pluralism have simply been elided. If this situation begins to sound familiar, it is because there is a striking methodological similarity between Greenblatt's use of contested concepts in historiography and the use made of historical materialism by early Marxist literary historians. Philosophical scepticism is, as we have suggested, fundamentally an argument about epistemology and cognition, but it is used by Greenblatt only as a methodological tool. 35 37

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 150.

36

Howard Felperin, The Uses of the Canon (Oxford, 1990), 155.

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These observations on their own are sufficient to place the whole project of new historicism in considerable jeopardy and to undermine the authority of the particular accounts of the past which it has so far produced. However, new historicism also has far-reaching local consequences for the disciplinary status of English and literary studies. In the hands of critics such as Greenblatt, new historicism claims to 'decenter' the judgements of traditional literary history. In practice, as a number of critics have noted,38 such views have led new literary historians to scrutinize increasingly esoteric documents and episodes, because their project is committed to revaluing the hierarchy which determines what is central and what is peripheral to the 'historical understanding of culture5.39 So for example, in Shakespearean Negotiations•, Greenblatt looks to an eclectic body of documents in order to talk about the social history of Elizabethan England. In this project, literary works, in this case Shakespeare's plays, are only one of the many forms in which cultural representation may occur. In other words, in new historicism the centrality of literary works in cultural history is displaced: the object of study in new historicism, Greenblatt argues, is the variety of relationships which exist between cultural practices: Instead we can ask how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption. We can examine how the boundaries were marked between cultural practices understood to be art forms and other, contiguous, forms of expression ... I have termed this general enterprise - study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices - a poetics of culture.40

Interestingly Greenblatt describes these relationships in metaphors taken mainly from economics and sociology, and his principal term for the social mechanisms of cultural exchange is 'social energy'. In his view this phenomenon is so widespread as 38

See, for example, Walter Cohen, 'Political Criticism in Shakespeare', in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (eds.), Shakespeare Reproduced (London, 1987), 39 33-4. Greenblatt, 'Resonance and Wonder', 70.

40

Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 5.


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to be finally resistant to thorough historical investigation, but, and at the same time, so pervasive as to inform all elements in past cultures: For the circulation of social energy by and through the stage [of Shakespeare's time] was not part of a single coherent, totalizing system. Rather it was partial, fragmentary, conflictual; elements were crossed, torn apart, recombined, set against each other; particular social practices were magnified by the stage, others diminished, exalted, evacuated. What then is the social energy that is being circulated? Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe, free-floating intensities of experience: in a sense the question is absurd, for everything produced by the society can circulate unless it is deliberately excluded from circulation. Under such circumstances, there can be no single method, no overall picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics.41 Literary works thus lose their privilege within new historicism, and literary history is deprived of its subject-matter. However, once again it is worth noting that in examining the ' circulation of social energy' new historicists have tended to focus their attention on the evidence provided by those works enshrined in the canon of traditional literary history: either on the work of Shakespeare (as with Greenblatt) or the Romantics (as with Levinson). So like deconstructionists, Marxists and feminists, new historicists appear silently to embody the very same hierarchy of texts which their histories are designed to overturn. There are, then, two reasons for being cautious about the claims of new historicism. The first is the illogicality of its premises. And the second is that new historicism cannot be a specialist practice in the discipline of English studies as it is currently defined. In partial contrast to new historicism, there is another recent critique of traditional literary history which appears to have embraced more enthusiastically the consequences of philosophical scepticism as they apply to empiricist literary his41

Ibid., 19. It is worth noting here that Greenblatt's claim involves the same contradiction we noted earlier. To argue that ' everything produced by society can circulate' implies that the past can in principle be known completely. Hence he cannot at the same time logically argue that there is 'no single method, no overall picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics'.

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toriography. Cultural materialists (to be distinguished from the earlier Marxist historians whom we have discussed above, and who employ a traditionalist empiricist historiography) accept that value is inherent in the writing of history, and they accept too all the limitations imposed upon historians by the nature of their historical location. However, these concessions are made in order explicitly to politicize literary history. That is, in this view, the adjudication between different historical accounts different constructions placed upon the past - is made on the basis of an appeal to politics; moreover, these politics are defined in terms of the interests of the present-day. Cultural materialists are explicit about interpreting the past in terms of its relevance to modern concerns, and are thus unashamedly practising what Richard Rorty has called a form of doxography.42 They may therefore seem to be much more rigorous than new historicists in their employment of the sceptical argument; that is, they see the values, assumptions and prejudices of historians determining the nature of the history which they write. Moreover, they do not entertain new historicism's second and contradictory claim that the past constitutes those values, assumptions and prejudices. However, in practice, cultural materialists are not that different from new historicists for they too only apply the insights of scepticism partially. For them, scepticism is limited to historical knowledge; they are only sceptical about history, and not about politics. Hence their confident assertion that the materialist perspective is 'right'. But as Danto argues, such a position is inconsistent, for if scepticism is to have any force, it must apply to every cognitive enterprise (including political knowledge and political decisions); otherwise it is not really scepticism. So the rationale of the new history proposed by cultural materialists, like that of the new history proposed by new historicists, depends upon an inconsistency, and the case it makes for disabling and superseding traditional literary historiography (at least on historiographical grounds) ceases to be very 42

See Richard Rorty, 'The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres', in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984).


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persuasive. More important than all this for our purpose, however, are the problems of cultural materialism for the disciplinary status of English studies. Like the earlier materialist histories we have discussed, and like new historicism, it is difficult to see how cultural materialism could constitute a specialist practice, for its concern with the political makes it liable to exactly the same objections as those levelled at a political literary criticism. In chapters 2 and 3 we discussed at a general level the issue of politicizing English studies, arguing that such a procedure was incommensurate with the conditions which generally obtain for disciplines of knowledge. In particular, we suggested that the politicization of the object of study in English compromised or jeopardized both the specialist status and the social utility of the discipline. Here these same limitations apply to the explicitly political literary history proposed by cultural materialists. Without reiterating that general argument the same issues may be broached, but at a much more pragmatic level - one which allows the questions we raised in chapter 3 about literary identity also to be discussed: in general terms, what c work' would a political literary history do? Ill

L I T E R A R Y H I S T O R Y AND P O L I T I C S

In order for literary histories to be useful they need to be able to operate a certain level of specificity in the sense that their most important purpose is the explanation of the individuality of works. As we have indicated, political literary histories concentrate for the main part on the processes by which certain values are ascribed to certain texts. In so doing they focus on the ideological determinants of texts — that is, the political conditions which may have had a bearing on that text's production or reception. This approach has important general limitations which can be illustrated by way of some examples. So, to keep to the subject of nineteenth-century English literature which we have used throughout this book: it might be possible to explain both the representation of, say, India in Kipling's novels, and their enormous popularity in Britain, in terms of contemporary

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ideologies of imperialism. The privileging of Kipling's work (its designation as 'literary') may be partly due to its perpetuation of certain political ideologies. But with this explanation a number of caveats need to be observed. The first concerns the ways in which politics operates in the designation of works as ' literary'. In the case of Kipling, why is it that his representation of India, rather than any other representations which share the same political perspective, was (and is) considered to be literature? To put the same point slightly differently: such a political literary history, because it does not pay attention to the literary identity of a text, in the sense that it does not recognize such a concept, will have on its own nothing to say about the differences between a work of history, such as Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, and a work of fiction, such as Charles Dickens's Hard Times, which depended upon Carlyle's thought for much of its politics. Such accounts, if they are consistent with their premises, will not be able to explain the differences between the politics of the determining processes and the politics of the determined artefact. The second caveat concerns the relationship between the content of a work and an ideology. Although it might under certain circumstances be possible to talk of content being causally related to, or produced by, ideologies, there is still an enormous number of questions, particularly those concerning the mechanism of the processes of influence, to be explained.43 But for the practising critic the most important limitation is that it is difficult to see how this kind of history can account for the diversity of formal or stylistic features of literary texts in solely ideological terms, without placing such a complex set of qualifications upon the concept of ideology that it would cease to have any useful explanatory power. The example of the formal diversity to be found in early British modernist writing will make this point a little clearer. Histories which emphasize the role of sexual and political ideologies as the determinants of 43

Strictly speaking, these are general questions concerning the nature of ideology and are not particularly relevant to literary works. For a discussion of the general issues concerned, see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1981), 4-44.


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texts have to account for the formal diversity which early modernist writing exhibits. A list of some of the works published in the years between 1918 and 1924 demonstrates the extent of that task. Those years saw not only T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and W. B. Yeats's Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920), but also Siegfried Sassoon's Counter-Attack (1918); in fiction they saw James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolfs Jacob's Room (1922), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), but also Ford Madox Ford's Some Do Not (1924) and Arnold Bennett's Riceyman's Steps (1923). These works were all produced under the same broad set of social and political conditions, and the historian who wishes to explain their diversity solely (or even principally) in terms of social determinants has to set about matching precisely those determinants with a set of formal devices. Such a task is complicated by the co-existence of works whose political content is diverse, but whose formal devices are similar, and vice versa. A good example of such a problem is to be found in the work of British and Irish dramatists writing a little earlier. The plays of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Henry Arthur Jones were produced under the same general ideological conditions, the same publishing and performance constraints, and they share broadly the same formal devices and resources of the 'well-made play'. But the political content of the plays is not uniform. So in order to explain such diversity in texts produced at any historical moment, political literary histories have to explain the selective nature of the determining processes which they allege are in operation; or they have to explain why the same ideological factors may produce quite different texts at any one moment. If political literary histories can neither describe nor account for the formal differences between works, then it is difficult to see what kind of use they have as a practicable history. Simply put, if they cannot operate at a sufficient level of specificity, they are, if not incorrect, then unusable history, for the statements which they will make about social and political contexts can only have force as generalizations. To conduct a political literary history which would operate with a specificity adequate to explaining the diversity of formal textual features and thus

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would be of practical use to the critic would have to involve paying attention to influences which are not political or ideological; in other words giving attention to the literary identity of texts. Although literary identity is, as we have frequently emphasized, indeed value-laden, it should be clear from our discussion in the previous chapters that it is a mistake to move from this observation to an assumption that these values are merely political ones. Literary value may sometimes be used in the service of political or ideological ends - such a use is a familiar strategy of avant-garde writers44 - but this circumstance does not mean that literary value can be wholly collapsed into politics. Such a discrimination of course underlay the procedures of older political histories, of which L. C. Knights's partial use of Marxist paradigms is a good example. As we have indicated, Knights did attend to the literary identity of texts - to, that is, the concept of literary art under which they were produced. Indeed it was precisely this identity which gave works by Jonson their special status as evidence. However, histories such as Knights's also have limitations, the most compelling of which is their failure to employ the concept of literary identity rigorously. More precisely, such histories largely ignore the possibility that authorial choices, including an initial decision to attend to a concept of literary art, may be circumscribed or constrained by political factors; and that such a concession would allow the literary historian to talk of how choices about form might possess a political dimension (and not just, as, for example, with the case of nineteenth-century 'social problem' novels, a political consequence). In such a situation it is not possible, as Richard Wollheim has noted, to identify a causal relationship between those choices and an ideology, except in the broadest terms.45 The example of British drama of the 1890s, mentioned earlier, will make this point clearer. The formal devices of the 'well-made play', widely used by dramatists such as Henry Arthur Jones, confirmed the con44

45

See J o s e p h i n e G u y , The British Avant-Garde: the Theory and Politics of Tradition ( H e m e l Hempstead, 1991). See Richard Wollheim,' Sociological Explanation of the Arts: Some Distinctions', in Milton G. Albrecht, James H. Barnett and Mason Griff (eds.), The Sociology of Art and Literature: a Reader (London, 1970), 574-81.


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servative values which the play explicitly expressed: so the resolution of the plot in the last act, so characteristic of these plays, restores or reaffirms as natural or inevitable British classdistinctions. In the hands of dramatists such as Wilde and Shaw, however, these same devices were used in radically different contexts, a procedure which exposed and undermined the political conservatism of their use by Jones. So on these occasions, the plot-resolution in the last act of a play such as Wilde's An Ideal Husband is so sudden and improbable that it presents the notion of social cohesion as a mere contrivance or fiction. In cases such as these it is clearly impossible to generalize about the political function of formal devices. Rather, the historian will only be able to isolate the specific circumstances in which formal choices might sometimes possess political significance. In other words, the politics of formal devices may only be understood in relation to the specific circumstances in which they are used. Understanding the role of politics in these sorts of ways attends to the literary identity of works, but without suggesting that it remains immune from political issues. It therefore avoids two limitations which have plagued both traditional literary history and those new literary histories which have attempted to replace it. On the one hand, it does not enforce the complete separation of the political and the literary; but on the other, nor does it permit the literary to be subsumed into the political. To summarize the points of this chapter briefly: literary history by virtue of both its terms, is inherently value-laden. In the case of the historiography of literary history, objections to the presence of value (and therefore to the critiques of literary history based on such objections) may be largely disregarded in the sense that value is a problem not only of history proper, but of the very act of cognition: it is an iiberhaupt problem. As such, as Arthur C. Danto argues, it does not need to be addressed. Or rather, if it is addressed, then its consequences, the disabling of all disciplines of knowledge, have to be acknowledged. No proponent of any 'new' literary history has been willing to adopt such a position. On the other hand, the argument concerning the value-laden nature of the concept of literary

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identity - the subject-matter of literary history - does need to be taken account of, but not in the ways in which contemporary literary historians have suggested. The main limitation with their approach is that they collapse literary value into political value so that literary history is replaced by, or subsumed into, political or cultural history. As we have argued in our discussions of the use of theory in English and literary studies, to identify all value with political value threatens the disciplinary status of the knowledge which such a history would produce. But it should also now be clear from our discussion of the politics of formal features that this collapsing of categories leaves us, at the very least, with a history which is of little practicable use, in the sense that it does not allow historians to distinguish between the kinds of texts which they use in such histories. Nor (and in their terms more importantly) does it allow them to distinguish between the kinds of politics which those texts embody. Once again, few contemporary literary historians have acknowledged any of these limitations to their projects. Ironically, many base their 'new' histories on works identified by, and enshrined in, traditional literary history: so both new historicism and cultural materialism initially focused on the work of Shakespeare. This fact alone suggests that these 'new' histories are silently employing precisely that principle of selection (based on a concept of literary identity) which they claim to contest. In the next chapter we suggest that exactly the same contradiction exhibits itself in the relationship between the premises of textediting and recent developments in literary theory.

