Intentional Fallacy Research Articles

And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing Nancy E. Berg And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing, by Wendy I. Zierler. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 368 pp. $49.95. Wendy Zierler's book serves as an introduction to Hebrew women writers as well as an interim report on the state of the field. The works of most, if not all, of the writers the volume explores have recently become part of the revised canon, and the writers themselves subjects of study. Zierler builds on these earlier studies—generously giving credit to her predecessors—and adds to this growing body of literature. The author is thorough; even the biblical story from which the title is taken is painstakingly explored. She makes use of an eclectic body of sources and approaches from biblical texts and medieval exegesis to traditional feminist literary theory, feminist biblical studies, and Hebrew literary criticism. She incorporates better- and lesser-known material, including classic texts in the field, unpublished manuscripts, and nearly forgotten works. Among her points of departure are Dan Miron's oft-cited book Imahot meyasdot, ahayot horgot, Lily Rattok's introduction to her anthology of women's short stories Hakol ha'aher, and the burgeoning interest in women's writing both in the academy and in the marketplace. The book brings together disparate works including earlier studies such as those done recently on Rachel, Devorah Baron, and Esther Raab. She shows herself to be equally competent in prose and poetry, and skilled at finding the balance between creating chapters that both work as self-contained units and are integrated into a coherent whole. Even where Devorah Baron is discussed in three different chapters Zierler introduces her the third time in such a way that it gives the appropriate context without repeating earlier introductory material. This work is immersed in the feminist enterprise of recovery, reassessment, and revision of literary history by incorporating hitherto less known or unappreciated foremothers. It resonates not only with English literary history as suggested in the introduction, but with literary histories of the Near and [End Page 149] Far East as well. Zierler offers readings of individual texts informed by feminist theory, and correctives to earlier misreadings due to either lack of erudition on the part of the reader or aesthetic blinders. In the book the idea of crossing borders serves as a dominant image, a leitmotif of transgression. While the idea pushes us toward an intentional fallacy—as if nearly every writer under discussion is conscious of trespassing into a male-dominated field—the very act of women's writing can be construed as subversive. Yet Zierler takes care not to push too far; she is careful, for example, not to claim a writer such as Leah Goldberg as a feminist; rather Zierler argues that the writer's work "raises issues of feminist import." After a short introduction that sets out some of the framework (including the idol-stealing image), the first chapter offers the background on which the rest of the book is built. A history of Jewish women's writing briefly covers known precursors before focusing on Haskalah writers Rachel Morpurgo, Sarah Foner, and Hava Shapiro and then the more contemporary Yocheved Bat Miriam. The text returns to all three of these writers. Chapters Two and Three focus on poetry: first, poems written about female figures from the Bible ("search for foremothers") organized by the figures, and then a series of studies of three poets who are known for their landscape poetry (Rahel, Raab, and Bat Miriam). Her exploration of their works offers a lucid summation of current androgyny theory and fresh readings. The next chapter combines readings of poetic and prose primary texts on the theme of barrenness. In addition to better-known texts by Rahel ("Akarah") and Baron ("Mishpahah")—the latter read against Agnon's "Aggadat HaSofer"—Zierler considers Pinkerfeld Amir's poem "Akarah" and Puchachevsky's "Asonah shel Afyah."1 The fifth chapter returns to the Haskalah writers introduced in Chapter One (Foner and Shapiro) and to the briefly aforementioned Devorah Baron, looking at their depictions of the ways...

The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology (review)

