A Literature for a Criticism without Contents

Abstract

It has been possible (and necessary) to distinguish at least three broad theories within the loose congeries of methodologies and practices generally known as critical modernism. First, and most ambitiously destructive, there is the theory of language latterly associated with Derrida and others, but in fact deriving from Bergson, Heidegger and Whitehead, that language is powerless to ‘express’ truth or reality adequately. (In Foucault this is wedded to a dissociation-of-sensibility thesis, dating a particular divorce of language and meaning at around the beginning of the seventeenth century.)1 Secondly, there is the theory of literary language, again associated with Bergson, but more familiar to English and American readers in the formulations of I. A. Richards and Susanne Langer, that literary language is different from ordinary language in consisting not of real statements, which assert feelings and truths, but of pseudo-statements, which amount to a kind of linguistic play. Lastly, there is the soft-core, or historicist version of this theory, that modern texts in particular (dating from the middle of the nineteenth or the end of the eighteenth century) differ from earlier literature in being incapable of ‘holding’ truth or reality of emotion or whatever, and so are non-referential or self-referring.