notes and references978-0-230-37137...notes and references the following works by henry james are...

Notes and References

The following works by Henry James are cited directly in my text, with volume and page references in parentheses:

The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols 1-24 (New York: Scribner's, 1907-1909); vol. 25 (1917).

The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1961-64).

'The Figure in the Carpet', in Stories of Writers and Artists, ed. F.O. Matthiessen (New York: New Directions, 1944). Cited parenthetically in the text as FIC

The Sacred Fount, with an introductory essay by Leon Edel (London: Rupert-Hart-Davis, 1959).

What Masie Knew (London: The Bodley Head, 1969). The American Scene, intro. Leon Edel (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1968). The Art of the Novel, ed. KP. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1962). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

1 An 'Intimate Commerce with Figures': On Rereading/Rewriting Narratives

1. Andre Lefevere, 'Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites? The Trouble with Interpretation and the Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm', in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Thea Hermans (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), p. 216.

2. Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 37.

3. Northrop Frye, 'The Survival of Eros in Poetry', in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, eds. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 33.

4. See E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 18.

5. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 369.

6. J. Hillis Miller, 'On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism', in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, eds Eaves and Fischer, pp. 110-1.

7. David Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice: Ways of Analysing Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 21.

8. Harold Bloom, 'The Breaking of Form', in Bloom et aI., Deconstruction

298

Notes and References 299

and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 8. 9. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruc

tion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 12. 10. E.D. Hirsch, 'The Politics of Theories of Interpretation', Critical

Inquiry, 9 (1982): 246.n 11. William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in

English Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 7. 12. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 427. 13. K.M. Newton, In Defense of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice

(London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 22. 14. Edward Said, 'Travelling Theory', Raritan, 1 (1982): 59. 15. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, foreword Wlad Godzich (Min

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 7. 16. Wayne Booth, 'Reversing the Downward Spiral: Or, What is the

Graduate Program For?', Profession 1987: 37-8. 17. See Wayne C. Booth, 'Pluralism in the Classroom', Critical Inquiry, 1

(1986): 476. 18. 'Reversing the Downward Spiral', p. 39. 19. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Litera

ture Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 7-9, 296. 20. Christopher Ricks, 'Theory and Teaching', in Critical Theory and the

Teaching of Literature: Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), vol. 3, pp. 4-5.

21. Ibid., p. 6. 22. Walter Benn Michaels, 'The Interpreter's Self: Peirce on the Cartesian

"Subject"', Georgia Review 31 (1977): 38J-402. Repr. in Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to PostStructuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 186-7.

23. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatverlag, 1959), p. 31. In a well-known passage from Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), E.D. Hirsch deplored the break down of this distinction, 'one of the firmest ... in the history of hermeneutic theory', between 'the subtilitas intelligendi and the subtilitas explicandi - the art of understanding a text and the art of making it understood by others' (p. 133).

24. Susanne Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 44, 45.

25. Marjorie Nicholson, 'The Professor and the Detective' (1929), in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), p. 126.

26. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 234, 240. Porter further notes the similarity between 'the parts played by the Great Detective and by the creator of psychoanalysis', or between the conjectural scenario of mystery fiction, and psychoanalytic case his-

300 Notes and References

tories. Both are recoverable narratives that depend on hermeneutic and proaeretic codes, and on strong solutions ('cures') that entail a reenactment of the original trauma, or scene of suffering (pp. 241-4).

27. Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 5l. 28. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, p. 226. 29. Erika Fischer-Lichte, 'The Quest for Meaning', Stanford Literary Re

view, 1 (1986): 137, 14l. 30. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univer

sity Press, 1978/1984), p. 166. 3l. William R. Schroeder, 'A Teachable Theory of Interpretation', in

Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 19.

32. In Paul Ricoeur's synthetic definition, 'hermeneutics is the theory of the operations of imderstanding in their relation to the interpretations of texts.' Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 8.

33. Schroeder, 'A Teachable Theory of Interpretation', p. 24. 34. M.H. Abrams, 'Construing and Deconstructing', in Romanticism and

Contemporary Criticism, eds, Eaves and Fischer, p. 173. 35. Deirdre Burton, 'Through Glass Darkly: Through Dark Glasses', in

R.A. Carter, ed., Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 196.

36. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 35.

37. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, p. 244. 38. Robert Scholes, 'Interpretation and Criticism in the Classroom', in

Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, ed. Stuart Peterfreund, pp. 38, 42.

39. Andre Lefevere, 'Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites?', p. 218. 40. Ibid., p. 219. 4l. Andre Lefevere, 'On the Refraction of Texts', in Mimesis in Contern

porary Theory, vol. 1, The Literary and Philosophical Debate, ed. Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Press, 1984), pp. 215-43.

42. Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 7, 4.

43. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 205.

44. David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 58.

45. Horst Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 4-6.

46. Ernesto Lac1au and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 127-8.

47. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 72.

48. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 54. 49. Michael Steig, Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 12, 14.


50. Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 11.

51. Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, pp. 3-4. 52. Jacques Derrida, 'LIVING ON: Border Lines', trans. James Hulbert,

in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 100.

53. Inge Crosman Wimmers, Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. xx.

54. Laura Mulvey, 'Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience', History Workshop Journal, 23 (Spring 1987): 6. In this engaging rereading of her own 'classic' article on woman as a fetishistic object for the male spectatorial gaze ('Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16/3 [Autumn 1975]: 6--18), Mulvey admits that her previous argument, 'important as it is for analysing the existing state of things', was too constrained by a 'rhetoric of binary oppositions'. The alternative she now envisions for wcmen authors and readers is a nonpolarised, 'pre-Oedipal' mode of Signification, or what she somewhat vaguely terms 'the possibility of change without closure'.

55. Thomas M. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', Modern Fiction Studies 33/3 (Autumn 1987): 501.

56. Dieter Richter, 'Teachers and Readers: Reading Attitudes as a Problem in Teaching Literature', trans. Sarah Lennox, New German Critique, 7 (1976): 31.

57. Peter Uwe Hohendhal, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 184, 187.

58. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 501. 59. Frank Lentricchia, 'On Behalf of Theory', in Criticism in the University,

ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985), p. 108.

60. Richard Rorty, 'Philosophy Without Principles', Critical Inquiry 3 (1985). Repr. in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p.I34.

61. Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, 'A Reply to Our Critics', in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, pp. 102, 105.

62. Stanley Fish, 'Consequences', in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, p. 120.

63. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 7. 64. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trol/ope,

James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 43. 65. Lentricchia, 'On Behalf of Theory', p. 106. 66. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer

sity Press, 1978/1981), p. 58. 67. Paul Ricoeur, 'Qu'est-ce qu'un texte', in Rudiger Bubner, ed., Herme

neutik und Dialektik: Festschrift in Honor of H.G. Gadamer (Tubingen: Mohr, 1970), pp. 194-5 (trans. Inge Crosman Wimmers).


68. Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, p. 75. 69. Iser, Prospecting, p. 10. 70. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1974), pp. 15--6. 71. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univer

sity Press, 1978), pp. 81 et passim. 72. Michael Riffaterre, 'The Interpretant in Literary Semiotics', Journal of

Semiotics, 3/4 (1985): 41-2. 73. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 494. 74. Northrop Frye, The Critical Path (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1971), pp. 20-33. 75. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1976), p. 276. 76. Fran<;ois Roustang, 'On Reading Again', in The Limits of Theory, ed.

Thomas M. Kavanagh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 127.

77. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading, p. 118. In chapter 3 I discuss in more detail Miller's use of New York Prefaces to articulate his own theory of deconstructive re-writing.

78. Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice, p. 43. 79. Paul de Man, Introduction to Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic

of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); repr. as 'Reading and History', The Resistance to Theory, p. 58.

80. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 96.

81. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 493. 82. Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice, p. 12. 83. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 502. 84. Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice, pp. 27, 29. 85. M.A.K. Halliday, 'The Teacher Taught the Students English: An

Essay in Applied Linguistics', in The Second LACUS Forum, ed. P.A. Reich (Columbia: Hornbeam Press, 1976), pp. 344-9.

86. Roland Barthes, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 295.

87. Annette Kolodny, 'Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism', in Feminist Studies, 6 (1980): 11.

88. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 85.

89. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 264.

90. See Wayne Booth's critical exchange with Iser in the latter's Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, pp. 59-60. Booth finds Iser's phenomenological model of reading 'emotion-free', strangely oblivious to the affective side of the interaction between text and reader. In his response to these criticisms, Iser dismisses such 'affective' or 'dramatic' responses from the sphere of the 'aesthetic' (Prospecting, p. 62).


91. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 37.

92. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, pp. 82, 99. 93. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 28, pp. 10, 16--17, 35.

94. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, pp. 107, 103. 95. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 14. 96. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 66--86. See also Shoshana

Felman, 'Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis', MLN, 5 (1983): 1021-1053; Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 90-112.

97. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 60.

98. Lacan enumerates 'ellipsis and pleonasma, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition', as examples of syntactic displacement, and 'metaphor, catachresis, antonomasia, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche' as semantic condensations. See The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 31.

99. Felman, 'Beyond Oedipus', 1042-43. 100. Steig, Stories of Reading, p. 32. 101. Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics,

trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 32, 160.

102. Teresa de Lauretis, 'Strategies of Coherence', in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), p. 201.

103. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, p. 30. 104. De Lauretis, 'Strategies of Coherence', p. 186. 105. Julia Kristeva, 'Psychoanalysis and the Polis', trans. M. Waller, in

W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., The Politics of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983): 84.

106. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 202.

107. Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 73. 108. De Lauretis, 'Strategies of Coherence', p. 193. 109. Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic

Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 148. 110. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, p. 247. 111. Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 249. 112. Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p. 432. 113. Tzvetan Todorov, 'The Secret of Narrative', The Poetics of Prose, trans.

Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 177. Originally published as 'The Structural Analysis of Literature: the Tales of Henry James', in Structuralism: an Introduction, ed. D. Robey (Oxford: CIaredon Press, 1973).


114. Iser, Prospecting, p. 49. 115. Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York:

W.W. Norton, 1975), p. 179. 116. Donna Przybylowicz, Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and

Other in the Late Works of Henry James (University: University of Alabama Press, 1986), p. 6.

117. Ellen Messer-Davidow, 'The Philosophic Bases of Feminist Criticism', NLH 19/1 (Autumn 1987): 73.

118. Dorin Schumacher, 'Subjectivities: A Theory of Critical Process', in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1975), p. 34.

119. Messer-Davidow, 'The Philosophic Bases of Feminist Criticism', p. 77.

120. Miller, 'On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism', p. 125. 121. J. Hillis Miller, 'Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II', Georgia

Review, 30 (1976): 337, 341. 122. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a /'age c/assique (Paris: Gallimard,

1976), p. 602. 123. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism

(London: Verso and NLB, 1981), pp. 137-8. 124. Nancy R. Comley, 'Composing, Uniting, Transacting: Whys and

Ways of Connecting Reading and Writing', College English, 51/2 (February 1989): 193.

125. David Bartholomae, 'Reading, Writing, Interpreting', in Only Connect: Ullitillg Writing and Reading, ed. Thomas Newkirk (Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1986), p. 119.

126. David Bleich, 'Reading and Writing as Social Activities', in Convergencies: Trallsactiolls ill Readillg alld Writing, ed. Bruce T. Petersen Urbana: NCTE, 1986), p. 105.

127. Barbara Lounsberry, Editor's Preface to Draftings in Literary Criticism: The New Journalism (Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa/Board of Student Publications, 1985), p. iv.

128. Barbara Lounsberry and Marcel Cornis-Pop, eds., Draftillgs ill ReaderOriellted Criticism: Reweavillg 'The Figure in the Carpet' (Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa/Board of Student Publications, 1987).

2 The Figures Readers Make: Interpretive Plots in Reader-Oriented Criticism

1. Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 10.

2. William V. Spanos, 'The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination', Repetitions: Postmodern Literature and Its Occasion (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana University Press, 1987), pp. 21, 16.

3. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, p. 161. 4. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren typically wrote in their influential


Theory of Literature (1949): 'Even though "reading" may be used broadly enough to include critical understanding and sensibility, the art of reading is an ideal for a purely personal cultivation. As such it is highly desirable, and also serves as a basis of a widely spread literary culture. It cannot, however, replace the conception of "literary scholarship", conceived as a super-personal tradjtion'. Theory of Literature (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 7-8.

5. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967; first published in 1954), p. 34.

6. Elizabeth Freund comments: 'The poem itself, enshrined as the prime mover of all meanings and emotions, governs the hierarchy. Subject to its domination is the disinterested critic who performs the task of giving an "account" by approximating the meaning and mediating the textual properties. Last comes the lowly reader who benefits passively from the critic's work. Since response, in this benevolent despotic arrangement, is not a property of the reader at all but something inscribed and controlled by "the poem itself", the reader need only be taken for granted. Taken for granted, readers and reading become invisible, mute, imperceptible, ghostly'. The Return of the Reader, p. 4.

7. This is how M.H. Abrams represents diagramatically the 'total situation' of the work of art in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1953/1958), p. 6.

8. Freund, The Return of the Reader, p. 2. 9. Cleanth Brooks, The Wel/-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

(New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1947), p. 194. 10. Stanley Sultan, Eliot, Joyce & Company (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1987), pp. 227, 232. What I find puzzling in this book, in addition to a reductive historical overview that attributes response theory and deconstruction absolute denials of reference and signification, is Sultan's effort to recuperate a rigid version of formalism: arguing, for example, in his reading of Eliot's Prufrock poem, that 'Prufrock's thought-discourse cannot be given meaning by a reader's processing it, because Eliot has processed it already in his poem embodying it' (p. 240). Ironically, Sultan's reading manages rather to prove the contrary: that the sigi1ificance of 'Prufrock's geometrical, not pictorial' configurations is adjudicated by the critic through such interpretive moves (some highlighted by Sultan) as attribution, excision, patterning, structural articulation, interpretation of speech acts. Sultan's interpretation of 'Prufrock' acknowledges some of the 'irresolutions' and 'ghostly demarcations' that subtend Eliot's text, without confronting the role a critic's own appropriative moves have in settling or unsettling these textual indeterminacies.

11. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 196111930), p. 1.

12. See also Freund, The Return of the Reader, pp. 46-9. 13. LA. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1924), pp. 250, 248. 14. Rosenblatt first pointed out her divergence from the New Critical use

of Richards, in the introduction to Literature as Exploration (New York:


Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938; revised and rpt. 1968). Predictably, her transactional approach was eclipsed in the age of 'postwar, postSputnik intellectualism [that] fostered the extraordinary dominance of the New Critics in university and critical circles'. It could re-emerge, contaminated with certain New Critical ideas, only at the end of the sixties when the objectivist paradigm had been eroded enough and an alternative, pluralistic episteme was in the making. See The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern PEnois University Press, 1978), p. xii.

15. Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), p. 1.

16. Reprinted in Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, pp. 21-67. 17. Iser, The Act of Reading, pp. 170--9. The very aspects of Ingarden's work

that Iser criticises had been turned by Wellek and Warren into staples of objective, 'intrinsic scholarship:' ... we can distinguish between right and wrong readings of a poem, or between a recognition or a distortion of the norms implicit in a work of art, by acts of comparison, by a study of different false or incomplete realizations .... A hierarchy of viewpoints, a criticism of the grasp of norms, is implied in the concept of the adequacy of interpretation' (Theory of Literature, pp. 143-4).

18. Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 12-3.

19. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, trans. by author (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 287.

20. Iser, The Reading Process: a Phenomenological Approach', New Literary History, 3 (1972): 279-80, 293.

21. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 20.

22. Freund, The Return of the Reader, p. 18. 23. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth

Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 1-2.

24. Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 50.

25. Stanley Fish, 'With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida', Critical Inquiry, 8/4 (Summer 1982): 704.

26. Samuel Weber, 'Caught in the Act of Reading', in Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy, Literature, Art (Glyph Textual Studies 1), ed. Samuel Weber (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 185.

27. Wolfgang Iser, 'Feigning in Fiction', in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 221.

28. Freund, The Return of the Reader, p. 96. 29. See also Freund's comment: 'When the reader's experience is the

object of analysis, the integrity of the text is threatened; when the text becomes the focus, Fish's program reverts to a closet formalism, in which the concept of the reader is only an extension of textual constraints or authorial intention .... The experience of self-consuming


artifacts, contrary to all expectations, engenders a remarkably docile, singular reader who regularly acquiesces in both the rhetorical and dialectic stratagems of an apparently "de-certainizing" yet powerfully authoritative text'. The Return of the Reader, p. 103.

30. Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, p. 42. 31. Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London:

Methuen, 1984), pp. 99-100. 32. Stanley Fish, 'Why no One's Afraid of Wolfgang lsd, Diacritics 2/3

(1981): 3. 33. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, 'The Affective Fallacy',

Sewanee Review, 57 (Winter 1949). Rpt. in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, p. 21. 34. Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (New York: Random

House, 1957); Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Norman N. Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1975); David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

35. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Steve Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

36. Holland, 5 Readers Reading, p. 39. See also Louise M. Rosenblatt, 'The Poem as an Event, College English (November 1964); repr. in The Reader, the Text, the Poem, pp. 6-21.

