The Reading Experience

Behold the Man

The most important argument James Shapiro makes in his book Contested Will is not that the author of Shakespeare's plays and poems is William Shakespeare (the "Stratford man")--anyone who honestly examines both the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship and the evidence for all of the rival candidates (most notably the Earl of Oxford) can only conclude there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare--but that the whole controversy over authorship has arisen because of the assumption held by so many people that a writer's work is a reflection, direct or indirect, of that writer's life.

Of course, the work is a reflection of the life, in the trivial sense that writers have only their life experiences (including what they've read or imagined) to lean on in producing the work, but the assumption goes farther than this: Events in the work recapitulate events in the life, social circumstances determine both manner and matter. Writers don't just write from their lives, they write about it, and the work can't escape its biographical influences. Once this logic is generally accepted (as Shapiro demonstrates it did under the dominance of Romanticism), it almost becomes inevitable that the "facts" of Shakespeare's life, so mundane as they generally are, become irreconcilable with the extraordinary occurrences in the plays and with the great verbal facility manifest there and in the sonnets. The poorly educated glover's son from Stratford, whose experiences apparently extended no farther than this provincial town and the London theaters, could never have written the great work attributed to him. As Shapiro puts it,

The extent to which so much that now gets written is autobiographical can easily alter the expectations we bring to all kinds of imaginative writing. We now assume that novels necessarily reveal something about a writer's life. . .At the same time, many literary biographies are supplanting the fictional works they are meant to illuminate, to the point where Ariel and The Bell Jar struggle to find a readership that books about Sylvia Plath's suicide now command. In such a climate, it's hard not to assume that literary works--of the past no less than of the present--are inescapably autobiographical.

This has been a blessing for those who deny Shakespeare's authorship, whose claims stand or fall on the core belief that literature is, and always has been, autobiographical. . . .

Thus, the authorship "controversy" is a fiction dreamed up out of a suspicion of fiction the creation of which would seem to be the writer's first task.

If anything, the distorting effects of the belief that fiction is just autobiography slightly altered are even more widespread than Shapiro suggests. Not only are biographies making claims on readers' time that would more appropriately be spent on the subjects' work, but biography has become about the only writing about literature to be reviewed in print book review sections, and, coupled with the focus in academic criticism on sociology and culture, is really the only kind of literature-centered commentary available to interested readers. New biographies are lauded or dismissed according to their capacity to explain "how he did it"--as if appreciating the process of literary creation is more important than appreciating the creation itself. Even this is just a barely disguised desire for a more elevated form of gossip, which is finally and unavoidably the stock-in-trade of all biography and almost always emerges as the contribution a biography makes to the "understanding" of its subject.

That this fascination with the life lived by the author over the purely literary implications of the work can be traced to the rise of Romanticism surely can't mean that Romanticism itself is responsible for the reduction of literature to an illustration of autobiography, recoverable through the research of the biographer. Although Shapiro convincingly maintains that the notion of reading autobiography into an author's work was alien to the literary culture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it's hard to believe that audiences had no interest in the personal details of playwrights' or poets' lives, that the drama-filled life of, say, Christopher Marlowe attracted no attention. Curiosity about other people's lives (real people, not just the "people" depicted in literary works) must surely be a long-standing and universal human characteristic.

But while fiction and drama exploit this curiosity by depicting the lives of imagined people, it is apparently difficult to convince all readers that the integrity of narrative art depends on granting the imagination a free rein. Presumptions that the novelist or dramatist is "really" writing about some real person, including possibly himself, betrays either a distrust in the imagination, a suspicion it promises more than it can deliver, or outright disdain for it as the foundation of literary narrative. This explains the current infatuation with memoir among American readers (and the increase in writers willing to provide it) and the dogged persistence of the Shakespeare deniers. Of course, not all readers who delight in the disguises of the roman a clef or thrill to the juicy memoir are going to be led by their preferences to doubt that Shakespeare among all writers had a vigorous imagination, but the authorship controversy is of a piece with the more general impatience with the transformative role of imagination.

Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly, given his background as a New Historicist), one of the readers who seems skeptical of Shakespeare's imagination is the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose 2004 book, Will in the World, attempts to fashion a biography of Shakespeare by attending closely to echoes and suggestions in the work. Greenblatt's knowledge of Shakespeare, his times, and his plays, is immense, but he unfortunately deploys that knowledge to reinforce connections between the life and the work. Shapiro writes of Will in the World that it

gave [the autobiographical thesis] the seal of approval of the leading American Shakespearean of the day. Greenblatt admits straightaway that 'the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare's life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.' Rather that consider what historical developments gave rise to this conviction, he focuses instead on how firsthand experience can be retrieved from Shakespeare's surviving works, allowing extraordinary access into the poet's desires and anxieties.

I think Shapiro is being rather reticent in criticizing Greenblatt's project. In trying to show that the work actually does confirm Shakespeare's experiences as its source, he only winds up giving support to the assumptions that made the authorship controversy possible. Greenblatt too underestimates the reach of imagination. Why couldn't the primary thing Shakespeare "knew firsthand" be the capabilities of his own imagination? Why couldn't "body and soul" simply be the springs of that imagination? Why isn't this enough?

 

The Horizon of the Sentence

(Continued from previous post)

If in essays such as "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World" and "The Political Economy of Poetry" (The New Sentence, 1987) Ron Silliman contends that New Criticism (presumably Silliman wants New Criticism to stand in for other varieties of formalism as well) puts too much emphasis on author and text in determining the "potential content" of the work, in my opinion he compensates for this failing by in turn giving over too much of the opportunity to "actualize" content to individual readers. Silliman is right to insist that the reading experience must include the reader as part of the process--the reader must be up to the task of apprehending the aesthetic qualities of the text--but in his determination to make poetry the servant of Marxist social reform, Silliman, at least in these theoretical essays, wants the reader's attention so thoroughly directed at the "meaning" a poem might provide that whatever aesthetic effects might accompany it are at best an afterthought, at worst regressive cultural baggage that must be discarded.

Silliman is not advocating for a crudely propagandistic kind of poetry, reducible to polemic and explicit "statements." Indeed, the meaning he wants readers to get from poetry is conveyed indirectly, through its material formal and syntactic procedures. Silliman believes (or at least this is what the Silliman of these essays, written twenty-five years and more ago, believed) that by frustrating the reader's ability to ready "hypotactically" (via transparent language and explicit connections made between parts of a discourse), the reader could be made aware of the way in which capitalist culture maintains its dominance through hypotactic communication. Thus both Silliman's poetry and that which generally came to be called "Language Poetry" employed instead a "paratactic" strategy, by which language refuses transparency and connections are denied (the former achieved mainly by the latter). The notion that parataxis might work to produce worthwhile poetry is far from outlandish (more on this in a later post on Silliman's The Alphabet), but while the disruption of expectations implied by Silliman's poetics could easily enough lead readers to a reconsideration of the assumptions behind conventional definitions of poetry, that this would in turn necessarily lead to increased skepticism about the machinations of capitalism is not a step in logic I can follow.

Silliman's most important exposition of his call for paratactic poetry, "The New Sentence," is largely free of Marxist rhetoric, and offers an account of what such a poetry might be like that even an apologist for New Criticism could take seriously. It is first of all a relatively straightforward and learned history of ideas about the sentence in both linguistics and literary criticism that demonstrates the potential of the sentence as an autonomous unit of language has not really been appreciated. Silliman also discusses a few precursor poets, such as the French symbolists as well as Gertrude Stein, who point to this potential but don't finally fully realize it.

The "new sentence," for Silliman, is one that "has an interior poetic structure in addition to interior ordinary grammatical structure." The "poetic structure" of the poem derives from the poetic structure of the sentences, arranged into paragraphs, a device that "organizes the sentences" but is "a unit of quantity, not logic or argument." In combination, this approach "keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below."

Thus the notion of "language poetry," which in effect forces the reader to attend to the poem's language as it comes, not in relation to the "syllogistic movement" we ordinarily expect between sentences and through the poem as a whole. It is ultimately a kind of prose poetry, and, according to Silliman "the new sentence is the first prose technique to identify the signifier [language itself]. . .as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long been associated with the tyranny of the signified [that to which the language refers], and is the first method capable of incorporating all the levels of language, both below the horizon of the sentence and above. . . ."