CHAPTER 5


Generally speaking, text-editors have had a low profile in English, especially in the recent debates about the future of the discipline.1 It is not simply that the ideas of textual scholarship and the interests of text-editors have been overlooked, although doubtless this has been the case; rather the work which editors do, and more importantly, the theoretical insights which their work has generated, have not generally been seen as relevant to the status of the discipline. However, logically speaking, textcriticism should enjoy a massive authority in English studies because the issues it addresses are fundamental. Why do we edit texts at all; why do we edit the texts which we do edit; and, how do we edit those texts? All of these questions implicate, in different ways and to varying degrees, the contested concepts which we have discussed in the previous chapters, those of literary value and literary identity, authority and canonicity. In other words, as Hershel Parker has pointed out, text-editing, far from being marginal to English studies, forces us to confront the central problems in the discipline.2 It is broadly agreed that we need standard editions of works. However this agreement seems to rest on an assumption that text-editing and literary criticism are two distinct activities. So while there may be objections to attempts by literary critics to 1

2

This observation is truer of Britain than of the United States, where the theoretical assumptions underlying the practices of text-editing have been more systematically examined, and where the relationship between those theories and larger critical issues has been the subject of some recent essays in periodicals such as TEXT and Studies in Bibliography. See, for example, G. Thomas Tanselle, 'Textual Criticism and Deconstruction', Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990), 1-33. See Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (Evanstown, 111., 1984).

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establish a simple authoritative reading of a text, there is rarely any unease about the principle of establishing a single authoritative text. (There are of course many specific objections to editorial decisions about specific works.) The paradox of this situation is that a concept of authority (authorial or editorial) is seen as legitimate when it is used in the context of the problems of text-editing, particularly those relating to competing textual variants, but it is considered inappropriate when it is used in relation to interpretation - when, that is, it is used to determine meaning. Is such a disjunction logically sustainable? More precisely, is the concept of authority used with any consistency in English studies? In brief, what is at issue is a local instance of a general problem outlined earlier - the inconsistent application of a theoretical paradigm. Over the past twenty years the main consequence of theorizing has been to challenge the whole notion of authority, particularly with regard to the determination of meaning. As we indicated in chapter 2, anthologies such as Douglas Tallack's Literary Theory at Work (1987) have suggested that the use of theory is to be welcomed in the name of an interpretative openness. Roland Barthes's programme in S/Z (l91°) w a s both an early expression of this trend and a powerful influence on its development. There Barthes suggested that This new operation is interpretation (in the Nietzschean sense of the word). To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. Let us first posit the image of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes... are indeterminable.3 The work which Barthes uses to illustrate his case is, paradoxically, one which he calls a 'readerly' text, one 'less 3

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), 5-6.


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plural 3 than the 'ideal' or 'writerly' text which he describes here. It is Balzac's ' Sarrasine', a short story taken from Scenes de la vie Parisienne. The text of the story is printed in full as an appendix to the French edition, but without any accompanying textual apparatus, or any indication of the edition from which it is taken.4 Moreover, the American translator of 5 / ^ does not even feel the need to comment upon this omission, or upon the textual (or even stylistic) difficulties involved in rendering nineteenth-century French into twentieth-century American English.5 The fact that Balzac's text comes to us already authorized, but without any means of testing its authority, is an indication of a basic assumption which Barthes makes: that indeterminacy or pluralism (even in its more extreme 'writerly' form) is in the first instance predicated upon a single, stable text.6 In other words, Barthes silently endorses a concept of authority used in order to establish a text (here by Balzac's editors); but at the same time he repudiates such a concept in relation to interpretative pluralism. Such a contradictory position is by no means limited to Barthes - assumptions very similar to his are commonplace. For example, in her antiessentialist reading of Milton, Catherine Belsey asserts unequivocally that My reading of his [Milton's] texts is not necessarily one that John Milton would have recognized or acknowledged. Interpretation is not - cannot be - an activity of reconstructing an intended meaning which preceded the writing process. This traditional quarry of criticism is always a phantom - not merely elusive and probably illusory, but also dead. The author's intended meaning died at the 4

5

6

The compositional and publishing history of most, if not all, of Balzac's work is complex. So ' Sarrasine' was originally published in the Revue de Paris in 1830, and then in Romans et contes philosophiqu.es in 1831. It was collected in Scenes de la vie Parisienne in 1834-5. For the difficulties of translation, particularly that of contemporary French academic discourse, see Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: the Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (London, 1982), 371—3. Our use of the term 'stable' ought to be denned here. We are using it in the narrow sense common among bibliographers, and take it to refer to the establishing of a copy-text. We are not concerned with the more recent and more inexact senses of the word, where it is used to indicate an (allegedly undesirable) attempt to impose interpretative exactitude and semantic closure upon an already established text.

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moment that the text came into being, and the text is necessarily more than the author conceived or knew. The interpretation I want to offer does not seek out an apparition; instead it attends to an appearance, the signifying surface of the text, not an essence concealed by the words, but the textuality of the words themselves.7 For Belsey as well as Barthes, the text is simply ' there'; its production, in so far as an editor would understand that term, is unproblematic. If the production of texts were a straightforward process, her comments would be perfectly reasonable. However, most works come to us in a more or less imperfect state (and Milton's work, like Balzac's oeuvre, is no exception). The text which we read, far from being simply 'there', is more often than not an editorial as well as an authorial construct. Moreover, as any reader of successive editions of Milton well knows, editors, as much as authors, have intentions; so, in the case of Milton, the editorial intentions of, say, Richard Bentley, or Helen Darbishire, or Alistair Fowler or whoever, are an integral part of the ' signifying surface of the text' which we (and Belsey) read. Pluralism, as understood by Barthes and Belsey, clearly does not include the complexities posed by the existence of textual variants of a work, nor does it take account of the fact that the work which they read is invariably the product of editorial and critical choices between its various states. Logically speaking, however, there is nothing in Barthes's argument to prevent the 'triumphant plural' which 'constitutes' the text from being extended to include all the textual variants of the work in question: interpretative pluralism, then, ought to make redundant a concern with textual scholarship. Indeed arguments which see meaning as 'constructed' (or, in the terms we used earlier, produced by conventions), if pursued rigorously, can have no interest in textual exactitude. Here, however, the term ' textual pluralism' is misleading, for it does not refer to textual pluralism, but only to 'interpretative' pluralism; as Barthes's reading of' Sarrasine' demonstrates, it refers only to the plural 7

Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford, 1988), 6.


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readings of a single, stable text.8 Is it logically possible to hold at the same time both to a notion of determinate meaning (with regard to the establishing of a text) and indeterminate meaning (with regard to interpretation) ? Are the grounds for what is to count as ' determinate' different in each case (for they must be if such a position is not to be contradictory)? And, if so, why? It will be useful to begin with some concrete examples of how the distinction between textual determinacy and interpretative indeterminacy works in practice. James Joyce's Ulysses is often viewed as a 'writerly' text, in the sense that it is now no longer thought capable of being reduced to a single 'correct' reading. On the contrary, it is often cited as the exemplary instance of the polysemous quality claimed to be characteristic of all writing, but particularly of modernism. However, as with Barthes's reading of 'Sarrasine', this attribute of indeterminacy or openness predicated of Ulysses is assumed to be independent of the state of the text which embodies it. So Hans Walter Gabler's recent synoptic edition of Ulysses, with its claim to rectify 5,000 textual 'changes', has not altered this view.9 (Recently there has been a dispute about how authoritative Gabler's text is, but we are not concerned with its particularities because in it the issue is not the possibility of an authoritative text, but how far Gabler's edition embodies it.) The interpretative range of the novel is claimed by literary critics to be neither more nor less limited by the existence of Gabler's textual emendations. The concept of an authoritative text of a work is not (in this view) considered to have any bearing on the variety of interpretations which it is capable of supporting. Simply put, the case for limiting the range of possible readings is never (or rarely) made by appealing to what editors consider an authoritative text: few critics of Joyce will acknowledge the power of any scholarly edition to limit the range of interpretations which his work can sustain. It is interesting to note that in his introduction to Gabler's 'reading' edition of Ulysses, Richard Ellmann ack8

9

On this point, see Hershel Parker,' "The Text Itself" - Whatever That Is', TEXT, 3 (1987), 47-54See James Joyce, Ulysses: a Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York, 1984).

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nowledged that certain textual emendations do clarify meaning at a local level. The claim, however, is not made with regard to the polysemous qualities of the work as a whole.10 In the instances where the differences between the texts of a work are few, the distinction which we are making may seem to be trivial; a more extreme example, however, shows that this is not so. There are occasions where one text of a particular work is so different from another that it in effect constitutes a new work. Moreover, textual editors have long been aware of this problem. John Worthen, for example, has called attention to the existence of multiple texts of some of D. H. Lawrence's poems. In these texts Lawrence's revisions are so thoroughgoing that it can be argued that they constitute separate poems rather than several versions of one poem. This feature of Lawrence's working practices (called by the Cambridge editors of his work a habit of' constantly revising'11) presents for the critic and the textual scholar alike problems which the concept of interpretative pluralism is unable to take account of. Worthen cites the example of Lawrence's early poem 'Virgin Youth', and comments on its textual history as follows: 'Virgin Youth'... which first appears in one of Lawrence's Nottingham University poetry notebooks, probably dating from 1910 at latest, and which reappears in the notebook he used in 1916 to prepare for his volume Amores, suffered an extraordinary revision in 1928, when Lawrence was putting together his Collected Poems. Only five lines of the original twenty-two-line poem (1, 4, 8, 10, 11) are even similarly phrased, out of a text finally totalling fifty-six lines: only the very first line, of three words - ' Now and again' - is identical in both poems. As editors or critics of Lawrence's work, we need to choose which poem to edit, or to discuss: in no sense is there a single poem entitled ' Virgin 10

11

See Richard Ellmann, 'Introduction' to James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (Harmondsworth, 1986), x-xii. See Michael Black, 'Editing a Constantly-Revising Author: the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence in Historical Context', in Mara Kalnins (ed.), D. H. Lawrence Centenary Essays (Bristol, 1986). A similar issue underlies the larger argument in the philosophical distinction between type and token; for a discussion of the relationship between the two see, for example, Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (1968; 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980).


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Youth'. The same point could be made, if a little less strikingly, about a number of the poems revised for Lawrence's 1928 collection.12 Such problems are not unique to Lawrence, and one of the aims of theories of text-editing is to provide general principles which enable them to be resolved. These principles have been based primarily upon assumptions which take account of intentionality (that is, in what kinds of ways the earlier or the later versions might reflect Lawrence's intentions, and in what kinds of ways those intentions change), and which are thus predicated upon a notion of determinate meaning. So, for example, D. F. McKenzie in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts

(1986) has commented on how editors might understand the relationship between an 'unstable or open text' and the processes of revision. His argument does not resort to an essentialist concept of intention (famously attacked by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley), but rather discriminates a number of historically specific authorial intentions towards the revised text: Where an author revised a text, and two or more versions of it happen to survive, each of these can be said to have its own distinct structure, making it a different text. It embodies a quite different intention. It follows therefore that, since any single version will have its own historical identity, not only for its author but for the particular market of readers who bought and read it, we cannot invoke the idea of one unified intention which the editor must serve.13 Without some concept of authorial intention, it is impossible (or, at the very least, it is pointless) to distinguish between the drafts of the poem in the first place. However, it is precisely these concepts of intentionality and determinacy which interpretative pluralism is designed to replace. It seems, then, that there is a radical disjunction between concepts commonly used by texteditors and those used by literary theorists. However, McKenzie is one of the few critics to have noticed this disjunction. More usual are Roland Barthes's and Michel Foucault's separate and 12

John Worthen, 'D. H. Lawrence: Problems with Multiple Texts', in Ian Small and Marcus Walsh (eds.), The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing (Cambridge, 1991),

13

D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London, 1986), 28.

15-16.

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infamous claims about the 'death of the author', not made because the author represents an intention (or intentions) towards the text, but rather because the author represents, in Foucault's terms, ' the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning'. 14 But the implications of this argument for the practice of text-editing are rarely considered and even more rarely affect practice. Hence Barthes's use of an ' authorized' text of Balzac in S/ZHow can this paradox be explained? Do concepts such as determinacy and intentionality mean something different when applied to matters of interpretation rather than to text-editing? Logically, interpretative indeterminacy has either to be an attribute of texts (or, at least, of some texts), or it has to be a function of reading. If the former is true - if, that is, indeterminacy is an inherent feature of some texts or of text itself- then clearly there can be no grounds, except arbitrary or subjective ones, for establishing authoritative editions. Indeterminacy understood to have its origins in text makes editorial work (as it is traditionally understood) impossible to execute. Does the second way of defining the term resolve this dilemma? If interpretative pluralism is defined as a product of reading then it must operate selectively if text-editors are to do their work. In other words, editors must read in one way (to establish copytext) and literary critics read in another way (when advocating interpretative pluralism). However, as several editors have recently pointed out, editorial decisions frequently involve interpretative acts.15 But even if there were two kinds of reading, it is difficult to see why literary critics concerned with interpretative pluralism would need an authoritative text, for no text by itself and by definition would be able to place limits on such an interpretative activity. Hence in this case the issue of choosing between textual variants, even if possible to execute, would simply be irrelevant. In other words, to subscribe to a 14

15

Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?', injosue V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies'. Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (London, 1980), 159. See Tom Davis and Susan Hamlyn,' What Do We Do When Texts Differ? She Stoops To Conquer and Textual Criticism', in Rene Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn (Oxford,

1979). 263-79.


