The Qualities of Action: Part II

Abstract

The first part of this essay, which appeared in the preceding issue of boundary 2, tried to show how literary texts can be seen as developing what I called a space of middles, a space elaborated by the qualities of the dramatic actions they present. Literary culture, I argued, must be seen as fostering our awareness of those areas of experience where the causal languages of metaphysics and science, of beginnings and endings, are simply not adequate to basic human concerns. The aim of literature is not primarily to present true explanations of experience but to render the qualities of the way men respond to their situations. Critical language, however, tends to ignore these qualitative features of literary texts either to turn them into thematic explanations or to make them aesthetic artifacts which purchase their freedom from truth claims by not proposing any cognitive function at all. I concluded by concentrating on the dilemmas of the New Criticism that followed from its refusal to consider literary texts as presenting coherent dramatic actions. The New Critics were devoted to distinguishing literature and humane culture in general from the authority of scientific discourse, but they never developed a conceptual vocabulary which could clarify how literary works were responsible to different modes of assessment, modes appropriate