Privileged Reader Research Articles

Catching the Invisible: Translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations

Abstract: This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams’s words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new formations of women’s thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text.

Catching the Invisible: Translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations

Abstract: This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams’s words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new formations of women’s thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text.

Like a finely-oiled machine: Self-help and the elusive goal of hormone balance

For over twenty years, medical doctors writing self-help books for major trade publishers have promoted hormone balance as a desirable physical state, particularly for women. To understand how hormone balance is presented as an actualizable health objective, we examine self-help hormone balance books written by medical doctors and published between 2003 and 2021 by major American trade presses. Books deploy a model of endocrine determinism that defines most health conditions as the consequence of imbalanced hormones, particularly for women whose bodies are said to be perpetually at risk of imbalance. The pathway to balanced hormones, we find, involves intensive lifestyle changes and consumption practices that are unachievable except for the most privileged readers. Our analysis reveals hormone balance to be a fantasy biological state that reflects a fundamental tension in neoliberal modernity, that of bodies breaking down from the strain modern life places on individuals, and bodies needing to accomplish more under ever-demanding social and economic conditions. We conclude with a reflection on the semantic flexibility of “balance” as an ambiguous term that can signify the very opposite of harmony and moderation, and the role of medical doctors as self-help entrepreneurs.

Castration Desire: Less Is More in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

ABSTRACT According to orthodox psychoanalysis, “castration” is always negative: to lose the “phallus” is to lose everything. Against this account, this article argues that “castration desire” offers a model for sustainable relationality on an imminently eco-apocalyptic earth. Using the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) to explicate castration desire, this article posits that Kazuo Ishiguro's organ-donating clones – in acquiescing to their own diminishment, and thereby signalling a more other-oriented relationality – teach a comparatively privileged reader how to desire castration. This article moreover demonstrates how the less-is-more ethic of castration desire can help theorise the intersection of the environmental humanities and queer studies in order to help unpick the acquisitive logic of a globalised world that otherwise has us on a track to ecological ruin.

TALKING BACK: SHARON DODUA OTOO'S HERR GRÖTTRUP SETZT SICH HIN AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF RESISTANCE

ABSTRACTSharon Dodua Otoo has called the artistic production of Black and of Colour writers in contemporary Germany ‘eine Praxis des Widerstands’. Here I read her Bachmann‐prizewinning story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin through the lens of Jamika Ajalon's conception of a fugitive archetype of resistance, which is, I argue, simultaneously a working definition of a literary work of art. I also read the story as a literary investigation of the phenomenon Miranda Fricker has called epistemic injustice (‘a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’). Fricker's articulation of epistemic injustice has helped spark an ‘epistemic turn’ across disciplines. I refer particularly to José Medina's development of her work in his Epistemology of Resistance (2013). Subaltern subjects, argues Medina, can gain an epistemic advantage because they have to work harder cognitively, maintaining ‘two cognitive perspectives simultaneously’. Theorists of epistemic injustice strikingly often rely for their arguments on literary fiction, which has long been alerting its readers to epistemic injustice and its painful or lethal consequences. Otoo, I argue, uses storytelling and humour to offer both the epistemically privileged Gröttrups and her epistemically privileged readers opportunities to understand and transcend their cognitive limitations.

Anthropocene Presences and the Limits of Deferral: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book

Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate.

The Royal Provenance and Tudor Courtly Reading of a Wycliffite Bible

This analysis of Cambridge University Library, MS Mm.2.15 indicates some ways in which the English Bible may have been read by social elites during the mid-Tudor period. The presence of the Cambridge manuscript within the royal collection followed a precedent set by several of Edward VI's predecessors, who owned manuscript copies of the Wycliffite Bible. The exclusive status of the Middle English scriptural text changed after printed English bibles became more available, beginning with William Tyndale's New Testament edition in 1526. Despite this proliferation of printed versions of the Bible in English, however, the Cambridge manuscript indicates that privileged readers showed a readiness to adapt older manuscript copies of the text for their use.