Unless by "prose technique" Silliman means specifically techniques used in prose poetry, I really can't accept the assertion that the new sentence is "the first prose technique" to call attention to the signifier as an end in itself. Metafiction, anyone? However, the radical break with the inherited presumptions about what makes for "good poetry" is real enough. Still, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in Silliman's poetics that should alienate the most recalcitrant formalist (even a backsliding New Critic). One could easily conclude after reading "The New Sentence" that poets without the slightest interest in Marxist theory could adopt the new sentence as credo and produce potentially interesting poetry, a challenge to convention and ordinary ways of reading, yes, but not necessarily a challenge to poetry as an ongoing tradition. (Or to Western capitalism, although one could also imagine some readers making the connection between the two kinds of challenges that Silliman would like, pursuing the extra-literary implications of the strategy after engaging with it on a purely aesthetic level--in my opinion an appropriate reversal of Silliman's priorities that more suitably preserves the integrity of the literary text.)

Silliman's animus toward New Criticism is additionally unfortunate in that his own close readings of particular writers and their work are surely New Critical in spirit if not in fact. In The New Sentence, his essay on Jack Spicer, "Spicer's Language," is a very precise and ultimately very evocative analysis of one relatively brief Spicer poem (as well as, along the way, Ezra Pound's 84th Canto and a few additional Spicer passages). Granted, the burden of the essay is to show Spicer as an important influence on the new sentence, but I found it to be the best piece of commentary on Spicer's work I've read, typified by this sort of careful exposition:

Spicer's poem is composed in one stanza, written in what are ostensibly sentences, with a surface conventionality that extends to the capitalization of the letters at the lefthand margin. We have already seen the amount of tension which is set up in the first line ["This ocean, humiliating in its disguises"] by the irreducibility of the subject and its modifying clause to any single, simple envisionment. The leap to the second sentence is made before a verb occurs in the first. In being suppressed, this verb ("is"?) becomes yet another moment of an absent presence. And there are no less than five positions in the sentence which it could have taken, so that its absence (i.e., its presence) is not perceived at a single point, but instead floats freely, a syntactic equivalent of anxiety. Far more jolting to the reader, however, is that the two sentences to a degree that is nowhere possible in the Pound passage, appear to come from entirely different discourses.

The combination of detailed description and critical insight ("a syntactic equivalent of anxiety") is very satisfying, and here, as in similar readings posted on his blog, Silliman seems to me to exemplify a particularly scrupulous (and therefore all too rare) kind of literary criticism. While The New Sentence elucidates a poetics that affirms the active part played by the reader in locating the "potential content" of the poem, his critical readings nevertheless implicitly assert the importance of informed criticism, the existence of some readers who through skill with the "codes" always associated with attentive reading can help other readers overcome the limitations of their inherited codes and approach poetry in a more rewarding way.

It is indeed true there is no "universal" mode of poetry--no "normal poetry" from which anything else is an aberration--and it is also true that much conventional poetry, with its "normative syntax, classical metrics, and a deliberately recessive linebreak" requires "at the level of the reader's experience" only "passivity." (Although I can't accept the further complaint that this passivity means the reader "can only observe, incapable of action": observation is not what happens in our interaction with a text, only reading, which is itself a form of action.) Silliman's challenge to the universalist and passive conception of poetry is entirely well-justified and should not be dismissed. But it is literary criticism embodying universal intelligence that keeps the multifarious practices of poets from devolving into chaos, and Silliman's criticism participates in this stabilizing process. It is, after all, in critical writing such as The New Sentence and on his weblog that Silliman convincingly makes his case against universalist assumptions and passive reading. Yet the cogency of this case depends upon a reader willing to defer to a critic speaking in what can't be denied is a critical "voice" of manifest authority.

