Abstract
The textual-supremacy argument is not the only objection that people tend to raise against the idea that application is aesthetically relevant. I have also pointed to the aesthetic argument, which privileges an aesthetic approach to literature. The textual-supremacy argument may seem more forceful at first sight, but I believe that the aesthetic argument has a comparable intuitive appeal and gives rise to equally fundamental questions about literature as an art.
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Notes
Jakobson; Mukařovský, “Two Studies of Poetic Designation”; I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), esp. p. 267; Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”.
The most classical texts are H.P. Grice, “Meaning”, Philosophical Review 66 (1957), pp. 377–88;
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962), 2nd edn, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975);
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
Searle has argued that the normal functioning of language is set aside in — at least — fictional literary discourse, and I do not agree. He has maintained that the author of fiction makes use of “a set of conventions which suspend the normal operation of the rules relating illocutionary acts and the world”. John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” (1975), in Searle’s Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 58–75; here, p. 67.
Cf. John R. Searle, “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”, in Searle’s Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1–29 (at pp. 3–4). In Searle’s theory, utterances may also lack a direction of fit, like the utterance “Thank you”, or possess a double direction of fit, like classical performatives (cf. ibid., pp. 15 and 19).
Wolterstorff’s fictive stance could be described as a special case of what Mary Louise Pratt has called “display” and seen instanced most paradig-matically by exclamatory assertions and by natural narrative where “the speaker is interested not only in reporting states of affairs, but in verbally displaying them, in enabling his audience to join him in contemplating them, responding to them, evaluating them, and interpreting them”; Pratt also extends the concept of display to apply to literary works. In my present context, the specifically literary is in the foreground, and that makes Wolterstorff’s concept of the presentational, explicitly singling out non-assertive and non-directive discourse, much more relevant to me than Pratt’s concept of display. At the same time, however, I do agree with Pratt that there is an important continuity here between the literary and the non-literary. See Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 136–51, esp. pp. 140–41 and 149–50 (the quote comes from p. 140).
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”, in Pound’s Collected Shorter Poems (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 109. The poem was probably drafted in 1911 and completed in 1913 or, possibly, 1912, after radical rewriting.
Cf. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: John Lane, 1916), pp. 100–103, and the sources referred to in the next note. The poem was first made public, it seems, as part of an essay in 1913, and then included in Pound’s collection Lustra in 1916.
If we are to believe Pound, his poem is based on what he once actually experienced on getting out of the metro at Place de la Concorde. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, pp. 100–3. Pound also recounted the story, in slightly different versions, in T.P.’s Weekly 1913 and in The Fortnightly Review 1914. See Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 135–6
and Earl Miner, “Pound, Haiku, and the Image”, in Walter Sutton, Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Walter Sutton (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 115–28 (at p. 119).
The concept of literature is itself vague and variable — cf. the next chapter — but there are also other reasons why the characterization should be seen as broad and approximate. For more about the relationship between literary discourse and presentational discourse, see my Theory of Literary Discourse, pp. 241–50. Wolterstorff’s account of the fictive stance has met with little understanding from philosophers, and as I just pointed out it must in fact fail as an analysis of fictional discourse specifically. Yet, as I said, it fits admirably as a general pragmatic characterization of the authorial stance in connection with core types of literary discourse, and I believe that that circumstance deserves much more attention and credit than it has received. Wolterstorff’s critics do not quite seem to have understood the nature of the point that he describes. Thus, in a review of Wolterstorff’s book, Kendall Walton conflates the introduction of a state of affairs with the presenting of it in Wolterstorff’s technical sense: Walton protests that all sorts of texts present states of affairs, but that is clearly not the case. Likewise, many years later Peter Lamarque puts forward the objection that “presenting a thought without asserting it is not peculiar to storytelling”, but he does not consider the fact that Wolterstorff’s fictive stance consists of more than presenting thoughts without asserting them. The special “presentational” purpose — to present unasserted thoughts for us to reflect on, etc. — is only present in presentational discourse. See Kendall Walton, “Review of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Art”, Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 179–93, p. 186,
and Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), p. 180.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), chapter 6.
Thus philosophical aestheticians normally place representation, expression, and form centre stage in their analyses of the arts, including literature. See, e.g., H. Gene Blocker, Philosophy of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), chapters 2–4,
Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chapters 2–4,
and Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), chapters 1–3.
Dagmar Hintzenberg, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Reinhard Zobel, Zum Literaturbegriff in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Friedr. Vieweg and Sohn, 1980), pp. 60–1.
Jofrid Karner Smidt, Mellom elite og publikum: Litterær smak og litteraturformidling blant bibliotekarer i norske folkebibliotek (Oslo: Unipub forlag, 2002), p. 67.
H.W.J.M. Miesen, “Predicting and Explaining Literary Reading: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior”, Poetics 31 (2003), pp. 189–212 (at pp. 195 and 201). The order in the list does not reflect frequency of mention. Both here and in the lists below, I have sometimes adjusted Miesen’s designations of the categories in order to achieve formal symmetry in the linguistic expressions.
Stephanie Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction: “Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life” and Other Tales (Oxford: James Currey; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); quotations from pp. 51 and 49 respectively.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Literary Practice. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_9
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