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notion of interpretative indeterminacy, whether predicated of texts or of reading practices, renders text-editing impossible or unnecessary or both. So the contradiction between the concepts used by text-editors and literary critics persists: literary critics continue to make use of authoritative texts in order to practise their plural readings. Moreover, to pick up our economic metaphor, editions still enjoy a buoyant market. I

T E X T - E D I T I N G : I D E N T I T Y AND A U T H O R I T Y

The classic rationales for the scholarly editing of literary texts have typically - and quite unproblematically - employed one or more of the following three concepts: authorship, intentionality and literary identity. Indeed all theories of text-editing invoke the concept of intentionality, either in a weak or a strong form, as one of the basic principles governing the choice of copytext. The strong arguments are manifold. They assume the primacy of an author, and furthermore that his or her intentions (in principle) exist to be discovered and retrieved. In other words, they are based upon an empiricist view of history. For example, Fredson Bowers, a dominant voice in debates about text-editing for the past twenty years, agreed in many respects with the classic formulations by W. R. Greg, by asserting unequivocally that a critical edition of a text should embody 'an author's full intentions'; 16 and more recently G. Thomas Tanselle has vigorously sustained the intentionalist case by arguing that the only proper basis for emendation to a copy-text must be made by reference to what an editor judges to be an author's intended meaning.17 Arguments about intention, however, especially as it bears upon the interpretation of literary texts, have been subject to sustained criticism, most famously by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1946). The logic of their argument about the irrecoverability of an author's intentions has had some influence upon theories of text-editing. In 16 17

Fredson Bowers, 'Remarks on Eclectic Texts', Proof, 4 (1975), 75. See G. Thomas Tanselle, 'The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention', Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 160-93.

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particular it has been used to emend the editorial programmes of textual scholars such as Greg, Bowers and Tanselle. These revisions, however, still employ a weak form of the intentionalist argument, in the sense that they see the author's intentions towards the text possessing some bearing upon a prospective editor's choice of copy-text. Perhaps the best known and most sophisticated of these 'weak intentionalist' editorial programmes is that proposed by Jerome McGann. In 'Textual Studies and Practical Criticism' he proposes an editorial programme which would 'perform a comprehensive textual and bibliographical study of a work' to result in ' the production of an edition;... a critical operation for studying the character of that edition;... [and] an interpretative operation for incorporating the meaning of the (past) work into a present context'. The elements which, in McGann's view, are to count as the ' originary textual moment' are as follows: 1. Author. 2. Other persons or groups involved in the initial process of production (e.g. collaborators; persons who may have commissioned the work; editors or amanuenses; etc.). 3. Phases or stages in the initial productive process. . . 4. Materials, means, and modes in the initial productive process.18 McGann thus argues that authorial intention is only one of the many factors affecting the production of the text, and one not necessarily of greater importance than what he calls other 'nonauthorial textual determinants'. However, it is significant that here McGann merely relegates in importance the concept of intention: in no way does he countenance its abolition. It might be objected that McGann's programme represents only a halfway house, and that there could be a rationale for textediting which is not predicated in any way upon a concept of intention or authorship. In this programme the reasons for choosing a copy-text would have to be based solely upon the social determinants of a text, on those elements which are often collectively referred to as the process of its social production. An 18

See Jerome McGann, 'Textual Studies and Practical Criticism', in The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford, 1985), 79 and 82.


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argument which does pay attention to the social determinants of both texts and their meanings is that set out by D. F. McKenzie. He extends the concept of the production of texts to take account of the significance of their material or physical forms, such as typography or binding. For McKenzie the physical embodiment of a text may affect its meaning. McKenzie, that is, regards the task of the text-critic as one requiring due attention to be paid to all aspects of the production of books and of their meanings - a process which he terms a ' sociology of texts': [A sociology of texts] accounts for a history of the book and, indeed, of all printed forms including all textual ephemera as a record of cultural change, whether in mass civilization or minority culture. For any history of the book which excluded study of the social, economic and political motivations of publishing, the reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die, would degenerate into a feebly digressive book list and never rise to a readable history. But such a phrase also accommodates what in recent critical theory is often called text production, and it therefore opens up the application of the discipline [bibliography] to the service of that field too.19 However, even such a radical programme as McKenzie's does not dissolve the concepts of intention, authority and agency;20 his 'sociology of texts' thus represents a shift of emphasis rather than a wholesale revision: I should resist [sociology's] abstraction to the point where it lost sight of human agency. At one level, a sociology simply reminds us of the full range of social realities which the medium of print had to serve, from receipt blanks to bibles. But it also directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission and consumption.21 The reasons why no text-editor has been able to offer a rationale for the provision of copy-text which explicitly pre19 20

M c K e n z i e , Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 5. It is worth adding that the notion of intention which McKenzie is alluding to here is not that attacked by Wimsatt and Beardsley: ' Whatever its metamorphoses, the different physical forms of any text, and the intentions they serve, are relative to a specific time, place and person. This creates a problem only if we want meaning to 21 be absolute and immutable' (ibid., 50). Ibid., 6—7.

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eludes the agency of the author (and hence his or her intentions) can be demonstrated once more by the example of Ulysses. A proposal to edit that novel which takes no account of concepts such as intentionality and authority would have to use some or all of the following criteria to establish copy-text: it would have to appeal to a notion of textual history understood solely in social terms, understood, that is, in terms of the general currency or availability of the text in question. So, typically, if faced with evidence provided by the discovery of later revisions to a work, such an argument could not justify any emendations by appeals to authorial intention. In such a rationale, then, there could be no text which is corrupt by virtue of the fact that it was later found not to embody the author's intentions. In this argument, 'authenticity' would be defined solely by reference to a text's readership. So the 1922 edition of Ulysses would be considered more ' authentic' than any subsequent revised text could be, for it could be argued that this edition is the most important text of the work in terms of the production of its meanings. It is worth pointing out in passing that this understanding of authenticity is common in documentary rather than literary editing, but the case for it is never made in terms of the unknowability of a writer's intentions, but rather in terms of value, a point to which we return below. A second point worth noting is that a weak form of this kind of argument is sometimes used in editing theatrical texts on the grounds that the performance text of a play is different from, and is to be preferred to, its published text. The rationale for the choice of performance text as copytext explicitly acknowledges that plays have primarily a social existence.22 However, as with multiple revisions, the rationale for printing the performance text of a play does not deny authority to the published text. So it is quite possible for both 22

A central aim of much theatre history concerns the retrieval of the text of first performances. See, for example, Joseph W. Donohue, Jr, ' The First Production of The Importance of Being Earnest: a Proposal for a Reconstructive Study', in Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson (eds.), Essays on Nineteenth Century British Drama

(London, 1971), 125-43. There are, however, complexities in the argument underlying such a practice. The first is that a performance text only approximates an actual performance - it cannot, for instance, capture gesture, and only rarely timing and intonation; and the second is that performances of any play undergo constant revision during a run.


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the performed and published versions of a dramatic text to constitute valid copy-text, but for quite distinct reasons. More importantly, to take a performance text as copy-text does not ignore the role of authorship or intention; it merely expands the notion of author and authorial intention to enlist figures such as players and directors, and on occasions, perhaps the audience too, as co-creators. In this sense, like McKenzie's proposal for a sociology of texts, it leaves the traditional editorial concepts of intentionality, authority and literary identity intact. There are other reasons why text-editors require the concepts of intention and authority. In the first place, the origins of a text are simply not explained. Secondly, without concepts of authority and intentionality editorial programmes would have no effective means of discriminating between different texts of the same work, when each text has equal social 'validity' or 'authenticity'. A host of examples spring to mind, but perhaps the best is the two King Lears.23 The third and most serious problem is that an editorial programme which renounces the notions of intention and literary identity would have no means of distinguishing between kinds of works; in the terms which we used before, it would have no means of accounting for why we edit the works which we do edit. This general point can once again best be seen in terms of a specific example: can and should editors justify editing a work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (traditionally held to be a 'literary' work) and a document such as a Victorian Blue Book on the same grounds? And, if so, can they be edited using the same principles? Can there be any meaningful measure of the relative social currency of each work which does not acknowledge that they have different identities? The question of how to edit diverse kinds of texts was a topic which engaged the attention of some textual scholars during the 1980s. So, for example, G. Thomas Tanselle in his essay 'Literary Editing' (1981) suggested that distinctions between texts (as far as the editor is concerned) should not be made on the 23

For details of the debate, about the two versions of Lear, see Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Revision. The Hilda Hume Lecture 1987 (London, 1988); and Philip Brockbank, 'Towards a Mobile Text', in Ian Small and Marcus Walsh (eds.), The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing (Cambridge, 1991), 90-106.

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grounds of'literary' and 'non-literary' identity, but rather on what he called ' the kinds of documents that editors ... have to deal with', where 'kind' was defined in terms of publication: Two broad classes of documents, calling for different editorial treatment, do exist: documents preserving writings of the kind normally intended for publication and those preserving writings of the kind not normally intended for publication. Historians more often find themselves editing the latter kind of writing, and as a result they have not had as much experience editing the former as have literary scholars; and literary scholars, in turn, have had somewhat less occasion for editing private documents.24 At first glance Tanselle's proposals appear to provide a method whereby works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and a Victorian Blue Book may be edited using the same general principles: according to Tanselle's definition, both were written with the express purpose of publication, and so both constitute the same kind of text. In this instance the distinction between 'intended for publication' and 'not intended for publication' seems straightforward. (It is worth noting that decisions about publication might in their turn depend upon prior decisions about a text's identity. So Wilde's motivation for publishing Dorian Gray, and his publisher's motivation for accepting the work, were quite different from those which produced Blue Books.) In other cases, however, Tanselle's distinction is much less helpful. It is these awkward cases, particularly that of editing letters, which best illustrate the inherent weakness of his proposals. It is possible to locate the letters of many writers on a variety of overlapping scales ranging from the private to the public, and from the pragmatic to the self-consciously aesthetic. At one point would be those carefully crafted letters written with some kind of publication in view; at another would be the private and often pedantic correspondence of writers such as Walter Pater. At yet other points would be letters which form a narrative sequence - some of those by Gustave Flaubert are a good example. At some other point would have to be Oscar Wilde's long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Epistola: in Carcere et 24

G. Thomas Tanselle, 'Literary Editing', in George L. Vogt and John Bush (eds.), Literary and Historical Editing (Kansas, 1981), 37.


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Vinculis (better known as De Profundis) which, on his release from prison, Wilde gave to Robert Ross, together with instructions to have copies of it made, and extracts from it circulated to friends.25 Taken collectively, these distinctions in the status of letters make Tanselle's private/published opposition a difficult one to sustain. They suggest that the criteria for editing documents such as letters, and, indeed, the reasons for editing some letters and not others, are based primarily on their value. So decisions to edit both Wilde's De Profundis or Pater's letters have not been based upon whether they were intended for public consumption. Moreover, letters are not an exceptional case: all decisions about text-editing initially involve valuejudgements. The question to be addressed, then, is: how is that value defined? Cultural materialists and Marxist critics might argue that what is at issue is merely a kind of political value. So, to return to the example of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and a Victorian Blue Book: in the view of a cultural materialist the reasons for editing both these works would invoke the same criterion, their political significance for readers today (or perhaps for their Victorian contemporaries). However, the issue of value in editorial (as well, as we have suggested, in critical) judgements is not as straightforward as this. A cogent discussion of some of the complexities involved has been made by Claire Badaracco in an essay which is in part a reply to Tanselle's proposals. She sees the term' value' possessing a special meaning when applied to editorial work: it distinguishes between the relationships which editors have with the various texts or documents they deal with: 'how an editor approaches the problem of value precedes questions of principle, and it is upon the basis of the solution to the problem of value that principles and procedures are enacted'. 26 Badaracco goes on to use this observation to distinguish between the kinds of editorial tasks which are appropriate to different kinds of texts. For certain texts, she argues, the issue of value is unproblematic for the 25

26

For a more detailed discussion of the problems of editing letters, see Ian Small and Marcus Walsh, 'The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing', in The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing, i - 1 3 . Claire Badaracco, 'The Editor and the Question of Value: Proposal', TEXT, 1 (1984), 42.

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editor in the sense that questions of value are determined by the community: they are not editorial decisions. With these texts the editor's audience is 'contemporaneous with the document', and for this reason 'the editor acts as scribe, reporter, cultural archeologist, and does not interpret or introduce the editorial persona in the edition'; for such an editor 'the business of editing is the art of evidentiary reporting'. 27 With other kinds of texts the editor does have a role in assigning value; indeed, it is a function of the very act of editing. In these cases the audience is contemporaneous with the editor rather than with the text; hence the editor acts as a ' mediator' between text and audience. Badaracco calls this kind of editor a 'textual' (rather than 'documentary') editor: The textual editor relates the authorial time to the present. Because the editor and hypothetical audience are contemporary, sharing cultural assumptions about the importance of the overall myth or general Story within which the edited text occupies a proportionate position like plot, the textual editor's work can be described as canonical. The editor relates the plot (or text) to the overall Story, acting as talebearer within the culture, by virtue of having presented the text. Both author and texts are other to editor and audience, and this admits the necessity for interpretation, elevating the role of the editor to that of a critic.28 So, to return to our two examples. The Picture of Dorian Gray would be an instance of Badaracco's second kind of text, and a Victorian Blue Book an example of the first. The decision to edit Dorian Gray (rather than, say, Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere) can only be made by assigning to it a value which must be accepted by the audience contemporary with an editor: by placing it, that is, in a ' Story'. As should be clear from previous chapters, the central element in such a Story has to be a concept of literary identity. So the decision to edit Dorian Gray rather than Robert Elsmere has as its basis a literary judgement. 29 27 29

28 ibid., 42-3. ibid., 42. That the Story does involve literary judgements and that those judgements are made by or on behalf of an audience by the editor is borne out by the histories of recent editions. So recent changes in criticism which have led to the revaluation of the work of writers such as Pater, Wilde and Lawrence have in their turn provided the justification for scholarly editions of their work.