The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Meaning, Intention, Ideology. Edited by Arved Ashby. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004. [viii, 404 p. ISBN 1-58046-143-3. $75.] Music examples, illustrations, index. This collection of fifteen essays aims to develop postmodern approaches to modernist (p. 2) as a means by which to reengage a repertory that throughout its history has been anathema to much of the musical public and at times, even the specialist. Central to this task is the conscientious rejection by the collection's authors of those tenants of modernist discourse that served to oppress, willfully or otherwise, individualized modes of listening. so doing, the volume creates a space within the highly polarized debates of the last century into which today's listener might experience pleasure and even discover musical meaning. dealing with the difficult works of the last century The Pleasure of Modernist Music necessarily restricts itself to the discussion of works generally considered elitist and unapproachable (p. 1). The composers whose works, musical and prose, are most heavily represented across these essays include Boulez, Schoenberg, Webern, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Babbitt. George Rochberg also receives a fair amount of ink given his public anti-modernist writings that, for the purposes of this book, serve to articulate some of the aesthetic conflicts inherent in a century dominated by the interrelated musical imperatives of structure, process, and autonomy. Over the course of the book's five parts, Reception and Politics, Metaphors for Modernism, Writing and Listening, case Study, and Belated Modernism, an emphasis on listening takes on a cumulative weight, and indeed becomes the collection's most important contribution. The authors each offer different ways of liberating the listener from a post-war project that demanded of them an attention to pitch structure, a project that denied the listener his or her need to create musical meaning relative to his or her own environment. This is a necessary endeavor, if not already too late, given the growing availability of this music to an ever-widening global audience. It stands to reason that people are going to listen to modernist music in ways that its composers could not have imagined, let alone intended. Under such a light, Arved Ashby engages the very issue of intention in his first essay, Intention and Meaning in Modern Music. addition to tracing the pertinent historiography of the intentional fallacy, as well as other death of the author constructs, Ashby's discussion offers a fascinating look at the involvement of the composer in the dissemination and reception of his own ideologies, as opposed to musical works, particularly through the print media. He points out that, at least during the formative years of musical modernism, people were more likely to read about a new musical work than to hear it, given the wider availability of newspapers and journals than radio broadcasts or recordings. The result was that many early modernist compositions became trapped in their composer's ideologies (p. 42), and consequently, the authority of intention seems to have lingered longer in the musical realm than in that of art or literature, although there were important voices of anti-intentionalism during the early formation of the modernist canon. One such voice was that of Theodor Adorno, who understood modernist music as an effective means of political and aesthetic resistance, thereby serving the needs of society over those of the composer. His ideas greatly inform Martin Scherzinger's essay, In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modern Musical Aesthetics. Scherzinger nimbly elucidates the aesthetic philosophies of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht, which posited aesthetic autonomy as necessarily antagonistic, and which sought to distance itself from the everyday, and therefore position itself as an agent of social change. …

Shakespeare's untranslatability

When Peter Hall dismissed the very thought of Shakespeare’s translatability, he was probably not doing so out of any consideration for the theory of translation, but UDWKHUIURPDSRVLWLRQRIXQUHAHFWLYHFRPPRQVHQVH,WVHHPVWRJRZLWKRXWVD\LQJ that translation begins with a text that is, above all, original. Any transformation of that text into a different language will involve a falling off, an inevitable process of ORVV7KLVRFFXUVSDUWO\EHFDXVHWUDQVODWLRQE\GH?QLWLRQLQWURGXFHVGLIIHUHQFHRU change through the replacement of one structure with another, and partly because it must of necessity muddy the original spirit that inspired the prototext. These modes of loss are not the same. One does not have to subscribe to a Romanticbelief in the pristine genius of the author as the sole inspirer of the text to claim that translation inevitably involves its betrayal. Shakespeare may be said to be untranslatable either because he is Shakespeare, or because his texts are a unique set of linguistic patterns that cannot be duplicated in a different system. The New Criticism, for example, held the latter but not the former position: as insistent upon the intentional fallacy as any proponent of the death of the author, they also saw Shakespeare’s texts as complex poetic structures which ultimately lay beyond paraphrase or explication.1

Is the writer Ethical?: The early novels of J.M. Coetzee up to age of iron

Summary The article claims that the investigation of the ethical dimension of literary writing has thus far wrongfully omitted to ask questions about the ethical intentions of the literary agent. It argues that this question can be put by asking, “Is this, i.e. the specific act of writing, an ethical act?” Drawing on some analytical philosophy of action and on Bakhtin, the article maintains that this question can be asked without reviving the intentional fallacy and without reverting to foundationalist ethics. These arguments are demonstrated by investigating the possible ethicality of acts of writing in the first six novels of J.M. Coetzee. Agential self‐awareness is interpreted as the agent's awareness of his writing being an action, and various examples are quoted to show that the agent of these acts of writing takes responsibility for the fact of his action. Writing seems to respond to ethically compromising aspects of the act of literary production. The refusal to write about death as if it can be an object of literary construction in novels written during the apartheid era and States of Emergency in South Africa serves as example.

Lucretius' Progressive Revelation of Nature in "DRN" 1.149-502

and uneven presentation in an eclectic didactic poet like Vergil or Horace, but it requires fuller explanation in a poet who treads in the footsteps of Epicurus. Volk (2002) has recently provided a welcome re-evaluation of the genre markers of didactic poetry, and her chapter on Lucretius (despite her stated misgivings as to intentional fallacy) demonstrates once and for all how important it was for the poet to set up a productive relationship with the Roman reader, construed as a possible but distrustful Epicurean convert. Epicureans were notoriously distrustful of both the emotional appeal and the communicative ambiguities of Homer's epic in particular, and they accused mythographers of contributing to humanity's insecurities and ignorance.3 As Philodemus shows in his works on rhetoric, on 1Although Anglo-American scholars appear more skeptical both of Jerome's biography and of Patin's anti-Lucrhce than their European counterparts, a widespread view remains that Lucretius' priorities are literary rather than philosophical: Kenney (1970) presents the work firmly within the genre of Hesiodic epic, analogous to Vergil's Georgics, as does Donahue (1993), who suggests that Lucretius' main inspiration was Callimachus; West (1994) sees no other aim to Lucretius' imagery than aesthetic.

