The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

Abstract

The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader James Phelan (bio) and David H. Richter (bio) Rader W. Rader consistently located his work within the tradition of Chicago School criticism, and he just as consistently characterized that tradition as a minor movement in the history of twentieth-century criticism and theory. But he only implied what we will now say explicitly and with the hope that in our current climate of renewed interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of literature more people will be receptive to the message. The work is part of only a minor tradition—and it’s a damn shame too. It’s especially a damn shame because, across Rader’s diverse body of essays on subjects ranging from Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” to Capote’s In Cold Blood, he sketches a coherent and compelling vision of the nature and significance of literature and an impressive way of translating that vision into interpretive practice. In this essay, we seek to reconstruct that vision and to explicate the interrelationships among several of its key components: Rader’s definition of literature, his understanding of the tasks of criticism and theory, his concepts of literary form and literary quality, his work on the history of the English novel, and his methods of interpretive reasoning. In a sense, we understand our task as doing for Rader’s critical work what he so often set out to do for another writer’s imaginative work: identify the core principles of its construction. One prefatory note before we take up Rader’s definition of literature: you will soon see that, from the perspectives of the current major traditions, those of [End Page 73] post-structuralist theory and of cultural studies, much of Rader’s vision is built on heretical ideas about authors, audiences, and literary language. In order to keep the focus on our task of reconstruction, we will not articulate the likely objections to Rader’s positions or his likely responses. Instead, we ask you to bracket temporarily your own objections as you try on the hypothesis that Rader has developed an alternative system of thought that is at least as deep and sophisticated as those underlying post-structuralist theory and cultural studies. Rader’s Definition of Literature and His Concept of Form In “Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation” (1974), Rader defines literature as that class of verbal compositions designed to be understood by immediate reference only to themselves through the reader’s grasp of the writer’s communicative act as directed toward the evocation of a certain pleasure in their own understanding. In this sense, literary works are verbal compositions in which “the act of understanding . . . is experienced as its own justification” (250). This definition has both a descriptive and an evaluative dimension. In its descriptive sense, the definition distinguishes literary works from non-literary works, the class of verbal compositions in which the reader’s act of understanding is directed toward her doing something else, often something practical (making a pie, voting for one candidate rather than another, writing a letter of protest, and so on). In its evaluative sense, the definition allows us to distinguish among degrees of literariness once we acknowledge that different members of the literary class offer their readers different degrees of pleasure-in-understanding and concomitantly different degrees of self-justification. For example, we could readily agree that Paradise Lost is substantially more literary than, say, Ogden Nash’s “Ode to a Baby”: “A bit of talcum / Is always walcum.” This painfully simple demonstration of the definition’s evaluative dimension also helps illuminate Rader’s understanding of the task of criticism. Why do we readily accept this judgment of Milton’s epic as a greater literary work than Nash’s doggerel? At least in part because the reference to Milton’s poem and the quoting of Nash tap into our intuitive understanding of each one’s literary merit. This answer doesn’t deny other influences such as Milton’s long-established place in and Nash’s absence from the standard canon, the cultural status of epics versus light verse and so on, but it keeps open the possibility that these other influences...