37. Rene Wellek, 'The New Criticism: Pro and Contra', Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978): 623.

38. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975; first edition, 1968), p. 309.

39. William Ray, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 62.

40. See Holland's anti-Derridean emphasis on the hermeneutic plenitude of reading in 'Re-Covering "The Purloined Letter": Reading as a Personal Transaction', in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and lnge Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 350--70.

41. Fish, 'Why no One's Afraid of Wolfgang lsd, p. 7. 42. Wolfgang lser, 'Talk Like Whales', Diacritics 2/3 (1981): 84. For a good

discussion of this polemic between lser and Fish, see Holub, Reception Theory, pp. 101-6; Freund, The Return of the Reader, pp. 148-51.

43. Holland, 'UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF', in Proceedings of the Modern umguage Association, 90 (1975): 815.

44. See also Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions, pp. 45-6. 45. Georges Poulet, 'Criticism and the Experience of Interiority', in Reader

Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism ed. Jane P. Tomkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 47.


46. Freund, The Return of the Reader, p. 122. 47. Holland, 'Why This Is Transference, nor Am lOut of It', Psychoanalysis

and Contemporary Thought,S (1982): 34. 48. See Bleich, The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). In this book Bleich broadens the scope of his explorations substantially, discussing the various institutional and cultural constraints that harness his model of 'pedagogical self-disclosure' and intersubjective negotiation: 'For me to teach literature is to teach and learn how a given work may or may not playa role in a culturally and politically situated living person. And this is the connection of literature to literacy and language that I discuss and reflect on in this book'. (p. xiii)

49. Gabriele Schwab, 'Reader-Response and the Aesthetic Experience of Otherness', Stanford Literary Review, 1 (1986): 117.

50. Georges Poulet, The Metamorphosis of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliot Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p.308.

51. See Jacques Lacan, 'The Mirror-Stage as Formative ()f the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 2.

52. Jacques L,acan, 'The Direction of the Treatment and the PrinCiple of Its Power', Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, p. 233 et passim. See also 'The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience' in the same collection.

53. For a good discussion of the limits of a psychoanalytic theory of reading uncorrected through Lacan's subject semiotics, see Freund, The Return of the Reader, pp. 114--8.

54. Sigmund Freud, 'Creative Writers and Daydreaming', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), IX, p. 153.

55. Cynthia Chase, 'The Witty Butcher's Wife: Freud, Lacan, and the Conversion of Resistance to Theory', MLN, 102 (1988): 992, 994.

56. Marshall W. Alcorn and Mark Bracher, 'Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: a New Direction for ReaderResponse Theory', PM LA , 10113 (1985): 342-54.

57. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 320-1. 58. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James. Melo

drama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 171.

59. By contrast, James R. Squire's early study of The Responses of Adolescents While Reading Four Short Stories (Urbana: NCTE, 1964) already used most of these categories to classify statements in student responses. But his statistical and taxonomic approach had little to say about the specific conditions and rhetorical effects of these forms of articulation.

60. Schwab, 'Reader-Response and the Aesthetic Experience of Otherness', p. 120.

61. David Bleich, 'Teleology and Taxonomy in Critical Explanation', in


Theories of Reading, Looking, and Listening, ed. Harry R. Garvin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981), p. 116.

62. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 258. 63. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 12. Quoted

in Inge Crosman Wimmers, Poetics of Reading, p. 129. 64. Jonathan Culler, 'Phenomenology and Structuralism', The Human Con

text,S (1973): 37-8. 65. See especially Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman

and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 66. Stanley Fish, 'How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act

Theory and Literary Criticism', MLN 91 (1976): 1022. Reprinted in Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 243.

67. For a similar point, see Ray, Literary Meaning, pp. 166-8. 68. Freund, The Return of the Reader, p. 105. 69. Wimmers, Poetics of Reading, p. 155. 70. Steig concurs with Frank Cioffi that a reader's response is affected by

how much he knows about the author's background and intention: 'A reader's response to a work will vary with what he knows; one of the things which he knows and with which his responses will vary is what the author had in mind, or what he intended'. Frank Cioffi, 'Intention and Interpretation in Criticism', in On Literary Intention, ed. David Newton-de Molina (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976), p.63.

71. Here is a characteristic example: 'It seems to me that Marian, who had to get my special permission to take the overcrowded course, was especially eager to do so because the "ghost" of her childhood friend Ted had not yet been laid to rest in her own mind, and though she somewhat dreaded the process of exploring her past, she also felt compelled to go through with it. I doubt that she was motivated by the feeling that she had better follow my paper as a model, although, again, my paper, among others, may have helped to open the way for her.' (pp. 227-8, n.3) This is followed with another note, advertiSing the 'therapeutic', self-enlightening role of reader-response: 'Two years after taking the course with me, Marian told me that her relationship with Ted had haunted her for years ... , but that after writing her paper for the class, rather than taking on a new burden of guilt she had felt tremendous relief - the ghost, so to speak, was gone, and she now hardly ever thinks of Ted'. (p. 228, n.7)

72. Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions, p. 41. 73. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 131.

3 The Figure of Catachresis and the Plot of Unreadability in Deconstruction

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 49.

2. Geoffrey Hartman, 'Literary Criticism and Its Discontents', Critical


Inquiry, 3 (1976): 211-2. 3. Geoffrey Hartman, 'Understanding Criticism', in Writing and Reading

Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, ed. C. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp. 159-60.

4. Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1988), p. 89.

5. Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 259-60. 6. Ray, Literary Meaning, pp. 187-8. 7. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 33. 8. De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary

Criticism, second ed. rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983; 1st ed. 1971), p. 11I.

9. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 33.

10. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 13.

11. Paul de Man, 'Shelley Disfigured,' in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 53.

12. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 4--5.

13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. Jacques Derrida, 'LIVING ON: Border Lines', trans. James Hulbert, in

Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 153. 15. See the first section, 'Tympan', of Derrida's Margins of Philosophy,

trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); also Derrida's analysis of the 'fold', 'hymen', 'membrane', 'sheet' in Mallarme's Mimique, (Dissemination, pp. 173--287). For a good discussion of Derrida's exploitation and critique of boundaries, see Jonathan Culler, 'At the Boundaries: Barthes and Derrida', in At the Boundaries: Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, vol. 1 (1983): 23--45.

16. J. Hillis Miller, 'The Figure in the Carpet', Poetics Today, 3 (1980): 107-18.

17. See Derrida, 'The Parergon', October, 9 (1979): 3--40. 18. Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the

Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 225. 19. C. Douglas Atkins, Reading Deconstruction: Deconstructing Reading

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 69. 20. Miller, 'Narrative and History', ELH, 41 (1974): 47I. 21. Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 68. 22. Miller, 'Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line', Critical

Inquiry 3 (1976): 57-78. Rpt. in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen J. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 197911981), pp. 148-66.


23. Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. viii.

24. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism, p. 42. 25. J. Hillis, Miller, 'The Geneva School', in Modern French Criticism: From

Proust and Valery to Structuralism, ed. John F. Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 292. Daniel Schwartz argues a continuity between Miller's phenomenological phase, with its 'self-effacing reader approaching the mystery of the cogito', and a poststructuralist emphasis on the reader's participation in the all-inclusive figuration of the text. In both cases the 'situation of the reader' is inscribed within the novel along certain interpretive paths that constrain and act upon the real interpreter. See The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 222-66. C. Douglas Atkins (Reading Deconstruction, pp. 69-72), and William E. Cain (The Crisis in Criticism, pp. 33-5) have pointed out other carry-overs in Miller's 'odyssey from "Geneva criticism" to deconstruction'.

26. Miller, 'Deconstructing the Deconstructers', Diacritics, 5/2 (Summer 1975): 31.

27. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1968), p. 16.

28. In Miller's view, a novel like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, for example, both supports and subverts the various explanatory causes proposed by criticism - social, psychological, genetic, material, metaphysical, or coincidental. The advantage of fiction over critical discourse is that the former can maintain 'a large group of incompatible causes or explanations' in active tension (pp. 140-1).

29. See also William Cain, Literature in Crisis, pp. 37-9. Cain identifies two conflicting notions of reading in Miller's essays: 'Though Miller often stresses the self-interpretive text, with the critic slotted in a subordinate role, he reinvests the critic with the authority to reveal the text's special "heterogeneous" nature .... The critic is needed to deconstruct the text precisely because it cannot "show" its own "interpretation," its deconstruction of itself.' (p. 45).

30. Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity - the Example of James (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). See my own discussion of Rimmon's analysis in chapter 6.

31. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, 'Deconstructive Reflections on Deconstruction: In Reply to Hillis Miller', Poetics Today, 2Ilb (1980/81): 187.

32. Miller, 'Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry', Daedalus, 99 (1970): 429.

33. Miller, 'The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time', ADE Bulletin, 62 (September-November 1979): 12.

34. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, p. 59. 35. Paul de Man, Foreword to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. xi. 36. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univer

sity Press, 1984), p. 80.


37. I am indebted here to Cynthia Chase's excellent discussion of de Man's radical figuration in 'Giving Face to a Name: De Man's Figures', Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 82-112.

38. Chase, Decomposing Figures, pp. 88, 89. 39. Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of

Aesthetic Ideology, p. 37. Norris discusses in detail de Man's critique of 'aesthetic ideology' in Chapter 2, pp. 28-64.

40. This exchange took place at the end of de Man's last Messenger Lecture delivered at Cornell University in February and March 1983. See 'Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator"', in The Resistance to Theory, pp. 99, 101.

41. Neil Hertz similarly notes de Man's 'particular way of combining analysis and pathos, of blending technical arguments about operations of rhetoric ... with language - his own and that of the texts he cites - whose recurrent figures are strongly marked and whose themes are emotively charged, not to say, melodramatic'. See 'Lurid Figures', in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), pp. 82-104.

42. Norris, Paul de Man, pp. xvi-xvii. In contrast to what I am suggesting here, Christopher Norris and Minae Mizumura ('Renunciation', Yale French Studies, 69 [1985): 91-2) argue that de Man's later work successfully purged this humanistic residue, defining language as a 'wholly impersonal network of tropological drives, substitutions and displacements' (Paul de Man, p. xvii).

43. Jonathan Culler, 'Reading Lyric', Yale French Studies, 69 (1985): 106. 44. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, p. 50. 45. De Man, Foreword to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony, p. xi. 46. Geoffrey Hartman, 'Tea and Totality: the Demand of Theory on

Critical Style', in After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature, ed. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985), p. 30.

47. J. Hillis Miller, 'Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing', in Composition & Literature: Bridging the Gap, ed. Winifred Bryan Horner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 48.

48. John K. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 32, 44.

49. Derrida, Positions, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), pp. 39-46; see also Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller, 'The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature?', in After Strange Texts, p. 9.

50. See Ray, Literary Meaning, p. 199. 51. Stefano Rosso, 'An Interview with Paul de Man', in The Resistance to

Theory, p. 117. 52. The 'notion of the general text', for example, is a philosophic construct

that has more to do with Heidegger's radical ontology than with any critical definition of textuality; insofar as it transcends the oppositions between extra textual and intra textual, appearance and essence, logocentrism and graphocentrism, it 'ruins the very project of literary


criticism'. Likewise, Derrida's notion of 'quasimetaphoricity' as the constitutive infrastructure of all philosophy, is a 'transcendental concept of sorts' that cannot be thematised in satisfactory ways for criticism. It can only be explained with any degree of coherence by reference to Heidegger's 'conceptual difference between subject and object, and even between Dassein and Being' - Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 282, 317. Gasche's perspective, while rescuing Derrida's philosophy, underrates the complex relationship that links Derrida's 'philosophic arguments' to his critical exploration of concept formation, rhetorical and argumentative moves, linguistic self-consciousness. Many of his philosophic 'infrastructures' are first defined within literary contexts: Rousseau's wrestling with the dangerous 'supplement' of writing, Bataille's exploration of negativity, Mallarme's deconstructive logic of the 'hymen', and so on. To discuss Derrida's infrastructure of the 're-mark' in abstraction of its various concretisations in Mallarme's work (as fan, fold, hymen) is both impoverishing and against Derrida's emphasis on the figural nature of all language.

53. Gasche, 'Unscrambling Positions: On Gerald Graff's Critique of Deconstruction', MLN, 5 (1981): 1015--34.

54. Miller, 'The Figure in the Carpet', p. 113. 55. Miller, 'A Guest in the House: Reply to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's

Reply', Poetics Today, 2/1b (1980/81): 190. 56. John R. Boly, 'Deconstruction as a General System: Tropes, Disci

plines, Politics', Cultural Critique, 11 (Winter 1988--89): 188--9. 57. Culler comments: 'One might also apply to [de Man's] discourse what

he says of Michael Riffaterre's "dogmatic assertions": "by stating them as he does, in the blandest and most apodictic terms, he makes their heuristic function evident ... " But even this would not hold for all his claims, since assertions about the eternal division of being, for instance, do not permit one to do anything. They seem to function -are necessarily made to function for readers - as allegories, as part of a story of reading and writing in which the figure of literature plays a starring role'. Framing the Sign, p. 119.

58. Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 71.

59. Culler, Framing the Sign, p. 15. 60. 'Hypogram and Inscription', in The Resistance to Theory, pp. 27-53. 61. Hartman, 'Tea and Totality', p. 39. 62. Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 224. 63. Ray, Literary Meaning, p. 204. 64. As Barbara Johnson writes, 'The fact that what is loosely called

deconstructionism is now widely institutionalized in the United States seems to me both intriguing and paradoxical, but also a bit unsettling, although not for the reasons advanced by most of its opponents. The questions I shall ask are the following: How can the deconstructive impulse retain its critical energy in the face of its own success? What


can a reader who has felt the surprise of intellectual discovery in a work by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man do to remain in touch not so much with the content of the discovery as with the intellectual upheaval of the surprise? How can that surprise be put to work in new ways?' A World of Difference, p. 11.

65. Miller, 'Composition and Decomposition', pp. 43, 52. See also Vincent Leitch's commenfin Deconstructive Criticism (p. 52): 'Positioned as a major American literary critic, Miller manages to produce the expected and required practical criticism while staying more or less enmeshed in philosophic domains'.

66. See especially the collection of essays edited by C. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson, Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1985), with contributions from Vincent B. Leitch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gregory L. Ulmer, David Kaufer and Gary Waller, Sharon Crowley, J. Hillis Miller, Nancy R. Comley, Barbara Johnson, Geoffrey Hartman.

67. Gregory L. Ulmer, 'Textshop for Post(e)pedagogy', in Writing and Reading Differently, p. 56. For a similar argument, see Vincent B. Leitch, 'Deconstruction and Pedagogy', in Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 53.

68. Barbara Johnson, 'Teaching Deconstructively', in Writing and Reading Differently, pp. 140-1, 147.

69. Johnson, A World of Difference, p. 14. 70. Boly, 'Deconstruction as a General System', p. 198. 71. Ulmer, 'Texts hop for Post(e)pedagogy', Writing and Reading Differently,

p.38. 72. The rediscovery in 1987 of young de Man's contributions to a Belgian

pro-Nazi newspaper, Le Soir, between December 1940 and November 1942 when he finally resigned, has thrown new doubt on the extratextual motives of the de Manian project. Some have tried to read the later de Man work as an attempt to exorcise the burden of his guilty memory through a skeptical philosophy of language and a denunciation of the manipulative, reactionary investments of traditional aesthetics. Others have used de Man's wartime anti-Semitic pronouncements as a cudgel to beat literary deconstruction with, to junk it wholesale as a 'vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II' - Jeffrey Mehlman, quoted in David Lehman, 'Deconstructing de Man's Life: An Academic Idol Falls into Disgrace', Newsweek, CXII7 (15 February 1988): 63-5. More recently, both a naive psychoanalysis of de Man, and the sweeping, often misinformed attacks on deconstructionist criticism, have been countered by a more rigorous analysis of de Man's cultural politics from his early book reviewing days, to his later critiques of 'aesthetic ideology'. See in this sense Jonathan Culler, '''Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology', Critical Inquiry, 15 (Summer 1989): 777-83; and Norris's 'Postscript' to his book on Paul de Man, pp. 177-98.

Deconstructionist theorists like Derrida and Hartman have also tried to reread de Man's youthful articles through his later strategies of


reading, looking for discrepancies, crucial ambiguities, but also for an 'evolution' in his work that led, in Hartman's words, to 'a deepening reflection on the rhetoric of totalitarianism .... De Man's critique of every tendency to totalize literature or language, to see unity where there is no unity, looks like a belated, but still powerful, act of conscience.' New Republic (7 March 1988): 31. The flurry of reactions caused by Derrida's essay on behalf of de Man ('Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War', Critical Inquiry, 14 [Spring 1988]: 590--652), drew another sixty-page response from Derrida which good-humouredly at times, resignedly at others, reviews the 'absurdities, logical errors, bad readings, the worse ineptitudes' that deconstructive theory has been submitted to, and ends with a meditation on culture's 'biodegradable' attempts to assimilate, control, repress the play of language. See Derrida, 'Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments', Critical Inquiry, 15 (Summer 1989): 812-73.