Intention and Ogden Nash

One of the most vexed terms in literary criticism is "intention." William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley tried to minimize its role in our critical vocabulary by their essay "The Intentional Fallacy"; and for the New Critics, led by the example and precepts of Cleanth Brooks, intention was a forbidden topic. 1 But forbidding them seldom weakens the popularity of ideas any more than it does the popularity of human activities, and literary intention has enjoyed an active critical life since then. For some critics the author's intention can be equated with the meaning of a literary text, and so in their view recovering that intention becomes the primary goal of literary criticism. 2 Critics with a psychoanalytical bent have enlarged the territory of the term to incorporate unconscious intention, and social critics, including New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, have often attributed intention to a social entity, such as the power elite of a society, or even the society as a whole.

Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization by Fred B. Tromly

REVIEWS ness and heroic glory recede further and further into mem­ ory, until finally they have disappeared entirely from the foreground narrative, leaving only a memorial of themselves. ( 212) Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon impresses one throughout with its consistent and powerful reading of Beowulf, and with the vivid translations that, whenever possible, retain the concrete­ ness of the original by employing literal, even etymological, meaning for a word. Lee’s abilities as a translator beg for a com­ plete translation of the poem — a future project, we can hope. LARRY MCKILL / University of Alberta Fred B. Tromly. Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xi, 238. This book takes its readers back — not so far back, perhaps, as the late sixteenth century when the poems and plays it treats were first written, but back several decades from the present to a time when mythic criticism was in its ascendancy. The purpose of the book is to supplant the Icarus myth, which in 1952 Harry Levin argued at book length is central to Marlowe’s work, with the Tantalus myth: “Throughout Marlowe’s work we meet a recurrent metamorphosis in which Icarian aspiration falls heavily downward to become Tantalian frustration. [... ] Marlowe intended his plays to entice and to frustrate playgoers” (18, 26). In advancing this thesis, Fred B. Tromly lays heavy emphasis on his access to Marlowe’s authorial intentions and thus stages himself as the opponent of such critics as Jonathan Goldberg and Stephen Orgel. I wonder why Tromly does not also mention, in addition to Goldberg and Orgel, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (New Critics writing at the time Northrop Frye was propounding a mythic criticism), who wrote “The Intentional Fallacy.” And I also wonder that he does not discuss how mythic criticism is rooted in a psychology of the unconscious, and reflect upon the relation of this psychology to the intentionalism that he espouses. 223 ESC 26, 2000 Because Marlowe mentions Tantalus (outside of his trans­ lations) only once, it requires strenuous argument (and some sacrifice of discrimination) to establish that “Tantalus and tantalization figure much more prominently in Marlowe than in any other writer of his time” (8). Tromly finds The Jew of Malta's Barabas “Tantalian [... ] in a kettle of boiling water” and “the [... ] king in Edward II [... ] more literally Tantalus-like, as he stands in a cesspool” (23), although neither character, unlike Tantalus, yearns to drink these means of his torture. By far the greatest part of the book is devoted to close readings of the plays, bracketed by Chapter 2, an examination of passages from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amoves, and by Chapter 8 on Hero and Leander, the text containing Marlowe’s sole reference to Tantalus. In Dido Queen of Carthage, the title character is read as the Tantalus figure, frustrated in her desire for Aeneas. Bajazeth occupies the role of Tantalus in the first part of Tamburlaine , but in the second part Tamburlaine himself and the play’s audience are the tantalized. In reading the second part of Tamburlaine, Tromly develops a strategy to which he will return: the construction upon discrepancies between a play’s prologue and the play itself a Marlovian intention to mislead and tease an audience. In The Jew of Malta, too, according to Tromly, the prologue is crucial to our understanding of Mar­ lowe’s manipulation and frustration of audience expectations, for the prologue offers the stereotype of the covetous Jew, while the play transfers the stereotype’s covetousness from Barabas to the Christians, and so, by implication, to the play’s audience. With Edward II, Marlowe’s arousal and frustration of audience expectations acquires “a wounding violence” (122) as “the play actively works to subject its spectators to the [horrible] condi­ tions affecting its characters” (123-24). And, finally, with Doc­ tor Faustus, discussion returns from tantalization closer to the figure of Tantalus, recalled by the play’s “repeated snatchingaway of sustenance,” including, at its climax, the spiritual sus­ tenance of “Christ’s blood streaming] in the firmament” denied to Faustus (139, 150-51). Tromly offers such “patterns of repeated motifs” as...

