Abstract
My project is to define a humanistic poetics as an ideological and theoretical alternative to deconstruction even while calling into question the hierarchical role that ideology and theory have been playing in literary discussion. This project began with my book The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (1986), in which I sought to define the theoretical underpinnings of Anglo-American criticism, and continues in my Reading Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1987) and The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890–1930 (1989). Within my larger project of defining a theoretical base for humanistic formalism, I shall in this chapter focus on the reader.
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Notes
Bialostosky, Don, ‘Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism’, PMLA, 105:5 (October 1986), 788–97.
Gordimer, Nadine, ‘The Arts in Adversity: Apprentices of Freedom’, New Society (24, 31 December 1981).
According to Bakhtin, the internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious language, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases) — this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types [raznorecie] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions (M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], pp. 261–3).
Quoted by Mary Reynolds, Dante and Joyce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 220.
Thus, to an Aristotelian such as James Phelan, a response to ‘Araby’ would inquire to what extent the characterization is mimetic, didactic, and synthetic (a term he has proposed to explain how characters are also artificial constructs — that is, part of the narrative discourse). See James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Fish, Stanley, ‘Facts and Fiction: A Reply to Ralph Rader’, Critical Inquiry, 1 (1975), 888–9. Quoted in James Phelan, Words From Worlds: A Theory of Language in Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 17.
‘Notes on the Text as Reader’, Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman, (eds) The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 229.
Ruppert, Peter, Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 42.
Eliot, T.S. ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), pp. 121–6.
Ricoeur, Paul, ‘The Model of the Text’, Social Research, 51:1 (Spring 1984), 185–218.
Schwarz, Daniel R., ‘“I Was the World in Which I Walked”: The Transformation of the British Novel,’ University of Toronto Quarterly, 51:3 (Spring 1982), 279–97; reprinted in The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890–1930 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). Crosman, p. 111.
Stone, Harry, ‘“Araby” and the Writings of James Joyce’, in Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York: Viking Press, 1969), pp. 344–68.
Pratt, Mary Louise, ‘Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: On Anglo-American Reader Response Criticism’, in Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 26–54.
Schwarz, Daniel R. The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (London: Macmillan; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).
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© 1990 Daniel R. Schwarz
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Schwarz, D.R. (1990). The Ethics of Reading: The Case for Pluralistic and Transactional Reading. In: The Case For a Humanistic Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11070-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11070-4_2
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