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Alternatively, a decision to edit Victorian Blue Books can be made purely on evidentiary grounds. Moreover such a decision does not have to be justified by an interpretation of their significance in any particular argument (in, for example, their contribution to the establishment of the welfare state): the justification for editing such a text, then, would be on the grounds that it is a social document. In practice, of course, interpretation - and therefore judgements about historical value - will inevitably have some bearing on choosing which social documents are to be edited and published; but there is no necessary reason for this to be so. In the terms which we have used earlier, the distinction between kinds of texts, and the choice of different editorial practices appropriate for them, is made on the grounds of identity. So a Victorian Blue Book has (primarily, at least) a documentary identity; Dorian Gray, on the other hand, has primarily a literary identity. Programmes for editing which deny the significance of authority and identity for the choice of copy-text cannot take account of these differences. The answer to the question ' Why do we edit the texts which we do edit?' is, then, based upon decisions about a text's identity, which in turn implicates value-judgements. II

A N N O T A T I O N : I N T E N T I O N AND M E A N I N G

The other practice associated with text-editing is that of annotation, and here too it is the case that annotators are unable to do their work if they incorporate the arguments of much recent literary theory. The limitations of theory for the practice of annotation take three forms. Generally speaking, the unstated aim of annotated editions is the reconstruction of the historical context in which a work was originally produced. The operations of what philosophical aesthetics has called the institutional elements involved in the production of a work of art generally constitute this context; hence it is these elements which must be made explicit by the annotator. With a work of literature, such institutional elements will include considerations such as the nature of an audience, and an awareness of the fact that a work is produced via a set of

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relationships, and, on occasions, transactions, between author, publisher and reader. Clearly in order to undertake such a task, an annotator must in the first place employ an empiricist concept of historiography - must, that is, assume that the past is knowable, at least in principle. We have already examined the criticisms of such a position in our discussion of historical scepticism in the previous chapter: and it should now be clear that annotation, like literary history, is not uniquely disabled by what we have argued is an uberhaupt problem.30 The second way in which the principles of annotation run counter to the proposals of some contemporary literary theorists once again concerns interpretative pluralism. The basic premise of any annotation - given its aim of enabling a prospective reader to ' understand' the text (in whatever way we may wish to define 'understanding') - will lead to the promotion of some readings and the relegation of others: indeed, often annotation, although rarely explicitly so, privileges one reading to the exclusion of others. It tends, that is, to place limits on the interpretative plurality advocated by some literary theorists. Annotators, then, must assume that meaning is determinative, at least in principle. A third way in which these objectives run counter to the proposals of recent literary theorists is that they inevitably assume the operation of concepts of authority and intentionality: without such concepts, relationships between author, reader and publisher cannot be understood. The necessity of taking account of such relationships can be illustrated by some examples drawn, in keeping with the rest of the book, from the nineteenth century. In works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, or Henry James's The Tragic Muse, the use of quotation, allusion and reference - precisely 30

It is worth adding in passing that few annotators claim to describe a definitive context, and that the limits of such a context is a topic of some debate. Moreover, editors are also aware that the recovery of the past is problematic. See, for example, Stephen Wall, 'Annotated English Novels?', Essays in Criticism, 32 (1982), 1-14; Ian Jack, 'Novels and those "Necessary Evils": Annotating the Brontes', Essays in Criticism, 32 (1982), 320-30; and Martin C. Battestin, 'A Rationale of Literary Annotation: the Example of Fielding's Novels', Studies in Bibliography, 34 (1981),


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those textual features which require annotation — is so complex and elusive that the annotator has to consider the possibility that a novel might quite deliberately address several different and mutually exclusive audiences; and that textual devices may be used by their authors to distinguish between audiences — to exclude, in the case of, say, Pater or Wilde, the mass of readers in favour of a coterie. Both writers, for example, frequently misquote or partially quote, but with a consistency which suggests not carelessness but rather a carefully considered strategy to discriminate between those educated readers who would recognize textual jouissance and those who would simply be misled.31 An example of this tendency is to be found in Walter Pater's novel Marius the Epicurean?2 The work is dense with allusion and quotation - much of the substance of the text comprises quoted material, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. On many occasions, however, Pater silently adapts quotations and misattributes his sources. A good example occurs in chapter xv where Pater describes the Roman Stoic and orator Cornelius Fronto delivering a discourse on 'The Nature of Morals'. From the textual signals in the novel, there is no way in which even the most careful reader may detect that Fronto's discourse is authoritative or less 'real' than any of the other classical source material quoted in the novel: Virgil, Tibullus, the Historia Augusta, and so forth. Of course Cornelius Fronto was historically real enough: indeed in the course of the novel Pater often quotes from his correspondence with the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and on one occasion actually refers to the authenticating source of that correspondence, its discovery in Milan by Cardinal Mai in 1815. 'The Nature of Morals', however, does not exist; nor is there any record of the discourse ever having existed. But the ' fictionality' of Fronto's oration in Pater's novel is never acknowledged; moreover, to complicate matters further, in reality, it is not fictional at all, in the sense that it is composed of material derived from the Meditations of Marcus 31

32

See Ian Small,' Annotating " Hard " Nineteenth-Century Novels', Essays in Criticism, 36 (1986), 281-93. W a l t e r Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. I a n Small (Oxford, 1986).

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Aurelius. Pater, however, edits and reorders Aurelius's work so substantially that in effect it comprises another work. The problem for the annotator is that a complex textual device such as this cannot be accounted for without a notion of an intending author. In this case what is interesting about Pater's strategies of quotation is that it appears to be used to discriminate between audiences — to share, as it were, a private and knowing joke with a reader educated in the classics, but to mislead others. If all examples of citation and quotation worked in a simple way - if, for example, they were simply used to authorize an argument - it might be possible to explain their functions solely in terms of a readership: in other words, in terms of the status which the quoted writer enjoyed in an interpretative community at any particular time. But as the example from Pater indicates, instances of citation and quotation are often much more complex than this; they are 'strategic', a term which makes no sense without the concepts of an intending author and of determinate meaning.33 The concession that there are certain texts or certain kinds of texts which are impossible to annotate without the notions of authorial intention and of determinate meaning is an important one. As with the problems of establishing copy-text, it suggests that if on occasions notions of intentionality have to be used in the annotation of texts, then the case for abandoning such notions in their entirety is not a persuasive one. Moreover, such an argument is in no way compromised by the frequency of occurrence of these 'difficult' texts: strictly speaking, the existence of one such text is sufficient to throw doubt on any general argument for the abolition of the concepts of the author and of authorial intention.34 If the use of concepts such as intentionality, authority, literary identity and determinate meaning is endorsed by some practices in the discipline of English, as the widespread respect 33

34

There are also other problems with the use of citation and quotation, the most pressing of which is that an annotator has to read a work in the guise of both a naive and a sophisticated reader. See Small, 'Annotating " H a r d " Nineteenth-Century Novels'. Peter Lamarque has also noted the general limitations of many of the arguments of literary theorists. See Peter Lamarque, 'The Death of the Author: an Analytical Autopsy', British Journal of Aesthetics, 30 (1990), 319—31.


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for the principle of scholarly editing seems to imply, what are we entitled to say about the logic of those theoretical paradigms which attempt to deny their existence? The first point, which we have already alluded to, is the most obvious: as theories of the practices of the entire discipline they are clearly inadequate, despite their claim to the contrary. The second point to consider, as we argued in general terms in chapter 2, is that if a theory is inadequate in some ways - if, that is, its explanatory power is demonstrably limited - then it must be modified or superseded by a better theory. In this instance the claims made by some literary theorists to have undermined concepts of authority and intention on ontological grounds, or literary identity on political grounds, must be re-examined; and, more importantly, the programmes to reform the discipline which have been based on these critiques must also be reviewed. These proposals, however, are far from novel; putting them into practice would merely bring the use of theory in English studies squarely into line with other disciplines.

CHAPTER 6


To maintain its academic authority English (or literary) studies has to conform to a widely accepted set of criteria and conditions which distinguish disciplines of knowledge from bodies of knowledge. English has, that is, to possess a clearly defined object of study, a set of specialist practices appropriate to explaining it, a theory (or theories) of those practices, and ways of evaluating theories. Our overall argument has been that recent radical critiques of the discipline have largely ignored the existence of these criteria and conditions, and as a result have focused not on the nature of the knowledge produced by English studies, but upon its function. The problems which we have described in all the programmes to reform the discipline derive from this failure to distinguish between the general conditions for disciplinary knowledge and the functions of the knowledge produced by particular disciplines. The conflation of the institutional and the intellectual, the epistemological with the political, described in chapter i, have their origins in this failure; so too do the problems produced by both the misunderstanding of the role of theory within disciplines and the contradictory nature of multicultural reforms of the canon. Critiques of the knowledge produced in English studies invariably rest upon the perception that such knowledge is valueladen. Here once more a failure to distinguish between the nature and function of disciplinary knowledge has led to a misunderstanding of how such value-judgements operate. We maintained in chapter 3 that problems of value are iiberhaupt problems; they are a condition of all knowledge and therefore of all disciplines of knowledge. In other words, value-judgements 156


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in English studies do not threaten its status any more than they threaten the status of any other discipline. In chapters 4 and 5 we examined two practices in English which currently enjoy much less prestige than theorizing does, those of literary history and text-editing, and we suggested that these practices reveal the contradictory nature of current critiques of the valuejudgements in English studies. Understood in disciplinary terms (that is, as specialist practices), literary history and text-editing are unworkable without the value-laden concepts contested by recent theorizing - those of literary identity, authority and intentionality. Radical critiques of English have attempted to disable these concepts while at the same time maintaining the disciplinary authority of the practices which they underwrite. As a consequence the epistemic bases of the discipline are contested in some cases, but not in others. In all of this, our principal aim has been to demonstrate that recent radical proposals to reform English studies have failed to take account of current disciplinary procedures, and that for them to be persuasive, it is essential for their proponents to develop a convincing critique of existing criteria for the disciplinary structure and status of knowledge and a proposal for an alternative set of criteria which are generally applicable to all professions and disciplines. Logically all of these tasks must precede any local argument about structural changes in the nature of a single discipline such as English. And practically any proposal must be capable of accommodating the demands of other disciplines of knowledge, such as medicine or physics. Moreover it must convince practitioners in those disciplines that they do so in ways wrfich are better than the present disciplinary structures of knowledge. None of these tasks has been undertaken. A second aim has been to show that the arguments and presuppositions which motivate these reforms particularly those relating to the value-judgements in English are themselves inconsistent and contradictory. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that English (or literary) studies does not need the kind of reforms proposed for it. These arguments, however, should not be mistaken for complacency. Most of the political views we have discussed have

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been left-wing; but an example of a critique of English studies made by a right-wing commentator amply demonstrates the necessity of being alert to the professional requirements of academic specialisms. In the highly conservative Salisbury Review, J. L. Wilson has recently argued that English studies has taken over a role which until the turn of the century was filled by classics - that of a generalist education in letters. However, since (in Wilson's views) their subject does not possess the intellectual rigour of classical disciplines, departments of English have encouraged ignorant and unmotivated students to enter universities, and have trained poor teachers. Moreover she claims that the more all-embracing the object of study in English, and the more numerous its practices, the greater the likelihood of academic mediocrity, and hence the more likely English is to lose its disciplinary and professional status.1 Wilson asserts that the 'English Literature industry is a self-inflating Leviathan'; and her remedy for this state of affairs is to restrict the size of English departments, to change the nature of the courses which they run, and to limit the number of students in favour of subjects which supposedly possess greater utility. To do otherwise, she argues, only encourages 'the lazy and the dim', and Wilson suggests that 'most of those who choose to read English do so because they have no alternative'. 2 Nearly every teacher of English (or literature) would, we guess (and certainly hope), wish to dispute such an extreme characterization. But it does hold one clear lesson: that to claim professional status - to maintain itself in higher education - English must possess specialist knowledge and specialist practices. It is perhaps comforting to learn that none of these dilemmas is particularly new. Just over a century ago, when the study of literature was first institutionalized within universities, similar arguments took place, and the ways in which they were resolved provide an instructive example for the current 'crisis' in English.3 1 2 3

J. L. Wilson, 'Lice in the Locks of Literature', The Salisbury Review, 7 (1988), 26—8. Ibid., 28 and 26. In the discussion which follows, our examples are principally drawn from Britain, but in the United States, as some of our evidence shows, a similar pattern occurred.