Parables of narrative imagining

Parables of Narrative Imagining David Herman (bio) Mark Turner. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. The literary mind? The literary mind? The literary mind? Any which way you parse it, the title of Mark Turner’s provocative, elegantly written study seems to beg important questions, assume things that do not by any means go without saying. First parse: is there in fact a literary (part of the) mind? That is, is there some nondiscrete but semi-autonomous module of cognitive capacities required for using and understanding literary discourse—a module that takes information (as its input) from other modules, operates on that information in some way, then feeds the transformed information (as its output: “literature”) into yet other modules, which in turn take that information as their input? 1 Second parse: assume that there is some module involved in the production and interpretation of literary discourse. Then of what nature, exactly, are the operations performed within that module, and how do they operate on the input in a way that makes the output specifically literary? How precisely is literature born from this process or set of processes? Doesn’t this kind of account suffer from all the disadvantages (inexplicitness, for example) that it inherits from its parent model, the black-box explanation? Third parse: should we even be talking about “minds” at all in connection with literature and the study of literature? Hasn’t “The Intentional Fallacy” and everything that has happened since in the fields of critical and cultural theory—from Marxism and poststructuralism to New Historicism and cultural studies—taught us to center critico-theoretical discourse anywhere but in “the mind”? Hasn’t all this research exposed the mind (of the author, reader, subject, or postsubject, as the case may be) as a construct with more or less noxious political and cultural properties? Are not the discourses of and about the mind so many strategies of interpellation—vehicles by which ideology can work to implant the illusions of inviolable inwardness, unchanging essence, and predetermined identity within a subject that takes such imagined realities to be its real conditions of existence? 2 Turner does not directly address any of these questions—at least in the way that I have framed them. That may be grounds for criticism: if you are using a title that can be construed as polemical, then the onus is on you to explain just how the title positions your work in a wider context of argumentation. But at the same time, Turner’s analysis reformulates the underlying problems to which some of my questions point, thus raising [End Page 20] other, equally important issues. Coming to terms with these other issues may change the way we ask questions about things like literature and the mind. Specifically, as part of a larger “cognitive revolution” now unfolding in social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ranging from linguistics to literary and narrative theory, Turner’s book provides ample reasons for not thinking the idea of mind tantamount to an ideology of mind. 3 After all, reducing mind to an ideology of inwardness leaves unexplained any number of basic facts about perception, cognition, and language processing. There is, for example, our ability to use “image schemata” such as motion along a path and bounded interior to make sense of events like milk being poured into a cup, on the one hand, and contained spaces like the ones inside bottles, heads, and houses, on the other hand [Turner 16]. Relying on such schemata, I don’t regularly try to pour wine into a cutting board or to measure, in miles per hour, the speed of an asparagus stalk as it sits on the kitchen counter. There is also—to invoke a slightly different cognitive-scientific vocabulary—our ability to make predictions about emergent situations and sequences of events on the basis of prior, stereotypical situations and sequences stored in the memory as knowledge representations sometimes called frames and scripts [see Schank and Abelson]. For example, the script associated with making a purchase guides me in my interaction with the person at a cash register, such that I can make seemingly effortless predictions about what this person wants me to do...

Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19 (review)