73. Miller, 'Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II', Georgia Review, 30 (1976): 332.

74. Cynthia Chase, 'Remembering Forgetting: De Man's Romanticism', paper presented at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (Harvard University, March 1988), p. 22. Both de Man's deconstructive readings of Romantic texts, and Laclau and Chantal's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Vero, 1985), valorise the 'differential positivity' of discourses against their pre-emptive logic of identity.

75. See Cedric Watts, 'Bottom's Children: the Fallacies of Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Deconstructionist Literary Theory', in Lawrence Lerner, Reconstructing Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 20--35.

76. James Gribble, Literary Education: a Reevaluation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 79, 87.

77. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, 'Against Theory', in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, p. 10.

78. Cedric Watts, 'Bottom's Children', pp. 30, 24. 79. Meyer Abrams, quoted in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory,

pp. 99, 101. 80. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Univer

sity of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 148. 81. William E. Cain, 'English in America Reconsidered: Theory, Criticism,

Marxism, and Social Change', in Criticism in the University, ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985), p. 91.

82. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 260.

83. Derrida, 'The Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', in The Structuralist Controversy: the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1970), p. 404.

84. Derrida, 'Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War', pp. 648, 640.


85. John Carlos Rowe, 'Surplus Economies: Deconstruction, Ideology, and the Humanities', in The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 134.

86. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference, p. 14. Still, Derrida's dictum that 'there is no outside-the-text' has been given at times a restrictive interpretation that pretty much confines deconstruction to a rhetorical analysis of intra textual contradictions devoid even of self-knowledge. The critic, Miller has argued, 'cannot by any means get outside the text, escape from the blind alleys of language he finds in the work. He can only rephrase them in their own, allotropic terms' ('Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II', p. 331); 'Language cannot think itself or its own laws, just as a man cannot lift himself by his own bootstraps. Nor can language express what is outside language. It can neither know whether or not it has reached and expressed what is outside language, nor can it know whether that "outside" is a thought, or a thing, or a transcendent spirit, or some linguistic ground of language, or whether it is nothing at all. . .. It is impossible to get outside the limits of language by means of language: (The Ethics of Reading, pp. 56, 59).

87. Derrida, 'The Conflict of Faculties: a Mochlos', trans. Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Irving Wohlfarth (New York: Columbia University lecture, 1980). Quoted in Vincent B. Leitch, 'Deconstruction and Pedagogy', p. 47.

88. Leitch, 'Deconstruction and Pedagogy', pp. 48, 53. 89. Culler, Framing the Sign, 109. For a more detailed analysis of the

ideological significance of de Man's deconstruction of 'aesthetic ideology', see Norris, Paul de Man, particularly Chapter 2 (,De Man and the Critique of Romantic Ideology'), 4 (,Aesthetic Ideology and the Ethics of Reading'), and 6 (,"The Temptation of Permanence": Reading and History').

90. Norris, Paul de Man, p. 115. 91. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deccnstruction: A Critical Articulation (Balti

more: Johns Hopkins University, 1982), p. xv. 92. David Kaufer and Gary Waller, 'To Write is to Read Is to Write, Right?'

in Writing and Reading Differently, p. 71. 93. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary

Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x-xi.

94. Johnson, A World of Difference, p. 36. 95. Rowe, 'Deconstruction, Ideology, Humanities', p. 154. 96. Przybylowicz, Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the

Late Works of Henry James, p. 312.

4 Difficult Figuration: Feminine Signifiers in Male Texts

1. Patrocinio P. Schweickart, 'Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminine Theory of Reading', in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 35.


2. Ibid., p. 40. 3. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Tru

mansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1983), pp. xi-xii. 4. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American

Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 197811981), p. viii. Another early book that made direct use of classroom discussions and critiques is Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975).

5. 'To be excluded from a literature that claims to define one's identity is to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness - not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one's experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male - to be universal, to be American - is to be not female.' Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xiii.

6. Elaine Showalter, 'Toward a Feminist Poetics, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 141.

7. Shoshana Felman, 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation', in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 194.

8. 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', Critical Inquiry, 8 (1891). Rpt. in the New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature, Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter, pp. 246--7.

9. See Paula A. Treichler, 'Teaching Feminist Theory', in Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson, pp. 81-4; Paula A. Treichler and Cheris Kramarae, 'Women's Talk in the Ivory Tower', Communication Quarterly, 31/2 (Spring 1983): 118--32. For an application of this concept to James's fiction, see Carren Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 14--17, 149--67.

10. Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

11. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986); Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen, 1987); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988).

12. See this argument in Jefferson Humphries, 'Troping the Body: Literature and Feminism', Diacritics, 18/1 (Spring 1988): 18--28.


13. Maggie Humm, Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics (Brighton, Sussex: the Harvest Press, 1986), p. 8.

14. See Rowena Fowler, 'Feminist Criticism: The Common Pursuit', New Literary History, 1911 (Autumn 1987): 53.

15. See, for example, Lillian S. Robinson, 'Feminist Criticism: How Do We Know When We've Won', in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 141-9.

16. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 58. 17. Fowler, 'Feminist Criticism', p. 54. 18. Ellen Messer-Davidow, 'The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary

Criticisms', New Literary History, 1911 (Autumn 1987): 85. Still, in her own attempt to define the philosophic specificity of feminism, Messer-Davidow repeats some of the totalising gestures of 'phallocratic' criticism: systemic inference, over-generalisation, the treatment of the sex/gender complex as a 'totality' affecting all disciplines and modes of expression.

19. Paul Smith similarly argues that feminism is committed to a 'double strategy', simultaneously engaging a 'notion of fixed and cerned subjectivity inherited from traditional humanist thought', and a 'poststructuralist fantasy of the dispersed or decentered subject'. Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 150.

20. See, for example, Nina Baym, 'The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory', in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock, pp. 45-6. For Elaine Showalter not only the 'new sciences of the text based on linguistics, computers, generic structuralism', but also poststructuralist deconstruction 'have offered literary critics the opportunity to demonstrate that the work they do is as manly and aggressive as nuclear physics - not intuitive, expressive and feminine, but strenuous, rigorous, impersonal and virile' (,Toward a Feminist Poetics', in Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism, p. 140). Still, instead of situating herself on an anti-theoretical position, Showalter has been eagerly advocating the need for a feminist theoretical model, different from all other modes of criticism.

21. Showalter, 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', p. 183. 22. An example of this type of appropriation of gender issues under

wider rubrics, is the following passage from Fredric Jameson, with its persuasive imagery of incorporation characteristic of much Marxist discourse: 'The affirmation of radical feminism ... that to annul the patriarchal is the most radical political act - insofar as it includes and subsumes more partial demands, such as the liberation from the commodity form - is thus perfectly consistent with an expanded Marxian framework, for which the transformation of our own dominant mode of production must be accompanied and completed by an equally radical restructuration of all the more archaic modes of production with which it structurally coexists.' - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, p. 100. Even a discussion of feminist reading among other approaches, as I have myself at-


tempted in this book, may unwittingly contribute to the fears that 'male recognition would magically make feminist criticism invisible' (Nina Auerbach, 'Why Communities of Women Aren't Enough', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 3 [SpringlFall 1984): 157).

23. Catharine R. Stimpson, 'Introduction' to Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, p. 4.

24. In The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman contrasts Barthes's pluralistic model of signification, and the more rigid, monologic concept of suture proposed by film theorists. While Barthes's approach highlights the 'surreptitious signifying activity ... that occurs in a wide variety of textual systems', the latter focus 'on editing procedures and a technological complex specific to cinema'. For Barthes 'connotation' remains a means whereby the denotative signified, 'the privileged and authoritative term can be contested, and a signifying diversity promoted' (pp. 238-40). In cinema, on the other hand, 'suture' works to conceal the 'apparatuses' of enunciation, the interplay of codes, creating a paradoxical illusion of cinematic coherence and plenitude by means of editing cuts. 'Suture' thus encourages the spectator to establish a relationship not with those apparatuses, but with their fictional representations, successfully absorbing the viewer in the pre-established cultural syntax (pp. 194-236). A number of feminist critics have more recently denounced 'suture' as an improper theoretical and practical tool in cinema, because it 'naturalizes' sociocultural contradictions and promotes a passive spectatorial attitude. They have recommended instead a whole array of disruptive procedures, from 'jamming' the Oedipal mechanism of narratives through 'imaginary excess', to the displacement of the viewer. See, for example, Jacqueline Rose, 'Paranoia and the Film System', Screen 17/4 (1976/1977): 102.

25. Josephine Donovan, 'Toward a Women's Poetics', in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, p. 98.

26. Susan S. Lanser, 'Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology, Style 2211 (Spring 1988): p. 54.

27. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. xiii.

28. Mary O'Brien, 'Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic', in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 99-100.

29. Treichler, 'Teaching Feminist Theory', p. 90. 30. Treichler, 'Teaching Feminist Theory', p. 88. 31. Susan Lanser, 'Toward a Feminist Narratology', Style, 20 (1986): 343. 32. Alice Jardine, 'Pre-texts for the Transatlantic Feminist', Feminist

Readings: French Texts/American Contexts, Yale French Studies, 62 (1981): 226-7.

33. Susan Lanser, 'Toward A Feminist Narratology', p. 343. See also Lanser, 'Shifting Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology', pp. 52-60, for a polemical engagement with formalistic, gender-binding narratology.

34. Robyn Warhol's Gendered Interoentions: Narrative Discourse in the


Victorian Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), for example, posits a gender-specific distinction between the 'engaging: reality-directed narration of Gaskell or Stowe, and the more 'distanced: 'meta fictional' approach of Thackeray or Kingsley. Conceived originally as a supplementation and refinement of Chatman's 'overt'l'covert' polarity of narrators, this study of 'the relationship of narrators to readers, characters, and toward the act of narration itself' (p. 20), outlines a 'gendered poetics' of realistic fiction within which the 'engaging: earnest narration of women is as legitimate as the ironic, self-reflexive male paradigm. The most interesting examples studied by Warhol are in fact those that 'cross' gender and poetic distinctions, placing (as does Eliot's Adam Bede) the 'engaging strategies' in a more complex, self-reflexive framework that draws attention to the constructed nature of the realistic discourse.

35. In a critical response to Susan Lanser's essay, Nilli Diengott refuses categorically to allow any interpretive (feminist or otherwise) concerns in the 'purely theoretical and logical', 'gender-indifferent' field of narrative poetics. See 'Narratology and Feminism', Style 2211 (Spring 1988): 42-51.

36. De Lauretis, 'Strategies of Coherence: the Poetics of Film Narrative', p. 186.

37. Felman, 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation', pp. 194-5. 38. Fetteriey, The Resisting Reader, p. xi. 39. Helene Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', in New French Feminisms,

ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 249. .

40. Luce Irigaray, 'Women's Exile', Ideology and Consciousness, 1 (Spring 1977): 64.

41. Geraldine Pederson-Krag, 'Detective Stories and the Primal Scene', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 18 (1949): 212.

42. Elaine Showalter, 'Women and the Literary Curriculum', College English, 32 (1971): 856-7.

43. Elizabeth Allen, A Woman's Place in the Novels of Henry James (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 38.

44. Marge Piercy, Small Changes (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972), p. 267. 45. Barbara Godard, 'Redrawing the Circle: Power, Poetics, Language',

in Feminism Now: Theory - Practice, ed. M. Kroker (Montreal: Culture Texts, 1985), p. 167.

46. Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 155-6. See also Helene Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', p. 91.

47. See this criticism in Nina Baym, 'The Madwoman and Her Languages', in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, pp. 56-7.

48. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, p. 84. 49. Xaviere Gauthier, 'Creations', in New French Feminisms: An Anthology,

ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 163.

50. Christine Makward, 'To Be or Nor to Be ... a Feminist Speaker', in The Future of Difference, ed. Alice Jardine and Hester Eisenstein (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), p. 96.


51. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 8.

52. Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa', p. 250. 53. Julia Kristeva, 'The Subject in Signifying Practice', Semiotext(e), U3

(1975): 22, 24-5. 54. Donna Przybylowicz, 'Contemporary Issues in Feminist Theory' in

Criticism Without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1987, pp. 129-59).

55. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 15.

56. Allen, A Woman's Place in the Novels of Henry James, p. 2. 57. 'The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that

women, like words, should be things that were exchanged .... But woman could never become a sign and nothing more, even in a man's world she is still a person, and since in so far as she is defined as a sign, she must be recognised as a generator of signs'. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J. Harle Bell, J.R. von Sturmer and R. Needham (London: 1969), p. 496.

58. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 218.

59. Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, eds., Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1977), pp. 8, 10. For an application and refinement of this analysis of specularity, see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

60. One could argue, for example, that it is equally difficult for a discriminating male spectator or reader today to identify with the stereotypal, submissive feminine roles illustrated by Georgiana in Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark', Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak House, Catherine Sloper in James's Washington Square, even thoughas Michael Steig notes - he may use his baggage of superficial psychoanalytic concepts to take distance from such 'repressed', 'neurotic' cases, and alleviate his sense of guilt for the position allotted to him as male in the text (Michael Steig, Stories of Reading, p. 76). Conversely, some female readers will feel ambiguously about such powerless, submissive counterparts, projecting their own 'nausea' on these characters, but refraining from a clear indictment of these roles.

61. Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 4.

62. Schweickart, 'Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading', pp. 50-1. 63. Przybylowicz, 'Contemporary Issues in Feminist Theory', p. 130. 64. See especially Carren Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of

Henry James (1984); Donna Przybylowicz, Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James (1986).

65. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 36. Trans. Inge Crosman Wimmers.

66. Treichler, 'Teaching Feminist Theory', p. 96.


67. Ezra Pound, Henry James', in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 296.

68. As an example of the latter attitude, see Quentin Anderson, 'The Golden Bowl as a Cultural Artifact', in The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 161-200.

69. See John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 90--1.

70. Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 115. 71. Kaja Silverman, 'Too EarlyfToo Late: Subjectivity and the Primal

Scene in Henry James', Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 21 (Winter/Spring 1988): 157. See also Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 115--32.

72. Henry James, Letters, 1843-1875, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. I, p. 226.

73. See Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, pp. 149, 154, 247. 74. J.P. Mowbray, 'The Apotheosis of Henry James', in Henry James: the

Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p.331.

75. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, pp. 151-2. 76. Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary

Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 232. 77. See this argument in Caserio, Plot, Story and the Novel, pp. 198-231. 78. Donna Przybylowicz quotes the following Jameson comment in

support of her argument: 'For modernism - radical in its rejection of realistic discourse and of the bourgeois world to which the latter corresponds - imagines that if ... seeing the world through the old "bourgeois" categories is bad, a change in style will help us to see the world in a new way and thus achieve a kind of cultural or countercultural revolution of its own'. Frederic Jameson, 'The Ideology of the Text', Salmagundi, 31-2 (1975/76): 242.

79. Susanne Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 145. 80. Maxwell Geismer, Henry James and His Cult (London, 1964), p. 146. 81. Silverman, 'Too EarlyfToo Late', p. 159. 82. According to Kaja Silverman, the male observer of these Oedipian

scenes 'seems incapable of effecting that meconnaissance so crucial to normative masculinity, that is, of mistaking his penis for the phallus. Nor, it would seem, could he unblushingly assume himself to be the point of (sexual) origin)'. - 'Too EarlylToo Late: Subjectivity and the Primal Scene in Henry James', p. 172.

83. John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 38.

84. P.J. Eakin, The New England Girl (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), p. 221.

85. See Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, pp. 98-112; Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James's American Girl: The Embroidery of the Canvas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 44-5.

86. Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, p. 146.


87. See, among others, E. Duncan Aswell, 'James's In the Cage: The Telegraphist as Artist', Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 8 (1966--1967): 37:>-84; Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 306, 318.

88. Leon Edel, Henry James, The Untried Years: 1843-1870 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), pp. 56--7; see also Edel, Henry James, The Conquest of London: 1870-1883 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), p. xiii.

89. Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, p. x. 90. Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 79. 91. Silverman, 'Too EarlyfToo Late', pp. 15:>-6. 92. Kaston describes the goals of feminism as follows: 'I take the wo

men's movement to represent the belief that power can be used communally; that it is better to have power with people than to have power over them; that men and women can collaborate with each other rather than renounce each other or engage in melodramatic rituals of domination and surrender, mastery and victimization' (p. 15).

93. Gabriel Pearson, 'The Novel to End All Novels: The Golden Bowl', in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, ed. John Goode (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 332.

94. Allen, A Woman's Place in the Novels of Henry James, p. 6. As we have seen, Donna Przybylowicz also talks about a major shift in James's narrative approach, from an earlier, more rigid economy of signification, to the later expressionistic semiotics in which 'ambiguity and multiplicity of signification become the bases of perception: the unreadable determines the narrative structure' (Desire and Repression, pp. 2S-9). Still, she finds this transition problematic because it involves withdrawal from the 'natural-fact-world into an intensely private, idiosyncratic realm'. James's rhetorical-stylistic hesitations undermine, according to Przybylowicz, semiotic clarity: 'Although the proliferating words and sentences are apparently attempting to settle upon a meaning and attain some final knowledge, they continually evade the signified, deflect, and compromise unconscious desire through ambiguity and sublimation' (p. 29).

