106 Book Reviews

Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History, Gerald L. Bruns (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), xiv + 201 pp., $18.95.

It is important to know that Bruns faults most of what goes on in literary theory today. He notes that ‘most of the major theoretical movements in recent literary study - structuralist analysis, semiotics, decwnstruction, varieties of readerly analysis, Marxist analysis . . , rest upon a cwmmon procedure: in order to define their topics of study they must first characterize them as epistemological problems. . . . Thus the motive of each of these movements becomes . . . the desire to describe how the mind works.’ One might say that modern literary theory has been more interested in psychology than in literature. Bruns takes a different approach than has been usual to the whole problem of interpretation by leaving alone what interpretation is in favour of an analysis of the ways in which it makes its appearance. For this reason, his central cwncem is whether interpretation is a rhetorical or a philosophical problem; that is, does interpretation appear as inventing ways to say things or as finding demonstrable truths.

The book is divided into four parts which move more or less from the ancients to the moderns. In part one Bruns deals with the problem of texts which are not fixed to one author but which are communal by nature; for example, ancient scripture. How does one interpret one of these ‘open texts’? A clue is given by his statement ‘the text as I have been discussing it is still as much an utterance as an object; it exists as an adjunct to speech. It is an utterance in a form that one might write as well as read.’ Part two centres on Descartes and is the most interesting section of the book. Bruns points out that the basic idea behind Descartes’ way of seeing (interpreting) things is that everything can be figured as a system, since the mind’s capacity for systematic operation is its essential feature. This feature is communal as well as individual, for deduction always ends up yielding a kind of ‘programme’ for ascertaining truths that go beyond any one individual’s ability to handle the vast world of particulars. Texts are structured language, and the Cartesian tradition of interpretation depends upon an enlightened and systematic view of language. Part three might be faulted for a two trendy use of the term ‘Romantic (Jane Austen and Gerard Manley Hopkins have to be stretched a bit tow far to fit into Romantic metaphysics of style), but has the virtue of an outstanding analysis of character in Pride and Prejudice. Part four deals with swme of the obvious features of modernist notions of textuality, and seems to hinge upon what Bruns has to say about improvisation, some of which (as the parallels that create a coincidence of situations in Joyce’s Ulysses) is simply obvious.

Taken as whole, though, this book has a straightforward knack of getting at the point without pretentiousness and resorting to modern theory’s cult jargon, which is almost reason enough to buy it. Couple that with numerwus brilliant insights and we have a book for everyone interested in this idea in European history.

Four Critics: Croce, VaKry, Lukbcs, Ingarden, Ren& Wellek (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981), ix + 92 pp., $8.95.

One of our most distinguished modern literary scholars here sets out a kind of outline of twentieth-century criticism which goes quite a way towards completing his monumental History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, now lacking its final volume or two for almost two decades. In this volume Wellek acts as critical surveyor, ‘not obliged to measure every foot of ground he triangulates’, but to take a number of vantage-points from which he can assess the actual contours of the landscape. What he