Abstract
In the spring of 1986 a group of graduate students with diverse backgrounds and interests (in American literature, communication and theater arts, religious studies, women’s literature, English pedagogy) met in my Topics in Criticism class to debate reader-oriented models of criticism and their role in the classroom. A substantial portion, as it turned out, of this seminar evaluating recent scenarios of meaning-making (phenomenological, semiotic, ‘affective’, deconstructive) was devoted to a critical workshop on James’s ‘Figure in the Carpet’ that studied these interpretive moves in actu. My purpose in conducting this experiment was not to unveil an ‘essential secret’ or figural design in James’s story, but rather to foreground the intricate process by which various competing interpretive figures come into being in the process of critical articulation; also to test the resourcefulness of a community of readers such as ours when confronted with a text that both flaunts and questions a traditional poetics and mode of interpretation premised on the existence of a hidden ‘figure of the text’.
There may be such a state of mind brought on the reader’s part … as a positive desire to take on trust; but that is only the final fruit of insidious proceedings, operative to a sublime end, on the author’s side …
Ito this extent recover the acute impression that may have given birth to ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ that no truce, in the English-speaking air, had ever seemed to me really struck, or even approximately strikeable, with our so marked collective mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation…
James, The Art of the Novel (pp. 224, 227)
As an institution, the author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person… no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation, nor his projection), as he needs mine …
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (p. 27)
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Notes and References
R.P. Blackmur, ‘In the Country of the Blue’, Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920–51, ed. J.W. Aldridge (New York: Ronald Press, 1952), p. 313.
Jean Perrot, Henry, James: Une écriture énigmatique (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982), pp. 9, 275.
Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 251.
Strother B. Purdy, The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature and Henry James (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1977), p. 18. Purdy discusses James’s paradoxical epistemology in relation to contemporary anti-hermeneutic literature (Robbe-Grillet, Ionesco, Günter Grass, Dürrenmatt, Vonnegut, and others).
Joann P. Krieg, ‘A Question of Values: Culture and Cognition in The Turn of the Screw’, Language and Communication, 8/2 (1988): 151–2.
Leo Bersani, ‘The Jamesian Lie’, Partisan Review, 36 (1969): 65.
David W. Smit, The Language of a Master: Theories of Style and the Late Writing of Henry James (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 77.
Jean Franz Blackall, Jamesian Ambiguity and ‘The Sacred Fount’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 9.
See Frank Kermode, Novel and Narrative (Glasgow, 1972), p. 15.
Kermode, The Art of Telling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 112.
Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), p. 131.
Henry James, ‘The Science of Criticism’, in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 171.
Krishna Balden Vaid, Techniques in the Tales of Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 16.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, vol. I, 1983), pp. 76–82.
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© 1992 Marcel Cornis-Pop
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Cornis-Pope, M. (1992). ‘Limp’ vs. ‘Acute’ Criticism: An Interpretive Community Refigures James. In: Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371378_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371378_6
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