Articulating a Poetics

Ron Silliman begins The New Sentence (1987) with this unimpeachable claim:

. . .if we look to that part of the world which is the poem, tracing the historical record of each critical attempt to articulate a poetics, a discursive account of what poetry might be, we find instead only metaphors, translations, tropes. That these models have a use should not be doubted--the relationships they bring to light, even when only casting shadows, can help guide our way through this terrain. Yet their value stands in direct relation to their provisionality, to the degree to which each paradigm is aware of itself as a translation of the real, inaccurate and incomplete.

Such a pragmatic perspective on the utility of "poetics" (of literary criticism in general) seems to me the most efficacious way of encouraging open-ended debate about all questions relating to a subject so thoroughly contingent as what properly constitutes the "literary" qualities of literature. (I especially like Silliman's reference to "that part of the world which is the poem," which correctly emphasizes that a poem is a phenomenon in the world, not a reflection on or of the world that somehow transcends or detours around the merely real. A text is an element of reality, not just an opportunity to discourse about it.) It is admirable that Silliman's first words warn against taking his own poetics as the last words on the subject, but as a critic he has firmly-held positions nonetheless and they are positions that, in my view, cast all those who would disagree with them not just as mistaken but as fundamentally bad people.

Silliman next locates his approach as a critic by identifying himself with other poet-critics such as Pound, Olson, and Creeley, who were themselves situated "warily midway between the New Critics" and the "anti-intellectualism" that New Criticism provoked among "other sectors of 'New American' poetry." Although it seems to me that Silliman's criticism, both in this book and on his blog, has much in common with the close reading of the New Criticism, he is very harsh here in his comments about it, characterizing it as a "positivist" approach encompassing "an empiricist claim to transcendent (and trans-historical) truth." But the New Critics did not view poems as "empirical" evidence (the text) that would lead to a claim to "transcendent" truth (the critic's interpretation.) This is, in fact, a wholly mistaken representation of the New Critics' project: New Criticism was "empirical" only in that it insisted readers attend to the perceptible structure and actual language of the text, and the only "transcendent truth" it implied was that reading a poem was not a search for transcendent truth. Indeed, the burden of New Criticism was exactly to convince readers to read rather than interrogate poems for their unitary "meaning."

Silliman makes his disdain for New Criticism (or at least the conception of "literature" he thinks it represents) even more blatant by comparing it to Stalinism:

Necessarily. . .a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature. It is particularly disturbing when, under the New Critics as well as Stalin, this transformation is posed and explained as though it were objective and not related directly to ongoing and fluid social struggles.

Certainly the New Critics were attempting an "objective" form of reading in that they believed a poem could be approached as a work of art with discernible features that could be identified by paying close attention--"dispassionate" is perhaps the term that might justifiably be used to characterize the attitude of the New Critics' ideal reader. And they surely did not have any interest in "ongoing and fluid social struggles" (at least where the analysis of literature is concerned) and would never have accepted that "a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature." Silliman, of course, believes they were a part of such organizing nevertheless (a retrograde part), and in the first several essays in The New Sentence he undertakes to establish that indeed poetics is finally about politics, poetry "a form of action," presumably on behalf of those "social struggles."

These first few essays are aggressively Marxist in their declarations about the place of poetry. In "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," we are told that the transparency of language we encounter in much ordinary communication is part of "a greater transformation which has occurred over the past several centuries: the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism."

Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the "mystical" and "mysterious character" Marx identified as the commodity fetish: torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject. A world whose inevitability invites acquiescence. Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. . . .

Because poetry "is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts" but "returns us to the very social function of art as such," it is in the best position to combat this commodification. Indeed, "perhaps only due to its historical standing as the first of the language arts, poetry has yielded less to (and resisted more) this process of capitalist transformation." But it hasn't resisted enough. According to Silliman, "The social role of the poem places it in an important position to carry the class struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness."

By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact.