95. For a good discussion of this aspect, see Lisa Appignanesi, Femininity and the Creative Imagination: A Study of Henry James, Robert Musil, and Marcel Proust (London: Vision Press, 1973); Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James's American Girl: the Embroidery on the Canvas, pp. 3-28.

96. Fowler similarly believes that 'James describes Maggie's emerging selfhood as her transformation into an artist, a creator. She moves from being at once object and a collector of objects to becoming a subject and a creator'. Henry James's American Girl, p. 138.

97. See this argument in John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James, p. 222.

98. Kauffman suggests interestingly that the extradiegetic narrator in The Turn of the Screw could actually be a woman. But this reading instead of empowering the voice of woman, further condemns her to a repetition of the governess's inside story of unrequited love. Just like the governess, the second narrator tries to overcome her 'invisibility'


by courting the attention of an oblivious 'master', Douglas. Discourses of Desire, pp. 230-3.

99. Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, pp. 247, 248. 100. Mark Seltzer, for example, argues that 'the "aesthetic" production of

ironies, tensions, and ambiguities in the Jamesian text ultimately serves the authority and interests that these signs of "literariness" have generally been seen to question or even subvert'. Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 157-8.

101. George Bishop, When the Master Relents: The Neglected Short Fictions of Henry James (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 4.

102. Quoted in F.O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 339.

103. Naomi Lebowitz, The Imagination of Loving: Henry James's Legacy to the Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965).

104. David Carroll, The Subject in Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 66.

105. For an analysis of this imagery, see Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, pp. 234-5; Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, pp. 91-7.

106. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period, p. 200.

107. Leo Bersani, 'The Jamesian Lie', Partisan Review, 36 (1969): 58.

5 Figures of Exchange: A Poststructuralist Semiotics of Reading

1. Pierre Maranda, 'The Dialectic of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics', in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 183.

2. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, pp. 5, 11. 3. Wayne Booth, 'Rhetorical Critics Old and New: the Case of Gerard

Genette', in Reconstructing Literature, ed. Lawrence Lerner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 136. For a deconstructionist like Paul de Man narratology 'is a rather barren area of endeavor constantly threatened by the tedium of its techniques as well as by the magnitude of the issues - Resistance to Theory, p. 106. Formalist critics have responded by describing deconstruction as a form of 'textual vandalism' and 'negative hermeneutics'.

4. Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 39-40. Se~ also Jonathan Culler's evaluation of Derrida's notion of 'double science' in 'Semiotics and Deconstruction', Poetics Today UI-2 (1979): 141; and The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 42-3.

5. Derrida, Positions, p. 27. 6. Miller, 'A Guest in the House: Reply to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's

Reply', p. 189. 7. In The Pursuit of Signs (pp. 52-3), Culler disputes the pertinence of an


empirical study of reading (such as Holland's in 5 Readers Reading) that scans a limited number of interpretive stereotypes foregrounded by undergraduate readings, without inquiring into a 'wider spectrum of interpretive possibilities and operations that a 'considerate reaction' entails.

8. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, p. 124. 9. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, 'How the Model Neglects the Medium:

Linguistics, Language, and the Crisis of Narratology,' The Journal of Narrative Technique, 19/1 (Winter 1989): 157-66. Presented originally as a plenum paper at the 1987 Conference on Narrative Literature (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor).

10. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 3, 8. 11. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth

Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 67-8. For an evaluation of Benveniste's subject semiotics, see Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 44-53.

12. Gerard Genette, Nouveau Discours du dcit (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 106. 13. For example, in Genette's narratology the process of storytelling

involves several frames or functions that have an increasing ideological complexity and impact on the reader: the 'narrative function', the 'directing function', the 'function of communication', the 'testimonial function' (which reveals the narrator's attitude to the story) and the 'ideological function' (which provides an authoritative commentary). See Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 255-7.

14. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 118.

15. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 8. But even this book does not entirely dismiss subjectivity from semiotic analysis. One section questions the appropriateness of those considerations linked to an economy of desire: 'When these extra-textual "drives" are not displayed by the text as an activity of "ecriture," then I cannot see a way to assume them into a semiotic framework.' (p. 318) A few pages earlier, however, Eco conceded that 'A theory of the relationship senderaddressee should also take into account the role of the "speaking" subject not only as a communicational figment but as a concrete historical, biological, psychic subject, as it is approached by psychoanalysis and related disciplines'. (p. 314)

16. Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979/1984), p. 3.

17. 'The Myth of the Superman' was written in 1959; 'Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les MysUre de Paris' and 'Narrative Structures in Fleming' both in 1965, at a time when Eco was still developing his semiotic approach.

18. Lubomir Dolezel, 'Eco and His Model Reader', Poetics Today, 114 (1980): 186-7.

19. Ibid., p. 187. 20. The Act of Reading, p. 34. See also this related explanation from The

Implied Reader (p. xii): 'The term incorporates both the prestructuring


of the potential meaning by the text, and the reader's actualization of that potential through the reading process'.

21. Culler, Framing the Sign, 203. 22. Menachem Brinken comments; 'The degree of freedom left to the

reader in Iser's theory may be even smaller than in Ingarden's theory. Ingarden's reader is asked to be faithful to the basic structures of the polyphonic harmony specific to an individual work. These are structures of (aesthetic and artistic) values. A reading that does not recover these values does not do justice to the work but it does not break by necessity the identity of the work. On the other hand, Iser's reader has to identify a specific communicative intention in the literary work. A constitution of an aesthetic imaginary object which does not fit the basic 'blank' of the fictional work (its hidden meaning) destroys the identity of the work. Hence, the constitution of the 'overall meaning' is carried out under the full control of the text.' 'Two Phenomenologies of Reading', Poetics Today, 1/4 (1980): 210.

23. ThaiS E. Morgan, 'Is There an Intertext in This Text?: Literary and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intertextuality', American Journal of Semiotics, 3/4 (1985): 8.

24. Michael Riffaterre, 'Interpretation and Undecidability', New Literary History, 12/2 (1981): 238.

25. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 31. 26. See Riffaterre's well-known critique of the positivistic excesses of

Jakobsonian structuralism in 'Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's "Les Chats''', Yale French Studies, 36/7 (1966).

27. Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Fiammarion, 1971), p. 327. Trans. Paul de Man.

28. Riffaterre's theoretical blind spot lies, according to de Man, in his foreclosing of the figural play of language, in 'his refusal to acknowledge the textual inscription of semantic determinants within a nondeterminable system of figuration' (The Resistance to Theory, 41). Riffaterre sidesteps the consequences of his own reading for figural infrastructures: 'At the limit, repeating the structure of which they are abyssal versions, all the hypograms and matrixes say the same thing: they meaningfully repeat the suspension of meaning that defines literary form', the negation of the referential function (Resistance, 39).

29. Riffaterre, 'The Interpretant in Literary Semiotics', American Journal of Semiotics, 3/4 (1985): 47, 53.

30. Morgan, 'Is There an Intertext in This Text?', p. 27. 31. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univer

sity Press, 1982), p. 12. 32. Leonard Orr, 'Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent Semio

tics', College English, 48/8 (1986): 33. 33. Morgan, 'Is There an Intertext in This Text?', p. 18. 34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel

(Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 164. In subsequent essays, Bakhtin identified a more radical form of dialogism ('heteroglossia') in the novel, engaging conflicting discursive modes and ideological intentions: 'no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between


the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme ... [Every object is] already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist - or, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien words that have already been spoken about it'. See 'Discourse in the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), p.276.

35. J. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 64-6.

36. De Man, 'Dialogue and Dialogism', The Resistance to Theory, p. 109. 37. See Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 55. 38. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,

pp. 56, 98--9. 39. See especially Iurij Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, trans. D. Barton

Johnson (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976). Other significant contributions, such as those of the Vienna sociosemiotic group (Wolfgang Pollak, Wolfgang Bandhauer, Friedrich Lachmayer, Gloria Withalm) emphasising the 'sociality' of sign systems and sign users, or the complimentarity of communication and representation in all relevant areas, have not yet been assimilated in this new canon. For a brief introduction to the Vienna sociosemiotic group, see Jeff Bernard, 'Transcending Signs by Signs and Semiotics by Semiotics. Approaches from the Periphery', Degres 15/51 (1987): al-a7.

40. Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), pp. 344, 340.

41. V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and LR. Titunik (New York: Academic Press, 1976), p. 60.

42. Barthes, 'From Work to Text', in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 160.

43. For a good discussion of Barthes's semiotics of re-writing, see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, chap. 6 ('Re-Writing the Classic Text').

44. M.A.K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: the Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Arnold, 1978), p. 81.

45. John Deely, 'A Context for Narrative Universals, or: Semiology as Pars Semiotica', American Journal of Semiotics, 413-4 (1986): 57-58, 60.

46. Myrdene Anderson, et al., A Semiotic Perspective on the Sciences: Steps Toward a Nezo Paradigm (Toronto Semiotic Circle Working Paper, 1984), p. 1.

47. For an excellent, synthetic discussion of this sociosemiotic orientation in relation to Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, see Terry Threadgold, 'The Semiotics of Volosinov, Halliday, and Eca', American Journal of Semiotics, 413-4 (1986): 114-15.

48. Fischer-Lichte, 'The Quest for Meaning', p. 149. 49. Thomas A. Sebeok, 'Ecumenicalism in Semiotics', in Sebeok, ed., A

PerfUSion of Signs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 182.


50. Anderson et aI., A Semiotic Perspective on the Sciences, p. 1. 51. Wayne C. Booth, 'Preserving the Exemplar', Critical Inquiry, 3/3

(Spring 1977): 415. 52. Hans Robert Jauss, 'Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Geschichte der

Literatur', Poetica, 7/3--4 (1975): 325-44. 53. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction, p. 125. 54. Steig, Stories of Reading, p. 11. 55. W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Pluralism as Dogmatism', Critical Inquiry, 1211 (1986):

496. 56. Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, 'The Semiotic of the Foreseen: Modes of Narra

tive Intelligibility in (Contemporary) Fiction', Poetics Today, 6/4 (1985): 607.

57. Paul de Man, 'The Purloined Ribbon', Glyph I: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), pp. 39-40.

58. Christopher Norris, Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory After Deconstruction (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 223. But Norris himself occasionally translates Derrida's paradoxical arguments in absolute terms, or regards deconstruction as 'the closest "philosophic" counterpart to that strain of unsettling meta-narrative experiment found in post-modernist fiction', an unveiler of the repressed fictionality and 'deviant' speech acts in all discourse (p. 165 et passim).

59. De Man, Foreword to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony, p. xi. 60. David Bleich, 'Discerning Motives in Language Use', in Composition &

Literature, ed. Winifred Bryan Horner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 81-95.

61. David Bleich, 'Gender Interests in Reading and Language', in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 239. In a fine, well-conducted analysis that as usual starts from sample written responses, Bleich advances the debatable hypothesis that these differences in the processing of narratives emerge from the alternate perceptions of the 'mother tongue' that boys and girls have during the process of language acquisition: perceiving their language as 'mother's language', boys are more prone to grasp the 'content of the narrative and the source of the narrative as other'.

62. Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Some Consequences of Four Capacities', in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), Par. 283. For a good overview of Peirce's theory of the semiotic subject within the pragmatic tradition, see Walter Benn Michaels, 'The Interpreter's Self: Peirce on the Cartesian Subject', in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, pp. 185-200.

63. For a helpful discussion of the role interpretive habits play in Peirce's semiotics, see Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, pp. 10-17.

64. See Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 18, 199. 65. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning: Charles Sanders Peirce, Structuralism, and

Literature, pp. 49, 57.


66. Umberto Eco, 'Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction', in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 205.

67. Norman N. Holland, 'The New Paradigm: Subjective or Transactive?', New Literary History, 7/2 (Winter 1976): 337.

68. See David Bleich, 'Epistemological Assumptions in the Study of Response: in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, pp. 156-7. Jonathan Culler similarly argues (On Deconstruction, pp. 64--7) that student responses are never 'spontaneous', but controlled by the classroom communicative situation which consists of the teacher's instructions, the knowledge that they are engaged in a formal process of writing that has its own conventions, and so forth.

69. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 6.

70. 'The playright, the novelist, the song-writer and the film-producing team are all doing the same thing as the gossip .... Each invites his audience to agree that the experience he portrays is possible and interesting, and that his attitude to it, implicit in his portrayal, is fitting'. - Harding, 'The Role of the Onlooker', Scrutiny, 6 (December 1937): 257. In a much later elaboration, Harding defined in more detail 'the mode of response made by the reader of a novel. . . as an extension of the mode of response made by an onlooker to actual events'. This response entails 'imaginative and empathic insight into other living things', and 'evaluation of the participants and what they do and suffer' - both responses to an 'overtaken' reality-like circumstance, rather than to a linguistic and symbolic text. See 'Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction', British Journal of Aesthetics, 2 (April 1962): 133--47.

71. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1985), pp. 264--5.

72. Zavarzadeh, 'The Semiotics of the Foreseen', pp. 615-16. 73. Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, p. 81. 74. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of

Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 143--60. The process by which a text is assimilated to certain models of coherence and intelligibility is called by Culler 'naturalization' and explained as follows: 'The common denominator of [the cultural and literary models which make texts readable] ... is the notion of correspondence: to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural and legible. Some of these models have nothing specifically literary about them but are simply the repository of the vraisemblable, whereas others are special conventions used in the naturalization of literary works' (p. 138).

75. Joseph Margolis, 'The Logic and Structures of Fictional Discourse', Philosophy and Literature, 7 (1983): 162-81.

76. Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology, p. 64. 77. Vicki Mistacco, 'The Theory and Practice of Reading Nouveaux


Romans', in The Reader in the Text, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and lnge Crosman, p. 382.

78. Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 43.

79. In his recent research on the reception of musical works, Rabinowitz seems to have relaxed somewhat his earlier emphasis on 'authorial reading': he still posits the existence of a partly recoverable authorial grid guiding readerly expectations, but 'meaning' in this case depends more on the attributive, interpretive screens in effect during listening. On the other hand, an article like 'End Sinister: Neat Closure as Disruptive Force' (in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan [Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1988), p. 121) returns to a more emphatic intentionalist, authorial perspective on the ground that, in spite of current theories of reading, 'most people still read in order to figure out "what the author was saying" and critical sophistication becomes elitist indeed when the whole notion of "reading" is taken to mean, for instance, the narrow kind of "focus on language as such" engaged in by J. Hillis Miller'.

80. Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 234. 81. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critics (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1983), p. 5. 82. See also Ray, Literary Meaning, pp. 75--6 83. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 76, 77. 84. Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 292-3. 85. Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power, pp. 23, 158--61. Seltzer's

observations focus briefly on John Carlos Rowe's 'The Authority of the Sign in James's The Sacred Fount', in Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 168--89.

86. Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: the Reader in the Study of American Fiction, p. 64.

87. Edward Said, 'Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community', in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 158, 155.

88. Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, p. 133. For an evaluation of the problems that the assimilation of Foucault's work poses for both a politically engaged criticism and a revamped hermeneutics of institutional structures, see Culler, Framing the Sign, pp. 62-8.

89. 'The Life of Infamous Men', in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979).

90. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 221-2. Rowe thus argues that Jameson's prejudice against the image of James invented by formalist criticism and his own reinforcement of an essentially Lukacsian, though more refined, view of modernism, prevent him from seeing 'the pertinence of James's theory of fiction and practice of realism to the method of "ideological" analysis so brilliantly worked out in The Political Unconscious' (p. 274 n. 16).


91. Iurij Lotman, 'The Dynamic Model of a Semiotic System', Semiotica 211 3-4 (1977): 193-210; Itamar Even-Zohar, 'Polysystem Theory, Poetics Today, II 1-2 (1979): 287-310. For an overview of the contributions brought by cultural semiotics to text theories, see Leonard Orr, 'Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent Semiotics', pp. 32-44.

92. Lefevere, 'Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites?', p. 225. 93. One can still notice a certain tension between Lefevere's two related

concepts, rewriting and refraction: the first emphasises cultural change, the latter cultural assimilation (,patronage'). Though subordinated to more rigid economic and ideological constraints, refraction still allows some degree of transformative assimilation: 'As long as he is working under conditions of strong patronage, whether economic or ideological, or, as was the case for the most works of literature produced in Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century, a combination of both, the writer will probably rest content with refracting these [poetological] elements according to a tried and true formula .... However, the refraction of the formula should not be regarded as deterministic. Rather, this is where the ludic takes over: the writer transforms the elements at his disposal within the parameters set for him' - 'The Refraction of Texts', p. 234.

94. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 8-9.

95. Ross Chambers, 'Narrative and Other Triangles', The Journal of Narrative Technique, 19/1 (Winter 1989): 37.

96. Chambers, 'Narrative and Other Triangles', p. 35. Chambers puns here on the following passage from In the Cage where Captain Everard insinuates that interception of letters (messages) may be, under the given imperfectness of human communication, 'all right': "'It fell in the wrong hands. But there's something in it," he continued to blurt out, "that may be all right. That is, if it's wrong, don't you know? It's all right if it's wrong," he remarkably explained'. The Complete Tales of Henry James, vol. 10, p. 223.