L’invention d’une géométrie pure au 17e siècle: Pascal et son lecteur Leibniz

In the 17th century, Leibniz and Pascal assumed that geometry was the science of space itself instead of extended objects. Leibniz invented the geometry of situation while Pascal developed the study of perspective and the theory of conics. They both defended that geometry might be “pure”. Besides, Leibniz was the privileged reader of Pascal’s geometrical manuscripts and he started his own researches on the geometry of situation just after reading Pascal’s essays. Then, what kind of relation does exist between the new geometry invented by Leibniz and the geometry of conics and perspective presented by Pascal? And were they really pure geometries? Almost all Pascal’s papers on geometry of conics and perspective being nowadays lost, I thus deal in this essay with Leibniz’s notes on Pascal’s manuscripts in order to compare their geometries and to understand what a pure geometry consists in.

A Genre for Justice: Life Writing and Undocumented Migration in Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope

Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope (2007) to date constitutes one of only two published memoirs by a woman who entered the United States as an undocumented migrant from Mexico; it is the only one which acknowledges this status openly. This article suggests that Rosay manipulates the life writing genre in order to inform her white American audience about undocumented migrants’ humanity and to call them to social and political action. Rosay writes in the form of the testimonio—traditionally connected with collective activism—but markets her book as a memoir appealing to American individualism. As a trickster text—a narrative that plays with genre boundaries to humanise undocumented migrants—Journey of Hope pushes readers to see undocumented immigrants as economic refugees who should not be excluded based on stereotypes but granted basic human rights. I explore specifically the rhetorical tools Rosay employs to speak to her privileged readers’ values and to alleviate their concerns about undocumented migrants as a social and cultural threat. In reviving the testimonio as a trickster text with new purpose for Latina immigrant writers, Rosay’s work shows how migration patterns are gendered and underscores immigrant women’s fight against oppression.

After Reading Selected Short Stories of South Chosŏn

After Reading Selected Short Stories of South Chosŏn Mo Yan (bio) There are seventeen short stories by sixteen authors in Selected Short Stories of South Chosŏn, a book composed of four hundred and seventy thousand characters. Published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House in February 1983, this collection was probably the first large-scale introduction of Korean literature into China. According to the copyright page, thirty-nine thousand copies were printed, a large number even by today’s standards. We can also see an “inside publication” stamp on the copyright page, which means this book was not sold to the general public through Xinhua Bookstore, but distributed only among libraries of various agencies, readers with special social positions, and high officials through the so-called “Inside Bookstore.” This kind of inside publication went on for some time in China. Even during the Cultural Revolution, influential foreign literary works were translated and offered to a select few special personnel for their “critical reading” through the channel of “inside publication.” The true meaning of “critical” reading is clear when we consider that “inside” film viewing was regarded as a “privilege” at the time. There is a lengthy “Afterword” as in all books published through “inside publication.” The real purpose of this “Afterword” is for the translator to prove that he has strictly followed official guidelines. Hidden behind the obvious intention of translator [End Page 209] and publisher to watchfully steer even the few privileged readers in the right direction was, naturally, their desire to protect themselves. At the time, China still called Korea “South Chosŏn.” This afterword begins with a brief overview of the modern history of the Chosŏn peninsula. It then goes on to describe the South Korean people’s suffering under the despotic rule of America and the South Chosŏn government, and expresses hope for the South Chosŏn people’s revolution with the phrase “Wherever there is oppression, there is also resistance,” as was usually the case with afterwords of this nature. Only after this does the translator offer an overview of South Chosŏn literature. Although the usual political slogans critical of South Chosŏn are found throughout this section, readers can still gain a general understanding of literary development in South Chosŏn. I bought this book at a bookstore in 1990. There was a scarlet stamp of a library of a certain agency on its title page. I didn’t buy it because I was interested in South Chosŏn literature. I bought it because its cover was tastefully designed and it was cheap. After I brought it home, I began flipping through it idly. But pretty soon I found myself completely absorbed and I finished it in one sitting. This book taught me that Korean literature is rich, works by authors of older generations are full of vitality, and all the stories contained impressive critical attitudes toward life and reality. More recent stories published in the 1960s and 1970s by Korean writers of younger generations were already so avant-garde it was clear that they studied and referred to Western literature. This book let me know that Chinese authors in the 1980s were simply following in the footsteps of Korean writers of previous decades. Kim Tong-in, the author of “Paettaragi,” the first story in the book, would be 108 years old if he were still alive. Although he has already passed away, he would be very happy to know that a Chinese author has read his story. This is probably a reason why a writer would be satisfied with his career. Good writing survives its author. In other words, a writer can extend his life through his [End Page 210] books. “Paettaragi” is a beautiful story beginning with descriptions of emotions and landscapes. Then, a gloomy, grief-stricken seaman appears, trailing a mournful song, and begins telling his sorrowful story. He is someone who plunged his own life into hell. He had a beautiful wife. They were rich and they loved each other. But love begets jealousy. He began to suspect a relationship between his wife and his younger brother, and became jealous of them, as if possessed, and...