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The history of the founding of the discipline of English is itself a highly politicized issue, for many of the proposals to reform the discipline are underwritten by a political understanding of the origins of English studies. It is not an accident that new histories of the discipline began to appear at the same time as radical proposals for its reform. So in the 1970s and 1980s critics and historians felt a need to re-examine the history of the founding of English in reaction to what they perceived to be half a century of deliberate misrepresentation. Earlier histories had viewed the establishing of the discipline of English as an altogether unremarkable part of a set of wholesale changes which took place in British universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century.4 However, in reassessing the role of English studies within British education, recent historians had larger ambitions. The first was to assign to English a much greater importance than had hitherto been usual; and the second was to suggest that its emergence as a discipline and its subsequent history were essentially political processes. Although it was challenged at the time of its first appearance, this new history has now taken on the dimensions of an orthodoxy.5 The different predispositions and aims of the individual historians concerned have inevitably resulted in changes of emphasis and of detail, but the overall argument has remained a fairly constant one. Reduced to its bare bones, it holds that the institutionalization of English studies in the late nineteenth century was instrumental in the construction of a form of national identity — a notion of Englishness — which in its turn was put to political uses. This new revisionist history has in its turn become one of the justifications for recent programmes to reform the discipline; to use the terms made popular by its advocates, it is the principal 4

See, for example, Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons (London, 1968) and Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (London, 1976); Anthony Kearney, The Louse on the Locks of Literature (Edinburgh, 1986); and D. J. Palmer, The Rise of

5

English Studies (London, 1965). The nature of this orthodoxy is such that critics as diverse as Bernard Bergonzi and Terry Eagleton have accepted it as correct. See Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English (Oxford, 1990), 27-36; and Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford, 1990), 29.

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rationale behind programmes to 'reread' or 'rewrite' English. In these programmes it is alleged that from its foundation in the nineteenth century the discipline of English has always been subject to political determination, although those politics are manifest in a variety of forms. 'Rereading English' primarily involves making the allegedly covert politics of the discipline explicit. So advocates of this view of the history of English are committed to putting forward suggestions for new kinds of critical practice; they argue that the study of texts should alert readers to the nature of the relationship of politics to literature: that, on the one hand, readers should uncover the political biases which have invariably informed past literary judgements; and that, on the other, they should be able to recover texts by attending in the first place to the politics of their production. Encapsulated in these proposals for the reform of the discipline, therefore, is a revision and an exposure of the alleged politics of its history. Perhaps the best example of a recent commentator motivated by a dissatisfaction with English studies to reassess the history of its foundation as a discipline of knowledge in Britain in this way is Brian Doyle.6 The central proposition in Doyle's argument is that 'the movement to advance the status of "English" in education' must be understood primarily in terms of a larger 'cultural and administrative' context, and in particular in terms of 'the establishment of national cultural institutions geared to providing a schedule for organizing the nation': 'English', he goes on, 'is best seen as an invented or constructed cultural form which was a culmination of attempts to produce a truly "English" theory of society and a prospectus for cultural renewal. ' 7 In Doyle's view, such a programme did not concern itself with the intellectual status and the intellectual value of 6

See Brian Doyle,' The Hidden History of English Studies' in Peter Widdowson (ed.), Re-Reading English (London, 1982), 17-31; and 'The Invention of English', in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1885-1920 (London, 1986), 89-115. We have used Doyle's account because it is the most thorough and the most widely available. See also Doyle, English and Englishness (London, 1989). For further similar accounts, see Peter Widdowson's ' Introduction' to Re-Reading English; and Terry Eagleton's opening chapter in Critical Theory: an 7 Introduction. Doyle, 'The Invention of English', 91 and 102.


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English studies. On the contrary, central to histories such as Doyle's is the contention that the founding of English coincided with, and was indeed causally related to, English and British nationalism. For Doyle, it is this very conjunction of literature and politics which makes the discipline historically important, and thus guarantees its centrality in accounts of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century culture. However, as we argued in chapters i and 2, the historical process is much more complex than Doyle allows. The thesis that the founding of the discipline was wholly determined by politics (in which nationalism played a leading role) is only made possible by a misuse of evidence, for there is a significant number of eminent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators on the discipline who fundamentally controvert the thesis. They are either ignored or very partially treated in histories such as Doyle's, and his use of one figure active in the establishing of English, A. C. Bradley, provides a good example of this partial use of evidence. In Doyle's argument, the justification for the view that there is a causal connection between nationalism and the founding of the discipline of English is to be found in the early history of the English Association, and particularly in arguments which claimed that the defining function of literature was its ability to act as ' a vehicle for morality' (although, of course, the nature of that 'morality' is one about which historians such as Doyle are profoundly critical): So here was the ultimate source of value in literature as in society: moral authority. The force of this moral authority becomes clearer when discussions within the [English] Association touching specifically upon the pedagogic uses of literature and indeed language are considered. Here the double emphasis upon the need to arrest cultural degeneration and to preserve the national heritage was overridingly in evidence.8 One of the figures whom Doyle uses to support this claim is Bradley. Indeed he appears as a central authority in Doyle's account of the history of English. However, Doyle's reading of Bradley's work is misleading, for it attributes to him opinions about the nature of the object of study of English which Bradley 8

ibid., 106.

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in fact did not hold. That Bradley played an instrumental role in the establishing of English as a discipline is not in doubt; he was one of the founders of the English Association and was fondly remembered by Ernest de Selincourt, then professor of poetry at Oxford, for having 'convinced a somewhat incredulous University that English Poetry was worthy of a place among academic studies'.9 De Selincourt's allusion to Oxford's reluctance to introduce the study of English literature into the curriculum should, however, alert us to the complexity of the processes involved. The arguments which earned Bradley the praise of de Selincourt were sophisticated ones, and in most important respects quite different from those specified by Doyle. Bradley's main aim in his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1901 was to demonstrate that the study of literature could satisfy the general intellectual and social criteria then obtaining for the establishing of any discipline, the most important of which was that it could yield a special or discrete kind of knowledge. While recognizing that literature could be discussed in several different ways - on national or political grounds, for example - Bradley nevertheless insisted that the term 'literature' described a discrete category of texts, and that it was this discreteness, rather than its 'moral authority', which provided the principal intellectual justification for the academic study of literature. Bradley argued that [The experience of poetry] is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has an intrinsic value. Next its poetic value is this intrinsic worth alone. Poetry may have also an ulterior value as a means to culture or religion; because it conveys instruction, or softens the passions, or furthers a good cause... So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be judged entirely from within.10

There are two reasons why Bradley defended the study of literature on these epistemological rather than political grounds, and neither of them demonstrates the naivete which many historians have implied. The first has to do with 9 10

E. de Selincourt, On Poetry, an Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 1929), 3. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909; 2nd edn, London, 1917), 4-5.


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contemporary views of the nature of the relationship between literature and morality. The proposition that literature could embody a form of moral knowledge - and so, as Doyle suggests, form the basis of a 'prospectus for cultural renewal' - had been problematic since the mid-1870s. In particular the Aesthetic Movement had strongly contested (on what were basically, like Bradley's, epistemological grounds) the assumption that morality and literature had a necessary relationship with each other. Any number of examples will serve to illustrate this point. Walter Pater's 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance is probably the most famous. But there is also Oscar Wilde's playful, almost irreverent, allusion to the distinction between ethics and aesthetics in Intentions in 1891, and the more sober and systematic argument preferred by Henry James in his essay 'The Art of Fiction'. There James argued that questions of literary art were 'questions of execution' and thus quite distinct from' questions of morality' - indeed so removed as to constitute 'quite another affair'.11 Of course in contesting the claim that there was a necessary relationship between literature and morality figures such as Wilde and James also clearly had political concerns. Their discontent with current views about literature was intimately related to their objections to the particular definition of morality (the particular moral principles) which literary works were then held to embody. Moreover, they also realized that to engage directly in a debate about what might constitute appropriate moral principles (whether or not in the context of literature) was too contentious. Much more circumspect, then, was their attempt to shift the grounds of that debate so that the whole issue of morality simply became irrelevant to the discussion of literary works. But leaving aside these individual motives, the important point to stress in all this is that the arguments put forward by the Aesthetes had the effect of making any subsequent claims about the political or moral functions of literature much more difficult to sustain; at the very least, they ensured that such functions could no longer simply be taken for granted. 11

Henry James, 'The Art of Fiction', in The House of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (London, 1957), 42-3-

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The second, and more important reason behind Bradley's defence of literary studies on epistemological grounds concerns his recognition that even if literature could (and did) embody moral knowledge, then that attribute alone could never be a sufficient reason for it to be considered an autonomous discipline of knowledge. In fact, precisely the opposite case would have obtained: the moral knowledge allegedly embodied in literature would have provided an overwhelming argument for subsuming its study into disciplines of knowledge which already existed, in particular, that of moral philosophy. Indeed exactly this general situation had obtained in the first half of the nineteenth century. There is abundant evidence that literary works were read and widely discussed within universities, but predominantly in relation to other bodies or disciplines of knowledge, principally theology, philosophy and the various classical studies then taught. Again, there are any number of examples which make this point clear. The highly respected and influential Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, for instance, discussed the moral aspects of contemporary literature in the 1870s and 1880s, but mainly in the course of his lectures on Greek philosophy. Bradley, in other words, was aware that certain general intellectual preconditions had to be met in order for any body of knowledge, including English, to be established as a discipline. (It should perhaps be emphasized in passing that we are not claiming that Bradley necessarily approved of such conditions, but only that he recognized that in order to give English studies a disciplinary status, he had either to observe them or to make a strong - and moreover successful - argument for changing them.) One reason, then, for Doyle's misrepresentation, and therefore misuse, of Bradley's views may simply be that he treats English in isolation from the large-scale reforms which were taking place within English academic life. In particular he takes no account of the general processes involved in the institutionalization of knowledge in the late nineteenth century, those of specialization and professionalization. This in turn has led him to ignore the fact that there were certain general (and therefore widely acknowledged and accepted) conditions which had to be


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met in order for a body of knowledge to be founded as a discipline.12 In chapter 2 we alluded to the twin processes of specialization and professionalization in our discussion of the new forms of intellectual authority (those concerning methodological and theoretical rigour and the new structures for weighing and testing evidence, and so forth) which arose at virtually the same time in the nineteenth century. The processes described there are perfectly illustrated in the arguments over the establishing of schools of English within English universities in the late nineteenth century. While support for the idea that English should enter the curriculum was fairly widespread by the 1870s, few advocates at the time were willing to entertain the idea that English could be a separate discipline, and even fewer were willing to concede that there could ever be a profession of English. In fact there were two quite distinct areas of conflict. The first was between the claims of pedagogy and scholarship - or, as we tend today to characterize exactly the same problem, between the demands of teaching and of research. The second was an argument about what constituted the specialist nature of English as a discrete discipline of knowledge. To draw attention to these intellectual arguments is not to suggest that they were the only arguments for the founding of English. But it is to claim that they were necessary in that without a satisfactory resolution to them the study of English would have remained firmly outside the academic establishment. Initially in the 1870s and 1880s both controversies over the nature of pedagogy and research in English were resolved by the arguments of philologists. Philologists could claim to be in possession of a specialist body of knowledge, and they could also claim to teach specialist practices. And because of their emphasis upon the teaching of linguistic competence and upon the importance of the history of the language, their subject could be perceived to be socially useful; hence the discipline proposed by 12

The discipline of history has been discussed in precisely these terms. See, for example, Doris Goldstein, ' The Professionalization of History in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries', Storia della Storiograjia, i (1983), 3-23; Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian

England 1838-1886 (Cambridge, 1986).

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philology was one generally perceived to fulfil the basic criteria for professionalization which we have outlined, and to do so in a way which other proposals for English studies did not. (It is interesting to note that an obvious comparison can be drawn with English studies at the present time. Similar and largely unproblematic claims are made today about the teaching of English language and linguistics; both subjects are seen as possessing a clear body of specialist practices, and, given the global popularity of the English language, both have an obvious social and commercial utility.) Moreover, with the proposals of philologists, there was no conflict between pedagogy and research, since competence to teach a discipline, defined in such a way, inevitably also ensured that all teachers were familiar with the latest facts in the subject and with the latest research methodologies being developed in Germany. Put more simply, in the case of philology, all teachers had also to be researchers, for there was no essential or theoretical conflict between the two. The fundamental problem for the opponents of the philologists, especially those who wanted to establish within the universities a discipline of English whose practice was literary criticism, was how to meet the specialist criteria of professionalization - how to make a convincing argument for literary criticism to be considered as a specialist practice, and hence a convincing argument too for teachers of literary criticism to be considered as transmitters of specialist skills. The problem of the social utility of English was not so pressing then as it is today: indeed both parties in the nineteenth-century controversies could claim some utility for the teaching of English. As we have suggested, philologists could claim it on linguistic grounds; but so too could teachers of literature by asserting that the study of literary works also produced a linguistic competence. It should be pointed out, however, that the argument put forward by historians such as Brian Doyle, that literature could embody a form of moral knowledge the transmission of which was socially desirable, would not have satisfied all the criteria of social utility, for moral knowledge (as we have argued earlier, and perhaps by definition, too) could not be considered to be a specialism. Indeed if moral knowledge was so complex that it could only be


16 7

understood by specialists then it is inconceivable that literature could have transmitted such knowledge to any but the smallest of communities; hence literature, so defined, would axiomatically forfeit any claim to be considered as socially useful. Academic literary critics could have argued that they were mediators of the moral knowledge embodied in literary works, and that in fulfilling such a role they made that knowledge available to a wider public. However, in this case, their specialism would not have existed in their access to moral knowledge/^r se, but rather in their familiarity with the devices of literary works used to represent that morality. In other words, they would have been ' literary specialists' rather than 'specialists in morality5. But it is important to emphasize that this particular argument was not made at that time, because at this point in the nineteenth century the concept of literariness valorized features such as clarity, simplicity and openness: it was not until the late 1880s and 1890s that literary identity came to be defined in a more restricted way. The most vociferous opponent of the philologists was John Churton Collins. Turned down for the Merton Chair of English at Oxford, Churton Collins launched a long and bitter campaign to support the establishment of a school of English based on the study of literature rather than of language. Collins's lack of success highlights the problems produced by a failure to observe some of the criteria which then obtained for the founding of a discipline of knowledge, those of specialization and social utility. Collins wanted to tie English studies as closely as possible to the classical disciplines, and he argued that English literature was incomprehensible without a thorough knowledge of classical culture.13 Thi§ may or may not have been true, but in itself it certainly was not an argument for establishing a separate school of English based on the study of literature, since there was nothing in Collins's argument which permitted literary studies to be seen as a discrete body of 13

