Abstract
Poetics and rhetoric, representation and the art of persuasion, are keys to Literature, Theory, History and share a concern with the relation between speaker and audience, writer and reader. These three disciplines in my title describe the focus of my writing as poet, critic/theorist, and historian. Working in the three areas for some time, I have long seen them as connected through language and, more specifically, in the use of stories and argument and figures of speech to related word and world. Rhetoric and poetics share this ground, and these three fields are all rhetorical to a greater or lesser extent. Plato seems to have mistrusted poetry as overwhelming reason with emotion, whereas Aristotle saw poetry as a means of purging feeling through catharsis. Figures and tropes for one may mislead, whereas for the other they lead to equilibrium and knowledge. The language of poetry, philosophy, and history is controversial. Expressions may be explicitly or implicitly metaphorical, and metaphor, which identifies one thing with another (this man is an island), is one of the centers of language. Metonymy, which is also a key to language, is a displacement or something that stands in for something else. Literary theorists, like Jonathan Culler, acknowledge the importance of tropes, but so do historians like Hayden White, who uses four tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony—to examine “emplotment” or historical explanation. Synecdoche has the part representing the whole, and irony generally means, in its rhetorical guise, meaning the opposite of what is said (or saying the opposite of what is meant).1
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Notes
See, for instance, Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72–73—Culler mentions White in this context—and his “The Turns of Metaphor,” The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 188–209.
See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
See also Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–71.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, rpt. 1973).
See Plotinus: The Enneads, ed. and rev. B. S. Page and trans. Stephen Mackenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), ch. 1.
Stanley Fish, “Rhetoric,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 220–21.
See, for instance, Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7. The French original has a more provocative title: Le Démon de la théorie: Littérature et sens commun (Paris Editions du Seuil, 1998).
Compagnon, 11. See Julien Gracq, En lisant en écrivant (Paris: José Corti, 1981), esp. 174.
Compagnon, 12–13. See René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).
Patricia Waugh, “Revising the Two Cultures Debate,” The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–34.
See Jonathan Hart, “Introduction,” City of the End of Things: Lectures on Civilization and Empire (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–34.
David Lodge, “Literary Criticism and Literary Creation,” The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 152.
Bertolt Brecht Diaries 1920–1922, ed. Herta Ramthun and trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 42–43.
In Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, rpt. 1994), 174. John Fuegi ends with “lots of theories,” and in the “Introduction” to Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), vii, Irene Makaryk ends with “newspapers.”
Bertolt Brecht Journals [1935–1955], trans. Hugh Rorrison and ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1993), 90–91.
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 219.
Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 271.
W. J. T Mitchell, “Critical Inquiry and the Ideology of Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 612–18. White, Fiction, 223–25. In the chapter “Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism,” White discusses Mitchell’s view of theory and history.
See James Clifford, Routes—Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth-Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
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© 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2011). Introduction. In: Literature, Theory, History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339583_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339583_1
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