Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty's Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making

Abstract

Uses of Metaphor:Richard Rorty's Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making Günter Leypoldt (bio) The so-called revival of pragmatism since the 1980s gained much of its cultural momentum in literature departments that welcomed Richard Rorty's philosophical antitraditionalism as a refreshing contribution to contemporary theory. And yet, Rorty's authority as a literary scholar has remained ambiguous. While literary critics tend to appreciate his turn to narrative—as an alternative to abstract theorizing—they often find it harder to accept his narrative ethics. As a result (and in contrast to the most prominent pragmatists in the literary field),1 Rorty has been accused of a backward-looking approach to literary artwork: a program of "literature as ethical reflection," according to Lawrence Buell, that "looks suspiciously like old-fashioned value thematics," a "pre-modern" approach that renders "aesthetic sensibility ultimately subservient to the goal of moral improvement."2 But why would a declared postmetaphysical pragmatist revert to premodern reading practices? Critics have invoked the specter of neoconservatism,3 and pondered personal deficiencies in Rorty's literary sensibility: such as a "puritan" distrust of aesthetic pleasure,4 inattentiveness to the intricate "sound and rhythm of poetic language,"5 or a habit of "philosophizing" literary texts by reducing them to propositional statements.6 It seems that such implausible explanations result from translating Rorty's pragmatist approach into literary studies without taking into account his view of literature as world-making.7 The concept of world-making as metaphoric redescription (in Rorty's terms) is arguably at odds with the conceptual coordinates of Kantian aesthetics that continue to shape contemporary views of the literary. We tend to feel so much at home with these coordinates (and a critical repertoire that questions them) that it is easy to misunderstand Rorty's revision, and to place him where he does not belong: in a quasi-formalist literary ethics that emerged in contemporary literary departments, often in response to the pioneering work of Martha Nussbaum. [End Page 145] I. Literary Ethics and the "Neglect of Form" The family resemblances between Rorty and Nussbaum are well known. Trained philosophers disillusioned with their field, both have expressed an aversion to philosophical inquiry based on the idea of a moral reason independent of human emotion and circumstance. They also share the conviction that the novel's thick description of human particularities offers richer explorations of ethical complexities than the theoretical treatise. But apart from disagreements on epistemology, they have markedly different concepts of the literary imagination. Nussbaum views her program of literature as ethical reflection as a stand against formalist traditions. Any explanation of "how literary theory lost [its] practical dimension," she says, should "include the influence of Kant's aesthetics; of early twentieth-century formalism; of the New Criticism." Nussbaum's critique of the disinterested artwork dovetails with a broad consensus, in the 1980s, against midcentury notions of literariness (as the inner form of autonomous aesthetic objects). But in contrast to more thoroughly antiformalist theoretical trends, Nussbaum tends to choose a middle way in her revisionist readings of canonical authors. She cautions her readers that what gives "ethical writing about literature a bad name" is partly the "neglect of literary form" by some of its practitioners.8 She holds that a successful ethical turn in literary theory needs to pay attention to how "form and content shape one another."9 This dialectical view characterizes some of Nussbaum's best work, especially her readings of Henry James, probably her most persuasive case for a turn to ethics in literary studies. They have helped to encourage a literary ethics that considers literariness and ethico-moral insight as two sides of the same coin, implying, for instance, that somehow Henry James's superior narrative skills contribute to the moral depth of his vision, which depth makes him all the more literary. In Nussbaum's terms, the ethical imagination in The Golden Bowl is "finely tuned" precisely because it emerges from "a fine work of art" whose stylistic sophistication defies paraphrase into the "flat" language of moral philosophy.10 Moral intelligence is thus understood as a heightened perception of complexity, and ethical progress becomes a question of improving...