Abstract
Those who theorize about literature do not normally doubt that readers can carry out what I call application or that they do so often. However, as I have emphasized repeatedly, many regard application as irrelevant from a purely literary point of view. One important motivation for such criticism is the idea that (i) literary values must be found in the text itself and (ii) application does not lead to the realization of such values. This line of reasoning underlies what I have called the textual-supremacy argument against application.
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Notes
Michael J. Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language” (1979), in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 164–201.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 10.
See esp. Joe Grady, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor’ Revisited: A Reassessment of Metaphors for Communication”, in Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap, ed. Jean-Pierre Koenig (Stanford, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1998), pp. 205–18. Grady’s main observation is that the logic behind the metaphors is more fragmented, so that the so-called conduit metaphor is, in reality, the surface manifestation of several more general metaphors. Grady also objects (rightly, to my mind) that the expression “conduit” does not fit in well with the picture of a package which Reddy also invokes.
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 151.
I repeat that I do not say that texts do not exist. My contention is, rather, that everyday thinking (which, on this point, is also substantially the same as standard critical and literary-aesthetic thinking) conceptualizes texts in an untenable manner. It follows from this that my standpoint should not be conflated with, e.g., Stanley Fish’s well-known denial of the existence of the text. Fish rightly stresses the importance of readers and of shared conventions for reading within larger or smaller groups (“interpretive communities”) for the emergence of meaning, but he also maintains that there is in fact no text and no meaning prior to the reader’s experience; for him, texts and all other things in the world “are made and not found, and … they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion” — see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 331. As Fish formulates himself, he denies the existence of an external world that is independent of how humans conceive of it, and his position is beset with all the familiar weaknesses of such idealism. I have accepted, above, that our representations of all things in the world, including texts, are made and not found, but I certainly hold that the external world exists and is radically independent of what we think or say about it. The stuff we call a physical copy of The Pickup is there before our reading begins, although our description of it is conceptually relative.
The mode of existence of works of art, including literature, has long been discussed in philosophical aesthetics. Practically all philosophers involved have regarded it as an axiom that ordinary critical language supplies the picture of the literary work that philosophical ontological reflection has to make clearer. David Davies has recently even wished to see it as a “pragmatic constraint” on such reflection that it must not deviate from the picture given by ordinary critical usage — see David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, Mass., Oxford, and Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 18. Since the ordinary-language picture of the literary work is in reality contradictory — the work is spoken of sometimes as something plural and sometimes as something singular, sometimes as something material and sometimes as something non-material — this strategy has led philosophers to devise remarkably complex theories about the ontology of literary art.
A minority view, first presented in Richard Rudner’s “The Ontological Status of the Esthetic Object”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 10 (1950), pp. 380–88, has been that the artwork is, in fact, only the product of a way of speaking. My own present position (cf. the works cited in note 5 above) is close to the minority view, but I stress the constructedness of both the ordinary-language picture of the literary work and the alternative picture. 31. For example, Peter Lamarque asserts, in his Philosophy of Literature, p. 135, that “[t]he literary critic is simply a reader who has more experience and heightened perceptiveness than the ‘common reader’ ” and that “there is no sharp line between the practice of criticism, broadly conceived, and the responses of an educated reading public with an interest in art and literature”. “Just like theologians or jurists,” writes Aleida Assmann, “literary scholars are professional readers who claim to read better than other literate people according to the rules of a certain practice”.
Aleida Assmann, “Im Dickicht der Zeichen: Hodegetik — Hermeneutik — Dekonstruktion”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 70 (1996), pp. 535–1; here, p. 536.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Conceptions of the Text. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_8
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