97. See Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York, 1976): p. 36. As Stuart Culver notes in 'Representing the Author: Henry James, Intellectual Property and the Work of Writing' (in Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian F.A. Bell [London: Vision Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1985], pp. 114-36), James showed an interest in applying the professional model (of the civil engineer, for example) to literary authorhip. At the same time, he copiously ironised the mercantile and opportunistic side of professionalism. The author figure that emerges from James's prefaces, Culver argues, is not a 'selfsustained' Master, but rather 'the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished' (p. 96), the 'amateur' struggling with his material and the marketplace.

98. Bishop, When the Master Relents: The Neglected Short Fiction of Henry James, pp. 8, 9.


6 'Limp' vs. 'Acute' Criticism: an Interpretive Community Refigures James

1. Felman, 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation', in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman, pp. 110-11.

2. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, p. 24. 3. Felman, 'Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis',

p. 1042. 4. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, p. 246. 5. Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 106. 6. Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity - The Example of James, pp.

95, 127. 7. For an insightful analysis of the various techniques of retardation and

ambiguisation employed in 'The Figure in the Carpet', see Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity, pp. 95-115.

8. KP. 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.

9. Jean Perrot, Henry, James: Une ecriture enigmatique (Paris: Aubier Mon-taigne, 1982), pp. 9, 275.

10. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, p. 251. 11. Susanne Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, pp. 205-6. 12. Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 250. 13. Felman, 'Turning the Screw on Interpretation', p. 101. 14. Todorov, 'The Secret of Narrative', The Poetics of Prose, p. 175. 15. Ibid., p. 177. 16. Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 251. 17. Todorov, 'The Secret of Narrative', The Poetics of Prose, p. 145. 18. Chambers, Story and Situation, p. 169. 19. Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, p. 3. 20. Poulet, 'Henry James', in The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley

Dawson and Eliott Coleman, p. 310. For a similar comment on the process of inner reflection in James, see Helene Cixous, 'L'Ecriture comme placement, ou De l' ambiguite de !'interet', in L' Art de la fiction: Henry James, ed. Michel Zeraffa (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), pp. 210-11.

21. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, p. 245. 22. 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, Gunter Grass, Durrenmatt, Vonnegut, and others).

23. Purdy, The Hole in the Fabric, p. 21. 24. Steig, Stories of Reading, pp. 81-2. 25. Ibid., pp. 101-2. 26. Purdy, The Hole in the Fabric, p. 26. Purdy comments: 'From the

conventional point of view, what is most striking about The Turn of the Screw is what is not in it. There is not, in short, any of the comfort


Western man has, or has come to depend upon, in the face of horror. There is no appeal to religion; there is no appeal to outside help, there is no outside'.

27. Joann P. Krieg, 'A Question of Values: Culture and Cognition in The Turn of the Screw', l.ilnguage and Communication, 8/2 (1988): 151-2.

28. Leo Bersani, 'The Jamesian Lie', Partisan Review, 36 (1969): 65. 29. Bishop, When the Master Relents, p. 69. 30. David W. Smit, The l.ilnguage of a Master: Theories of Style and the l.ilte

Writing of Henry James (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 77.

31. Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 53. 32. Jean Franz Blackall, Jamesian Ambiguity and 'The Sacred Fount' (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 9. 33. See Frank Kermode, Novel and Narrative (Glasgow, 1972), p. 15. 34. Kermode, The Art of Telling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1983), p. 112. 35. Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, p. 58. 36. Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, p. 59. 37. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature

(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), p. 131. 38. Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, p. 99. 39. Ibid., p. 100. 40. Przbylowicz, Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the

l.ilte Works of Henry James, pp. 33, 285. 41. See Rowe, Henry Adams and James, p. 174; Elizabeth Allen, A Woman's

Place in the Novels of Henry James, pp. 170-1. 42. Bishop, When the Master Relents, p. 7. 43. Henry James, 'The Science of Criticism', in Selected Literary Criticism,

ed. Morris Shapira (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 171. 44. Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, p. 162. 45. Joseph Albrecht, 'To Begin: a Postscript', in Draftings in Reader-Oriented

Criticism: Reweaving 'The Figure in the Carpet' (hereafter DIROC), p. vii. 46. On the opposition between natural speech as a patient, sensible

farmer, and writing as a dabbling, frivolous gardener in Phaedrus, see Derrida, Dissemination, p. 150.

47. Chambers, Story and Situation, p. 177. 48. John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 16. 49. For a summary of the characteristic narrative relations in a riddle, see

Ruthroi, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, p. 130. 50. Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: the Emergence of a Modern Con

sciousness, p. 241. 51. Elizabeth Allen, A Woman's Place in the Novels of Henry James, p. 117. 52. Krishna Balden Vaid, Techniques in the Tales of Henry James (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 16. 53. Derrida, l.il Carte postale, p. 415. Trans. Samuel Weber. 54. Vaid, Techniques in the Tales of Henry James, p. 82. 55. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, pp. 158--88. 56. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, p. 162. 57. Ibid., pp. 181, 186.


58. Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass, p. 27. 59. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and

David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, vol. I, 1983), pp. 7~2.

60. Bleich, 'Discerning Motives in Language Use', in Composition & Literature, ed. Winifred Bryan Horner, p. 88.

61. Ibid., p. 95. 62. Edward Said, 'Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Com

munity', p. 143.

7 Stringing 'The Figure in the Carpet': Seven Readings, Seven Critical Plots

1. This interactional dialectic between text and reader 'operates on both the temporal and spatial axes: just as various phases of the reading experience supersede their predecessors, invoke revisions of former textual perceptions, and are in turn displaced, so various thematic structures vie for centrality and push others into the foreground and background'. William Ray, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction, p. 34.

2. I presented sections of this and the foregoing chapter in a meeting of the 'Theory and Interpretation of Literature' seminar chaired by Barbara Johnson (Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, 24 February 1988). Several respondents also noticed that the discussion following my presentation re-enacted the interpretive scenario of my seminar, taking divided attitudes to the question of the figure and hermeneutic desire.

3. Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale, p. 417 (trans. Samuel Weber). 4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1973), p. 74. 5. In Joseph Campbell's well-known formulation, the standard path of

the mythological hero-quester consists of 'a separation from the world, penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. A Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: BOllingen Foundation Inc., 1949), p. 35.

6. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 72. 7. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870-1883, p. xiii. 8. Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature,

p.272. 9. Ibid., pp. 291-2.

10. Ibid., p. 294. 11. 'A naturalistic style is bound to be the result ... The particular form

this principle of naturalistic arbitrariness, this lack of hierarchic structure, may take is not decisive. We encounter it in the all-determining "social conditions" of Naturalism, in Symbolism's impressionistic methods and its cultivation of the exotic, in the fragmentation of objective reality in Futurism and Constructivism, and the German Neue Sachlichkeit, or, again, in Surrealism's stream of consciousness.'


Georg Lukacs, 'The Ideology of Modernism', in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), p. 34.

12. Jiirgen Habermas, 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project', in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 3-15.

13. J .M. Berstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: LukJics, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.234.

14. Peter W. Lock, '''The Figure in the Carpet": The Text as Riddle and Force,' Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 36 (1981): 158.

15. We owe the standard distinction between fetish and idol to F. Max Muller's Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1878): 'A fetish properly so called, is itself regarded as something supernatural; the idol, on the contrary, was originally meant as an image only, a similitude or symbol of something else'. Quoted in W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 191.

16. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. with an intro Charles Levin (St. Louis, Mo: Telos Press, 1981), p. 88.

17. Said, 'Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community', p.136.

18. Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Scribner'S, 1914), p.87.

19. Seltzer, Henry James & the Art of Power, p. 140. 20. See Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, chapter 7, 'Narrative

Strands: Presented and Presentational'. 21. Perrot, Henry James: Une ecriture enigmatique, pp. 121-157. 22. In the meantime I found a similar argument in Samuel Weber, 'Caught

in the Act of Reading': 'This figure is not simply "in" the carpet: it is on the carpet ... , and the difference is de taille. For this little detail marks the figure as more than just an image, an apparition, but rather as a body, the vulnerable object and subject of desire. Having incurred his wounds at the hands of the other (the Author), the critic now submits himself to the spectacle of his desire: abandoning the effort to speak for himself, he lets himself be spoken for, and above all, spoken to, as the exlusive addressee of the Author. The Author thus becomes his Author, the image of his desire .. .' (p. 209).

23. Phonetically 'Vereker' suggests associations with truth (from Lat. vere: according to truth, properly, rightly); shame (from Lat. verecundus: bashful, ashamed), loathsome traffic (from Germ. verekeln: to make loathsome, spoil something for somebody; and Germ. verkehren: to run, trade, traffic/to pervert); and dying (from Germ. verebben: to die down, to die out). At least one or two of these associations may have occured to James: for example, he has Gwendolen quote Aeneid, Book I, line 405 ('Vera incessu patuit dea') as a description of Vereker's 'unveiling' of 'truth' to Corvick.

24. Peter W. Lock sees in these variations on the letter V and other similar combinations something like the hidden figure ofJames's story ('''The


Figure in the Carpet": The Text as Riddle and Force', pp. 157-75). Other critics have focused on the literalist significance of names: for William R. Goetz, Corvick and Vereker are (consonantically, at least) scrambled mirror images of each other (Henry James and the Darkest Abyss of Romance [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986], p. 169). George Bishop (When the Master Relents, p. 5) has even suggested that the combination of Corvick and Erme produces the anagram Verickor, 'with the remainder that is cast aside being a redoubtable "me," the signal of the unnamed narrator's cleverness and egotistic obsession'.

25. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 19.

26. Chambers, Story and Situation, pp. 174-5. 27. Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 157, 158. 28. Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Uni

versity Press, 1986), p. 128. 29. 'Bargaining, threatening, promising - whether in commerce, diplo

macy, warfare, card games, or personal relations - allow a contestant to pit his capacity for dissembling intentions and resources against the other's capacity to rile or cajole the secretive into readability.' See 'Character Contests', in Erving Goffman, Interactional Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1967).

30. Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1983), p. 134.

31. Ronald Adler and George Rodman, Understanding Human Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985), p. 9.

32. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 190.

33. Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 10.

34. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, pp. 233. 35. F.O. Matthiessen, Introduction to Henry James, Stories of Writers and

Artists (New York, New Directions, 1944), p. 6. 36. 'The point is not that one keeps the games, but that, in each of the

existing games, one effects new moves, one opens up the possibility of new efficacies in the games with their present rules .... It is a problem of inventiveness in language games.' - Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans, Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 62). 'A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the evolution of language on the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary -at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation.' Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 10.


Note, however, that Lyotard's insistence on the absolute singularity of language games reinstates the reductive logic of identity that it is supposed to counteract. As Samuel Weber argues in the Afterword to the English translation of Just Gaming (p. 104), 'as soon as the field of [a general agonistics of language) is constituted by absolutely incommensurable, and thus essentially determinable games, the agonistic aspect is paradoxically restricted by that of the system - in other words, by the idea of a finite system of rules, without which it would be impossible to conceive of a game being absolute in its singularity. From that moment, struggle is no longer possible outside of a game, but that game as such is not in struggle, it cannot be'.

37. See Uri Rapp, 'Simulation and Imagination: Mimesis as Play', in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu, p. 147.

38. According to Richard Poirier, James identifies for much of Washington Square with Sloper, taking pleasure in the latter's debilitating ironies at Catherine's expense: 'To take [Sloper) throughout, as a melodramatic figure is to ignore the fact that before the terrible scene on the Alps, his ironic observation of experience is, with some slight modification, James's own'. See The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 169.

39. On the paradoxical role of these 'misplaced feminine middles', see Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, pp. 247-50.

40. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen, 1987).

41. As James remarked in his preface to the New York edition of In the Cage, 'My central spirit, in the anecdote, is, for verisimilitude, I grant, too ardent a focus of divination, but without this excess the phenomena detailed would have lacked their principle of coherence. The action of the drama is simply the girl's "subjective" adventure - that of her quite definitely winged intelligence; just as the catastrophe, just as the solution, depends on her wit' (The Art of the Novel, p. 157).

42. Habegger, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature, p. 56. 43. Allen, A Woman's Place in the Novels of Henry James, pp. 133---4. 44. 'Seeing, knowing and loving are bound together in an intimate vig

ilance of care ... [that) involves both a fantasy of surveillance and the pleasure of knowing.' - Mark Seltzer, Henry James & the Art of Power, p. 81.

45. Rowe has identified similar imagistic details in The Bostonians and The Aspern Papers that foreshadow, according to him, the 'more general postmodern attack on "phallogocentrism," which one finds in the French theorists of cultural representations of women.' - The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, pp. 99-118.

46. Roland Barthes, 'The Pleasure of the Text', A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, Strauss and Giroux, 1982), pp.410-11.

47. Jacques Lacan, 'Discours de cloture des journees sur les psychoses chez l'enfant', Recherches, 11 (1968): 145-6.

48. Elaine Showalter, 'Piecing and Writing', in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University, 1986), p. 226.


49. Samuel Weber, Afterword to Jean-Frant;ois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, p. 111, 113.

8 Rereading, Rewriting, Revisioning: Poststructuralist Interpretation and Literary Pedagogy

1. Steig, Stories of Reading, p. 63. 2. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 135. 3. Christine Brooke-Rose, '''The Turn of the Screw" and Its Critics: An

Essay in Non-Methodology', A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative & Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 12~57.

4. Barbara Johnson, 'Teaching Deconstructively', p. 145. 5. Kaufer and Waller, 'To Write is to Read is to Write, Right?', p. 76. 6. Holland, 'Re-Covering "The Purloined Letter": Reading as a Personal

Transaction', p. 370. 7. Schwab, 'Reader-Response and the Aesthetic Experience of Other

ness', pp. Ill, 112. 8. Schwab, 'Reader-Response and the Aesthetic Experience of Other

ness', p. 114. 9. As one student noted, 'the relationship between author and reader in

a closed text is relaxed, friendly even, the closed text always providing the reader with familiarity and reassurance. An open text, especially one containing a grave philosophical and aesthetic import, ... always brings the reader into a certain masochistic relationship with the author. Although clearly there is a great deal of beauty is such a work, and this beauty gives us the pleasure we desire and reason to turn to other open texts, there is always intellectual uncertainty involved, and often pain and tension .... At the very least, a level of intellectual exertion is necessary which is beyond the minimal exertion required by a Holmes story'.

10. I have been following here suggestions from two recent textbooks that group theoretical approaches around critical contexts and a core of literary texts: Shirley F. Stalton, Literary Theories in Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1987); Donald Keesey, Contexts for Criticism (Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1987).

11. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 491. 12. See Frye, The Critical Path, pp. 20-33. 13. Mariolina Salvatori, 'Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations be

tween Reading and Writing Patterns, College English, 45 (1983): 659. 14. Kaufer and Waller, 'To Write is to Read is to Write, Right?', p. 83. 15. On the role of schema theory in reading, see D.E. Rumelhart, 'Sche

mata: The Building Blocks of Cognition', in Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension, ed. R.J. Spiro, B.C. Bruce, and W.F. Brewer (Hillside, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980); also Margaret Early and Bonnie O. Ericson, 'The Act of Reading', in Literature in the Classroom: Readers, Texts and Contexts, ed. Ben F. Nelms (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1988), pp. 31-44.


16. Derrida, Positions, pp. 47, 64. 17. Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, p. 10. 18. Louise M. Rosenblatt, 'On the Aesthetic as the Basic Model of the

Reading Process', in Theories of Reading, Looking, Listening, ed. Harry R. Garvin (Lewisburg: Buknell University Press, 1981), pp. 21-2.

19. George L. Dillon, 'Styles of Reading', Poetics Today, 3/2 (1982): 77-88. 20. Dillon, interestingly, does not think a separate style of reading is

necessary for these latter features: the 'semic', 'symbolic' or 'structural' moves are scattered over the other three styles he describes, deployed in different ways within them. 'Styles of Reading', p. 88.

21. Russell Hunt has suggested a similar procedure for stopping student reading in 'Toward a Process-Intervention Model in Literature Teaching', College English, 44 (1982); 345-57.

22. Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation, p. 113. 23. Gerald Prince; A Grammar of Stories (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 13.

See also Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, pp. ~8.

24. David Lodge, Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) p. 78.

25. By contrast a phenomenologist like Horst Ruthrof, who regards the 'ideational superstructure which the reader hinges on each set of signs' inferior to the 'complex world which the reader constructs from the text signs in the total work', insists on merging the two methods. The Reader's Construction of Narrative, p. 41.

26. Menakhem, Perry, 'Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meaning', Poetics Today, 11 1-2 (1979): 58-61.

27. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference, p. 5. 28. Thomas M. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 493. 29. Ibid., p. 494. 30. Kaufer and Waller, 'To Write is to Read is to Write, Right?', p. 72. 31. Compare the foregoing quotes with two sample comments from a

'Form and Theory of Fiction' class that explored in more detail the relationship between response and focalisation:

Alhough the theme of the male role or question of competency is raised in the beginning of the story (,The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'), we do not get full treatment of it from Margot's point of view. Most of the internal focalization comes through Wilson, with a fair amount coming through [Francis] Macomber and very little internal focalization from Margot. We must surmise what she thinks about the male role through her exchange of dialogue with the two men. The subjective bias is with the internal focalizations of Wilson and Macomber and thereby narrows what the reader is able to learn about Margot's thoughts or feelings. This limitation of her perspective gives the story a decidedly masculine point of view .... There is little opportunity for the reader to experience from [Margot's] consciousness. The story is not constructed or framed in such a way as to create much, if any, sympathy for Margot. Geannette).


The omniscient observer of this Hemingway story keeps the reader off balance by constantly switching focus throughout the narrative; we are barely given time to adjust our lens to one character before the camera is shifted to another. Nor are our feelings about any of these three people on safari allowed to remain either sympathetic or unsympathetic. In fact, the narrator alternates almost every positive viewpoint with a negative one .... Not only does the focus change constantly from one to another of the three characters involved, but we have the rug pulled from under us when we feel we are beginning to know one or another of them. (Elizabeth)

32. Fredric Jameson, 'Magical Narrative: Romance as Genre', New Literary History, 7 (1975): 135. Likewise for Eagleton, literary forms are 'a complex unity of at least three elements': 'a "relatively autonomous" literary history of forms', crystallisations of 'certain dominant ideological structures', and 'specific sets of relations between author and audience'. Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976),' pp. 23, 26.

33. Leitch, 'For (Against) a Theory of Rereading', p. 498. 34. Wimmers, Poetics of Reading, p. 41. 35. See Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, pp. 86-9. 36. The Reader's Construction of Narrative, chapter 8, 'Acts of Narrating:

Transformations of Presentational Control'. 37. Ibid., p. 129. 38. Linda Flower, 'The Construction of Purpose in Writing and Reading',

College English, 50/5 (September 1989): 539. 39. Ibid., p. 542. 40. Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation, pp. 30, 4-5. 41. Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 24. 42. Wayne C. Booth, 'LITCOMP', in Composition & Literature, ed. Winifred

Bryan Horner (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), p. 64. 43. In addition to Robert Scholes and Wayne Booth, see Winifred Bryan

Horner, ed., Composition and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson, Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985); Bruce T. Petersen, ed., Convergences: Transactions in Reading and Writing (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1986); Ben F. Nelms, ed., Literature in the Classroom: Readers, Texts, Contexts (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1988).

44. This is how E.D. Hirsch summarises his own argument in The Philosophy of Composition (1973). See 'Reading, Writing, and Cultural Literacy' (in Composition & Literature, ed. Winifred Bryan Horner, pp. 141-7), an essay that partly breaks with Hirsch's previous position, advocating a broader pedagogy of reading/writing that would take 'explicit, political account' of particular 'cultural contents' and 'vocabularies' 'by way of a combination of literature and rhetoric, of linguistic form and cultural content' (p. 147). See also Wayne C. Booth's comment in the same collection: 'I do not see how any


professor of "literature" can be satisfied at any level, but especially in the early years of college, with instruction that leaves the students passively observing techniques and effects in what they read without practicing those techniques and seeking effects of their own. . . . What is most important is that students be asked not just to study the texts, but to do something like the text, to practice the rhetoric the texts exhibit, and then to reflect ... on that practice'. 'LITCOMP', in Composition & Literature, pp. 66, 79.

45. Gary Tate and Edward P.J. Corbett, ed., Teaching High School Composition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Quoted, without amendment, in Edward P.J. Corbett, 'Literature and Composition: Allies or Rivals in the Classroom?', Composition and Literature, ed. Winifred Bryan Horner, p. 182.

46. Miller, 'Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing', in Composition & Literature: Bridging the Gap, ed. Winifred Bryan Horner, p. 41.

47. David Bleich, 'Reading and Writing as Social Activities', in Convergences: Transactions in Reading and Writing, ed. Bruce T. Petersen (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1986), p. 114.

48. Steve Katz, Moving Parts (New York: Fiction Collective, 1977), 'Trip', pp.73-4.

49. Mary Louise Pratt, Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 66.

50. For a recent deconstructive analysis of the cognitive focus on 'control' in writing, see Robert Brooke, 'Control in Writing: Flower, Derrida and Images of the Writer', in College English, 5114 (April 1989): 40~17.

51. Nancy R. Comley, 'A Release from Weak Specification: Liberating the Student Reader', in Writing and Reading Differently, p. 131.

52. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, p. 219. 53. Felman, 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation', p. 124. 54. Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Plural

ism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 284. 55. Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 16.

Index

Abrams, M.H., 10, 97 on alternative modes of

criticism, 44 Adler, Ronald, and George

Rodman, 253 aesthetic reception

critiques of aestheticism, 49, 102, 114, 134, 146

redefined by reader-oriented criticism, 36, 47-8, 49

Albrecht, Joseph (as participant in DIROC project): see under critical workshops

Alcorn, Marshall W., and Mark Bracher, 308 n. 56

Allen, Elizabeth, 120, 132, 133, 320 n. 43, 333 n. 51

on women as signifiers in James's later works, 149-53, 257

Atkins, C. Douglas, 311 n. 25 Auerbach, Nina, 318 n. 22

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81, 180 concept of dialogism in, 327

n.34 influence on narratology and

the semiotics of reading, 172-3

Barthes, Roland, 1, 84, 165, 201, 302 n. 86, 309 n. 63, 319 n. 24

on cultural codes in reading, 113, 174

on (Oedipal) pleasure in reading, 32---4, 47-8, 129: 'text of desire', 29, 30, 34-5; 'text of pleasure', 29, 30; 'text of bliss', 32, 33---4

on rereading/rewriting, 22, 25, 33, 273

on segmentational reading, 173, 260

objections to, 33---4, 47-8, 129-30, 259-6

see also desire; rereading Bartholomae, David, 304 n. 125 Baudrillard, Jean, 242, 244 Baym, Nina, 318 n. 20, 320 n. 47 Beauvoir, Simone de, 321 n. 58 Beckett, Samuel, 135 Benjamin, Walter, 98, 117 Benveniste, Emile, 165 Berstein, J.M., 335 n. 13 Bersani, Leo, 218, 324 n. 107, 333

n.28 Birch, David, 27, 298 n. 7, 302 nn.

78 and 84 Bishop, George, 324 n. 101, 332 n.

98, 333 nn. 29 and 42, 336 n.24

Blackall, Jean Franz, 333 n. 32 Blackmur, R.P., 107, 332 n. 8 Blake, William, 185 Bledstein, Burton, 331 n. 97 Bleich, David, 58, 304 n. 126, 308

342

n. 48, 328 n. 61, 341 n. 47 and subjective reading, 60---3,

69, 73, 181 critiques of Bleich's model, 61,

62, 66---7, 69-70, 181-2, 186---7

Double Perspective, The, 308 n. 48 Readings and Feelings, 63 role of self-motivation in, 60, 62,

65 sociocultural aspects in, 62, 66,

73, 179, 308 n. 48 stages in reading:

symbolisation, 37, 60; resymbolisation, 60---1, 79; intersubjective negotiation, 73, 179, 230;

Subjective Criticism, 60, 61, 70, 73, 179

Index 343

see also response criticism Bloom, Harold, 298 n. 8 Boly, John R., 313 n. 56 Booth, Wayne c., 6--7, 184, 287,

296, 324 n. 3, 340 n. 44 Brinken, Menachem, 326 n. 22 Brooke, Robert, 341 n. 50 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 267 Brooks, Peter, 1, 29, 31, 34, 336 n.

25 and narrative analysis, 68-9 see also desire; psychoanalysis

Burke, Kenneth, 107 Burton, Deirdre, 300 n. 35 Butler, Christopher, 184, 313 n. 58

Cain, William, 89, 299 n. 11, 311 n. 29, 315 n. 81

Campbell, Joseph, 334 n. 5 Caputo, John D., 310 n. 12 Carroll, David, 324 n. 104 Caserio, Robert, 155, 310 n. 18,

322 n. 77 Chambers, Ross, 222-3, 332 n. 18

on 'The Figure in the Carpet,' 194-200: conflicting models of interpretation in, 197, 199, 199-200; FIC as an 'education' story, 251

transactional analysis of narrative 194-6: narrative seduction, 194-5; narrative and interpretive desire 194-5; narrative figuration, 195

see also desire; 'The Figure in the Carpet'; semiotics of reading

Chatman, Seymour, 166, 319 n. 34 Chase, Cynthia, 110, 303 n. 109,

308 n. 55, 312 n. 37 Chodorow, Nancy, 130 Cioffi, Frank, 309 n. 70 Cixous, Helene, 130, 132, 320 n.

39, 321 n. 52, 332 n. 20 Comley, Nancy R., 40, 341 n. 51 Corbett, P.J., 341 n. 45 Cornis-Pope, Marcel (as

participant in DIROC project):

see under critical workshops critical workshops

and their pedagogical relevance, 41, 202-3, 232-4, 270, 287

bi-active focus on reading/writing in, 184, 221, 232, 233, 266

conflicting interpretive models in, 262, 268, 285

interpretation and refiguration, 221-2, 228-9, 230-1, 260-1

role of class as interpretive community, 230-1, 243, 268

role of reader's interests and cultural choices, 255, 256, 268, 269

role of teacher as mediator, 232, 233-4

self-criticism (self-understanding) in, 223, 225-6, 228, 230-1, 251, 263, 266--7, 270-2, 278, 338 n. 9, 339 n. 31

types of reading, 256, 267, 269, 294

workshop on 'The Figure in the Carpet': choice of story, 203-4; description of seminar, 41, 184, 202-3; interpretive dynamic, 221-33, 266--8;

stages: first reading, 223-4; narrative understanding, 224-5; critical response, 225-6; interactional plot with the narrator, 226--7; refiguration, 228-9; rewriting, 229-30, 268;

'stories of reading': collective, 230-1, 266--7; Joseph Albrecht, 225, 229, 234-7, 268, 269, 333 n. 45; Marcel Cornis-Pope, 237, 245-51, 268-9, 304 n. 128; Ann Ellsworth, 221-2, 223, 225-6, 228, 231, 254, 255-61, 265-6, 267, 269; Tom Kloes, 224, 225; Tim

344 Index

'stories of reading' - continued Lange, 225, 237-241, 268; Michael McKinlay, 228, 229-30, 245, 261--4, 268; David Powell, 222, 228--9, 230--1, 241-5, 268; Joan Talty, 224, 245, 251-5, 268, 269

tasks, 222-3, 233, 270;

workshop on The Turn of the Screw: choice of story, 213; description of seminar, 41, 272-3, 275--95

stages: first reading, 275--79; rereading, 279-83; rhetorical-semiotic analysis, 283--7; critical articulation, 287-95

'stories of reading' in, 214, 292-5 tasks, 272-3

criticism of literature and role of theory, 7, 19, 20--1,

103, 163 as discourse of desire, 28, 29,

34-5 as performance, 5--6, 10--12, 20,

27, 161, 220--2, 231, 251, 263, 266, 287

relation to creative literature, 163, 240, 261-2

see also hermeneutics; interpretation; interpretive models; rewriting; understanding

Culler, Jonathan, 58, 114, 252, 273, 299 n. 9, 310 n. 15, 312 n. 43, 314 n. 72, 324 n. 4

Framing the Sign, 307 n. 35, 309 n. 65, 313 nn. 57 and 59

On Deconstruction, 14, 74, 185, 300 n. 47, 310 n. 5, 329 n. 68

on divisiveness in reading, 3--4, 14, 73--4

on reading as rule governed, 72, 185

on the semiotics of reading!

writing, 72--4, 163--4, 184 on the sociocultural space of

reading, 71, 72 on stories of reading, 14-15, Pursuit of Signs, The, 72, 163--4,

307 n. 35, 324 n. 4, 325 n. 7 Structuralist Poetics, 71, 72, 307

n. 35, 309 n. 62, 329 n. 74 Culver, Stuart, 331 n. 97

Daly, Mary, 321 n. 51 deconstruction

and pedagogy, 101-9, 119-20, 314 n. 68

and phenomenology, 85, 91, 95, 101-2, 307 n. 40

and reader-oriented criticism, 51, 76, 80, 95

and theory, 101-2, 103, 104, 312 n.49

as 'corrective', polemical reading, 11, 12, 82, 83--5, 93, 103, 110

as a radical critique of logocentrism, 39, 177; of linguistic empiricism, 97-8, 177, 178; of traditional hermeneutics, 20, 84, 85

'double writing' in, 85--6, 101, 163, 189, 324 n. 4

dualities in, 15, 105, 106, 187 language focus in, 84, 94, 95,

97, 110, 187 objections to, 39, 83, 93, 94,

103--5, 106, 110, 197 reader's role in, 39, 85, 90--1 resocialised deconstruction:

focus on articulation, 83, 93, 97, 112-13; on cultural ideologies, 39--40, 109-10, 113--14; on gender and race, 119

misrepresentations of, 83, 110--11

'undecidability' in, 190--1 'unreadability' in, 51, 83, 90--1,

94, 96, 99 Deely, John, 327 n. 45

Index 345

De Lauretis, Teresa, 34, 121, 132, 303 n. 102, 320 n. 36, 325 n. 8

De Man, Paul, 6, 9, 10, 19, 20, 40, 57, 85, 94-102, 112, 115, 119, 148, 173, 269, 273, 299 n. 15, 300 n. 43, 310 n. 8, 312 n. 41, 324 n. 3

Allegories of Reading, 20, 83, 94, 100, 101, 102, 105, 107, 112

and Le Soir controversy, 110, 314 n. 72

Blindness and Insight, 40, 99, 102, 106, 107, 114, 310 n. 8

on criticism as argument, 95, 98; as a cognitive drama, 98, 99, 101-3, 106, 107-8; as a 'reading of reading', 83--4, 99, 102, 107

on figurationldisfiguration, 82, 95, 96-7, 106

on hermeneutic and phenomenological criticism, 94, 95, 101-2, 326 n. 28

on language indeterminacy, 94, 95,97, 178

on narratives as allegories of reading, 76, 83, 97, 100, 105

on necessity and determination in reading, 95, 99-100, 115, 178

on sociocultural aspects of reading, 84, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 113--14

on 'unreadability', 83, 94, 96, 99 Resistance to Theory, The, 9, 10,

20, 57, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 110, 114, 173, 178, 269

Rhetoric of Romanticism, 96, 97, 99, 106, 110

see also deconstruction Derrida, Jacques, 6, 51, 82, 88, 93,

101, 106-7, 110, 114, 118, 189, 227, 233, 307 n. 40, 312 nn. 49 and 52, 314 n. 72, 316 n. 86, 328 n. 58, 333 n. 46

and deconstruction, 85--6, 163, 103--4, 187, 189

and the new semiotics of reading, 163--4

as revisionistic reader, 39, 84-5, 113

Dissemination, 109, 112, 187, 310 nn.9 and 15, 336 n. 27

La Carte postale, 303 n. 112, 334 nn. 53 and 3

'Living on: BORDER LINES', 86, 301 n. 52, 310 n. 14

on reading as 'capital unveiling', 85--6; as 'vigilant practice', 85, 163; as infrastructural analysis, 113, 187; as a critique of articulation, 112-13, 187

Positions, 163, 324 n. 4, 325 n. 5, 334 n. 58

Writing and Difference, 15, 299 n. 12, 330 n. 84

Descartes, Rene, 23~9 desire

dialectic of desire (delay/transgression vs. fulfillment), 29-30, 31-2, 36

hermeneutic (interpretive), 28, 29, 34-5, 194-5, 198

narrative, 29-32, 34-5, 40, 92-3, 194-5

pleasure-seeking mechanism of reading, 65--6

poststructuralist critiques of, 31, 32-4, 37-8, 12~30, 135--6, 194-5

see also Barthes, Roland; Chambers, Ross; feminist criticism; psychoanalysis

detective fiction and the hermeneutic model of

literature, ~9, 30 and critical 'unveiling', 85--6,

106, 130, 254 and rereading, 25--6 detectivistic-hermeneutic model

in Henry James, 143, 205--6, 212, 216-17, 224-5

Diengott, Nilli, 320 n. 35 Dillon, George L., 339 n. 20

346 Index

Dillon, George - continued on styles of reading, 275-6

DIRaC (Draftings in Reader-Oriented Criticism) project, 41, 222, 232-3

Dolezel, Lubomir, 168

Eagleton, Terry, 304 n. 123, 315 n. 80,340 n. 32

Eakin, P.J., 323 n. 84 Eco, Umberto, 325 n. 17

on rereading, 22, 23 on the role of the reader, 167-9,

170 on subjectivity in interpretation,

325 n. 15 Edel, Leon, 146, 238 Ellsworth, Ann (as participant in

DIRaC project): see under critical workshops

Empson, William, 45 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 193

Faulkner, William, 291 'A Rose for Emily', 278, 281-2,

284, 285, 298 Felman, Shoshana, 130, 205, 303

n. 96, 317 n. 7, 320 n. 37, 332 n.13

feminist criticism and cultural theory, 123, 132-3 and literary theory, 122-3, 125,