As armadilhas da memória: história e mito em Emir Rodríguez Monegal

Um homem jovem, de uma família da classe média, converte-se em intelectual. Esse homem ocupa um espaço central na cultura literária do seu país (Uruguai) e, aos poucos, na América Latina. Mas, ele carrega consigo um drama pessoal, uma marca de origem, que sempre procura encobrir e que, no entanto, sua própria escrita acaba por desvendar. Este artigo explora a(s) história(s) e os caminhos de Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1921-1985), um dos principais especialistas em literatura latino-americana no século XX. Em especial, Monegal foi um leitor privilegiado, desde os anos 1940, da obra de Jorge Luis Borges, cuja escrita foi fundamental, também, para que o crítico pudesse compreender-se a si mesmo.

Broken signs: The architectonic translation of Peirce's fragments

Peirce's writings are understood and translated in their interweaved fragments without final form. The broken and unbroken fragmentary items of language correspond to degrees of tone, token, and type as Peirce's building blocks of his three superlative categories. The collective and private meanings of Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds are embodied in vague bricolages and grounding paraphrases toward the (maybe idealized) whole manuscript version. Semio-translation, the process of reading and translating from one language into another, speaks about metaphrase, periphrase, and superphrase in order to construct the proposed verbal meaning, corresponding to the judgmental semiosis of Peirce's writings. The text of his entire manuscripts (in edited and unedited versions) give the readers (including translators as privileged readers) the opportunity of various degrees of justification and doubt of possible meanings, casted on what is the fragmentariness, elementariness, and holism of his oeuvre. Using the available translations of Peirce's English writings into German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, and other languages, translation criticism perceives different upward and downward habits at work, creating acceptable and unacceptable solutions in the target language of philosophical and narrative genres. As practical examples of the degrees of formal and dynamical translations, interlingual and intralingual translations of Peirce's terms and sentences such as ‘lithium,’ ‘university,’ ‘apple pie,’ ‘musement,’ ‘decapitated frog,’ and the versions of the ‘pragmatic maxims’ — all of them fallibly (and sometimes fallaciously) translated into single and replicated fragments of scripture composed by various translators into various languages are discussed.

