OST OF THE ESSAYS in this issue are exercises in variously conceived, but generally used in a way that pushes readers and spectators very much into the background. The plan (one sees this especially in the contributions of Todorov and Brooke-Rose) is to bypass criticism and its evaluative categories by conceiving art works as objects, data on which a classifying science of literary forms can be built, with a view of predicting developments or retrodicting origins. Much could be said about this aim and about these examples of its pursuit. It could be argued that scientizing is a principal source of the situation in which serious literature is written for academic theorists and readership becomes cultist. But I shall begin instead by injecting into the debate a conception of theory that does not bypass criticism. I take a text from Todorov: genres, he says, are horizons of expectations for readers and models of writing for authors. Not, notice, the concepts of a scientific classification of objects, as Todorov otherwise dreams of, but the foci of critical awareness and judgment. Criticism (continuing to expound on Todorov's text) is the clarification of readers' expectations or authors' intentions. The critic, to borrow Locke's celebrated term, is an underlaborer, serving the primary activities of creation and appreciation. And theory, on this view, is more reflective criticism, occasioned by the emergence of new authorial aims or devices, and by changing audiences or modes of dissemination. At such moments of crisis the critic loses his bearings; his assumptions are called into question and need to be brought to the surface. So my comments here will be shaped by this conception of audiencelinked criticism and criticism-linked theory. I begin with puzzles raised for me by the question, as applied to Renaissance and seventeenth-century art, or narrate? In Svetlana Alpers' paper these concepts function in a critical way, or at least a way that bears, reflectively, on the critical function. Thus a somewhat extended discussion may prove to be a useful propadeutic to a commentary on criticism and theory. In the Renaissance, Alpers says, the goal of painting is to tell a story. This aesthetic surfaces, for example, in Alpers' quotations from Vasari, who finds Giorgione incomprehensible. Giorgione's figures, though conveying features and fabric with startling fidelity, do not depict actions that Vasari, at least, can identify. The next generation, too, Alpers observes, is dominated by painters-Rembrandt and Velazquez-who have allowed a passion to describe to divert them from the narrative aim. Alpers sees this as anticipating in some sense the conscious abandonment of storytelling in the painting of the nineteenth century, and