Book Reviews 99 Carmichael has produced another stimulating volume on the shaping and purpose ofbiblical law. While every scholar may not agree with his conclusions, they are well worth our attention. This book should be a part of every collection on law and on the study of narrative analysis. Victor H. Matthews Department ofReligious Studies Southwest Missouri State University Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19, by Robert Ignatius Letellier. Biblical Interpretation Series 10. Leiden: E. 1. Brill, 1995. 296 pp. $128.00. Robert Letellier provides what is probably the most comprehensive study of Genesis 18-19 in the English language. Only the book-length study of Rudin-O'Brasky in Hebrew compares to the coverage offered by Letellier. Letellier divides his book into four chapters. The initial chapter concisely guides us through a Forschungsbericht of Pentateucha1criticism, with special emphasis upon the ferment since the mid-sixties. He documents the paradigm shift in biblical studies from diachronic to synchronic approaches. At the end of this chapter, he lays out his own methodological approach in which he opts for a combination of the "vertical" and "horizontal" methods, after the model ofFokkelman's "total interpretation." Letellier's hermeneutical approach attempts to steer a middle course between the deconstruction ofDerrida and the "intentional fallacy" of the older historical criticism. He locates his "North Star" in this enterprise in the assumption that the text possesses a certain transcendence (p. 29). Chapter two justifies his delimitation of these two chapters as a proper locus for study. The various criteria for determining the boundaries ofa self-contained unit within a larger narrative complex and the structural patterns inherent within the section receive extended discussion. He determines, by a close study of the structure, both surface and "deep," that there are five basic units within the two chapters as we now have them. One might quibble here and there with some of his analyses, but, on the whole, his observations are very illuminating. The five basic units, which are treated as scenes, are as follows: 1. 18: 1-15: the visit of YHWH to Abraham at Mamre 2. 18:16-33: YHWH's soliloquy and dialogue with Abraham 3. 19:1-23: the visit of the messengers to Lot at Sodom 4. 19:24-29: the destruction of Sodom and its aftermath 100 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, NO.2 5. 19:30-38: the story of Lot and his daughters in the cave These basic units are further subdivided into discrete movements each of which assists in unfolding the scene. Having done this, he is ready to turn to the actual task of analyzing how the text "works." Chapter three, covering about 124 pages, is the longest and most thorough section of the book. Letellier analyzes each unit or scene from three different vantage points: the literary structure, the language as a conveyor of the story, and significant details within the basic unit. By far the most lengthy treatment occurs in the linguistic analysis section. Lexical, grammatical, syntactic, thematic, and socio-cultural analyses are patiently deployed in order to eludicate the text. Letellier is clearly at home in Classical Hebrew as well as the broader field of (the new) literary criticism. Chapter four brings us to the real thrust of the study, at least as I perceived it. The author takes up a discussion of myth, fairy tale, and legend (or saga), concluding that Genesis 18-19 incorporates elements of all three. What really absorbs his interest, however, are the motifs, themes, and, particularly, the archetypes, that emerge from a close reading ofthe narrative complex. His indebtedness to the thought of Carl Jung is readily acknowledged. The bottom line is that these stories embody elements of universally shared human experience. Letellier helpfully canvasses a wide array of ancient Near Eastern literature (with some more recent examples as well), showing the prevalence ofthese motifs and archetypes. There is much here that is informative and insightful. My own reading of this section has been enriched by Letellier's observations. A question, however, arises concerning his heavy reliance upon Jungian psychological theory as the master key. That human experience possesses universality seems...

I Untied the Camera of Tastes (Who Am I?): The Riddle of Chool (A Reply and Alternative to A. Sahay)

1 Anyone who writes should have no illusions about being understood. The intentional fallacy that critics applied to authors must be extended to the critics themselves. Amrohini Sahay read my books and concluded that mystory, choragraphy, and heuretics have to do with an idealist and ludic self-fashioning. Is this classification accurate? The real issue is what to do with the opportunity created by this invitation to reply. Since heuretics lends itself more to demonstra tion than to explanation, let me appropriate the genre of the riddle, however loosely, to articulate a current project. The riddle will function as the tale of the GATTt heuristic that I will use to generate this text, which in turn will have to do with how to use riddling in an electrate pedagogy. I will use this generator (which I introduced in Heuretics and elsewhere) to orient my exploration despite the fact that I tell my students not to speak directly of their CATTt, but to bury it in the garden at midnight if they hope to benefit from its magic power of insight. There is a riddle form which in a sense is a 'meta-riddle'; the question 'what is the difference between A and B?' To this the answer is T do not know,' and the answerer receives a retort which puts him to shame. ('What is the difference between the behind of a horse and a

Intentionalism, Anti-Intentionalism, and Aesthetic Inquiry: Implications for the Teaching of Choreography

One of the most heated debates in modern literary and aesthetic theory concerns the relevance to criticism in general, and to interpretation specifically, of information about an author/artist's intentions in creating a particular work. This intentionalist/anti-intentionalist debate is an important one for dance educators to examine and discuss with students, since teachers' beliefs about the relevance of an artist's intentions determine in large part the way they interpret and judge dances (and other works of art), and mentor student choreographers and critics. The critical advice of mentors who hold intentionalist assumptions naturally tends to be quite different from the input of those holding anti-intentionalist views.The debate over artists' intentions began in earnest in 1946 with the publication of a provocative and now famous essay entitled “The Intentional Fallacy” by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. In this work the authors attacked the intentionalist idea that to achieve a valid, or true, interpretation of a work we must ascertain whatever meaning its maker intended it to possess. The essay laid the groundwork for a rigorous anti-intentionalism, which held that works of art and literature are autonomous entities whose meanings are carried entirely by their internal structures and do not depend on the so-called meaning-intentions of their creators.