Despite the dogmatic tone of these passages, the underlying analysis of public language vs. literary language seems pretty cogent to me. Extending the analysis to fiction, Silliman notes that "the most complete expression" of the "invisibility" of language "is perhaps in the genre of fictional realism, although it is hardly less pervasive in the presumed objectivity of daily journalism or the hypotactic logic of normative expository style." Further, "it is the disappearance of the word that lies at the heart of the invention of the illusion of realism and the breakdown of gestural poetic form." That calls for simplicity of style and an emphasis on narrative--both in fiction and journalism--reflect an impatience with language as medium and the dominance of "message" is undoubtedly true, and the proposition that poetry especially represents an opportunity to "liberate" language from these constraints is one I can easily accept. But I fail to see why it is necessary to lay the blame for the crudity of public language specifically on capitalism, as opposed to the general human reluctance to pay attention to subtlety and nuance and willingness to accept the "preferred reality" of authority. Capitalism will get no propping up from me, but I can't see that it has uniquely invoked these human limitations.

Much of the logic of Silliman's poetics (as well as, ultimately, his own poetry) depends on the assumptions he brings about the "role of the reader in the determination of a poem's ideological content" ("The Political Economy of Poetry"). Silliman contends there is no "genuine" version of a poem, only those versions experienced by a particular audience at a particular time:

What can be communicated through any literary production depends on which codes are shared with its audience. The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers. 

Again this is a defensible position, but again I fail to see that asserting reception is determined by "social composition" is to say anything very significant. At best it establishes that audiences and readers bring to the reception of poetry their life experiences and circumstances, but to make "social composition" into the kind of essentialized, metaphysical entity Marxists want it to be doesn't convert a mere sociological fact into a revelation. Similarly, to say that "context determines the actual, real-life consumption of the literary product, without which communication of a message (formal, substantive, ideological) cannot occur" seems to me little more than a truism, and belies the question whether "communication of a message" is the goal a poet ought to be setting for him/herself. It is the goal that Silliman is setting, although in his practice as a poet he does concentrate on the "formal" message, through which the substantive and ideological are finally expressed.

. . .To be continued.

The Reading Experience--Preface

The very first post on The Reading Experience weblog was a "statement of purpose" that included the following justification of attempting to do literary criticism online:

Literary criticism is greatly in need of revitalization, as mainstream publications confine their coverage mostly to gossip and the book business, their book reviews becoming more and more perfunctory when not being eliminated altogether, while the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of "cultural studies" and other forms of political posturing. I would hope, in fact, that this blog could work as a kind of bridge between blogs and other general interest literary publications and what was once called "literary study"--which in my mind is simply the willingness to take works of literature seriously.

In a later post, I briefly chronicled my own disillusionment with academic literary study:

My alienation from academe was in part a reaction against the prevailing modes of academic criticism, which in my view had essentially abandoned "literature itself" in favor of critical approaches that were mostly just a way of doing history or sociology by other means. I had pursued a Ph.D in literary study in order to study literature, not to validate my political allegiances on the cheap, or to study something called "culture," an artifact of which literature might be considered but given no more emphasis than any other cultural "expression." I was looking to find a way to write literary criticism that continued to focus on the literary qualities of literature, and to that end had published several critical essays in publications that would still print such efforts when I happened upon the first literary weblogs. I soon enough concluded there was no reason the literary blog could not accommodate a form of literary criticism--longer than the typical kind of post I was seeing on the extant litblogs but shorter than the conventional scholarly article or long critical essay. Trying out these possibilities has been the ongoing project of this blog. . . .

If anything, the decline of book review sections I described in the first post has only continued apace, to the point that book reviews as part of newspaper "coverage" will likely disappear altogether within a few more years, while academic criticism remains as clueless about literature as it did when I abandoned it. Literary criticism that focuses "on the literary qualities of literature" still needs to be recovered, although the rise and development of literary weblogs since I created my own has indeed contributed to a process of such recovery. There are now more sources of serious discussion of new (and old) fiction on blogs and numerous other book review sites than were ever available when book reviewing was dominated by newspapers and a handful of magazines, and this discussion is at least as well-informed as the old print-based criticism and generally avoids academic pretension.