127, 128 and narratology, 128-31 approaches: collaborative

criticism/pedagogy, 123, 319 n. 9; revisionistic reading, 10-11, 15, 38, 121-2, 125; rewriting, 10-11, 133, 134

as a 'double voiced' discourse, 122-3, 125

critique of Oedipal narration, 31, 37-8, 128-30, 132, 133, 155, 158; of the phallocentric tradition, 15, 31, 38, 121-2, 128-30, 143--4; of traditional representations of women, 132-3, 137-8, 144-6, 152

contextualisation in, 124-5, 129 dualities reexamined in, 15, 38,

124, 127-8, 131, 301 n. 54 'ecriture feminine', 132, 261 feminine signification, 122,

130-1, 132-3, 134, 261 focus on women's experience

and conditioning, 38, 124; in James, 136-9, 145-53

objections to, 15, 38-9, 122, 124, 126-8

Fetteriey, Judith, 122-3, 137-8, 317 n. 5

'The Figure in the Carpet', 44, 52-3, 60, 121, 143, 159, 194-200, 221-31, 232--64, 266-71, 295, 335 n. 23

as a critique of traditional hermeneutics, 8, 50, 87, 196, 203, 205-6, 228-9, 235; as a hermeneutic puzzle, 204-6, 208, 211-12, 224-5, 253

as exploration of the institution of criticism, 2-4, 92, 196, 199

as 'narrative of desire', 35, 207, 208, 222, 224, 248

dynamic of figuration! refiguration in, 50, 86-8, 91-2, 197-8, 207, 209, 227, 228-9, 240, 245, 247-9, 250-1, 262

missing figure motif in, 35, 87, 160-1, 196, 203, 206, 215, 222, 228-9, 242-5

phallogocentric imagery in, 92, 197, 221-2, 229, 237, 248, 257-8

predatory imagery in, 152, 254, 258-9

reader approaches in, 208-9, 240,251

relationship author-critics in, 136, 160-1, 196-7, 236-7, 249,258

rhetoric of 'tipping' and withholding, 92, 196, 198, 206, 226-7, 249, 253, 254, 258

Index 347

see also critical workshops; figuration in narrative

figuration in narrative approached by deconstruction,

82, 86-94, 95, 96-7, 106 approached by feminism, 30--1,

34, 38, 121-2, 128-30, 133, 136, 143--4, 153

approached by reader-oriented criticism, 50, 52, 53, 88

approached through sociosemiotics, 34-5, 194-200

in Henry James, 35, 50, 86-8, 91-2, 144, 203--4, 205-7, 211-12, 213, 248-9

refiguration, 92, 197-8, 209, 221-2, 228-9, 230--1, 240, 245, 247-9, 250--1, 262

Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 9, 175 Fish, Stanley, 42, 45, 188, 190, 298

n. 5, 301 n. 62, 306 n. 29, 307 n.32

affective stylistics, 46, 48, 49, 54, 63

conventionalist approach to interpretation, 14, 54, 64, 73

critiques of, 14, 37, 54-5, 64, 73, 186-7

'Interpreting "The Variorum''', 14,55

Is There a Text in This Class?, 18, 46, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59

on critical self-consciousness, 17-18, 64, 73

on interpretive communities, 54, 55, 58, 179

on reading as reformulation, 46, 49,64

on textual gaps and indeterminacies, 49-50, 51

response to Wolfgang Iser 63--4 see also reader-oriented criticism

Flaubert, Gustave, 75 Flower, Linda, 286, 341 n. 50 formalism

contradictions in, 44-5 poststructuralist critiques of, 10,

12, 23, 43--4, 47, 49, 55, 58,

63--4, 180, 306 n. 29 treatment of textual

indeterminacy in, 9, 14, 45 see also New Criticism

Foucault, Michel, 19, 39, 114, 173, 198, 190, 303 n. 106, 330 n. 88

Fowler, Rowena, 318 n. 14 Fowler, Virginia c., 323 n. 96 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 30, 31, 195,

213, 227, 233 dialectic of desire in, 68 Freudian readings of Henry

James, 142-4 reread by feminists, 31, 128-30 subjectivity and signification,

165 see also desire; psychoanalysis

Freund, Elizabeth, 304 n. 1, 305 nn. 6 and 12, 306 n. 29, 308 n.53

Frye, Joanne S., 123 Frye, Marilyn, 317 n. 3 Frye, Northrop, 22, 237, 273, 298

n. 3, 302 n. 74, 338 n. 12, 334 n. 4

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 20, 29 Gallop, Jane, 130 Gasche, Rodolphe, 312 n. 52 Gasset, Jose Ortega y, 238 Gautier, Xaviere, 320 n. 49 Geismer, Maxwell, 143 Genette, Gerard, 166, 325 n. 13 Gilbert, Sandra, 6, 123 Godard, Barbara, 320 n. 45 Goffman, Erving, 253, 336 n. 29 Greimas, A.-J., 101 Gribble, James, 315 n. 76 Gubar, Susan, 123 Guillen, Claudio, 283

Habegger, Alfred, 211, 238, 257 Habermas, Jiirgen, 238-9 Harding, D.W., 182,329 n. 70 Halliday, M. A. K., 28, 174-5, 327

n.44 Hartman, Geoffrey, 6, 82, 83, 103,

107, 190, 299 n. 19, 300 n. 37, 312 n. 46, 314 n. 72

348 Index

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 'The Birthmark', 278-9

Hegel, G. W. F., 19, 20, 178 Heidegger, Martin, 27, 85, 107,

173, 312 n. 52 hermeneutics

deconstructive critiques of, 4-5, 84,85,94

feminist revisions of, 11, 129 poststructuralist reinterpretation

of, 5--6, 20, 27, 284-6, 287 traditional model of, 4, 7, 8-10,

14, 17, 27, 30, 52 see also: detective fiction;

interpretation Hertz, Neil, 312 n. 41 Hirsch, E. D., 12, 17, 179, 282, 298

n. 4, 299 n. 23, 340 n. 44 on determinacy of meaning, 14 on objective/prescriptive

hermeneutics, 14, 27, 52 Hohendhal, Peter Uwe, 301 n. 56 H6lderlin, Friedrich, 99, 110 Holland, Norman N., 9, 58, 307

n.40 and the reader's identity theme,

64-5, 69, 181 and transactional reading, 14,

59-60, 65, 181 critiques of, 14, 37, 64-5, 67, 69,

181 Dynamics of Literary Response,

The, 59, 60, 65--6, 67, 304 n. 115

5 Readers Reading, 63, 64, 65, 69, 181

'Re-Covering "The Purloined Letter''', 307 n. 40, 338 n. 6.

'Unity Identity Text Self', 65, 307 n. 43

see also reader response Holub, Robert c., 176, 307 nn. 31

and 42 Humm, Maggie, 124, 125 Humphries, Jefferson, 317 n. 12 Hunt, Russell, 339 n. 21 Hurston, Zora Neale, 119 Husserl, Edmund, 52, 85

identification in reading, 32, 65, 71, 133, 227, 228

and gender distinctions, 133, 179, 321 n. 60

and self-definition, 67-8, 69 and transgression, 67, 228, 288 reader's interactional plot, 47-8,

224, 226--8, 280-1 readjustment of, 280-2

implied reader and 'model reader', 167, 168-9,

170 as a concept in reader-oriented

criticism, 51, 54, 169-70, 326 n.20

Ingarden, Roman, 46--7, 306 n. 17 in terpreta tion

and cultural analysis, 11-12, 78 and response, 62, 64, 77, 78,

223--5 conflicting paradigms in: quest

for meaning, 5, 7, 9-10, 199-200; poststructuralist rewriting (criticism as performance), 4, 5--6, 10-12, 25, 27, 41, 91, 133, 134, 193, 296--7, 331 n. 93.

focus on interpretive conventions and institutions, 19, 20, 27-8, 40, 72, 89, 91

see also criticism of literature; rereading; rewriting

interpretive community (see Fish, Stanley)

role in defining responses, 70, 230-1

role in intersubjective negotiation, 73, 185--6, 230

interpretive models (narrative literature), 2-13

traditional: aesthetic, 9, 114, 175; cathartic, 9; expressive, 9; mimetic, 8, 9, 175; hermeneutic: see under hermeneutics

poststructuralist, 12-13: deconstructive, 76, 82, 86--94, 96--7, 100, 105, 106;

Index 349

feminist, 31, 37-8, 128-30, 133, 141-2; intertextual, 170-3, 192-3; sociosemiotic, 174--5, 188-92; psychoanalytictransactional, 68-9, 194--6

lrigaray, Luce, 129, 130, 132, 320 n.46

Iser, Wolfgang, 21, 22, 45, 49, 64, 65, 101, 113, 184, 273, 275, 326 nn. 20 and 22

Act of Reading, The, 26, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54, 56, 71, 72, 170, 186, 203, 296

compared to Ingarden, 46 critiques of, 37, 52, 56-7, 63, 71,

186 on 'The Figure in the Carpet',

50-1, 52, 53, 203 on reader-text interaction, 36-7,

46-7, 53; see also implied reader

on reading as reformulation, 47, 48, 50, 53, 282

on self-awareness in reading, 48,52

on textual constraints in reading, 53

on textual indeterminacies and gaps, 47, 54, 56, 169-70

Prospecting: From Reader-Response to Literary Anthropology, 36, 300 n. 42, 302 nn. 69 and 90

significance in pedagogy, 54, 57 see also reader-oriented criticism;

rereading

Jauss, Hans Robert, 47-8, 72, 101, 328 n. 52

on historicity of understanding, 49

on identification in reading, 32, 65, 71, 227, 228

negotiating horizons of expectations, 32, 49, 71

see also reader-oriented criticism; reception theory

Jacobus, Mary, 6, 123, 301 n. 50, 321 n. 61

James, Henry and self-reading, 23-5, 116, 204,

219-20 author-reader relationship in,

2-3, 135-6, 141, 142, 153--61, 192, 196-7, 219-21, 236-7, 249, 258

conflicting ideologies in, 120, 135, 191

conflicting narrative models in, 138, 139, 153, 158, 190, 192, 199-200

hermeneutic dynamic in, 35, 135, 136, 142-3, 144, 216, 217; role of (interpretive) desire, 35, 37-8, 139-41, 153, 155, 158, 198, 204, 205; primary hermeneutic of secret figures, 204, 205-6, 211-15, 220; secondary self-ironic hermeneutic, 215-21; hermeneutics undone, 35, 144, 159-61

figural dynamic in: see under figuration in narrative

interpreted by deconstruction, 86-94, 115-17, 245-51; by feminism, 120, 134--61, 214--15, 219, 256-7; by reader-oriented criticism, 50, 52-3, 60-3, 67, 203, 212; by psychoanalytic criticism, 35, 135-6, 139-44, 147, 194--6, 205, 213, 295; sociological criticism, 120, 186, 187-92, 211, 238-9; by sociosemiotic criticism, 194--200, 216-18, 219, 245-51; by structuralism, 36, 93, 206-7, 209-10, 218-19, 267

narrative mastery in, 35, 134, 153-61, 192, 197-8, 219-20

rereading as revisioning, 24--5, 122, 263, 266

rewriting in, 115-17, 220-1, 293 use of 'central consciousness' as

reflector, 67, 134, 145-6, 148, 151, 189, 211-12, 257

350 Index

James, Henry - continued women as signifiers in, 130,

135--7, 144-53, 226, 256--7

works: Ambassadors, The, 139, 148; American, The, 146; American Scene, The, 137, 138, 142, 144, 149, 151, 296; Aspern Papers, The, 35, 61, 159, 197, 205, 219; Awkward Age, The, 141, 150; 'The Beast in the Jungle', 139, 140; 'The Beldonald Holbein', 145; Bostonians, The, 137, 138, 150; Complete Notebooks of Henry James, The, 2-3, 144, 155, 156, 158, 219-20; 'Crapy Cornelia', 139; 'Daisy Miller', 139, 150; 'The Figure in the Carpet', see separately; Golden Bowl, The, 139, 148--9, 150, 152-3, 256--7; In the Cage, 139, 146, 148, 256, 331 n. 96; 'The JoUy Comer', 139, 140; 'The Lesson of the Master', 153, 205; Nona Vincent, 145; Portrait of a Lady, 139, 146--7, 153, 256; Prefaces to the New York Edition (The Art of the Novel), 3, 5, 24, 35, 36, 86, 87, 94, 115, 116, 117, 136, 137, 145, 146, 147, 148, 155, 157, 158, 162, 192, 201, 2~5, 214, 215, 217, 22~1, 232, 251, 265, 266, 282, 295, 296, 337 n. 41; Princess Casamassima, 139, 190; 'The Real Thing', 154--5, 159; Sacred Fount, The, 87, 139, 140, 143, 187, 205, 216, 219; Spoils of Poynton, The, 153; 'The Story in It', 196--7; Tragic Muse, The, 150; Turn of the Screw, The, see separately; Washington Square, 146, 337

n. 38; What Maisie Knew, 80, 139, 150, 213, 256; Wings of the Dove, The, 150-1, 152, 256

see also critical workshops James, William, 154 Jameson, Fredric, 6, 142, 173, 190,

191, 300 n. 36, 318 n. 22, 322 n. 78, 330 n. 90, 340 n. 32

Jardine, Alice A., 123, 127, 131, 132, 319 n. 32

Johnson, Barbara, 118--20, 310 n. 10, 313 n. 64, 334 n. 2, 338 n. 4,339 n. 27

on deconstruction as cultural reading, 109

on deconstruction and gender, 118, 119

on deconstruction and feminine pedagogy, 119-20, 314 n. 68

on textual cultural difference, 118, 119

Joyce, James, 135

Kant, Immanuel, 178 Kappeler, Susanne, 8, 136, 299

n. 24, 332 n. 11, 333 n. 44 on James's demystification of

narrative control, 154, 156--7, 158--61

on James's hermeneutic plots, 143, 214--15, 217

Kaston, Carren, on gender relations in Henry

James, 146--9 on the goals of feminism, 323 n.

92 on the surface/depth dialectic in

James, 217-18 Katz, Steve, 341 n. 48 Kaufer, David, and Gary Waller,

316 n. 92, 338 nn. 5 and 14, 339 n. 30

Kauffman, Linda, 31, 205, 322 n. 76, 324 n. 98

Keesey, Donald, 338 n. 10 Kermode, Frank 190, 217 Knapp, Stephen, and Walter Benn

Michaels, 301 n. 61, 315 n. 77

Index 351

Kolodny, Annette, 302 n. 87 Krieg, Joann P., 333 n. 27 Kristeva, Julia, 34, 132-3, 172, 173,

174, 321 n. 53

Lacan, Jacques, 31, 32, 118, 165, 180,260

LaCapra, Dominick, 329 n. 71 Laclau, Emesto, and Chantal

Mouffe, 110, 267, 300 n. 46, 315 n. 74

Lange, Tim (as participant in DIROC project): see under critical workshops

Lanser, Susan 5., 319 nn. 26, 31 and 33, 320 n. 35

Lebowitz, Naomi, 154 Lefevere, Andre, 11, 298 n. 1, 331

n.93 on criticism as refraction!

rewriting, 11, 193, 331, n.93

see also rewriting Leitch, Thomas M., 339 n. 28

on rereading as a critical method, 16-17, 22, 338 n.ll

on rereading genre, 283 see also rereading

Leitch, Vincent B., 113, 313 n. 62, 314 n. 65

Lentricchia, Frank, 18, 301 n. 65 Lesser, Simon 0., 58 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 132, 321 n.

57 Lock, Peter, 241, 336 n. 24 Lodge, David, 277, 300 n. 44 Lotman, Jurij, 173, 193 Lounsberry, Barbara, 304 nn. 127

and 128 Lukacs, Georg, 238, 330 n. 90, 334

n.ll Lyotard, Jean-Fran<;ois, 254, 255,

336 n. 36

Macherey, Pierre, 27, 218-19, 302 n. 80, 320 n. 48, 330 n. 88

Mailloux, Steven, 50, 58, 188, 309 n.72

Mallarme, Stephane, 119, 312 n.52

Maranda, Pierre, 162 Margolis, Joseph, 330 n. 75 Martin, Wallace, 336 n. 32 Marxist criticism, 318 n. 22

and deconstruction, 110, 117-18 and feminism, 126, 318 n. 22 poststructuralist critiques of, 19,

49, 118, 126, 173-4, 176, 188 post-Marxist analysis, 110, 267,

315 n. 74 mastery

in interpretation, 84, 101, 294-5, 296

in narrative, 35, 61, 92-3, 134, 153-61, 192, 197-8, 219-20

in pedagogy, 222-3, 294-5, 296 see also James, Henry: narrative

mastery Matthiessen, F.O., 254 McI(~nlay, Michael (as participant

in DIROC project): see under critical workshops

meaning in deconstruction, 24-5, 44, 81,

84-6,87-8 in feminism, IG-ll, 122, 124,

129-30, 133-4 in phenomenological qiticism, . 21-2, 43, 44, 45-7, 48 in psychoanalytic criticism, 32,

78, 80, 181-2 in reader response, 48, 49, 58-9 in semiotics, 179-81 in sociocultural criticism, 174-5

193-4 ' Megill, Allan, 315 n. 82 Melville, Herman, 118 Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 39, 304 n.