The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism by Anthony John Harding

toward private, subjective desire. The familiar vacillations of Macbeth in I.vii. are placed against the earlier model of split awareness in Tarquin and are compared to the design of sonnet 129. Each of the chapters lucidly examines the historical, theoretical and prac­ tical implications of the definitions of the central issues: conventions, voice, worldbuilding, and character. While postmodern theoretical approaches speak of the text rather than Shakespeare and are unwilling to fall into the intentional fallacy, Wilson easily marvels at Shakespeare’s “imaginative plurality” (147), which deliberately opens up rather than minimalizes inter­ pretative possibilities. The last chapter, “Boundaries,” is a bold attempt to study the problems of his own methodology, the paradoxes and dilemmas inherent in narrative theory, through the lens of Hamlet. Contemporary narrative theory, Wilson claims, has finally supplied the tools to study, or at least more completely articulate, Shakespeare’s complex use of narrative, and reveal (again) how “problem-filled Shakespeare’s texts actually are” (217). At the end of the chapter, he argues that theory is best regarded as a “question-quest” or as “hyperplay” : a mode of exploration which “follows paths rather than seeks destinations as such” (218), a kind of theoretical negative capability. This is an appropriate ending to a chapter that raises many questions about the limitations of narrative theory, especially the difficult issue of mapping interactive and overlapping semiotic domains and boundaries. Although it scants performance theory’s claims (with many of which I am deeply sympathetic) and presents one side of Shakespeare— as master storyteller not as dramatist — Wilson’s return to Shakespeare’s narrative is very persuasive in positing one possible explanation for Shakespeare’s richness, his continuing popularity, and his comprehensibility to a wide range of readers, both general and professional. “Narrative seduces the vision” (19), Wilson confesses early on in his insightful book, and it makes us see the plays differently. He’s right. ire n a R. m a k a r y k / University of Ottawa Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995). xvi, 289. $39.95 cloth. The réanimation of traditional mythological elements in Romantic poetry has always been recognized as an enlistment of their fertile figurative pos­ sibilities in the service of certain new cultural and literary ideologies. Far from picturesque or sentimental paganism, or facile redeification of nature, 362 the Romantic appropriation of myth was a strategy perfectly suited to dra­ matic representations of imaginative epistemology in a changing intellectual and political climate. Or so we have felt able to say in hindsight. And now Anthony Harding provides strong historical confirmation that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did understand their reconstructions of fa­ miliar mythology as strategic interventions in that struggle. More generally, Harding urges in his Introduction a revival of myth crit­ icism, grounded in the complex reception or process theory developed most fully by Hans Blumenberg in Work on Myth. Lamenting our languished ap­ preciation of the literary uses of myth, Harding acknowledges that they have been “obscured” and rendered “moribund” by a reductive modernist univer­ salizing archetypalism and “escape from history” he especially associates with the influence of Frye. The means of recovery is presumably a much subtler, harder, and more dynamically historicized Blumenbergian myth criticism that affirms the metaphoricity, the contingency, and the alwaysalready -opportunistic secondariness of any supposed invocation of (“working on” ) traditional belief systems. Harding’s first chapter, for example, identifies in the calculated weird­ ness of themes, language, atmosphere, and endless self-interpreting in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a specific and subversive engagement with tendencies in late-Enlightenment comparative mythography. At issue in this background of controversy were the rival claims of natural and revealed religion, and syncretic theory about “primitive” belief, shamanic vision, and other traditions. Dovetailing as these debates did with Coleridge’s own curiosity about unusual mental states of possession or inspiration and the authenticity or credibility of the poetic imagination, and with his own theological sympathies, they become the basis for what Harding calls “a rad­ ically indeterminate poem about the very nature of myth” (56). Harding’s later chapter on the polysemous “Christabel” turns by...

Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy

Despite criticisms, Allen Forte's theory of atonal music remains a widely used basis for analyzing atonal music, particularly that of Schoenberg. A re-examination of Forte's premises questions whether his method is suitable for the analysis of Schoenberg's music. Schoenberg's manuscripts and writings lack any evidence that Schoenberg intentionally composed with pitch-class sets. In the past, the practice of justifying analytical observations by recourse to the composer's intentions has led some to reject the findings, invoking the intentional fallacy. However, the intentional fallacy has been hotly disputed and should not be used to reject all uses of the composer's intentions. Indeed, certain kinds of statements not only permit but mandate consideration of the composer's intentions. A close examination of Forte's analysis of Schoenberg's op. 11 no. 1 reveals that his analysis fails the criterion of testability. An alternative analytical approach is proposed, one which is more in conformity with what is known of Schoenberg's compositional thought from the period. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:44:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy

Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy

The Death of Art: On Kuspit's The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist

The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Donald Kuspit, 1993, New York: Cambridge University Press, 175 pages. which his reviews of hundreds of works of visual art have appeared in major art magazines and in Art Criticism, the journal he edits. Kuspit is an art historian, philosopher, and art critic who is trained in psychoanalysis and well-versed in postpsychoanalytic thought. He employs concepts from Freud, Fromm, Winnicott, and Kohut-along with his own contributions to psychobiography and psychodynamic personality theory-to explicate the shift that has taken place from avant-garde to postmodern art. His approach to criticism focuses the same kind of attention on visual art and artists that has long been given to literature and writers. The book brings together a cultural critique of capitalism and of postmodemism with a penetrating psychological analysis of the cult phenomena that pervade the contemporary art world. Kuspit is keenly aware of the narcissistic dangers that abound for artists who attempt to shape an identity while living in a culture that values celebrity over authenticity, and surface over substance. Kuspit's writing is rich and expressive. His method is more aligned with what Baudelaire called poetic as opposed to mathematical criticism (1846/1964, p. 38). It is criticism that attends to what the artist evokes-not just what the artist's work signifies. Because he is as comfortable in the art world of Soho as he is in the academic settings of Cornell University and The State University of New York at Stony Brook where he teaches, his style is both hip and scholarly. Kuspit begins with the assumption that most avantgarde art has a therapeutic intention. He further posits that As an artist and psychologist, I have certain expectations for the art criticism I read, expectations that are not easily fulfilled. I look for writing about art that enhances my experience of art works and that deepens my understanding of artists, without doing injustice to either. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to do injustice to both. At its worst, art criticism can unwittingly reduce the experience of the sublime and beautiful to mere perception, of creativity to ordinary behavior. It can also carry interpretation too far, committing deterministic reductions and intentional fallacies and risking either romanticizing or pathologizing the artist. (Positivism and Freudianism have both taken a toll on our understanding of modern art.) What I need, therefore, is balanced art criticism that is both sensitive to the subtle phenomenology of aesthetic perception and that leaves the psyche of the artist intact. Good art criticism also meets more general needs. It helps us understand why we like what we like. It gives meaning to our preferences and interests. Moreover, it puts things in context: It creates a historical and cultural backdrop for what we see. It also allows us to see more, or more clearly. It reveals a previously hidden order of perception or a new perspective, orienting us toward experiences in the world-and in ourselves-that we might otherwise miss. The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist meets many of these needs. It does so because Kuspit has successfully integrated aesthetic and psychological perspectives. The book makes explicit Kuspit's theory of 20th-century art, a theory evolved over several decades during neo-avant-garde, or postmodem art at once mocks and denies the possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and

The Artist's Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation

A formal claim was made in the mid- 20th century that the goal of art conservation is to present the artwork as the artist intended it to be seen. Dispute over this claim among conservators and art historians involved differences of perspective on the relative roles of science and art history in the interpretation of artist's intent. A separate but concurrent debate among philosophers, art critics, and literary critics was sparked by publication of “The Intentional Fallacy,” a scholarly article discrediting appeals to the intentions of artists and authors in art and literary criticism. In this separate debate, difficulty in the evaluation and application of artist's intent was traced to ambiguity of the term “intent.” The author discusses 11 variations of its meaning and puts the issues surrounding artist's intent together in the contexts of art conservation. He also presents more recent viewpoints in the social sciences that associate issues of artist's intent with the role of the artist in the continued existence of the artwork. The writings of contemporary philosophers contribute useful perspectives on the essential nature of art and the autonomy of artworks from their creators. The author finds that the interpretation and application of artist's intent is an interdisciplinary task and that its evaluation in conservation contexts is limited to consideration of distinctive stylistic characteristics that demonstrate the correlated individuality of artists and their work.