In my statement of purpose, I also indicated that I wanted to use the weblog form to try a "new kind of literary criticism, more compacted and concise, perhaps than conventional print lit crit, but serious criticism nonetheless." By "new" I did not mean criticism of some unprecedented or revolutionary insight but a less formulaic--in the case of book reviews--and a less discursively extended--in the case of scholarly criticism--approach that seemed appropriate for a medium that most readers expected to feature briefer and thus more "compacted" commentary. A weblog could "review" new fiction without reinscribing the conventions of the journalistic book review, and if the typical "post" on a weblog would not allow for an 8,000 word scholarly analysis, much of what is included in most scholarly essays is filler and rote rhetorical gesture, anyway. As became increasingly clear as I began to post the more "concise" critical essays I had in mind, the ease and immediacy of publication and the ability to link posts that characterize the weblog made it possible to revisit and serially expand on chosen issues, specific texts, or particular authors in a way that compensated for the need to abbreviate most individual posts.

After six years of posting criticism of this sort, I have concluded both that my original hope that what came to be called the litblog could enable a form of serious literary criticism had been warranted, and that my own blog was approaching an imposed limitation of sorts, imposed precisely by my practice of returning to those subjects that most engaged my interest as a critic. This practice was only reinforced by an assumption that many if not most readers were understandably not following all of my posts with the same degree of concentration I myself brought to them and thus a strategy of something like theme-and-variations would be necessary to keep the blog's most central concerns in steady circulation. While this strategy continued to provoke some lively discussions in comment threads and resulted in posts that still managed to advance my own thinking about the subjects considered, eventually I had to acknowledge they were nevertheless being overworked. Since The Reading Experience came into existence essentially as a vehicle for exploring these subjects, I also had to acknowledge that this weblog, at least in its originally conceived version, would have to be retired.

If the blog had reached the end of its usefulness, however, the writing I had posted to it retained its value, or so I believe, at least. In many ways, in fact, the writing, reduced to a core of representative selections, amounted to a coherent, extended articulation of those main concerns with which the blog had been occupied; in effect, the book I might have written had I not instead used The Reading Experience as medium could be fashioned from my TRE posts, a book that would both sum up what I had attempted to accomplish with the weblog form and perhaps stand on its own as a work of literary criticism. This is that book, borrowing the weblog's title--the significance of which as overarching theme should become clear enough as the reader progresses through the text--and otherwise distilling the blog's content to what I think of as its essence. I have arranged the selected posts in what seems to me a suitable order reflecting the coverage of issues readers of the blog encountered, in some cases have edited the posts substantially to integrate them more effectively into book form, and in other cases have added wholly new material to be found only in this book version.

Readers will have to judge for themselves whether this book affirms my original intuition that the literary weblog could support serious criticism and ultimately whether the book itself does hold up as an adaptation of the critical writing that began as posts on The Reading Experience weblog. I can say for myself, however, that the effort to produce criticism of substance on a regular basis, as well as the subsequent time spent reinforcing that effort by putting together the book version of The Reading Experience, have been even more rewarding than I might have imagined when first thinking about experimenting with a "new" kind of literary criticism.

The Reading Experience--Table of Contents (paperback version)

Preface

PART ONE

Reviewing the Reviews 1

New York Reviews of Books 1

Middling Intelligibility 6

Problems in the Story Line 17

Bridging the Gap 22

Theory About Practice 22

Serious Criticism 26

Critical Assumptions 41

Aesthetic Analysis 41

The Biographical Fallacy 50

PART TWO

John Dewey's Art as Experience 56

Aesthetic Experience 56

Means and Ends 62

Old and New 71

The Role of Criticism 80

Deep Reading 87

PART THREE

Experimental Fiction 95

Prologue 95

Context 98

First Principles 112

Practice 125

Alain Robbe-Grillet 160

PART FOUR

Realism 183

Realisms 183

Flaubert's Children 199

Realists 214

PART FIVE

The Elements of Fiction 240

Beyond Story 240

Narrative Strategies 251

Point of View 274

Style 305

PART SIX

Saying Something 329

Critiquing American Society 329

Subversive 336

The Big Dialogue 346

Very Funny 355

PART SEVEN

The Profession of Literature 362

Literary Study 362

The "Book Business" 374

PART EIGHT

Art and Culture 394

Audience 394

Affirmation 405

Canonical 416

PART NINE

Critics 429

Morris Dickstein and Historical Criticism 429

James Wood 455

Harold Bloom 455

Susan Sontag 467