Erasing Cerinthus: Sulpicia and Her Audience

Erasing Cerinthus:Sulpicia and Her Audience Lee T. Pearcy Maria Wyke, Allison Sharrock, and others have recently reminded us that in Latin elegy, loving and writing are often figured as the same activity, as are being loved and being read.1 The elegists' masculine voices constitute their mistresses and their books simultaneously. In the self-centered world of elegy, problems of love and gender blend into and feed on problems of authorship and genre.2 The beloved puella docta becomes an ideal reader. When Propertius imagines his literary fate and posthumous audience, he pictures a very private recitation to an audience of one: me iuvet in gremio doctae legisse puellae, / auribus et puris scripta probasse mea ("Let me enjoy reciting my poems in the lap of a scholarly girl and having her approve them with the pure taste of her ears," Prop. 2.13.11–12).3 The puella becomes the primary audience through which the elegist creates his erotic and literary persona. Other readers include an assortment of individual addressees, human and divine, but the elegist can also imagine an audience wider than the private world of assignation, friendship, and prayer. Propertius imagines a throng of writers following his triumphal example (Prop. 3.1.11–12) and an envious crowd of readers whose detractions will be erased by his posthumous fame (21–22). Ovid imagines an extensive readership of troubled lovers: atque a sollicito multus amante legar (Am.1.15.38). Loving entails writing, and writing entails not only being read, but also being published. The masculine elegist's emotions are not a private phenomenon. This masculine elegiac ego constructs his hard-hearted, enticing mistress as he writes his poems and shares her and them with a public readership. The puella docta, however, remains his primary audience, and what might be called the wider erotic public, the community of lovers and readers, becomes his secondary audience. What happens to these two audiences when the first person of Latin erotic poetry becomes feminine? The poems of and around Sulpicia, even though most are better called epigrams than elegies, allow us to try to answer. Just as Cynthia is the key to understanding Propertius, our answer will begin with Cerinthus. It will be a different answer than the one given for the masculine elegist who writes Cynthia into his poetry and by doing so, creates his elegiac persona. Sulpicia writes Cerinthus out of her poetry and as she deconstructs him, creates her distinctive revision of the elegiac ego. [End Page 31] In poem 7, Tandem venit amor, Sulpicia works against masculine elegy's convention that the poet's lover is both primary subject and primary reader; instead, she claims amor and fama as her subject.4 The character we have been calling "Cerinthus," in fact, does not appear by name in this poem, but only as a demonstrative: illum.5 Venus has brought him in response to her poetry (exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis / attulit, 7.3). Unlike the male elegist's beloved, however, Cerinthus is not the first possible reader of Sulpicia's poetry. She does not, she declares, want to entrust anything to sealed tablets so that no one will read it before her lover. Sulpicia thus denies Cerinthus his place as primary and privileged reader (ne legat id nemo quam meus ante, 7.8).6 In a characteristic, hypotactic litotes,7 Sulpicia here suggests an inversion of masculine elegy's usual relationship between the beloved as ideal reader and the public audience who are witness to the elegist's experience. If Sulpicia's primary readers are her public audience, then to read Sulpicia's poetry is to take part in experiences that, in the normal world of masculine elegy, should be enjoyed first by the poet's beloved primary reader and only then overheard by a secondary, public audience. If loving and writing are figured as the same activity, as are being loved and being read, then this experience must be understood as in some sense erotic. Sulpicia's primary audience, then, consists of a public defined by shared erotic experience. In the second couplet of Tandem venit amor, Sulpicia tells how she had sought her love from...

Ilustrando la Nueva Espana, Texto e imagen en el Periquillo Sarniento de Fernandez de Lizardi

Ilustrando la Nueva Espana, Texto e imagen en el Periquillo Sarniento de Fernandez de Lizardi. Por Beatriz de Alba-Koch. Caceres: U de Extremadura, 1999. 190 pages. Beatriz de Alba-Koch's title promises something other than what the book delivers. Thirty illustrations, which reproduce pictures from the first edition (1816) of the Periquillo but also works by Spanish and Mexican painters and engravers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, would seem to corroborate the author's interest in showing how the novel set parameters for mirroring New Spain. Chapter iv is devoted entirely to looking at the Periquillo's illustrations and seeing how they reveal, in particular, the colony's racial diversity. Instead, the author declares in the introduction: El presente estudio busca restituir al Periquillo a la sociedad y la cultura que le dio origen, dando especial enfasis no solo a las caracteristicas genericas y a la construction narrativa de la obra, sino a las ideas political del autor expresadas, sobre todo, en su presentation de los conflictos raciales de la Nueva Espania y en su propuesta de una sociedad ideal (2). She is especially concerned with proving the thesis that criollos of Lizardi's day were closely connected to Peninsular cultural and literary traditions because, she says, present-day lizardi scholarship has negated these continuities and thus separated Nueva Espana from the European culture and even Spanish language that formed that world. She blames this orientation on a mistaken application of colonial studies, as formulated by theorists from other worlds, to the colonial situation of Lizardi. Thus, she is at pains in her chapters i and ii to rehearse the genealogy of the picaresque genre in order to reconnect Lizardi with that genre's tradition. She begins by repeating the judgment of Jose Mariano Beristain de Souza, just as the Periquillo was going to press, that lizardi's novel bore a resemblance to the Guzman de Alfarache. Most critics have seized on this early linkage as evidence of Lizardi's indebtedness to that Golden Age variety of novel, finding it easy to classify the work in this way. However, no matter how extensive the list of critical authorities one invokes to justify the assertion that the Periquillo is a picaresque novel, the fact remains that that term was not in use in Lizardi's day; instead lizardi described his work as part of a satirical tradition, thus affirming antecedents in the classical and various national traditions of Europe (Spain, but also Italy and France), yet also opening up connections with a popular oral tradition in Mexico. De Alba-Koch herself says (14) that it has been the critic, a privileged reader, who has determined that the Periquillo is a picaresque novel. …