Churton Collins endowed a prize in the School of English at the University of Birmingham, where he later held a chair. He stipulated that it should be awarded to the 'best second-year student in English literature' to offer 'Latin or Greek as subjects for the degree of BA\

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knowledge - that is, as a specialism - in the senses that the professions were then defining that term. Moreover, Collins did not outline what literary study would entail, nor how it would be taught. Elsewhere, in his very public criticism of such eminent figures as Edmund Gosse and John Addington Symonds, he seemed to suggest that scholarship was of paramount importance.14 But, once again, the appeal to scholarship alone was not in itself an argument for a specialism of English literature. Collins made a simple but none the less basic mistake: he failed to realize that scholarship could only ever amount to a methodology. Indeed, the scholarly programme which Collins demanded was equally applicable to any discipline within the university - to history or to classics, for example. Precisely because it was a methodology rather than a body of knowledge, scholarship alone could not provide sufficient conditions for the study of English literature to be considered as a specialism. In terms both of pedagogy and of research, then, Collins's programme for a discipline of English based on the study of literary works failed, for he could not define adequately either a specialist body of knowledge or the specialist skills and practices which were exclusive to it. These failures are borne out by the comments of John Morley, a contemporary of Churton Collins and an equally enthusiastic advocate for the study of literature in universities. Speaking to students of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, Morley showed his sympathy with current attempts to institutionalize literary studies, but he evinced no surprise at their lack of success: Those who are possessed, and desire to see others possessed, by that conception of literary study must watch with the greatest sympathy and admiration the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, I hope, so successfully, to bring the systematic and methodical study of our own literature, in connection with other literatures, among 14

Collins was highly critical of Symonds, and particularly of Gosse - who was the second Clark lecturer at Cambridge - for shoddy scholarship. In Collins's view, their histories of literature were simply inaccurate. See John Churton Collins, ' English Literature at the Universities', Quarterly Review, 163 (1886), 289-339; Phyllis Grosskurth, 'Churton Collins: Scourge of the Late Victorians', University of Toronto Quarterly, 34 (1965), 254-68; Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: a Literary Landscape,

1849—1928 (London, 1984); Anthony Kearney, The Louse on the Locks of Literature; and Ian Small, Conditions for Criticism (Oxford, 1991).


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subjects for teaching and examination in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. I regard those efforts with the liveliest interest and sympathy.15 Indeed Morley's own proposals for the academic study of literature were as limited as Collins's: in 'cultivating the study of literature', Morley had argued, 'you will be cultivating the most important side of history \ 1 6 Such a proposal asserted that the importance of literary study existed only in terms of its usefulness to another body of knowledge - that of history. Morley, in other words, had merely reaffirmed the opinion of previous generations, that the study of literature was already covered by existing areas of study, and so did not require separate disciplinary status. Later in the same address Morley virtually admitted as much when he hinted that he could not see in literary study (as he defined it) a unique or discrete kind of knowledge: The professors all tell very much the same story, and this is, that it is extremely hard to interest any considerable number of people in subjects that seem to have no direct bearing upon the practical work of everyday life. There is a disinclination to study literature for its own sake, or to study anything which does not seem to have a visible and direct influence upon the daily work of life. The nearest approach to a taste for literature is a certain demand for an instruction in history with a littleflavourof contemporary politics. In short, the demand for instruction in literature is strictly moderate.17 Morley's tantalizing aside to the 'little flavour of contemporary polities', coupled with his acknowledgement of the contemporary failure to institutionalize the subject, tends on its own to undermine the revisionist thesis represented by Doyle. It shows quite clearly that the potential use of literary works for the study of politics and history was fully realized in the late nineteenth century, but was not considered to be an important element in so far as establishing English as a discipline was concerned. This historical example shows that there were two primary conditions related to the process of professionalization which 15

See John Morley, 'On the Study of Literature', in Studies in Literature (London, 16 17 1891), 220. Ibid. Ibid., 198.

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were of central importance in the original debates about the founding of a discipline of English within the universities. The first and fundamental condition concerned the specialized nature of the knowledge produced and transmitted by a discipline. As we have consistently argued, the concept of specialism is posited on social agreements about a discrete or autonomous object of study, and about the practices appropriate to explaining it. The second condition concerns social utility, which is directly related to the specialist nature of the knowledge produced. The problem with the first nineteenthcentury propagandists for the study of literature, such as Churton Collins, was their failure to attend to the closeness of the relationship between specialist knowledge and its social utility. This inattention led them to describe a utility for the study of literature, but in terms so general that a study of it defined in the ways they proposed could never be marked off as a discrete (that is, as a specialist) practice. The proposal that the discipline of English should be based on the study of literature, rather than language, was not in fact taken seriously until the turn of the century - not, that is, until the question of the specialist nature of literature and the social use which knowledge of the literary might possesses had been adequately answered. Thus there were two quite different debates about the founding of English as a discipline: those which took place in the 1870s concerning the teaching of English language, and in which philologists played the leading role; and those which were conducted in the late 1890s and 1900s by literary critics and which concerned the teaching of English literature. Moreover, it is from this second debate that the modern discipline of English evolved, based as it is primarily on the study of literature, however it is defined. (The legacy of the first debate, however, still persists today in the existence of departments or sub-departments of English language, often seen as quite separate from departments of English literature.) Only if we acknowledge the existence of a social agreement concerning the importance of these general intellectual and social preconditions can we adequately explain the enormous expansion of the numbers of disciplines of knowledge within the


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university system during the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the form which that expansion took. Moreover, only such an account can adequately explain why some bodies of knowledge became institutionalized as disciplines while others did not. A failure to identify these conditions rigorously enough throws light on some further problems in recent histories of English. It is significant, for example, that Brian Doyle fails to distinguish accurately between the two different debates about the founding of English in the late nineteenth century which we have described. Indeed it is largely this failure which has led to a mistaken emphasis upon the role of nationalism. If nationalism was the primary reason for the founding of English then the discipline we have today, one based on the study of literature more than language, should have come into existence in the 1870s and 1880s, at a moment when the currents of nationalism and imperialism were running as strongly as at any other time. However, in the discussions about English which took place in the 1870s, and which were dominated by the demands of philologists, the moral function of literature - indeed literature itself- was simply not an issue. Nationalism may have been intimately related to how particular works were interpreted at specific times, and, furthermore, to how the discipline as a whole was perceived, but, as we have indicated, it could not have been a sufficient condition for the establishing of English literary study as an autonomous discipline of knowledge in the first instance. Doyle and historians like him fail to see that nationalism played only a partial or secondary role in the founding of English as a discipline. In the terms which we have used above, it was only one of the social functions to which knowledge in the discipline was put; it was not an intrinsic or necessary part of the social processes which brought about the transformation of a body of knowledge into a discipline. Nationalism on its own, that is, was not, and could not possibly have been, an enabling precondition for the establishment of English as a discipline. More revealing of Doyle's misconception of his subject is the fact that he insistently maintains that exactly the opposite conditions to those we have described obtained for the

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establishment of English as a discipline at the end of the nineteenth century: The history of the transition from the 'English Language and Literature', 'English and History', and the 'English subjects' to the simple and all-embracing generic term ' English' is the history of a complex process of cultural extension and elevation.' English' came to extend its range of operations beyond any disciplinary boundaries ... In the words of one professor, the object of teaching English literature came to be not the imparting of' knowledge' but ' the cultivation of the mind, the training of the imagination, and the quickening of the whole spiritual nature'.18 The embedded quotation here is taken from the 1914 Bulletin of the English Association, the proceedings of which, rather than inaugural lectures, are Doyle's principal source of evidence. The comments come from an address by F. W. Moorman, professor of English language at Leeds. In fact, Doyle's selective quotation totally inverts the substance of Moorman's argument, for put into its full context, Moorman's sentence has a completely different point and shows that contemporary practitioners were well aware of the social and intellectual conditions which obtained for the founding of disciplines of knowledge: But the books for general reading are to be used outside of the university walls. I said at the outset that one of the functions of the teacher of literature is to sweeten the leisure hours of those who have passed through his classes. If we can encourage the habit of thoughtful home-reading we are fulfilling one of the highest services which fall to the lot of university teachers. A golden opportunity is placed in our hands while our students are still among us, their minds still ductile to the pressure of authority and stimulus. By drawing up a list of carefully selected books, suitable for home-reading, we may encourage the formation of a habit which will become second nature and remain with them for the rest of their lives. At the same time we shall be effecting a cultivation of the mind, a training of the imagination, a quickening of the whole spiritual nature.19 It is clear that Moorman's argument at this point does not, as Doyle assumes, concern the discipline of English, but rather its 18 19

Doyle, 'The Invention of English', 98. S e e t h e Proceedings of the English Association

Bulletin n o . 22 ( F e b . 1 9 1 4 ) , 1 1 .


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opposite, the habit of 'home-reading'. Earlier in his paper Moorman clearly stated that such an argument could not be applied within a disciplinary structure; indeed he even drew attention to the derision with which it would have been met. And the reason which he put forward was a simple one: literary studies defined in such a broad manner would meet with 'impatience' when compared with other forms of specialist knowledge on offer in the university 'bazaar': I imagine that everybody here is more or less familiar with that somewhat trying ordeal with which a university session usually opens - when heads of departments meet together in some large hall and, like oriental merchants at a bazaar, expose their wares for sale. The purchasers, thirsting for knowledge, and eager above all things to secure their pound of flesh, are not slow to ply their questions. It is not difficult for the professor of biology to give a satisfying answer to those questions. Sit at my feet, he will say, and I will read to you the riddle of life. Similarly the teacher of logic may answer, Learn of me, and I will teach you to overcome your adversaries by skill in argument; or again, the historian, Enter my lecture-room and I will show you all the kingdoms of the world. But the answer of the teacher of literature is not so easy. If he is frank, he will confess that it is not his main purpose to impart knowledge, or to equip his students for the conquest of the world; and he may even add that his object is not to teach, but to delight. Go to others, he will say, if all that you want are implements of war for the great battle of life, but come to me if you wish to sweeten your leisure when the day's conflict is over, and the armour is laid aside. By emphasizing the fact that the study of literature means a cultivation of the mind, of the imagination, above all of the sense of beauty, rather than the extension of knowledge, the teacher of literature will sometimes find that his hearers grow impatient.20 Although Moorman was for the most part unsympathetic to some of the intellectual rigour which disciplinary status enjoined, and although he clearly wanted the study of English literature to be as broadly based and as popular as possible, he none the less conceded the incompatibility between that desire and the general disciplinary structure then in place in universities. In the discussion which followed his paper, other speakers 20

Ibid., 7-8

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emphasized the necessity of English imparting a specific and specialist knowledge. One Professor Dewar, for example, was adamant about the specialist nature of the university study of English, arguing that The real university graduate in English is one who not only knows English, but also the method, the procedure, to adopt with a view to increasing knowledge upon the subject. He must have some sense, some power, of what is nicknamed in other studies ' research'. If we are going to produce students who will advance the knowledge of the subject, then our first year must include something in the nature of discussion work, seminary work, something to enable the student to understand literature, and to enable him also to understand how a scholarly critic goes to work in editing a text or in making a study of some author or period.21 In the terms which we used above, Dewar recognized that for English to justify its disciplinary status, and to be reckoned the intellectual equal of other university subjects, it had to possess both an autonomous object of study, and an appropriate set of specialist practices which would produce specialist knowledge. Moorman and his contemporaries recognized, that is, that the ill-defined subject which Doyle describes could not possibly have fulfilled these criteria, and therefore could not constitute a discipline of knowledge. The main reason, then, for Doyle's misreading of the evidence is that his (and other revisionist) accounts of the founding of English as a discipline have simply confused the functions of the knowledge produced by a discipline with the social conditions which obtain for its being accepted within academic institutions. The result is a viciously circular argument in which it is suggested that the processes involved in the growth of nationalism brought about the founding of English; and that the function of the new discipline of English was to encourage the growth of nationalism. The problems in recent revisionist histories of English suggest that there is another history of the founding of the discipline to be written, one which pays attention to the general intellectual and social conditions for the establishing of disciplines of knowledge in the late nineteenth century. A useful point of 21

Ibid., 12.


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departure for such a history would be the second set of debates which occurred towards the very end of the century and which were concerned with what would constitute the specialist nature of literary studies. A more detailed examination of the changed conditions which enabled Bradley to convince 'a somewhat incredulous University' that English literature was 'worthy of a place among academic studies' will allow us to see that the history of the modern discipline of English, at least in its early stages, and contrary to revisionist views, is not one whose primary characteristic is a submerged or hidden political agenda. One of the earliest indications that the debates about the founding of English had changed by the end of the nineteenth century was the publication of a number of works, which, although not particularly important in themselves, when taken together indicate that the study of literature had begun to be seen as a legitimate subject for inclusion within the university curriculum. The appearance of Charles Mills Gayley's and Fred Newton Scott's An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of

Literary Criticism (1899) is one such work. The book, designed as a course of study, was a survey of the types and methods of literary criticism then practised, and it included the theory and history of criticism and theories of literature. It was, that is, a text-book which addressed itself to ascertaining the appropriate methodologies and explanatory theories for contemporary varieties of academic literary study: 'Any critical process which deals with the facts of history is called historical criticism, any critical process which deals with science is called scientific criticism; and so any critical process which deals with literature is called literary criticism.?22 In itself, Gayley and Scott's work is of little consequence. The significance of their volume, however, lies in its typicality, in the fact that, by the turn of the century, it was possible to take for granted the autonomy of literary identity and of the practice of literary criticism; in other words, the study of literature could be seen as a specialist 22

Charles Mills Gayley and Fred Newton Scott, An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism: the Bases in Aesthetics and Poetics (1899; 2nd edn, Boston, 1901), 4.