117, 318 n. 18 Michaels, Walter Benn, 7, 301

n. 61, 315 n. 77, 328 n. 62 Miller, J. Hillis,

, Ariadne's Thread', 88-9 'Composition and

Decomposition', 312 n. 47, 314 n. 65, 341 n. 46

352 Index

Miller, J. Hillis - continued critiques of, 88-9, 92, 93--4, 105 Ethics of Reading, The, 25, 100,

115-17 Fiction and Repetition, 89, 91, 92,

94 on the ethical nature of reading,

1O~1, 114.-17 on The Figure in the Carpet',

82,86-94 on narrative figuration, 86-94 on rereading/rewriting, 25, 91;

in James, 23-5, 115-17 on role of reader in

deconstruction, 9~1 on unreadability/endless

readability, 9~1, 110, 117, 210

see also deconstruction; 'The Figure in the Carpet'; figuration; rewriting

Milton, John, 46 Mistacco, Vicki, 330 n. 77 Mitchell, Juliet, 130 Mitchell, W.J.T., 328 n. 55,335

n. 15 Moers, Ellen, 123 Moi, Toril, 127 Morgan, Thais E., 326 n. 23, 327

n.33 Muller, F. Max, 335 n. 15 Mulvey, Laura, 301 n. 54, 321 n. 59

narratology and poststructuralist critical

theory, 13, 132, 165, 174; feminist contributions, 31, 37-8, 128-130, 141-2; psychoanalytic, 68-9, 133-5, 194.-6; reader-oriented, 47, 5~1, 52, 53, 88; rhetorical-deconstructive, 76, 82-3, 86-94, 96-7, 100, 105, 106, 108; sociolinguistic, 172-5; semiotic, 176-94

critiques of traditional narratology, 164--5, 166, 324 n. 3

poststructuralist narratology and the subject of reading, 162-76

naturalisation and critical analysis, 40, 41, 49,

163, 184, 202-3, 283--4 in reading narrative, 16, 72, 182,

183, 275, 329 n. 74 modes of narrative intelligibility,

182-3, 184 naturalisation and

denaturalisation in Henry James, 212-14

New Criticism, 9, 108, 172, 181, 268, 305 n. 14

contradictions in, 43, 305 n. 6 treatment of reader response in,

43--4 treatment of textual ambiguity,

45 see also formalism

Newton, K.M., 299 n. 13 Nicholson, Marjorie, 8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 177, 187 Norris, Christopher, 177-8, 310

n. 4, 312 n. 39, 316 n. 89, 328 n.58

Ohmann, Richard, 102 Orr, Leonard, 172, 331 n. 91

Pearson, Gabriel, 323 n. 93 pedagogy of literature

and active rereadinglrewriting, 1~11, 15-17, 40, 108, 200, 221, 269, 270, 274

and intersubjective negotiation, 73, 179, 185-6, 230, 293

and 'misreading', 267 and new critical theory, 6-7, 8,

12-13, 54, 57, 102-9, 119-20, 202, 266-7, 287-8

and reader's readjustment, 221-2, 226-9, 267-8

and self-awareness, 40, 60, 166, 27~2, 276, 278; student resistance to, 266, 29~1, 293

in undergraduate vs. graduate

Index 353

classes, 272, 339 n. 31 new vs. traditional pedagogy,

108, 109, 119-20, 200, 269, 270, 314 n. 68

stages in, 223--30, 271-95: first reading: cultural pressures in, 275; limits of, 273, 274, 277; reading protocols and journals in, 276-8; rereading: contrast with first reading, 279-80; pedagogical tasks, 274, 279, 280; questionnaires in, 279-80; restructuring strategies in, 282-3, 286; critical (re)writing: focus on problematic textual areas, 228, 266, 292; role of, 286-8

tension between first reading/rereading/rewriting, 23, 273, 274

tasks: to convert students' interpretive desire into new textual production, 28, 31, 34-5, 36, 40, 220--2; to deconceal process of textual and cultural construction, 40, 41, 163, 184, 202-3, 283--4; to explore the continuum reading/writing, 23, 40, 287-9

see also critical workshops; rereading; rewriting

Pederson-Krag, Geraldine, 320 n. 41

Peirce, Charles S., 233 role of the interpretive subject

in, 179-81 Perrot, Jean, 247, 332 n. 9 Perry, Menakhem, 339 n. 26 Piercy, Marge, 320 n. 44 Plato, 85, 112, 222, 252 plots of interpretation

conventional and creative elements in, 15-16, 229, 238-9, 255, 268

cultural nature of, 233--4, 268, 269

interpretive plots in 'The Figure

in the Carpet' workshop, 228-9, 232-64, 267-8

in deconstruction, 15, 92, 100, 108

in feminism, 121-3, 125-6 in reader-oriented criticism, 73--4 philosophic and interpretive

choices in, 15, 184, 238, 255,268

'stories of reading', 14-15, 79, 81, 184-5, 266-7, 268, 292

Poe, Edgar Allan, 118, 290 'The Purloined Letter', 118, 284

Poirier, Richard, 337 n. 38 popular fiction

critical reading of, 17, 29, 30 pleasure mechanisms in, 29, 30 semiotic nature of, 17 see also detective fiction

Porter, Dennis, 25-6, 30, 212, 299 n. 26, 332 n. 19

poststructuralism and interpretation, 4, 5-6,

10--12, 25, 27, 191, 193, 284-6, 287, 296-7

and narrative analysis, 12-13, 132, 165, 174; see also interpretive models

and the subject of reading! writing, 10--11, 36, 49, 72, 162-76, 184, 186, 221, 232, 233,266

impact in criticism and pedagogy: 6-7, 10--13, 23, 28, 36, 49, 176-7, 202, 266-7, 287-8; political impact, 20--1, 176-7

limits of, 176-9, 182, 187, 188 poststructuralist readings of

James, 120, 144-5, 190--1, 204; see also under James, Henry

refutations of, 10, 16-19, 110--11 see also deconstruction;

feminism; reader-oriented criticism; semiotics of reading

Poulet, Georges, 45, 65, 67, 91, 307 n. 45

354 Index

Pound, Ezra, 322 n. 67 Powell, David (as participant in

DIROC project): see under critical workshops

pragmatism anti-theoretical bias in, 7, 18, 64,

73 new pragmatism and critical

interpretation, 18-19, 301 nn. 60 and 61

Pratt, Mary Louise, 341 n. 49 Prince, Gerald, 339 n. 23 Propp, Vladimir, 159 Proust, Marcel, 75, 76 Przybylowicz, Donna, 38, 120,

132, 135, 154 on James's dialectic of desire

and repression, 138-44, 154 on James's figurative style,

141-2 on James's subjective

phenomenological perspective, 138-42, 219, 323 n. 94

psychoanalysis and the dialectic of desire,

29-30, 31-2, 35, 37-8, 138-44, 154, 155, 158

and narrative analysis, -29-32, 35, 68-9, 139--44, 194--6, 205, 213, 295

in feminism, 3G--1, 126--7, 133--5, 139--44

in reader response, 32, 66, 68-9 limits of, 32, 66, 68, 126, 127 see also desire

Purdy, Strother B., 213, 332 n. 22, 333 n. 26

Rabinowitz, Peter, 330 n. 79 on reading rules and

conventions, 185-6 Rapp, Uri, 337 n. 37 Ray, Williams, 232, 307 n. 39, 313

n. 63, 334 n. 1 reader-oriented criticism

definition of, 42-3 directions: phenomenological

(focus on aesthetic

experiencing, textual production and reception), 45--6, 47-8, 49, 57-8; psychological - see under reader response; sociocultural, 49, 58, 7G--81

impact in critical pedagogy, 12-13, 43, 54, 57, 176--7, 188

interactional dynamic of reading, 36--7, 46--7, 51, 53, 59-60, 71, 75--6, 181

limits of, 37, 53--4, 55, 56, 69-70, 81, 187

reading dialectic nature of, 23, 26, 48,

58-9, 67, 77, 223 dual stages in, 21-2, 273--4, 277 new theories of, 6, 11, 14--15,

16, 36, 95-6 oppositions in, 3--4, 13--14, 16,

73--4, 81 ordinary vs. critical, 16--17 reader participation: tasks,

12-13, 28, 32, 34--5, 40, 46, 167-9, 176, 221-3, 282; dynamic of readjustment, 267-8; conflict between authorial and readerly perspectives, 80, 185--6

role of: affects, 12, 46, 48, 54, 66--7, 73, 325 n. 15; articulatory modes, 16, 267, 269; gender distinctions, 12, 321 n. 60, 329 n. 61; interpretive conventions, 10, 12, 21-2, 72, 113, 174, 185--6; reader's beliefs and interests, 9-10, 6G--3, 73, 256; self-criticism, 18, 21, 28, 63, 103, 225-6, 23G--1, 251, 266--7, 27G--2, 278, 292

sociocultural aspect of, 5-6, 12, 71-2, 84, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 113--14

styles of reading, 275--6 see also reader-oriented criticism;

rereading reception theory, 26, 32, 49, 71,

169-70, 176

Index 355

see also reader-oriented criticism; Jauss, Hans Robert

reader-response criticism of the text-oriented

approach, 11, 58, 63-4 focus on self-recreative

subjectivity, 58-9, 60-3, 69, 73,77, 181

literature as performance, 58, 63 methodological and

epistemological problems in, 59, 63, 65--6, 70, 74, 79, 177

stages in reading: subjective to intersubjective, 59-61, 73, 79, 179, 181-2, 230

see also Bleich, David; Fish, Stanley; Holland, Norman N.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 75 rereading

enjoyment in rereading, 22-3, 33-4, 291-2

focus in rereading, 22-3, 273-4, 279-83

limits of rereading 25-6 readjustment in, 26-7, 280-3,

286 role of rereading, 16-17, 23,

24-5, 273-4, 279, 280 see also Barthes, James, Leitch,

Miller and Riffaterre on rereading

response statements as a technique in reader

response, 40, 61-2, 181-2 from affective to critical

response, 40, 181-2, 224-5, 277 ,

problems with, 78-9, 181, 182 subjective and sociocultural

frameworks in, 6-3, 70, 78-9

used in 'The Figure in the Carpet' and The Turn of the Screw workshops, 202-3, 276-88

rewriting and pedagogy: see under critical

workshops; pedagogy of literature

and refiguration: see under figuration in narrative

and textual production, 28, 31, 34-5, 40, 220-2, 286, 287, 288-9

and textuaVcultural restructuring, 26, 33, 133, 134, 287, 282-3, 286

as a model of criticism, 4, 5-6, 10-12, 25, 27, 41, 91, 133, 134, 193, 296-7, 331 n. 93

sociocultural role of, 10-12, 27-8,287

Richards, LA., 42, 45 Richter, Dieter, 301 n. 56 Ricks, Christopher, 299 nn. 20 and

21 Ricoeur, Paul, 21, 229, 300 n. 32 Riffaterre, Michael, 22, 101, 113,

300 n. 30, 313 n. 57, 326 n. 28 on need for rereading, 22, 107,

170-1 role of reader in, 170-2 structural-semiotic constraints in

reading, 171 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 93, 327

n. 7 on James's figural ambiguity,

206, 209-10 on need for rereading, 210 on role of the reader in

narratology, 166-7 Rorty, Richard, 301 n. 60 Rose, Jacqueline, 130 Rosenblatt, Louise M., 42, 45, 48,

69, 275, 305 n. 16, 307 n. 36, 324 n. 2

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 106-7, 110, 114, 312 n. 52

Roustang, Fran<;ois, 302 n. 76 Rowe, John Carlos, 120, 187, 316

n. 86, 322 n. 83, 332 n. 12, 333 n. 48, 337 nn. 39 and 45, 341 n. 55

on James's dynamics of reading, 186, 192

on James's subversive narrative

356 Index

Rowe, John Carlos - continued practice, 190, 191-2

poststructuralist readings of James, 19G-1

Ruthrof, Horst, 55, 246, 333 n. 49, 339 n. 7, 339 n. 25

on modes of narrative 'appresentation', 182-3

on reader-author contracts in narrative, 285--6

Ryan, Michael, 117-18

Said, Edward, 118, 244, 299 n. 14 on interpretive communities, 230 on limits of poststructuralism,

186, 188 Salvatori, Mariolina, 274 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 85, 165,

252 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 7 Scholes, Robert, 72, 265, 300 n.

38,326 n. 31 on the pedagogy of textual

production, 286, 287, 288 Schor, Naomi, 123, 132, 257 Schumacher, Dorin, 304 n. 118 Schroeder, William R., 300 nn. 31

and 33 Schwab, Gabriele, 70, 338 n. 7 Schwarz, Daniel, 311 n. 25 Schweickart, Patrocinio P., 316 n.

1,321 n. 62 Sebeok, Thomas A., 328 n. 49 self-consciousness in critical

reading/writing, 6, 13, 16, 17, 18, 48, 52, 60, 266, 270, 276, 288--9

and enjoyment of reading, 22-3, 290,291-2

and self-analysis, 18, 21, 40, 61-3, 103, 166, 27G-2, 276, 278

student resistance to, 266, 29G-1, 293

theoretical objections to, 17-18, 64,73

Seltzer, Mark, 192, 259, 324 n. 100 critique of deconstruction, 187 Henry James & the Art of Power,

189-91: 'double discourse' in James, 189, 191, 245; Foucauldian evaluation of James, 189, 226

semiotics of reading and the interpretive subject,

164-76 and narrative analysis, 176--96 and poststructuralist theory,

72-4, 163-4, 172, 173-4 and sociocultural semiotics,

17~, 327 n. 39 conventionalist vs. recreative,

183-4, 185--6 focus on operations of

reading/writing, 11, 12, 72-4, 164, 185, 284-6

in James's fiction, 149-53, 211-21

Sendak, Maurice, 80 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 106, 110 Sheriff, John K., 18G-1, 312 n. 48 Showalter, Elaine, 122-3, 317 n. 6,

318 n. 20, 320 n. 42, 338 n. 48 Silverman, Kaja, 135, 144, 302 n.

88, 319 n. 24, 322 n. 71 on James's female reflectors, 147 on James's scenes of revelation,

147, 322 n. 82 on subjectivity in semiotics,

165-6 Smit, David W., 333 n. 30 Smith, Paul, 318 n. 19 Spacks, Patricia Mayer, 317 n. 4 Spanos, William V., 43 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 118,

123 Squire, James R., 308 n. 59 Staton, Shirley F., 338 n. 10 Steig, Michael, 32, 77-80, 300

n. 49, 304 n. 71, 321 n. 60, 332 n. 24

critique of, 32, 78--9 on dialectic of response and

interpretation, 77, 78 on intersubjective response, 77,

78 on sociosemiotic aspects of

reading, 78, 79--80

Index 357

on stories of reading, 78-9, 80 Stendhal (H. M. Beyle), 7 Stimpson, Catharine, 319 n. 23 Sultan, Stanley, 305 n. 10

Talty, Joan (as participant in DIROC project): see under critical workshops

Todorov, Tzvetan, 35--6, 209 Treichler, Paula, 123, 125--6, 322

n.66 Turn of the Screw, The, 35, 41, 80,

205, 213, 217, 219, 234 approached by feminism, 135,

139, 140, 146, 153; by reader response, 60-3; by psychoanalytic criticism, 205,213

dialectic of reading in, 214, 295 interpretive models in, 214-15,

283, 295 see also critical workshops

Ulmer, Gregory L., 314 n. 66 understanding

and interpretation, 7-8, 11, 19-20, 26, 200, 223, 224

as critical performance, 26, 29, 160-1, 219, 220-2

limits of, 96, 98, 99, 101-3, 106, 107-8, 231

metacritical understanding, 72, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103

self-understanding, 18, 19-20, 40, 61-3, 103, 166, 266,

270-2, 276, 278 sociocultural modes of, 49, 71,

72, 182-3, 184 Uspenskij, Boris, 172

Vaid, Krishna Balden, 333 n. 52, 334 n. 54

Volosinov, V. N., 174

Warhol, Robyn, 319 n. 34 Watts, Cedric, 315 nn. 75 and 78 Weber, Samuel, 52, 264, 298 n. 2,

301 n. 15, 329 n. 63, 335 n. 22, 336 n. 36

Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren, 304 n. 4, 306 n. 17, 307 n. 37

West, Cornel, 118 White, Allon, 303 n. 111 White, Hayden, 182 Wimmers, Inge Crosman, 74-7,

301 n. 53, 340 n. 34 on literary and sociocultural

frames of reading, 74-5 poetics of reading, 74, 75, 76 reading models in narrative

texts, 75--6, 77 Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe

Beardsley, 57-8, 305 n. 5 Winnicott, D.W., 70 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 255 Woolf, Virginia, 135 Wordsworth, William, 96, 110

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud, 177, 182

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