Survival in atomic spectrometry

WHEN you have lived all of your 28 years in Holland, January is the best month to arrive in Florida. In 1966 transatlantic traffic or post-dots was gaining momentum and inspired many a contemporary Cassandra to toll the alarm bell against the brain-drain from Europe to the U.S. Having obtained my Ph.D on a now extinct atomic emission source known as the direct current carbon arc I was only too happy to let my brains drain, but where to go? It was Marvin Margoshes from the National Bureau of Standards (now renamed NINT) who with apologies for not being allowed to hire foreigners drew my attention to an obscure young professor by the name of JIM WINEFORDNER. It was one of the best pieces of advice I have received in my life. Jim had just embarked on his astounding publishing career with one or two papers on a phenomenon called flame atomic fluorescence spectrometry in a time when Alan Walsh’s atomic absorption had barely reached Europe and flame emission with noisy, total consumption burners was still very much en vogue. Soon after I arrived in Gainesville, I discovered that science was not the only area where Jim was far ahead of his times. Already then he put to practice what many years later became a fashionable scientific theory and a more dubious management tool: thriving on chaos. He had surrounded himself with a handful of graduate students from all over the U.S. with accents that gave an entirely new meaning to the concept of a common language. My boast that I was able to understand half of the lunch conversation added to my already substantial prestige as the first post-dot, and from a continent as remote as Europe. Those were happy days! We were all in our twenties except for Jim who had already passed the magical border of 30, where most people start to worry about their career. Not Jim. He joined in our lunch debates, commented on the next football game, organized beach parties, and shared our excitement over scientific innovations that would shatter the ancien regime of arcs and sparks. Out of his and similar groups elsewhere would grow a new generation of atomic spectroscopists who started their own series of conferences on atomic absorption spectrometry that would challenge and ultimately in the eighties take over the traditional Colloquium Spectroscopicurn Internationale (the Latin was Greek to us). There was one other weakness Jim shared with us. It is a delicate subject that I would prefer to overlook, but I must respect the stern policy of this learned journal to give an honest account of all relevant data. It was the interest in the opposite sex, and the privileged readers of Jim’s quarterly newsletter know that he has never really recovered from the affliction. In his defence I must remind you that the Florida climate does not call for heavy clothing and that the fashion in 1966 offered little solace. What else did we study? Atomic fluorescence, of course, and atomic absorption with continuum sources in long light pipes. Two miserable graduates worked long hours to tame microwave or electrodeless discharge lamps as they were then known, the fate of which has been amusingly described by HERB KAHN [l]. And TOM O’HAVER

De Helft Is Goed Genoeg!

The Dutch linguist Knuvelder once said that a writer generally succeeds in putting on paper only 90% of what he intended to write, that a reader understands only 90% of what he reads. A translator, who may be considered a privileged reader, understands therefore 81% of the original thought, translates it for 73% in order to make the new reader understand 64% of it. If we suppose that the average reader is not a privileged reader, we may assume that the reader of a translation understands more or less half of what was said in the foreign language. Partly this is due to the fact that language is culture-specific. A Dutchman will think that a Russian "dacha" is something like a second home, but is unable to make a representation of it, no more than a Russian is able to imagine what a "café" is, let alone the typically Dutch "bruin café". Like a Dutchman, a Russian will stand in line on Saturday morning in the supermarket, but unlike the Dutchman who will just have the time to read a small newspaper item before it is his turn, the Russian can buy another novel when he is half the line, because he has finished War & Peace while waiting. That poses the question: how should one translate Dacha into Dutch or second home into Russian, how should one translate "bruin café" or "stand in line"?

Studies in Henry James (review)