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activity. As Gayley and Scott noted in their first chapter: 'literary criticism... is named with reference to its subjectmatter. It is not a method which can be applied to other subjects.)23 The uniqueness of literature was simply assumed: it did not need explaining or justifying. Gayley and Scott were Americans, and their statements were general, with examples drawn from Western Europe. However, in a section devoted exclusively to Britain, they described how literary criticism had recently been given the intellectual and institutional prestige hitherto enjoyed only by philology. They attributed this change to the advent of explicit theorizing by literary critics, and pointed out that all such theorizing had to acknowledge the autonomy of literary identity as anterior to any discussions about methodology. Moreover, Gayley and Scott's observations about what they called the 'present condition of English criticism' was borne out by contemporary practitioners in Britain. At this point it is possible to return to the primary source of evidence for revisionist histories, A. C. Bradley. As we have mentioned, in his inaugural lecture Bradley expressly drew attention to the uniqueness of literary (which he called poetic) identity; in his view this identity was not to be collapsed into any other category. He recognized that literary works could be discussed in several different ways - on national or political grounds, for example. Nevertheless he insisted that those discussions could not replace an account of what he saw to be their specifically literary qualities. In his view literature is ontologically discrete: there is a ' world of literature' as well as other worlds. Literature may, then, have had specific uses, such as its role in cultural, moral and political domains; but these uses did not impinge upon, nor even affect, its primary literary existence. The integrity, autonomy and specificity of literary judgements (or, more generally, aesthetic judgements) thus became a constant theme with Bradley: 'What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the picture and the 23

Ibid., 5.


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symphony. Meaning they have, but what meaning can be said in no language but their own ... It is just the same with poetry. ' 24 Evidence that Bradley's views were commonplace at this time is easy to find. So a few years later W. H. Hudson, then a London University Extension lecturer, made exactly the same distinctions between the uses of literature and its defining characteristics. In An Introduction to the Study of Literature (1910),

he distinguished between three quite separate descriptive categories: the cultural uses of literature, its mimetic and expressive qualities, and its formal characteristics. Each of these categories was perfectly legitimate and could thus be profitably studied. But for Hudson it was the aesthetic - in his words, the ' formal' - qualities of works which were the necessary condition for them to be defined as literary: A piece of literature differs from a specialised treatise on astronomy, political economy, philosophy, or even history, in part because it appeals, not to a particular class of readers only, but to men and women as men and women; and in part because, while the object of the treatise is simply to impart knowledge, one ideal end of the piece of literature, whether it also imparts knowledge or not, is to yield aesthetic satisfaction by the manner in which it handles its theme... The great impulses behind literature may, I think, be grouped with accuracy enough for practical purposes under four heads: (1) our desire for self-expression; (2) our interest in people and their doings; (3) interest in the world of reality in which we live, and in the world of imagination which we conjure into existence; and (4) our love of form as form ... Of these four impulses, the last named, being a factor common to all kinds of literature, may for the moment be disregarded.25 By the 1900s, then, views which had been controversial in the 1880s and 1890s could be taken for granted, to the extent that popular writers such as E. A. Greening Lamborn could simply allude to the existence of the literary as a discrete category: 'What poetry is, in spite of all the definitions, we can no more define than we can define life or love; but what things are poetry we know, as we know what things are living, and loving, by 24 25

Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 4 - 5 . W i l l i a m H e n r y H u d s o n , An Introduction to the Study of Literature (191 o ; L o n d o n , 1927), 10 and

11-13.

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their attributes and by their effects upon us.' 26 In Greening Lamborn's view, English literature embodied a unique form of knowledge which was incapable of being redescribed in the terms of any other disciplines. Surveying the critical shibboleths of the time, he described the failure of some British and German criticism, particularly that of the 'Higher Criticism' of German scholarship, in terms of its inability to recognize the irreducibility of literary judgements: The worst thing we ever got from Germany was the Higher Criticism, not of the Bible but of Shakespeare; the misguided attempt to dissect out his theology, his philosophy, his moral teaching, his educational theory, his political thought. The Germans have made a monster of him; they have discovered that the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is really a lay sermon - and probably by this time that the sonnets are really tracts.27 It is important to emphasize here that in making such arguments about the autonomy of the literary, academic critics were not unaware of the political elements involved in the study of literature; but at the same time, it is equally true that in subscribing to a notion of literary identity they were not attempting to disguise a political judgement as a literary one. Rather, these early critics believed that discussion of the politics of particular works required a prior identification of their literary qualities. It was these qualities which gave the politics of literary works their distinctive character; moreover, the relative autonomy of these qualities from questions of politics provided the fundamental rationale for the formal or academic study of literature. Such distinctions can be clearly seen in the work of W.J. Courthope, writing slightly earlier. In his monumental History of English Poetry (1895—191 o), Courthope criticized the efforts of one of his predecessors, Thomas Warton, on the grounds that the latter's History of English Poetry followed no principle of selection based upon a concept of literary identity. A literary history without such a principle was in Courthope's view only of an antiquarian interest. According to Courthope, Warton's error lay in his tendency to see literary 26 27

E . A . G r e e n i n g L a m b o r n , The Rudiments of Criticism (Oxford, 1916), 10. Ibid., 120.


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qualities as secondary rather than essential; he discussed them 'separately, incidentally, in a merely archaeological temper, and with so little perception of their necessary relation to his subject, that he gave equal prominence to a "dissertation" on the Gesta Romanorum\ In Courthope's eyes, Warton was merely a chronicler of texts who inevitably failed to complete his task: ' by treating the history of poetry as if it meant a mere series of annals, he fell into the way of simply hunting up old metrical remains, without attempting to classify them by their poetic spirit and character'. 28 Moreover, Courthope was explicit about the reasons for Warton's failure: it came about because there was no adequate concept of literary identity to guide his history. In contrast to Warton, the aims of Courthope's own history were unashamedly nationalistic; however, the fact that he chose to approach his subject as (in his words) a 'political historian' in no way contradicted his acknowledgement that a recognition of the autonomy of the literary was a necessary precondition for any history of poetry. Courthope was well aware that he was interpreting for political reasons a set of works already selected on literary, and not political, grounds. This distinction between an antiquarian or historical interest and a literary or aesthetic one was a key way of defining the literary at the end of the century, and, as we have suggested, its pedigree can be traced back a generation. It differentiated between what was essential to literary texts and other kinds of information which literature may have provided. By the turn of the century it had become increasingly commonplace and was perhaps most forcefully made by Arthur Symons in 1909 in the introduction to The Romantic Movement in English Poetry. Symons criticized historians such as Courthope (just as Courthope had criticized Warton) because they failed to dwell exclusively on what was distinctively literary and argued that his history of literature would be literary history, as opposed to literary history: Poetry is a reality, an essence,... it is the critic's business to find it where it is, to proclaim it for what it is, and to realise that no amount of historical significance or adaptability to a former fashion can make what is bad poetry in the present century good poetry in any century 28

W.J. Gourthope, A History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1895-1910), 1, xii.

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of the past... To distinguish poetry, then, where it exists, to consider it in its essence, apart from the accidents of the age in which it came into being, to define its qualities in itself; that is the business of the true critic or student.29 Given his closeness to and familiarity with the main literary movements of the late nineteenth century, Aestheticism included, Symons's views are in many ways to be expected. But they are not isolated opinions of an Aesthete outside of his time. Most of the figures we have discussed in relation to the founding of English recognized a general indebtedness to the propositions which the Aesthetes popularized; they acknowledged their achievement in developing a concept of literary identity and consequently in laying the grounds for literary criticism to be viewed as an autonomous practice. Even A. C. Bradley in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry, although refusing to endorse all of the implications of Art for Art's Sake, none the less acknowledged its importance in marking off the discreteness of the literary or poetic: The offensive consequences often drawn from the formula 'Art for Art' will be found to attach not to the doctrine that Art is an end in itself, but to the doctrine that Art is the whole or supreme end of human life... The formula ' Poetry is an end in itself has nothing to say on the various questions of moral judgment which arise from the fact that poetry has its place in a many-sided life.30 The overwhelming logic of the evidence provided by figures as otherwise diverse as Bradley, Gayley and Scott, Greening Lamborn, Hudson and Arthur Symons, suggests that the founding of the modern discipline of English conformed to the general set of intellectual and social conditions which obtained for other disciplines. The most important of these was an acknowledgement of a discrete object of study (in this case a recognition of the concept of literary identity) and agreement about the specialist practices which were appropriate to it. By the turn of the century it was possible to conceive of literature as an autonomous object of study, and most subsequent debates in the discipline of English were of the nature of those outlined by 29 30

A r t h u r S y m o n s , The Romantic Movement in English Poetry ( L o n d o n , 1909), 9 - 1 4 . Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 5.


181

Gayley and Scott. They concerned methodologies and practices only. The evidence suggests, then, that English studies in its foundation at least was not the site of crisis which some modern commentators have claimed; nor were its principal apologists primarily motivated by political interests in their defence of the new discipline, either covertly or openly.31 In this history we have concentrated on the evidence of literary critics. However, arguments about the autonomy of aesthetic or literary value from figures such as Bradley (or Pater or Wilde) did not occur in an intellectual vacuum. In one form or another all were indebted to a philosophical tradition stretching from Kant and German Romantic philosophy to Hegel. Indeed most defences of the autonomy of the aesthetic (and therefore of literary value) have been able to draw upon 31

We have insisted that two of the most important conditions for the founding of a discipline of knowledge were its specialist nature and its social utility. It might at this point be objected that the evidence which we have cited from the main commentators on the discipline at the turn of the century has dwelt exclusively on the first of those conditions - on the specialist nature of the study of literature. However, at that time, the social utility of English was not a matter of dispute, and so, in contrast to the heated arguments about its specialism, it was invariably simply taken for granted. The reasons for this state of affairs are to be found in large cultural changes which took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This topic is too complex to discuss in detail here, but the following outline indicates some of the issues involved. There are certain givens in the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth century. They include a general increase in the wealth of the nation, and a revolution in printing and distribution technologies which accompanied, and to some extent brought about, programmes for universal adult literacy. There was, in addition, a general movement towards what some American cultural historians and economists have called a 'consumerist culture'. The most important aspects of this change, for our purposes, were the restrictions in working hours and a consequent increase in ' free' time which was subsequently redefined as' leisure \ The most significant effects of this invention of leisure at a mass level (rather than as a privilege of the rich) included the development of tourism and forms of mass entertainment. The growth of reading as a leisure activity, the increase in the number and role of public libraries, and the phenomenon of the cheap paperback were all part of these large cultural changes. The proposition within late nineteenth-century literary culture that the reading of literature was an activity to be undertaken principally for pleasure was one easily affiliated to the invention of leisure; but by the same token, it was realized that the reading of literature or the appreciation of art and music (in other words, of the aesthetic) were activities hitherto largely restricted to an educated audience, and were moreover not skills which were easily acquired, nor universally available. It was recognized, in other words, that literature was a specialized area of knowledge which had to be taught. The perception that the social utility of disciplinary knowledge was intimately related to its specialism was therefore as true of the nascent discipline of English literature as it was of any other discipline.

182


this tradition. Literary critics working in the early years of the twentieth century could, for example, appeal to the work of Croce, Santayana or Collingwood. Later Leavis could find support for his views in Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics at Cambridge in the late 1930s. This tradition of philosophical aesthetics has continued to the present day in the work of philosophers such as Richard Rorty. 32 Our arguments in this book have dwelt upon the social nature of disciplinary knowledge, but a deeper familiarity with this philosophical tradition, which the founders of the discipline of English took for granted, might be salutary for their present-day successors, for whom politics and aesthetics are assumed to be irreconcilable. 32

It is interesting to note that even Terry Eagleton wishes in some ways to preserve the autonomy of the aesthetic. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), passim.

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Index

Abbott, Andrew, 5m. Abrams, M. H., 108-10, 121 Adams, Jad, gin. Albrecht, Milton, C , i32n. annotation, 151-4 anthropology, 7 m., 90 Arnold, Matthew, 21 Attridge, Derek, 26n. Aurelius, Marcus, 153-4 authority, 3, 13, 16, 30-1, 34, 42, 66, 68, 71, 75-6, 78, 92, 135-7, 143, 145-6, 151-2, I54-7* l 6 l ~ 2

Bloom, Allan, 8, 57, 62-3 Bowers, Fredson, 143-4 Bradley, A. C , 161-4, 175-7, 180-1 Brockbank, Philip, 27, i47n. Brookman, Jennie, 6on. Browning, Robert, 113 Bruss, Elizabeth, i37n. Burke, Sean, n o Burrow, J. W., 113 Bush, John, i48n. Butler, Marilyn, I23n. Byrne, James M., n o

Badaracco, Claire, 149-50 Baker, Houston A., 58n. Balzac, Honore de, 137-8, 142 Barber, Bernard, 52 Barnett, James H., i32n. Barthes, Roland, 136-9, 141-2 Barwick, Sandra, 3n. Bate, Walter Jackson, 37n. Bateson, F. W., 73-6 Battestin, Martin C , i52n. Beardsley, Monroe, 143, i45n. Beethoven, Ludvig van, 176 Belsey, Catherine, 17, 44-6, 48-51, 53, 56, 59, 61, 65-6, io7n., 108, 137—8 Benjamin, Walter, 51 Bennett, Arnold, 131 Bennington, Geoff, 26n. Bentley, Richard, 138 Bergonzi, Bernard, 8, i59n. Bernstein, Richard, 72n., 89, gon., 91-2 biology, 38, 173 Black, Michael, i4on. Black, R. D. Collison, 33n. Blackmur, R. P., 76 Blaug, Mark, 33n.

