= one of the main points of the lecture |
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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
- Reminder: online demo
of reading quizz
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Critiques of the General Communicational Paradigm
of "Transmission":
The Sociological Critique
- Remember the claims that Shannon and Weaver's information
theory made for "generality"
- Thought Experiment from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz's
The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 6-7 (based on work
by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle): winking:
- John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, "The
Social Life of Documents":
"Undoubtedly, this metaphor [the conduit or transmission
metaphor] captures important aspects of communications technologies.
But it simultaneously hides others. As new technologies take
us through major transformations in the way we use documents,
it becomes increasingly important to look beyond the conduit
image. We need to see the way documents have served not simply
to write, but also to underwrite social interactions; not simply
to communicate, but also to coordinate social practices. By
following research that has gone beyond the limits set by the
conduit metaphor, this essay attempts to bring into view a broader
idea of the document and to emphasize how and why it has a future
as well as a past."
"Seen this way, shared documents within communities are
in many ways simply the grounds for a fight, merely the pre-text
for agreement. Providing a shared context for constructing meaning,
documents are the beginning rather than the end of the process
of negotiation."
- Daniel Chandler, "The
Transmission Model of Communication" (1995)
(see excerpts)
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Cleanth Brooks
from "The Heresy of Paraphrase," in his The Well Wrought Urn:
Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947)
The structure
meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations;
and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of
balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.
But even here one needs to make important qualifications: the
principle is not one which involves the arrangement of the various
elements into homogenous groupings, pairing like with like. It
unites the like with the unlike. It does not unite them, however,
by the simple process of allowing one connotation to cancel out
another nor does it reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony
by a process of subtraction. The unity is not a unity of the sort
to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate
to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative;
it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.
The attempt to
deal with a structure such as this may account for the frequent
occurrence in the preceding chapters of such terms as ambiguity,
paradox, complex of attitudes, and—most frequent of all,
and perhaps most annoying to the reader—irony. (p.
962)
The conventional terms are much worse than inadequate: they are
positively misleading in their implication that the poem constitutes
a "statement" of some sort, the statement being true
or false, and expressed more or less clearly or eloquently or
beautifully; for it is from this formula that most of the common
heresies about poetry derive. (p. 962)
For the imagery and the rhythm are not merely the instruments
by which this fancied core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase
is directly rendered. Even in the simplest poem their mediation
is not positive and direct. Indeed, whatever statement we may
seize upon as incorporating the "meaning" of the poem,
immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions
with it, warping and twisting it, qualifiying and revising it.
(p. 962)
To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in
the heresy of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by
it, we distort the relation of the poem to its "truth,"
we raise the problem of belief in a vicious and crippling form,
we split the poem between its "form" and its "content"—we
bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition
with science or philosophy or theology. (p. 964)
The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the
rational or logical structure of the "statement" which
we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting:
it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or to move closer still
to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a
poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is
a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations developed
through a temporal scheme.
Or to move still closer
to poetry, the structure of a poem resembles that of a play. . . .
(pp. 964-65)
The characteristic unity of a poem (even of those poems which
may accidentally possess a logical unity as well as this poetic
unity) lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated
to a total and governing attitude. In the unified poem, the poet
has "come to terms" with his experience. The poem does
not merely eventuate in a logical conclusion. The conclusion of
the poem is the working out of the various tensions—set up
by whatever means—by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The
unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents
an equilibrium of forces, not a formula. It is "proved"
as a dramatic conclusion is proved: by its ability to resolve
the conflicts which have been accepted as the données
of the drama. (p. 966)
If the structure of poetry is a structure of the order described,
that fact may explain (if not justify) the frequency with which
I have had to have recourse . . . to terms like
irony and paradox. . . . irony
is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification
which the various elements in a context receive from the context. . . .