R. P. Blackmur. Studies in Henry James. Ed. and with an introduction by Veronica Makowsky. New York: New Directions, 1983. 250 pp. $19.50. pb $9.25. R. P. Blackmur's posthumously coUected essays, Studies in Henry James, is a troubling and timely book. WeU, not quite a book, but a coUation of variously fugitive or fixated texts recording the evolution of "Blackmur's James." This new book, only titularly the one long promised by Blackmur, does not exactly tell us anything we didn't already know about James and perhaps little we hadn't encountered in Blackmur's career-long efforts on behalf of that "aesthetic exile" from American crudity—not even in bringing to light the long, posthumous fragment "The Spoils of Henry James: A Special Case of the Normal," the only piece appearing here for the first time. Still, because it is "Blackmur," this book must be taken into account in any assessment of American literary criticism—then and now, from Blackmur's situation to the present—his problems remain our own. One is of course reminded of the importance of his 1934 introduction to the Prefaces (even if, as the editor must admit, his categories are adapted from Pound's 1918 Little Review tribute), the suggestive elaboration and the dismissal of "executive form" in "The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James" (1951), and the presiding ambivalence of "In the Country of the Blue" (1943), the crucial essay for assessing Blackmur's reading of James. More interesting still is what remains, editorial efforts notwithstanding, Blackmur's failure to finish his book, to have done with that writer who he said represented "the predicament of the sensitive mind during what may be caUed the interregnum between the effective dominance of the old Christian-classical ideal through old European institutions and the rise to rule of the succeeding ideal, whatever history comes to caU it" (91). Indeed, Blackmur is himself a transitional figure, standing between formalism and those recent critics who remain in transit away from New Criticism, using him as their American-made vehicle. For decades Blackmur promised Studies in Henry James, but with each successive essay, with each attempt he made to identify or analyze his near obsession with James, it became clear that his own resistance to system would allow him neither to complete nor to throw over his project of making the selfreflexive novelist the exemplary case of, as weU as for, "The Critic's Job of Work." The notion of James's "felt life," which belies a hope for some manner of counter-system to several reigning orthodoxies, is perfectly consonant with the New Critical autonomy of poetry and the privileged reader. For instance: "Criticism must be concerned first and last—whatever comes between—with the poem as it is read and what it represents is felt. And no amount of physics and physiology can explain the feeling of the things seen as green or even certify their existence, so no amount of linguistic analysis can explain the feeling of the poem" (Form and Value in Modern Poetry [Doubleday, 1957] 358-59). That manifestolike caU to a socially responsible criticism invokes a particularly Jamesian style of thought: "Fortunately, there exist archetypes of unindoctrinated thinking. Let us incline our minds like reflectors to catch the light of the early Plato and the whole of Montaigne. Is not the inexhaustible stimulus and fertility of the Dialogues and Volume 8 145 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 Essays due as much as anything to the absence of positive doctrine?" (FV 340). Written in 1935, in the midst of an engagement with James, that essay seems to appropriate Eliot's ironic comment about the "purity of James' mind." And, while it might be unfair to give that statement another screw, Blackmur himself remained vigilent against "violation by any idea." Indeed, what gives his writings on James their special urgency is his desire on the one hand to celebrate James's freedom from ideology and, on the other hand, to extract a mastering idea from the novels. When he outlined his job, James's criticism and novels were the "form" from which "values" could be gleaned...

Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics

SASSUME IN THIS PAPER that the main problem of hermeneutics is that of interpretation. Not interpretation in any undetermined sense of the word, but interpretation with two qualifications: one concerning its scope or field of application, the other its epistemological specificity. As concerns the first point, I should say that there are problems of interpretation because there are texts, written texts, the autonomy of which (as regards either the intention of the author, or the situation of the work, or the destination to privileged readers) creates specific problems; these problems are usually solved in spoken language by the kind of exchange or intercourse which we call dialogue or conversation. With written texts, the discourse must speak by itself. Let us say, therefore, that there are problems of interpretation because the relation writing-reading is not a particular case of the relation speakinghearing in the dialogical situation. Such is the most general feature of interpretation as concerns its scope or application field. Secondly, the concept of interpretation occurs, at the epistemological level, as an alternative concept opposed to that of explanation (or explication); taken together, they both form a significant contrasting pair, which has given rise to many philosophical disputes in Germany since the time of Schleiermacher and Dilthey; according to that tradition, interpretation has specific subjective implications, such as the involvement of the reader in the process of understanding and the reciprocity between text-interpretation and self-interpretation. This reciprocity is usually known as the hermeneutical circle and has been opposed, mainly by logical positivists, but also for opposite reasons by Romantic thinkers, to the kind of objectivity and to the lack of selfinvolvement which is supposed to characterize a scientific explanation of things. I shall say later to what extent we may be led to amend and even to rebuild on a new basis the opposition between interpretation and explanation. Anyhow, this schematic description of the concept of interpretation