Cain, William, E., u - 1 3 , 18-19 Canary, Robert H., 4m., 8on. canon (the literary), 6, 10, 20, 56-8, 60—6, 76, 105-8, i n , 112, 117-18, 135.156 Carlyle, Thomas, 31, 130 Checkland, S. G., 33n. class, 65 Coats, A. W., 33n., 34n. Cohen, Ralph, 4, 1 in. Cohen, Walter, i26n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 114 Collier, Peter, i22n. Collingwood, R. G., 182 Collins, John Churton, 167-9, 170 Colls, Robert, i6on. community (concept of), 52-3, 83-5, 87-9, 92 Comte, Auguste, 113 Connor, Steven, 49, 85-6 Courthope, William, 101, 178—9 Crewe, Jonathan, 9n. crisis (in English), 6-8, 12, 19, 21, 23, 37, 158, 181 Croce, Benedetto, 182

192

Index

Culler, Jonathan, 26n., 77n., 102, iO3n., 109-10 cultural materialism, 4, 101, 128-9, 134, H9 cultural studies, 57, 66 Danto Arthur C , 68, ngn., 120-1, 124, 128,133 Dahlhaus, Carl, 97, 98n. Darbishire, Helen, 138 Darwin, Charles, 115 Davis, Tom, i42n. Day, Gary, in. Deane, Seamus, 66n. deconstruction, 24-5, 81, 99-100, 108-11, 121, 127, 13511.

Derrida, Jacques, 20, 108 determinacy, 142 determinate meaning, 139, 141, 154 Dickens, Charles, 96, 114, 130 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 70-1 Dodd, Philip, i6on. Doeser, Marinus C , 79-83, 93-4, 97 Donohue, Joseph W., i46n. Douglas, Lord Alfred, 148 Dowling, William C , ion. Doyle, Brian, 160—4, J 66, 169, 171-2, 174 Dylan, Bob, 43 Eagleton, Terry, in., 17, 43-51, 53, 56, 59, 61, 65-6, 93n., 108, i59n., i6on., i82n. Eco, Umberto, 88-9 economics, 34, 54, 7 m., 90, 126 Edel, Leon, i63n. editing, documentary, 146, 150; literary, 146 Ekelund, Robert B., 33n. Eliot, T. S., 131 Elliott, Philip, 5in. Ellmann, Richard, 139, i4on. Empson, William, 10 English Association, 161-2 Falck, Colin, 93n. Felperin, Howard, 9, 125 feminism, 4, 24-5, 27, 81, 99, 106-8, i n , 121, 124, 127 Feyerabend, Paul, 39n., 77, 89, 91 Field Day Anthology, 62n., 66n.

Fish, Stanley, 9, ion., i3n., 37n., 45, 11 in.

Flaubert, Gustave, 148 Ford, Ford Madox, 131 formalism, 4, 6, 24 Forster, E. M., 131 Foucault, Michel, 43, 141-2 foundationalism, 25, 87 Fowler, Alistair, 138 Freadman, Richard, 4, 8n., 9, 26n., 38n. Freud, Sigmund, 26—7 Frisch, Max H., 84n. Fronto, Cornelius, 153 Furnivall, Frederick, 113 Gabler, Hans Walter, 139, i4on. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 70, 72, 77-8, 83, 89, 92, ii9n. Gates, Henry, Louis, 58 Gayley, Charles Mills, 175-6, 180-1 gender, 65, 66n., 81 Genette, Gerard, 102-4 Geuss, Raymond, i3on. Geyer-Ryan, Helga, 122 Gibbons, Reginald, 21-2 Giles, Steve, 14 Goldstein, Doris, i65n. Goode, William J., 5in. Goodwin, Craufurd D. W., 33n. Gosse, Edmund, 113-15, 118, 168 Graff, Gerald, 2, 11, 15-16, 18-19, 21-2, 49 Greenblatt, Stephen, 122, 124-7 Greer, Germaine, 108 Greg, W. R., 143-4 Griff, Mason, i32n. Griffiths, Sian, 23n. Grosskurth, Phyllis, i68n. Guy, Josephine, i32n. Habermas, Jurgen, 49, 85-8 Halsey, A. H., 5 m. Hamilton, Paul, i23n. Hamlyn, Susan, i42n. Harari, Josue V., i42n. Hawkes, Terence, 6on., 88 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 59 Hebert, Robert F., 33n. Hegel, Friedrich, 181 Heidegger, Martin, 63, 70 hermeneutics, 7on., 74, 125 history, 41-2, 90, 113, 115-16, 119, 121, 124, 128, 130-1, 143, 168-9 Hirsch, E. D., 9n., 72

Index Holloway, John, 3111. Howard, Jean E., i26n. Howard, Roy J., 72n. Hudson, W. H., 177, 180 Hughes, Everett, 52 humanities, 39, 57, 69, 71-3, 97 Hutchison, T. W., 33n. imperialism, 171 Ingarden, Roman, 95-6 intellectual authority, 2, 12, 30, 32, 34-6, 75; mechanisms of, 2-3, 5-6, 16, 29, 32-3, 35-7, 78, 165 intellectualism, 30, 33 intention, 141-7, 154-5 intentionality, 141-3, 146-7, 152, 154, 157 intersubjective agreements, 85-9 Jack, Ian, i52n. Jackson, J. A., 5 m. Jacob, Frangois, 35n. Jakobson, Roman, 102, 104 James, Henry, 152, 163 Jay, Peter, 45-6 Jevons, William Stanley, 33-5 Jones, Henry Arthur, 131-3 Jonson, Ben, 118, 132 Jowett, Benjamin, 164 Joyce, James, 59, 131, 139 Jung, Carl, 26n. Kalnins, Mara, I4on. Kant, Immanuel, 181 Kearney, Anthony, i59n., i68n. Kipling, Rudyard, 129-30 Klein, Melanie, 26n. Kloesel, Christian J. W., 8 4 ^ Knapp, Steven, 4, 9-11, i3n. Knights, L. C , 116—18, 132 Kozicki, Henry, 4m., 8on. Kraay,J. N., 8on. Kristeva, Julia, 20 Kuhn, Thomas, 4on., 77 Lacan, Jacques, 26 Lakatos, Imre, 4on., 4m., 89 Lamarque, Peter, I54n. Lamborn, E. A. Greening, 177-8, 180 Larkin, Philip, 105 Larson, M. S., 5m. Lauter, Paul, 6in., 64-5, 66n.

193

law, 90 Lawrence, D. H., 14, 59, 140-1, i5on. Leavis, F. R., 17, 21, 73-6, 78, 182 Levine, Philippa, ii3n., i65n. Levinson, Marjorie, 122-3, I 2 7 literary criticism, 2, 7, 12, 17, 68, 70, 75, 101-3, i n , 129, 135, i5on., 166, 175-6, 180 literary history, 58, 64, 93, 98, 99-134, l 5*> 157. 179 literary identity, 18, 93, 99, 103, 105-6, 109, 112, 118, 129-30, 132-5, 143, 147-8, 151, 154-5, 157, 167, 175-6, 178-80 Lodge, David, 104-5 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 114 Lukacs, Georg, 14 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 85n., 86-7 MacCabe, Colin, in. Mahoney, John, 34n. Mailloux, Steven, gn. Marshall, Alfred, 34-5 Marxism, 4, 6, 24-6, 99, 106-8, 111, 115-18, 121, 124-5, I27> I3 25 J 49 McGann, Jerome, i23n., 144 McKenzie, D. F., 141, 145, 147 media studies, 43 medicine, 54, 90, 157 Menger, Carl, 34-5 Michaels, Walter Benn, 4, 9-11, i3n. Mill, John Stuart, 31 Millard, Elaine, 14 Miller, J. Hillis, 109-10, 120 Miller, Richard, 136n. Miller, Seumas, 4, 8n, 9, 26n., 38n. Millerson, G., 5m. Milton, John, 43, 107-8, 115, 137-8 Mink, Louis, 8on. modularization, 57 Moorman, F. W., 172-4 Morley, John, 113, 168-9 Morton, Alice, 77 multiculturalism, 56, 60—2, 64-6, 79, 156 Murray, David, i6n. Musgrave, Alan, 4m. Nagel, Ernest, 4on. nationalism, 62-4, 161, 171, 174 natural sciences, 39, 69-73, 77> 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, i2on., 136

Index New Critics, 76, 78 new historicism, 101, 121-7, 129, 134 Norris, Christopher, 47n. Novitz, David, 93n. objectivity, 3, 41, 75, 78, 83, 119 O'Connor, Marion F., i26n. O'Hara, Daniel T., 9n. Olsen, Stein Haugom, 93n. Osborne, Harold, 95n. Palmer, D. J., i59n. Parker, Hershel, 9n., 135, i39n. Parrinder, Patrick, 9-13, 18, 26 Parsons, Talcot, 5 m. Pater, Walter, 148-9, i5on., 152-4, 163,

relativism, 25, 81-3 Ribeiro, Alvaro, i42n. Rice, Philip, i6n. Richards, Kenneth, I46n. Richardson, Dorothy, 59 Ricoeur, Paul, 70 Robbins, Lionel, 33n. Robertson, Eric S., 114 Rorty, Richard, ion., 85n., 87, 128, 182 Rosmarin, Adena, ion. Ross, Robert, 149 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 114 Rothblatt, Sheldon, 3 m., i59n. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63 Rushdie, Salman, 6in. Rylance, Rick, i6n.

181

Patten, John, 60 pedagogy, 6, 9, 12, 165-6 Peirce, Charles, 84, 87-9 Perkins, David, iO2n. philately, 53 philology, 70, 166, 176 philosophy, 164 physics, 157 Pinkney, Tony, 20, 59 Plato, 63, 89 pluralism, 137-8; interpretative, 141-2, 152 Polanyi, Michael, 77 political correctness, 3, 56 political science, 71 n. Poole, Roger, 14, 21-2 Pope, Alexander, 115 Popper, Karl, 89 positivism, 69-71 post-structuralism, 78 Pound, Ezra, 59 pragmatism, 87 professionalization, 31, 50—1, 69, 164-6, 169 professionals, 37n. professions, 51-4, 157-8 Proust, Marcel, 43-4 psychoanalysis, 26 race, 65 Ranke, Leopold von, 113-14 Raphael, Max, 10 rationality, 82-3, 89—90 Reader, W. J., 3m., 36n. Redmond, Patricia, 58n.

Said, Edward, 37n. Saintsbury, George, 113-14 Samuels, Warren J., 33n. Santayana, George, 182 Sassoon, Siegfried, 131 scepticism, 109—11, 120-1, 123-4, I2 ^5 philosophical, 100, 121, 123-5, I 2 7 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 7on. Schneewind, J. B., i28n. sciences, 39, 40 Scott, Fred Newton, 175-6, 180-1 Searle, John, 2n, 49, 56, 6in. Sebeok, Thomas A., iO2n. Selden, Raman, i6n. Selincourt, Ernest de, 162 Shakespeare, William, 59n., 6on., 63, 107-8, i n , 127, 134, i47n., 178 Shaw, George Bernard, 62n, 131, 133 Sheridan, Alan, i03n. Sills, D. L., 5in. Skinner, Quentin, 128n. Small, Ian, 14m., i47n., i49n., i53n., i54n., i68n. Smallwood, Philip, 9, 48n. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 58n., 7on., 85-7 Smyth, Ailbhe, 66n. social sciences, 39, 69-73 social utility, 29, 36, 38, 50-6, 129, 158, 166-7, 170 sociology, 27, 7in., 90, 126 specialization, 21-2, 29, 31, 36, 38, 50, 53> 55-6> 69> 164-5, l 6 7 Sperber, Dan, 77m Spillman, Betty E., 35n.

Index structuralism, 4, 24-6, 76-8, 81, 99—100, 102-8,

in

Stubbs, William, 113-14 Symons, Arthur, 179-80 Symonds, John Addington, 168 Tallack, Douglas, 14-18, 50, 136 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 13511., 143-4, I 47"9 Tate, Allan, 76 text-editing, 93, 98, 135-55, ! 57 theology, 164 Thorn, Rene, 27 Thompson, Peter, i46n. Thwaite, Ann, i68n. Tibullus, 153 Tillyard, E. M. W., 125 Trow, M. A., 5m. Turner, J. M. W., 176 utility (of theory), 12, 14, 23, 35, 38, 46, 56 Virgil, 153 Vogt, George L., i48n. Wall, Stephen, i52n.

195

Walras, Leon, 34-5 Walsh, Marcus, 14m., i47n., 14911. Ward, Mrs Humphry, 150 Warton, Thomas, 114, 178-9 Washington, Peter, 8n., 9, ion. Waugh, Patricia, i6n. Weinsheimer, Joel, 7m., 77n. Welch, Robert, 20-1 Wellek, Rene, 73, 76n., i42n. Wells, Stanley, i47n. White, Hayden, 41-2 Widdowson, Peter, i6on. Wilde, Oscar, 62n., 112, 131, 133, 148, 149, i5on., 152-3, 163, 181 Wilson, J. L., 158 Wimsatt, W. K., 143, i45n. Winters, Yvor, 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 182 Wolff, Janet, 93n. Wollheim, Richard, 132, I4on. Woolf, Virginia, 59, 131 Wordsworth, William, 105, 112 Worthen, John, 140, 14m. Yeats, W. B., 131 Young, Robert, 26n.

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