Morever, irony is our most general term for indicating
that recognition of incongruities—which, again, pervades
all poetry to a degree far beyond what our conventional criticism
has been heretofore willing to allow. (pp. 966-67)
There should be no mystery as to why this must be so. The terms
of science are abstract symbols which do not change under the
pressure of the context. They are pure (or aspire to be pure)
denotations; they are defined in advance. They are not to be warped
into new meanings. But where is the dictionary which contains
the terms of a poem? . . . [T]he word, as the poet
uses it, has to be conceived of, not as a discrete particle of
meaning, but as a potential of meaning, a nexus or cluster of
meanings. (p. 967)
[The poet's] task is finally to unify experience. He must return
to us the unity of experience itself as man knows it in his own
experience. The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of
reality—in this sense, at least, it is an "imitation"—by
being an experience rather than any mere statement about
experience or any mere abstraction from experience. (p. 968)
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John Crowe Ransom
from The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,
1941)
What sort of liberties does the poet take with a discourse when
he sets it to meter? And what sort of discourse is prepared to
permit those liberties?
An argument which admits of alteration in order that it may receive
a meter must be partly indeterminate. The argument cannot be maintained
exactly as determined by its own laws, for it is going to be un-determined
by the meter.
Conversely, a metrical form must be partly indeterminate if it
proposes to embody an argument. It is useless to try to determine
it closely in advance, for the argument will un-determine it. . . .
I offer a graph, which will be of course an oversimplification,
to show the parts which meaning and meter play in the act of composition.
DM stands for determinate meaning, or such of the
intended meaning as succeeds in being adhered to; it may be fairly
represented by the logical paraphrase of the poem. IM stands for
indeterminate meaning, or that part of the final meaning which
took shape not according to its own logical necessity but under
metrical compulsion; it may be represented by the poem's residue
of meaning which does not go into the logical paraphrase. DS stands
for the determinate sound-structure, or the meter; and IS stands
for whatever phonetic character the sounds have assumed which
is in no relation to the meter. . . .
For the sake of the pictorial image, I assume the final poem to
be the body of language lying between the intersecting arcs at
the center; the one arc (on the left) representing the extreme
liberties which meaning has taken with meter, and the other arc
(on the right) representing the extreme liberties which meter
has taken with meaning. . . .
[Poetry] is a discourse which does not bother too much about the
perfection of its logic; and does bother a great deal, as if it
were life and death, about the positive quality of that indeterminate
thing which creeps in by the back door of metrical necessity.
I suggest the closest possible study of IM, the indeterminate
meaning.
(pp. 298-303)
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Charles Bernstein, "You" (1983)
Time wounds all heals, spills through
with echoes neither idea nor lair
can jam. The door of your unfolding
starts like intervening vacuum, lush
refer to accidence or chance of
lachrymose fixation made
mercurial as the tors in crevice lock
dried up like river made the rhymes
to know what ocean were unkempt
or hide's detain the wean of
hide's felicity depend.
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References
- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973)
- The New Criticism
- I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition,
by Twelve Southerners, introduction by Louis D.
Rubin, Jr., biographical essays by Virginia Rock (1930;
rpt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977)
- John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time, The
Fugitives and Agrarians: The Nashville Groups of the
1920's and 1930's, and the Writing of John Crowe Ransom,
Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1965)
- Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians
(Knoxville, Tenn.: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1988)
- Louis Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary
History (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1959)
- John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk,
Conn.: New Directions, 1941)
- Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding
Poetry, 1st ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1938)
- Robert Penn Warren, "A Conversation with Cleanth Brooks,"
in The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and
His Work, ed. Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State Univ. Press, 1976)
- W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon: Studies
in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky
Press, 1954)
- Some Works about the New Critics:
- John Guillory, "Ideology and Canonical
Form: The New Critical Canon," in Cultural Capital:
The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 134-75
- Ren้ Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism,
1750-1950, Vol. 6, American Criticism, 1900-1950
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986 [esp. chapter 8 and
following]
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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