The Artist's Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation

The Artist's Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation

Beyond the Intentional Fallacy: Art Criticism and the Ethnography of Aboriginal Acrylic Painting

Visual Anthropology ReviewVolume 10, Issue 1 p. 10-43 Beyond the Intentional Fallacy: Art Criticism and the Ethnography of Aboriginal Acrylic Painting Fred Myers, Fred Myers The Department of Anthropology at New York University.Search for more papers by this author Fred Myers, Fred Myers The Department of Anthropology at New York University.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1994 https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1994.10.1.10AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume10, Issue1March 1994Pages 10-43 RelatedInformation

Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (review)

226Philosophy and Literature In the brief, sweepingEpilogue, Westbrookcalls not for more Deweyan theory but for more Deweyan practice—though this is expressed only as a wish rather than a plan of action. This is partly because no book can do everything. But it is also because Westbrook's focus on politics misses Dewey's deeper concerns with individual and social arrangements and values that give rise to this politics. Similarly, Westbrook's focus on political activism does not penetrate Dewey's deeper grasp ofcritical philosophy that informs its changing activist expressions. While indispensable for specialists, this book is more broadly important for readers of Philosophy and Literature. First, it highlights the philosophical and political differences between Dewey's pragmatism and Richard Rorty's now more familiar neo-pragmatism, demonstrating the politically radical and immensely relevant character of this pragmatism and contrasting it to now more fashionable literary and philosophical theories (that are radical primarily only in theory and in the safety of the academy). It thus should send readers back to Dewey. Second, it recovers in a sustained and compelling manner the possibility that humanities scholars might again become public intellectuals, and thus realize Dewey's demand that the point of pragmatism is not to render theory practical but instead to render practice intelligent. This should send readers back to the future. University of OregonJohn J. Stuhr Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema, by Tom Conley; 250 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, $39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper. In Film HieroglypL·, Professor Tom Conley offers a detailed analysis of nine films (with allusions to a number of others) that interrogates the conventional experience of reading narrative. His use of the hieroglyph as a central image is a canny one since he defines the hieroglyph as a figure, "a writing that unites and divides word and image; that invokes memory to recall analogous forms of legibility and meaning, which serve and contradict what is before our eyes; that fashions rebuses or unforeseen combinations of pictures and writing that are controlled neither by the film nor by the viewer" (p. x). Thus, without betraying the materiality of film and narrative, Conley examines this area of "legibility" beyond the control of the text and the spectator, an area of rich allusions and deceptive illusions in which the text and the unconscious meet in complicitous subversions. The book that results is a heady fantasy of words, a Reviews227 fantasy of reading parts of words, single letters, puns, doubled/tripled and further multiplied meanings where socially accepted notions are countered, and the secret programs of the personal and historical are free to emerge. For Conley, this scenario is played out in the "iconic writing within the field of the moving image" (p. ix). He examines the graphic elements (titles, credits, maps, messages, signs) that are both pervasive in cinema and "foreign" to it. These elements therefore define the image because of"their own alterity within cinema" (p. xxxi). The exegeses of these graphisms promote a tendency to read against the linearity of narrative and its most readily accessible interpretations. Conley finds the lesson of modernist, experimental texts in his treatment of Hollywood films whose "icons can betray and invert the Hollywood model" (p. xxx). Literal-minded readers will be aggravated by Conley's radical explosion of the intentional fallacy. But if the author sees the erotic and the excremental everywhere, his arguments are persuasive in their patient reasoning and the elegance of their linkages and allusions. The titular hero of Boudu sauvé des eaux, a character who has difficulty reading, invades the home, shop, and life ofa bookseller. As Boudu, the outsider, the asocial figure, moves between image and various modes of discourse, he "reveals the gaps that produce illusions of meaning in cinema" (p. 190). In Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, a neon sign, "Jewelry," bears the film's specifically sexualized narrative space of the El, the genocide of the Jews (the film was released in 1945), the "el" of Hell, the monogram of the hero's boss, seen several times in the film, etc. In Raoul Walsh's Manpower, Conley explicates areas of male (homo)sexuality undreamed of by the stars...

The Receptive Circuit and the Mise en scene in/of La Estrella de Sevilla

An important collection of essays on post-structuralist theory that appeared less than a decade ago carries the general title Displacement and the claim of its editor that this term, although perhaps less frequently used in an explicit sense by the avatars of deconstruction and other post-structuralist schools, succinctly characterizes all the activity of literary theory of the 1970s and early 80s (1-17). Although the short half-life of contemporary critical discourse immediately suggests that by now the concepts developed in this volume have also undergone their own form of displacement, a case may well be made for the validity of such a notion if it is accepted that newer critical approaches have not revolutionized but rather have subverted-that is, have displaced instead of replaced-the previous discourse. Rather than establishing an original or revolutionary position, the contemporary scene has been dominated by a series of displacements: the displacement of the values of logocentrism in deconstruction; the displacement of the formalist intentional and affective fallacies in phenomenological methodologies; and the general displacement of anything smacking of subjectivity in its traditional sense from a variety of arenas which feature prominently psychoanalytic theory, feminist theories, and often these in combination. The theoretical study of the relation of dramatic text to performance and reception has also invoked strategies of displacement that have undermined the dominance of text-centered