CRITICAL DISCOURSE

Like many people preoccupied with literature, I often ponder what is at stake: why I would write or read literary texts, what I stand to gain by doing so, and how I could convey all this to anyone else, especially to my colleagues and students. These questions grow acute when our culture tends to relegate literature to the margins of social activity, or to preserve it mainly for unengaging schoolroom exercises in 'trivia' -- knowledge compiled from isolated facts without regard for human usefulness or intellectual relevance.

Having been fortunate enough to earn my doctorate at the University of California, Irvine while the School of Critical Theory was based there, I had the opportunity to hear numerous prominent scholars in person endeavouring to expound the fundamental issues of literature. However, listening to their lectures and reading their occasional papers often proved wholly insufficient to grasp their ideas. Since I have often declared that the surest (though by no means the easiest) way to comprehend complex issues is to write about them, I have now taken my own advice.

During the two years of writing – principally during a sabbatical in Mazatlán, overlooking the Pacific -- I felt impelled not merely to expound and synthesize, but also to suggest reservations and counter-positions respecting the critical proceedings I encountered. Moreover, the intent to situate the theorists in a common context had to be balanced with the need to respond to each in accordance with his or her individual method, and to reflect that method back upon itself by pursuing its consequences. Though this dialectic requires some intervention, I have striven to let the critics tell their own stories, whence the extensive quoting of exact original wording, as opposed to summarising into my own wording. I know of no other book constructed by this method, except my own later volume on Linguistic Theory.

Of course, I had to make many decisions in selecting, organizing, and grouping their ideas systematically. My choice of critics is rather arbitrary. Due to the space and effort needed to deal with a critic in proper detail, I had to omit encounters with many I would have wanted to include: Meyer Abrams, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir. Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Cavell, Umberto Eco, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Lucien Goldmann, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Roman Ingarden, Barbara Johnson, Murray Krieger, Julia Kristeva, Georg Lukács, Jurii Lotrnan,. Hillis Miller, Georges Poulet, Paul Ricocur, Michael Riffaterre, Louise Rosenblatt, I.A. Richards, Edward Said, Jean Starobinski, Tzvetan Todorov, Hayden White, and so forth. Even so, it’s a long book by industry standards.

Nor was there any truly compelling logic for ordering the chapters I did include. It seemed reasonable to start with the founders (Wellek, Frye, Fiedler); proceed to the (then) Konstanz theorists of reading or 'aesthetics of reception' (Iser, Jauss); adjoin the three psychological or psychoanalytic critics (Holland, Bleich, Paris): the (then) Yale bouquet (de Man, Bloom Hartman) ushered in by Culler’s ‘Michelin Guide to deconstruction’ (Derrida scolded me for calling it that); and the two feminists Millett and Irigaray. But in almost all cases, the individual critics in these groups may be miles apart in theory or method. And there was no logical place at all to put Hirsch (insert your own joke here). If you appreciate irony (a rhetorical drift admit I am wholly unable to shed), you will see the point of ending with Irigaray, who foresees the end of discourse as we know it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was made possible by the generous funding of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which released me for research during the academic year 1984-85, for which I would like to express my gratitude again here. I am also indebted to the institutions where I had the opportunity to present and discuss the ideas developed in this book: Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon Universities; the Universities of Maryland (College Park), Minnesota (Minneapolls), Vienna, London, and Amsterdam, as well as Bielefeld and Siegen (Germany); the Summer Institute of Semiotics at Indiana University (Bloomington); the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest); the Technical University of Berlin; the Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil); and the State Universities of New York and New Mexico. Most recently, I have profited from lively interchange here with the members of the Crump Institute for Medical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Further, I wish to thank the indulgent critics for responding to my sketches: René Wellek, Northrop Frye, Leslie Fiedler, Don Hirsch, Wolfgang Iser, Norm Holland, David Bleich, Bernie Paris, Jonathan Culler, Harold Bloom, H.R. Jauss, and Fredric Jameson. Jauss, Holland, and Paris wrote especially detailed reactions. I was also stimulated by discussions of various ideas with Siegfried J. Schmidt, Teun van Diik, J. Hillis Miller, Stanley Fish, Michael Halliday, Luiz Antonio Marcuschi, Jerorne Harste, Roland Posner, Alastair Duckworth, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Michel Grimaud, Paul Garvin, and my understanding and capable directors at the University of Florida and UCLA, Mel New and Gene Yates. Finally, I am inestimably indebted to Waiter J. Johnson for his continuing support of my (to put it mildly) unconventional books, which were published without having “peer reviewers” peeing all over them.

GRAPHIC CONVENTIONS

To conserve space in the text, references to works by the sample critics are made with abbreviations listed below. Also, Note I to each chapter provides a key. References to other works are done with author and date; where relevant, the original publication date follows in square brackets. A reference is not shown when it is identical with the one just before it, and may thus he shared by a whole series of quotes.

To avoid brackets or spaced periods, I set each part of a quote in its own quotation marks; I apologise for the cluttered look, which was not improved by the US printing conventions of double quote (“) over single quote (‘), which would have been horrendously hard to change now because my HP scanner interchanges them.

I have also allowed myself minor changes of word-forms, mostly in the person and tense of verbs or the endings of nouns, but none I felt would change the meaning or intention of the quote. 'Emphasis added' and 'emphasis deleted" are given as "e.a." and "e.d." Otherwise, all italics are those of the original source.

Variations in spelling, ("aesthetic” vs “esthetic,” “hypostasize" vs 'hypostatize," etc.) were unified unless special distinctions were involved. Non-English characters like é or ö appear only as far as stingy FrontPage allows them; others are unpredictable, depending on the version of your programs, and I used conventional characters, thinking that Sklovskij" and” Mukarovsky” are still better than, say, “&klovsky" and “Muka$ovsk%”,

References to authors, readers, and so on by masculine pronouns, which we now regard as sexist, are too prevalent in my sources to eliminate altogether, though I reduced them considerably.

Since webpages have no page breaks, the footnotes were moved to the point where they are signalled. The result may be choppy in the middle of the sentence; if you read the footnotes (and some contain important comments or reservations) you might have to go back and reread the start of the sentence. Sorry! Of course, I could have bookmarked or hyperlinked them, but that would probably keep them from getting read at all, and horribly cluttered up my website.